NEWS Archive

She created a lot of nice background for the new UY Dojo which you can see at The Cast, FIXME add more links. After about half an hour of work cleaning a lot of old, stinkin' code, the new subdesigns were implemented and added.

And damn, each of them looks just great! :-)

I could have created an image of each title and used that (the site is generated from a layout description and the content data with the help of the wonderful programming language Python) but this would mean a lot more data would have to be downloaded for each page you visit. Just imagine the additional traffic if you were browsing through the UY characters!

No go.

So I opted to create a set of images for the font. PNG images, to be exact. This way, I could have antialiased font display (using the 8bit Alpha channel of the PNG images) and you wouldn't even notice what was happening.

I thought.

WhohahAHAhahAHAHIihihIHEheHE

Oops, sorry for that.

Ok, creating the images was done in a few seconds with the help of PIL (Python Imaging Library) which can load a TTF font from a file (so I didn't even have to install it!) and then renderes the font into a set of 255 images. The "few seconds" above include writing the 20 lines of code which do just that.

Then I changed my layout code to take the text of the title and replace every character in that title with an image from the image set. This took about 15 minutes.

And I generated the page.

And I had a look at it on my own computer (a Linux box). Konqueror, Mozilla and Opera showed me a perfect result.

Wonderful!

I started Windows and had a look with MIES (M$ Internet Explorer Software - one should really know his acronyms :-).

Ugh???

There was a nice grey background behind every image!?

After a little bit of googling, I found out why: MIES doesn't support PNG (well, it supports it half-heartedly like most things: web standards, user friendlyness, program stability to name a few).

ARGH!

More googling revealed that there is a cure ... sort of. You have to revert to JavaScript. Wonderful. Just what I wanted: Having every UYD fan rip a large hole in their security while surfing the net.

With only 200 lines of Java code and four hours of work, I have something which almost works: It breaks miserably if you disable JavaScript. sigh

So after another half an hour of work, I fixed that, too. Now the page contains a lot of NOSCRIPT tags for those people who have older browsers and those who care about their security (like I do).

Wonderful.

Did you know how much M$ made last year? 28.37 billion Dollars.

And the revenue was $11.91 billion Dollars.

That's about 41.9%.

That means: If they sell you something for $100, they earn $41.9 when you buy it.

Most of that money was made with products that cost people like me billions of dollars because we have to work around the bugs and problems in them.

That is what I hate about Microsoft.

I figure it would take one hour from one man at M$ to fix this bug.

A bug that costs you (as you read this) money: Because of the bug, the code for the pages of the UYD is about 5% bigger.

When I run into another one of those, the code will get even more bloated!

This means that the page takes longer to download and if you are paying for that, it costs you real money.

And even if you don't, then this page takes longer to process by your webbrowser.

Admittedly, it's only a fraction of a second.

But it happens for every user who visits one of our pages (or any other site which happens to use transparent PNG images, too).

And it happens for every page he visits.

Countless hours of processor time are wasted because of this.

Countless amounts of electrical energy are wasted.

That sucks.

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