[schnee]

So how do I figure out who gets it next? On the Frappr Map, I see bradley in Austin. Bradley, are you there? Or I could get it to ubernerd42 in Macon or to Ray in Chattanooga. First one of those who respond gets it?

[schnee]

Picture taken. I’ll try to figure out who’s next and get it out soon.

[schnee]

And many of the static reports are back, too (but have issues).

Mostly resolved now, and small improvements made. I still have some behind the scenes goo to work through, but, yeah, the sexy is back.

[schnee]

Oh, in case anyone was wondering how long it took me to do all the past thumbnails, here’s an entry from my log:

Processed 7218 in 5 hours 27 minutes 51.141 seconds (2.725289692435578 s/e)

7218 entries is not all of them, mind you, but the 2.7 seconds is the average time needed to fetch the image from the URL, resize it and stuff it into the DB. The big time waster in processing historical images is waiting for the HTTP GET timeouts for those images that no longer exist. Multithreading would have helped here but I didn’t want to mess with it.

For recent contests, images are thumbnailed on the fly at a rate of less than a second per. This is due to image URLs being mostly valid for fresh entries.

I also SHA-1 the original image bytes, which was suggested by Zeke as a possible indicator of Recycled entries. I haven’t done anything with that yet.

[schnee]

A – you are already cropping the red-orange-yellow fields and the left-hand-side of the fork, cropping the end of the tines adds “balance”. In B, as my eye traces to the end of the tines, it is kind of left hanging there with no clue where to go. With A, my eye traces the tines and get to the edge of the photo and is OK with that since every other edge is likewise cropped.

[schnee]

This confused me as well, I think he meant a repeat win… not that I used the photo again. I’ve never taken a picture of a Barbie before last night anyway.

After being hit with the cluebat, I’m sure “repeat winner” was the intent. My bad.

[schnee]

schnee – count me as well for someone who got TF b/c of farktography. and sorry about the ‘forktography’ – i didn’t even think of the FSM.

i feel shame.

1) No shame – it was a good test case. The less someone thinks about the FSM, the better I’ve done my “job”. It should just work.

B) I think a later greenlight time provides more pressure for someone to go TF. Certainly not a deciding factor but over time I got tired of the late greenlights and decided to spend the $. I have no idea if Fark, Inc. thinks about it that much, but there it is.

[schnee]

“nearest neighbor”, “cubic”, “bicubic” and “lanczos” are all sampling algorithms used by Affine Transforms. When the FSM makes its thumbnails, it uses “bicubic”.

I’m fuzzy on the details, but when an Affine is applied, it maps from one space to another. If those spaces aren’t the same size (or shape), pixels are either discarded or created. Those pixels are defined by the sampling algorithm – “nearest neighbor” will just duplicate the pixel closest. The other algorithms do a better job at figuring out how to create or destroy pixels.

“Lanczos” is apparently all the rage amongst the cool kids. It is supposed to be quite good. When it becomes available to me, I’ll use it in the FSM.

(one of the raisons d’etre of the FSM is to allow me to monkey around with whatever captures my interest – Levenstein Distance Algorithm, Atom syndication, image processing, comparative statistics – all there. Someday, I may even allow someone to search for farktographers based on what their name sounds like)

[schnee]

Is it so hard to have a specific (reasonable) time frame to automagically greenlight to? Really?

Is 12:01 AM fair?

In other news, re: SaintDiluted‘s “Ken gets Forked!”: Ladies and gents, the anatomy of a repeat[?]

*I remember, chakalakasp, we’re not supposed to make assumptions — it’s just that this image is so good in so many ways (Barbie’s hair helps) it seems oh so obvious…*

Hard to tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not – my sarcasm detector is on the fritz. It is the use of “anatomy” that makes me think there’s a funny in there.

I don’t think it is a repeat. SaintDiluted‘s portfolio doesn’t have it twice, and there’s no missing thumbnails. That said, the Scarlet R ain’t up so I don’t know if the URL was reused.

[schnee]

I suspect if they did some kind of analysis, they’d find we bring people into the TF fold at a pretty good rate.

“analysis”, wait, what? Did someone say analysis?

and point to me as someone who came into TF because of Farktography.

[schnee]

Anyway, this is the first time I can recall where all three of my entries were taken with the Canon 50mm prime I have. It’s nothing to sneeze at, as it’s the $80 f/1.8 version, but nevertheless…

I hear that’s a great lens. I keep meaning to pick one of those up.

[schnee]

elsinore – i borrowed your ‘forktography’ for the link description –

I saw that and I was wondering if the FSM could handle it. Apparently, it did.

/yea me.

[schnee]

Ok, I have no idea what an Affine Transform is, but the fact that it intoduces an alpha channel is pretty wild. So did the thumbnails just not show up at that point?

They showed up – the JPEGs got written out just fine (apparently, alphas are part of the JPEG standard) but Netscape and IE (and Photoshop) don’t know what to do with a 4-channel JPEG. They looked like someone scanned a transparency as a color-reversal.

Originally, I created PNG thumbnails. They displayed just fine, but were 6 or 7 times bigger than the JPEG equivalents.

Affine Transform is “the” way to resize. When you select “bicubic” or “nearest neighbor” or whatever when you resize, there’s a good chance that whatever tool you are using (GIMP?) is applying an Affine.

[schnee]

It is not completely sorted out yet (try a contest contour or search for a farktographer that doesn’t exist for all sorts of chewy exception goodness), but the path is clear.

The recent troubles with the reports made me forget how hard it was to do the damn thumbnails. Java does not make it easy. Did you know that when you do an Affine Transform, an alpha channel gets introduced? That sucked.

One thing that I did learn is that the oft-repeated advice to resize in steps is very good advice. I originally built the thumbnails in one step (e.g. from 700px to 200px) and they didn’t look too good. Now, I do it in 10 steps and they look much better.

If you want to link to a thumbnail, you can “simply” do something like:

http://www.schneeworld.com/fsm/thumbnail.do?tnc={the code}

e.g. http://www.schneeworld.com/fsm/thumbnail.do?tnc=12345

You can find the code by looking at the source of a portfolio – the URL is right there. First person who tries to run through all 12461 entries gets slapped and then I’d have to do something like IP filtering. Not every entry has a thumbnail; such is the web.

I tried really hard to keep the image inside of a 200×200 pixel box, but sometimes it leaks out to 201. Zeke, Brian, feel free to stick them on FT.net, or use the random thumbnail URL – right now, that selects from the top 100 vote getters in the last 4 contests, but I’ll probably tune it a bit (suggestions?).

[schnee]

I’ve gotta say it.

You suck, schnee.

You really, really suck.

hehe 😀

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