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Tag Archives: Roborooter.com

Rotating Banners

Now on every page you'll get a different banner. Every single photo is taken by me (to the best of my knowledge — if you took it that will teach you to borrow my camera!) hand picked out of my gallery and then cropped and edited by me too to fit. I used iPhoto to crop the photos to get the aspect ratio (quick and easy) and then wrote a quick script to resize everything to fit.

find . –type f –exec convert {} –resize 970×140 {}.970x140.jpg \;

And that resized everything. I wrote a quick rand with a sprintf to generate the url. It's not automatic — it wont detect new photos but I can take the time to edit the range the next time I take the time to edit hundreds of photos.

The real joy was finding a 97×14 swash of image I wanted to show. I'm not being sarcastic either. Everything looks different when put though constraints. It highlights parts of the photo that would otherwise be lost. Street signs stick out the most, I'll have large photo of trees and I'll have picked out a swash of photo I want to show and the street sign will be sticking up off to the side, but it stands way out where I didn't even know it was there before. There is even one photo where I took two swashes out of, there were two different photos I wanted to show.

Enjoy =)

Posted 27 May 2008 § ‡ Comments (2) ° Also tagged: ,

Hacker Crackdown!

One of my new interests Cory Doctorow read a book (which is just as much in interest) called The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. If you're curious why a bunch of kids playing on computers have an entire culture to work with then you should probably read this book. If you're curious about why in the beginning of the movie Hackers an entire SWAT team was allowed to storm a house (and presumably took every computer, electronic device, and piece of paper in the house for an indefinite period of time) then you should probably read this book. If your curious how the first and largest network in America came about and why it's owned by AT&T (and still is) then you should read this book.

In fact let me help you out. I have an edited podcast of Cory Doctorow's reading and a Gutenberg PDF of the book. Both perfectly legal as Bruce not only let his book be distributed for free electronically (since 1992!) he also gave Cory permission to read it as long as he distributed his reading for free. See where I'm going with this? Cory publishes all his work under The Creative Commons License which says as long s I mention it's his work then I can share it as much as I like.

So have it it. I made a torrent, you can download it right here.
DOWNLOAD TORRENT OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

What's a torrent? Well I can't blame you it's sorta new, and not everyone knows what it is yet. Go download uTorrent or azureus and read up on how torrents work. Both utorrent and azureus have documentation on how to use them but you basically take my small file and use it to get the set of files for the Hacker Crackdown. It's a large mp3 and a pdf. I'd give you the files right here but they're big and I have to pay for my server's bandwidth! In fact I have a large enough audience that if I offered both files up for download and paid for all the bandwidth that you would all use I'd be in the poor house pretty quick.

So as long as people will "seed" the torrent (as I do at home, but as of this writing so do 15 other people so I don't even have to anymore.) then anyone can download the files free of charge. And it frees me of charges too, because you're getting the file mostly from each other instead of me.

I'm glad technology like this exists.

Posted 04 February 2008 § ‡ Comments Off ° Also tagged: ,

RSS Feed

Since last mucking around with my site's templates I've started to use RSS pretty religiously. If you've subscribed to my site's feed you probably got the old ".rdf" RSS 1.0 feed as it was the only advertised up top.
clickmeforRSS.png
I've changed it to default to the new ".xml" RSS 2.0 feed and I've also made sure both feeds have my full post content in them. Nothing pisses me off more then a teaser feed. I have to warn you though, I like doing fancy things in my post and they might not all show up in your reader of choice so if something doesn't look right, feel free to visit my actual site. But seeing that I don't run ads to support me, nor do I have that much special extra stuff to offer I wont make you come here to read what I have to say. The fact you're reading it nice enough. =)

Update: I don't know how rss readers deal with updates though.. I do that a lot, I make a lot of adjustments after I publish.

Posted 31 January 2008 § ‡ Comments Off ° Also tagged:

More Gallery Updates

Ok I stayed up a little later and added a few more gallery features.

Tags, tag cloud, random, popular, and recent changes.

Like say you have this picture here.
alex
I tagged it alex, so if I goto gallery.roborooter.com/tag/alex I get every picture tagged alex (well when you edit a photo it's called keyword but whatever). Flickrish and nifty eh?

Also at the bottom of the main gallery page you have the "tag cloud" which shows the most popular tags bigger.

I already posted about the random but now there's also popular and recently updated. And if you're in an album there's a link on the side that give you these features with regards to an album instead of the whole site.

Ok That's all for now.

–Francis

Posted 28 March 2007 § ‡ Comments (1) ° Also tagged:

So much has happened lately

I had a really good weekend. I hope I get to write about it.

