In the name of Science, and Me…

All programmers, at one point or another, have dreamt of this:

Of course, you know what this is, right? It’s a file. Duh, you say? No, you don’t understand. Each pixel represents 4 bytes of a file. I used the first two pixels to “store” the number of bytes of the actual file, then the rest up to that white line at the end, is the file.

Brilliant? Yes, yes I know. I have not been able to purge my mind of this ridiculously stupid project / experiment for years. Every now and then, it’s very “what if” resurfaces like a slightly annoyed blackhead. It needed popping…

Needless to say, it is not very good for compressing. Zipping the image actually increases it’s size slightly. I was skeptical of this, though (this is SCIENCE), so I decided to try it on a PCLinuxOS Mini-Me 2008 ISO image I had laying around on my desktop, which is around 296MB. The bmp generated is quite large – 8821 x 8821. The compression results:

• PCLOS ISO: 311,207,936 bytes
• PCLOS ISO bitmapped: 309,407,681 bytes
• PCLOS ISO zipped: 307,880,700 bytes
• PCLOS ISO bitmapped & zipped: 309,407,811 bytes

There. Finally. Purged from my mind…but…

WHAT IF I GENERATED A SERIES OF 50 x 50 BITMAPS OF THE ISO AND STRUNG THEM INTO AN AVI?

Not going there. If you do, please dear God and baby Jesus let me know how it goes. Here’s my dumb code if it’ll help, or get it from here:

But that’s not all I did in the name of science tonight! I went out to have a cigarette (in our 15 degree weather) in celebration of lobotomizing the bitmap wart from my mind to discover this:

In the name of science, I had to know what it would look like lit up. I knew the dangers. I knew I might, potentially, kill the power to our house, destroy my beloved TV, and black out the neighborhood.

Eh, boring. Thought all the ice would light up or something…

~zagnut

Long time no post...

Sorry, all 1 readers. I've had much going on the last two+ months. Just a few of the wonderful things:

• sold house & moved in with mother (total house population = mom, joey, 3 pugs, 2 german shepards, me, and LOTS of booze to get through all this...)


• just finished migrating Windows / SQL Server 2005 / .NET multi-tier app I had finished at the end of October to a LAMP solution (fun fun fun...)


• ulcers...

Revelations I'd like to share from all this:
I am a Linux convert now. This does NOT mean I am one of those losers who goes around calling Microsoft M$ and all that. I still love my XP + VS2005 for development, but this works wonderfully within VMWare on my linux install. I'd been using CentOS for the project at work, and had it all set up on my Toshiba Satellite P25-520 (b'yatch) working gravy, until I just downloaded and immediately installed PCLinuxOS 2007. OMFG, so so cool.

Eclipse is fantastic, and I'm going to start doing MUCH more development in Java because of it. Eclipse does NOT beat Visual Studio 2005 for me yet, BUT before I am flamed like a mother for this statement, I figure here's why: I haven't been doing development in Java, but C#. That's, I think, 'nuff said. Eclipse was fine for the PHP work, and I love the Web Services designer in there. So, although I am still a huge fan of VS, I readily and humbly admit that I simply do not have enough (any, actually) Java / Eclipse action under my belt yet. VS2005 + MSDN Library, though = very powerful.

Wandering into this LAMP project was also difficult wondering which of the 800-godzillion distros to pick from. We had a contract class run at one of our campuses a while ago where the guy used CentOS, but I first tried FreeBSD. After my head became flat as a pancake from beating it on my desk so much and getting sick of hacking configure files just to make shit build on there, I slapped in CentOS and BOOM! Two hours later had a solid LAMPer with PHP Soap service ready to go (b'yatch). Yum = my friend.

Now it's PCLOS. The CentOS was just a bit too much of a loser to get perfectly set up on my laptop, and I just wanted that Toshiba to become my daily "appliance" for email, word processing, et al, with the VMWare for any specific crap I needed to do. So I try out the PCLOS and BOOM! I really liked how it's packaged as a LiveCD so you can try it out first. I highly recommend this distro.

[to be continued...i'm hungry and tired, so i'll edit this later]