Now that the gallery has over 17,000 images, I've been meaning to write something pseudo-creative using them. I'm pretty happy with the results.
The page automatically refreshes every 3 minutes, changing one image in the collage each time. My first attempt used ImageMagick to composite the images together into one image before sending it to the browser, but it put too much load on okcomputer. Instead, I decided to let the browser do all the work.
This video (10 MB) of Steve Ballmer is strangely enthralling. As far as I can tell, the video came from here, but it's not there anymore and the music is from here.
Posted by tim at November 24, 2003 08:15 PMnice work, buddy. are you going to to add transparency like webcollage?
Posted by: grant on November 26, 2003 08:20 AMHmm. Interesting idea. I didn't think CSS had transparency controls. Looks like it does, but it browser support is pretty limited.
I'd much prefer to use my original idea of using ImageMagick to resize and composite the images, but it took 20-30 seconds to put together 10 pictures.
So I guess no transparency until everyone handles CSS3 or okcomputer gets a faster CPU.
Posted by: tim on November 26, 2003 12:19 PMyou could use your original imagemagick plan, but construct the collage with a cronjob rather than per page request.
Posted by: grant on November 26, 2003 10:01 PManother interesting story - i was in new orleans a year ago, and he came out in a welding suit wielding a rod with lightning bolts flying out of it. he promptly burst into flames and they had to have backstage hands rush out and put him out.
incidently, the 30 foot tesla coil they had in the background fried all the PCs they were going to use for demos. ha!
Posted by: scott on December 10, 2003 02:51 PMFor historical significance, I should note that I changed the collage a while ago to use ImageMagick as I originally intended. I changed things around to use the scaled or thumbnailed images for everything but the background and that cut down the processing time quite a bit. Saves a lot on bandwidth and doesn't bog down the browser's machine with useless calculations.
Posted by: tim on January 9, 2004 02:54 PMI'd really like to know how you did that. Is it scripted? Can you share your code?
Posted by: gerry on February 29, 2004 10:27 AMIt's a pretty messy combination of perl, PHP, and shell scripting right now. I'll post it on my site once I get a chance to clean it up properly.
Posted by: tim on March 2, 2004 11:36 AMI was really just curious about the imagemagick portion of it. Are you calculating the sizes and positions of the images in the perl scripting? I'd be interested even if it wasn't clean but I'd be glad to see it after it's cleaned up too! Thanks.
Posted by: gerry on March 5, 2004 05:29 PM