Interesting tags to search for
- japan
- hdr
- pano
- train
- germany
I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to write any more flex/flickr toys since they seem so cliche, but when I saw all the cool panoramic, equirectangular photos on flickr this morning I knew I had to write this when I got home from work today. Clicking on the thumbnails will load them in the viewer (some are not high resolution). You can search through panoramas through the search field up top (there are some cool ones under HDR). Click the fullscreen button up top, or double click the panoramic image to go fullscreen (should run a bit faster). Many optimizations could be made, and I’m not able to test any higher than a 1440×900 resolution at the moment. Powered by Papervision3D 1.5 and of course Flickr. Note: the tag “equirectangular” is automatically included in any search.
I decided to dive into Flex a couple days ago, and I have to say I’m very impressed at how much functionality you can get out of a minimal number of lines of mxml. I was able to build in minutes what would take me hours to code from scratch in Flash. This toy/experiment started off as the introductory Flickr RIA tutorial over at adobe labs, but I had to put my own twist on it. Trippr takes a tag or list of tags (”rose,pink”) and then bombards you with resulting images from flickr in alternating add/subtract blending modes. I found that this pattern of blending modes tends to burn in details while producing some very vivid colors. You can change the background color, the number of images to blaze through, and the image size. Go discover some psychadelic images!
right-click on the app to view the source code (just don’t abuse my flickr key please!)
28 Dec, 2007
Posted by: Ian In: PHP
We deal with a lot of spam and bots on devbump and after a vulnerability was found in the version of captcha we were using for human verification I had to code a simple math test in its place. That solution is extremely trivial to bypass and so I started looking at alternatives. There are some interesting ones that use pictures instread of garbled numbers which I liked but the ones I saw just rotated a fixed number of images (probably easier to bypass than captcha if one tried). The solution I decided to try and code up was one that used pictures grabbed from flickr which will never be seen twice. So here is my attempt in a PHP4 class with example usage. Feel free to point out any glaringly obvious flaws in it that I might have missed. It does take some time to grab the images since it has to hit as many xml feeds as the number of images you use. It is also a good idea to use tag names that wouldn't normally be associated with eachother to avoid ambiguous images.
Example usage:
PHP:
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$flickcha = new Flickcha("kitten,hamster,bird");
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if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
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if($flickcha->validate())
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else
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}
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else {
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echo("<form action='$PHP_SELF' method='post' name='commentform'><p>");
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$flickcha->formPrint('commentform');
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echo("<p><input name='submit' type='submit' id='submit' value='Submit' /></form>");
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}
Read the rest of this entry »
My twin brother David and friend Brian have stepped into the world of Independent Game Development and people need to go check out some of the cool things they're doing. They call themselves NimbleBit and they're making a kart racing game called ZeroGear. If you're a fan or Mario Kart, you're going to want to keep tabs on this one for sure. I've been lending some help when I can, mostly dealing with their JavaScript / Lua / Navi / Ogre user interface.
21 Dec, 2007
Posted by: Ian In: PHP
The other week I found myself needing to populate a database with information found on various spots around the web. Unfortunately none of the information was in a standard format (RSS, XML) so I had to scrape the HTML pages the old-fashioned way. I wrote this little scraper class to help out with the parsing.
Here's a usage example:
PHP:
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$scraper = new Scraper();
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$scraper->getRemoteText("http://flickr.com/explore/");
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$scraper->jumpNextToken('"Interestingness"');
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$imgURL = $scraper->scrapeNext('src="', '"');
$imgURL would then contain the URL of the main image found on the explore page of flickr. There are of course much better ways to do things like this using XML and RSS when available, but sometime you've just got to take what you're given.
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Another short-lived previous version of my personal website. While it had a pretty slick interface which used PaperVision3D and lots of dirty little PHP scripts, the whole site slowly evolved out of a demo I did so the design wasn't planned at all and it became difficult to add to the site. Rather than re-write the site again in Actionscript I decided to go with yet another WordPress installation that could be viewed on a wider range of devices and is a bit easier to update. The old site is still available for playing with here and I'm planning on extracting some of the cooler bits out into self-contained swfs to showcase on this site.
One of the larger projects I've been a part of is the creation of devbump.com with my brother David. It's involved much tweaking of the PHP, CSS, JavaScript, and Smarty templates provided by Pligg. Definitely worth a look if you're at all interested in game development as it contains a wealth of news and resources.
