Pasture project (php)

[death]

why would anyone want to trade viruses? i dont think i understand this very well

edit: saw the xkcd comic you linked to (i love xkcd) i think i understand now

double edit: i just read the collecting to create anti virus's for it and i understand, and i think i want to start developing antivirus's, especilly after i got the "antivirus" virus

[ih8censorship]

I like to play with fire. Both literally and metaphorically. That is a big part of who a hobbiest collecter/trader is. Then yes, there are people who study malware for the purpose of defending against them.

I have the disassembler mostly built in now, though i need a feature for disassembling files that are already part of the collection. I'm working on a hex viewer too, going to be using a bit of Java there i think.

[ih8censorship]

The other day I was watching Antitrust and I got inspired. In the opening credits there is a bunch of html code used for artwork, and a good portion of the movie is centered around programmers and looking at code. So I thought I would find a way to use my source code as artwork. I got to thinking about it, and how I would go about doing it in an arty way in Pasture without being distracting, but being intriguing instead. I decided I wanted to put the source code in small characters behind the actual content of the page, as well as having the characters match the background of the page to sort of help camouflage them . So i was
thinking sure thats not hard ill just make a div and then make the characters white, and then semi transparent that shouldn't be too hard. Well as it turns out in css/html there seems to be no way to make characters semitransparent. you can make a div semi transparent, but the characters themselves seem to be a different ballgame from what i could tell.  So i was stuck. Then I got to thinking about dynamic image generation, and how you can have transparent backgrounds and semi transparent writing on it, so then I had it figured out!

Check it out:
http://pasture.sourceforge.net/pasturedemo/index.php
Notice the top of the code is a different shade than the bottom part of the code, that is totally because of the background of the page

The pages don't display quite right in IE7 at the moment, I haven't got that far. But if you are using Firefox or Chrome or another browser it should work fine. In the future, it will be an optional feature as I figure some users might find it distracting or there might be bandwidth and processing time issues that would be better spent on something else.

What do you think? cool? silly? completely retarded?

[oulyt]

i think it's an awesome idea if you figure out a nice matching background and font that will be transparent. right now with the blue plus the font it's kind of eye hurting(not eye sore because it's a cool idea, it just hurts my eyes).

If you can get some sort of balance it would really make for an awesome looking site. i don't think it's ever been done before.

[FrozenKnight]

funny i watched that movie just a few weeks ago. I agree with oulyt the small white characters on, on blue gradient is almost unnoticeable, and when you do see it, it hurts the eyes to try to read it.
I think using a more matrix theme would be ironic though, viruses trapped in a virtual world.


Side note: when i last watched antitrust i noticed that all the code they used was HTML but they were supposed to be programming a high tech multiplatform network, with emphasis on performance and compression. and i remember thinking HTML can't do that, maybe with a bit of php, but they never showed anything close to a 'real' programming language not even java-script. I guess Hollywood will never be able to show the real world. (i wish, i could watch a movie without thinking about this kind of thing.) btw, dang that kid was lucky, his skills were so good that they paid 2 women to watch him, and he didn't even have to do any work, they just gave it all to him.

[ih8censorship]

Yeah I agree, a matrix theme would be sweet! Pasture is fully skinnable, in time I will definitely have a matrix theme! I didn't think of it as being ironic though, but I see what you mean! Clever 

I agree the letters/gradient background needs tweaking. In time I'll probably scrap the whole skin, or leave it the way it is as an alternative skin to whatever will become the new default. It doesnt scale how id like above 1024x768 (what i use) either. To me there's a fine balance between something being distracting, and something being intriguing. The text actually is set up to make the color of whatever is behind it lighter, so I could set it up to make it darker or mix a different color in. I just don't want it to be distracting from the actual content. I dunno i guess i figure if someone wants to read the source code its easier to open it up in an IDE anyway..  but idk *shrugs* at the time i put the skin together my skills werent what they are now and I was just wanting something quick and easy so i didnt have to look at default html rendering anymore and have an approximation as to what an actual page might look like.

Yeah i thought he was sure lucky too haha. I've seen C code in a movie before, but I can't remember which one it was.