For now, I got a new gallery feature.

12 Random Pictures

–Francis

Posted 27 March 2007 § ‡ Comments Off ° Also tagged:

When roborooter became a blog.

This is the post that started it all.

Posted 12 January 2007 § ‡ Comments Off ° Also tagged:

Rock 24

I setup a mirror for Rock 24 a hl2 mod I never even tried. If you play it let me know how it is.

http://www.roborooter.com/ftp/rock24/

–Francis

Posted 09 January 2007 § ‡ Comments Off ° Also tagged:

Hits, speed, space and bandwidth.

I've written about this before.. I should probably search for it..
And to clarify, hits means unique hits, different ips.

I had reported that I get about 250 nique hits a day, and mostly from a video I posted. (About 4 out of 5 of the hits were for the video opposed to the main page) And so today I check back and I'm now getting on average 500 hits a day.

Why?

Well all this was prompted by me browsing my stats again (same thing happened last time) so lets give some stats.

Emo Kid Is posted on about 4 or 5 myspace pages. That gets me about 30–40 hits a month.
People like to hear long lists of Hobo Names about 30–40 of you a month.
I'm glad to see that someone found my favorite mashup of all time, the Toxic Loveshack and shared it with their friends, who share it with about 20 different people a month.
That stupid car commercial is still up there at 91 hits a month.

The top two requested pages are the "cool" archive page and the robots.txt which is well.. unimpressive. In fact while my traffic may have doubled, now almost half of it is web robots!

So while there are more people viewing my site, I have a lot more robots visiting too. Indexing and categorizing and all sorts. And hopefully, determining that I'm just a stupid blog and only relevant to specific searches. The top search that finds roborooter is "volvo logo" followed by "ghosts" and then "emo kid". (Wtf emo kid?) I take pride in not incessantly repeating other people's posts and linking to them. Which is what most blogs seem to do these days.

The Gallery should run marginally faster now, if I get some free time I'm going to try out eaccelerator and compile it for dreamhost (they run my servers) as that should give it quite a boost and make it.. well responsive. I also let google back in, I had them blocked on the IP level due to them sending my processor usage through the roof while they indexed me. But I signed up with google's webmaster services and told them to take it slow, and that my gallery need them to be sweet, kind and loving. Otherwise it will freak out and I'll get emails saying I'm using too much of the processor. Also the pages get cached now, but they have to be visited at least once to cache and since there are so many pictures, when google indexs me it hits thousands of pictures and generates a cache for each one. So when you go to visit that obscure photo later you'll get the cache and it will load faster and not use much processor, but it doesn't protect from google until next time.

I also continue to have plenty of bandwidth and server storage to spare (thanks to dreamhost). I think I'm gonna try making another gimic site (I had a link exchange for Kings of Chaos a while back. But I'm officially retiring that today.) maybe "am I shoopdawoop or not" or something…

Anyway thanks for partaking in another one of my meandering "Francis dumps his mind" posts. No plan, no process, just writing. Just like they taught me in school. (I'm swear to god.)

–Francis

Posted 08 December 2006 § ‡ Comments Off ° Also tagged:

Studio 60 err. umm…

Well I like the show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Recently they had the idea to have lots of ads as their main set. You know, the Sunset Strip.

Well, I shouldn't have any more comment spam, my blog isn't the sunset strip.

–Francis

Posted 27 November 2006 § ‡ Comments Off ° Also tagged:

Gallery Update

Yet another gallery update with a new logo!
Gallery Logo
Ghettofabulous I know, font support in my install of Gimp is lacking. I was just sick of the faceless gallery logo.

This time I bring you ratings! Not that I can give you a list of top rated photos yet (I should make myself a bunch of top 10 pages — Top 10 views, top 10 rated), but you can rate photos, and I think I can sort albums by rating. (Sarah's internet findings album may be a good candidate for this. Here's the link, and it's most definitely nsfw, so kiddies stay away.) By default every album has ratings enabled, but you can edit the album (under the "album" tab near the bottom) you can turn off this cool new feature if you don't want it in your album.

Another cool feature you'll never even see is caching support! This means pages will load faster overall, and especially if more then one person is looking at the same thing. Things like view counts won't change as fast for guest visitors but with a 90% decrease in processor load, I don't care.

You might notice RSS feeds for albums too… play with them if you like but I haven't done anything cool with them yet, I haven't played with them.

Oh and we have a new album too! My girlfriend Jen now has her own Roborooter Gallery Album, Pie's stuff :-). And I probably never announced a while back when Caroline started her own album too.

That's all for now folks!

–Francis

Posted 25 March 2006 § ‡ Comments Off ° Also tagged: