Three funny piercings

Monday, March 21, 2005

Or should I say a hundred and forty? The girl in the third photo got 138 piercings. Thanks to BlueStar, nellyzofe, and Plea4paiN for all trying something goofy. I'm not going to tell you that any of these are neccesarily a good idea — not even close — but I'd like to think the universe has a sense of humor, and that entry into heaven is determined by who's told the best jokes and told the best stories, rather than who's washed the most lepers' feet.

Oh, and if you didn't catch it, the left photo isn't just a strangely located hand piercing — it's a piercing through a mole-like birthmark. Like I said, not neccessarily a good idea, but it's not as if I haven't ground over (with the artist cringing the whole time) any mole that got in the way of my tattoos.

So far no cancer or abnormal growths!

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More Worldlog animations

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Fueled by a mix of Red Bull, coconut milk, cranberry juice, and good old wish-I-was-back-in-the-islands 151-proof rum, I've outputted a few more test animations from my Worldlog software. These are all based on usage stats from my friend ServMe's FriedKitten blog, which is an ideal test because it gets a decent amount of hits, but not so many that it takes a long time to process.


Since my last post on this subject I added some beautification in terms of hits fading out over four frames (rather than just blipping for a single frame), and support for day-night blended animations. The left animation is a one month long animation of daily accesses, and the central animation is the same thing, but zoomed in to show only North America (with slightly different settings).

The right animation is an hourly animation, with every frame being five minutes of access, and is also partially zoomed in. The usage is surprisingly flat (usually the time of day has more of an effect on usage) so I have a nagging feeling there's a problem, but I haven't found it in the code so I'm not sure… Anyway, it's coming along nicely, but now it's back to real work so this project is going to have to stall for a little while. Thanks to everyone who helped me out by sharing log files.

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Glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate

Saturday, March 19, 2005

Peering into my “office” at any given moment in time it would be very easy to convince yourself that my life is more full of depraved and self-destructive vice than hard work, but don't let the excess of alcohol and sex fool you — I am a highly productive worker that like some cartoon robot is in fact fueled by these poisons rather than slowed down by them… albeit one that wilfully ignores the warning: “the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long”

Anyway, my WorldLog program is rapidly maturing and is now able to output its first sequential files (and is much faster and more optimized than the primitive code I was using initially). Still to add is better date math (not too hard), titling tools (very easy), and the day-night-alpha blending (not too hard), some minor cosmetic fixes, and then I'm done. As my first test animation I spit out a one month (two-second long, less than 1/4-meg WMV file) sequence of the views to ServMe's FriedKitten blog.


Watch it on loop!

I'll probably play with it for another day and then shelve it for a while. Believe it or not, building this sort of toy is more of a “vacation” to me than going to Africa (not that Africa wasn't amazing). I'll say once more that if you want to send me some zipped up copies of your log files so you can get an animation, shoot them over to glider@zentastic.com and I'll see what I can do. If you have a preference as to what kind of animation you'd like and how you'd like it titled, let me know.
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Worldlog -allplot initial output

Saturday, March 19, 2005

I've run a few more in-depth test plots to get myself warmed up for the “real” work (which I may or may not do this weekend because I have a short attention span, and have other things I “have to” do). Here's a few outputs from both my own log files and ones that people have sent in



bodymodification.be
This is a render for a month of access to bodymodification.be, run by ServMe.
Friedkitten.com
…and for his other, more popular site, friedkitten.
deskwork.de
You can see the German bias in the output for a day or so of logs for this tool's site.
Bot Nets?
This is a record of (zombie-PC based) dictionary attacks on BME.

IAM users
This is a record of all IAM user creations for well over four years of logs.
Hotmails
These are originating IP stamps for unanswered messages from hotmail users currently in my personal inbox.
Submissions
These are the IP locations that recent online image submissions sent to BME have come from.
Netzapper
These are accesses to Netzapper's website, mostly hack attempts.

Anyway, next step is to make it so that it can render just inside a specific time or date range (not difficult), so it can output stills that can later be made into pretty animations.
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Working on new geolocation tools

Friday, March 18, 2005

So as I mentioned recently, I'm working on a geolocation-based log analysis tool that makes animated (and still) maps from your webserver logs (and other log files which contain IP records and timestamps). I used some of the locations from my own login log file here to test the accuracy of my IP to Lat/Lon database, and it seems to work fairly well — the only locations that tested inaccurately were a kiosk in Antigua (which showed up in NY), and my satellite connection in Tweed.


   Buenos Aires, Argentina
   Sun City Resort, South Africa
   La Paz, Mexico
   Toronto, Canada
   Maui, Hawaii
   London, UK
   Miramichi, Canada

I wanted to repeat my earlier request — if you don't mind sharing some of your log files, email them to me (zipped please) to glider@zentastic.com and I'll use them to make some test animations and send them to you as well. It's really a neat little toy. I say again: I am, at my core, a toymaker.
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