Whomwah.com

Whilst searching through my hard-drive the other day, I found a bunch of games and experiments I did in Flash 5/MX. At that time I was still working in engineering, and reading everything I could about the the web and computer languages. Although the games are not ground breaking and the experiments just fluff, I find looking through them very nostalgic. They came at a the point when I finally realised I could do this web stuff for a living.

The source for the games is still missing which is frustrating, but I did find the source for all the experiments.

After what has been the most strange of days, I thought I’d write a little bit more on the QR Code work I have been doing for /programmes. This is a bit of a sneak preview, as the work will not be pushed out live for a little while as we try and fix a potential bit of memory corruption found in one of the binaries we were using.

So, I mentioned in a post not long ago that I had been working with QR Codes, and that I wanted to extend the current offering we have, which is just basically a simple implementation of a clever Japanese guys JavaScript library. I was also interested in the embedding of images in QR Codes, as displayed on the wikipedia page. This is possible due to the Reed-Solomon error correction code written into the QR Code encoder. This allows up to 30% deterioration of a QR Code possible with it still being readable.

So armed with that knowledge, and a bit of tinkering in Photoshop, we came managed to come up with a solution that was still readable by a QR Code reader and also incorporated the BBC logo in a clearly readable form. I think you’ll agree, it came out quite nice? (It has been mangled a bit going though Flickr’s image re-sizing) We were quite lucky as the simple geometry of the BBC logo was ideal.

The next thing was to coderize (patent pending) our Photoshop mock up. I had a few choices, I could use Image software to merge the logo and the QR Code, I could write the logo first and the write out the QR Code data around it (this would be the ideal solution to be honest), but I adopted for, reduce the Image to be 1:1 pixel:data ratio, adjust the logo so it fitted, then create a matrix of the logo data. This way I had a kind of BBC logo blueprint I could scale up to whatever size the QR Code image needed to rendered at. Below is the matrix based on a min image size in pixels of 39×39.

$bbc_logo = [
  ['w',  7, 15, 31, 23], ['b',  8, 16, 14, 22],
    ['b', 16, 16, 22, 22], ['b', 24, 16, 30, 22],
    ['w', 10, 17, 12, 21], ['w', 18, 17, 20, 21],
    ['b', 12, 17, 12, 17], ['b', 11, 18, 11, 18],
    ['b', 12, 19, 12, 19], ['b', 11, 20, 11, 20],
    ['b', 12, 21, 12, 21], ['b', 20, 17, 20, 17],
    ['b', 19, 18, 19, 18], ['b', 20, 19, 20, 19],
    ['b', 19, 20, 19, 20], ['b', 20, 21, 20, 21],
    ['w', 27, 17, 28, 17], ['w', 26, 18, 26, 20],
    ['w', 27, 21, 28, 21],
];

It was then just a matter of drawing this information over the top of the QR Code image information and writing out the file, which as it turns out, does not appear very CPU intensive, as it’s a simple image construct, that along with the Squid caching we have in place means the server load is minimal.

So what we’ve ended up with is below. I’m really pleased with the results and look forward to the code going live.

Oh and for the benefit of people who don’t have access to one of the many free QR Code readers for mobile phones, the logo above decodes to bbc.co.uk/programmes

[Update]: Just got a nice mention on the 2-d code magazine site. Also, good to see other people are liking the work.

I have been doing a little messing with the canvas tag that comes with Firefox 1.5 and Safari. This tag is a new HTML element for programmable graphics. canvas is based on the WhatWG canvas specification, which itself is based on Apple’s canvas implemented in Safari. It can be used for rendering graphs, UI elements, and other custom graphics on the client.

I had seen some examples of using canvas to draw pictures and was inspired by the 3-d demo done by Benjamin Joffe, so I thought I’d have a little play myself. It felt a bit like the early experiments done when Flash5 and MX came out.

Here’s a couple of experiments using some simple physics.

• example 1 (elastic)
• example 2 (bounce)

This is a great page from Kwok-Leung Lee that just shows a bunch of graphical images that trick the eye. Infact I actually found some of them uncomfortable to stare at.

I got send a link to a online face transformer the other day. As you can see the images it produces are interesting ?! This is suppose to me as a child. I think my mother would have drowned me in a lake if that had been the case.

It’s build in Java by the University of St Andrews and is certainly worth a laugh mind you. If you think I look bad as a child you should have seen me as a woman.

This has probably been around for ever, but I’ve never seen it before. What a great idea. I have seen a similar type of live clock over at Yugop a while ago but it never used peoples own photos.

I just deciding which photo to send in …

A work collegue of mine Matt Biddulph has written another great ‘toy’. This uses the Porter Stemming Algorithm to search through your del.icio.us tags and find words with the same English word stem. This proved highly useful for me and I’m sure will be to others that are terribel typers and spellers. Thanks.