Monday, February 25, 2008

hobby? (nsfw?)

Okay, now I'm actually looking for these things.



http://crtv.mate1.com/crtv/1759/geolocation=crumpled

I expect this project to be short-lived.

Still looking though.....

Edit: Torrent sites are all used up. I don't think I can search much more. They'll come to me. Share the ones you encounter.

posted by Elex | 7:23 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Fun with Dynamic Geocoded Images


I know I promised waterboarding, and more stuff about Gothla. Well, this is my blog, and it is slave to my whims. I will probably never follow up on those posts. If I felt I had to, I might never blog again. That's what you get for reading.


Today I'm going to talk about banner ads for dating sites. The one that say stuff like "Meet singles in Sacramento" or some other town that you happen to be in or near while browsing the web. You see these on myspace or torrent search sites. If you actually look for porn (not that you have to) you are pretty much guaranteed one of these banner ads.


The simple ones just have some text that has your location. The better ones render a new image that has your location written into the image. That makes it look like maybe there is an entire website dedicated to people in your town flirting with eachother, and the model in the photo probably lives just a few miles from you. Um.... sorry guy, it's not true.


Creating these images is actually pretty easy, and if I ever did follow up posts I'd probably make one for you, but for now I'm just going to describe how those images get made and how you can have fun with the ones you encounter.


First, whenever you request a resource on the internet, the http server that supplies the resource has access to your IP address (the address of your computer on the internet). That IP address is fed to a database that has associated physical locations. These locations aren't specific enough to know where you live but are usually specific enough to know what city you are in. Sometimes they aren't even that perfect and will think that you live in a city nearby.


Next the advertiser has to feed that location into the advertisment being served up. It is technically possible for code to be in the image that does the location lookup (geocoding) and write out the name of your town as a word, but most images accept city names as text and leave the geocoding part to something else. This means the request for the image has the city name in the URL or the filename for the image. This also means that we can use these ad servers to create images with our own words by modifying the URL.
Here are some I've made by feeding words to an ad that showed up on a bittorrent tracker site:
There you go. Whenever you find images like these, you can right click them to get their properties, and paste thier locations into your web browser. Sometimes you have to navigate to the images in your browser before you can see the geolocation location information in the URL. Once you are there though, you can load all kinds of words into the URLs.
Here is the link to the image in this example so you can play with it. (if you want) http://crtv.mate1.com/crtv/1751/geolocation=Rehab
Have fun.


posted by Elex | 10:54 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Gothla US: Post 1: The Conjuring

This weekend was the first annual Gothla US, a (the) goth belly-dance festival. There was so much I wanted to blog, but I've been slipped some bloggersbane, the effects of which cause posts to be written well in the head and fail in the presense of a keyboard. Perhaps I just need time to decompress. It was potent combination of Driving, Standing, Working, Spectating, LOLing, Party-Like-A-Rockstaring, Napping, and Mingling. My energy reserves are all but sapped, and I have to save some for work tommorow. If I don't have the energy to post my photos of the weekend, I obviously need to split the post in two. Have a link for yor troubles: Gothla, Gothic Belly Dance Festival, LA (extra long link title to associate keywords with the website in search engine rankings. ;) )

In a related story, I'm going into my third week of four, four-day work weeks. It's my staccato, poor-man's vacation; just perforrate the month. Speaking of perforation, We saw a Halliburton perforating facility. I don't know what that means, but I'm sure it has something to do with sinister holes. I could look it up, but I don't care, sisnister holes is good enough.

With that, Good Night.

posted by Elex | 9:48 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Illegals

In a moment, I'll tell you my idea for a reality show. I found it in my notebook from work. No, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about things like this. Things like this flash into my brain during the pauses between thoughts. Honestly, it takes some effort to take time out to write them down. Most of the time I chuckle to myself and discard the thought, hoping that nobody will ask what's so funny.

Here's the show:

The Immigration and Naturalization Service performs surveillance on several chosen illegal immigrants (with TV cameras, of course)
Celebrity guest-judges rate the "Illegals'" value to the country.
Each week, one of the "Illegals" gets deported based on their low value.
At the end of the season, the most valuable contestant gets surprised with a temporary work visa, a 1987 Toyota Tercel, and an Americanized name.

"Welcome to America, Todd!"

posted by Elex | 4:58 PM | 0 comments

Grasping at Threads

<digression>
So I'm not really using this blog much. (you may have noticed)

Like many people with blogs, I can't really explain why I'm not blogging like I used to. Like many people with blogs, I plan to change this. Change will include moving the blog to the main page of crumpled, and reinstating my old trick of having random styles load for the duration of your session. In addition to random styles, there will also be some site features that are only available while the page is displaying the related style. If some of that doesn't make sense, don't worry, you'll see... eventually.

Hopefully having a more fun site around my text, I will be inclined to write more in order to show it off.

Some of you may remember that this site used to have a random style when you visited, the current style was one of them. Some of them were too ugly for some people. Some of the ugly styles were failed attempts to have more cool styles. The next incarnation will have ugly styles as well, but they will be deliberately ugly, if not meticulously ugly.

</digression>

This post is actually in response to a comment in my most recent previous post, the 123 book thing.

Here goes:

Click OK to complete the installation and close the Local Area Connection Properties dialog box. Restart the computer.

Good advice. Highly recommended.

posted by Elex | 4:18 PM | 2 comments