Sig Test

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Sig Test

 

[VBDude]

It's...big! But what's wrong with the triple-banner? It's not wide enough to read.

 

[audiovoodoo]

In the style of many of your threads..

Huge ugly sigs:

A tribute to brand loyalty or a sign of desperate need to belong to a collective?

Discuss...

 

[VBDude]

Yes. :lol:

Let's see: scott mueller, nv10, keyboard, openoffice, nes (oldschool? I was born before nes, it ain't old school), notepad, nerd (how do you use a nerd? um, don't ask wing!), wikipedia, tekken, hl2:dm, xfi, teletubbies (!?), xfiles, xp pro, spybot, java, and vs.net.

That's a lot of clubs. And now my eyes are sore...

 

[audiovoodoo]

LMAO :lol: :lol:

______________________________________
My little fella is big enough to not need a sig...

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

NERD ?

Look at the image

It is clearly NERO Burning ROM

It is still a work in progress anyway, just a conceptial piece with a warped aspect ratio (which no-one noticed, or at least complained about...).

I'll happily mention (ed: advertise) good products in my signature space.

I felt it was time to express myself on the forums a 'little' more, saves people asking questions, etc and gives them something cool to look at. (Kids these days, attention span of a goldfish).

 

[VBDude]

My bad. Now that you mention it, I can see Nero, but it ain't clear!

I thought I both mentioned and complained about the aspect ratio. If not, I just did. I don't mind that much as this is what test posts are for, but it does need some work. ("I felt it was time to express myself on the forums a 'little' more." Haha, little. :lol: Aspect ratio strikes again!)

I like watching gold fish. Are you going to put those in your banner?

 

[audiovoodoo]

Sorry man.. we/I was a bit scathing there. Like you say a work in progress. It will probably look better when the resolution issues are sorted.

 

[VBDude]

I apologize too if I said anything upsetting. I like the triple banner, but I want to be able to read it. Heck, I'd like it if you made a sextuple banner.

One other question: Why the long pause at the beginning of the animation, or is that another kink being worked out?

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Here is one that is still extremely 'beta'. The light effect when used in GIF (only one color can be transparent, there is no alpha) and the fact it affects the 'screen' on the right is an annoyance.

This one is too large to use as my standard Signature Banner though:

29.12 seconds, at 6,009,802 bytes = 206,381 bytes/sec - This may have long pauses on even 1.5 Mps links by the looks of it.

I hope to have something 'half cool' by mid 2007 though.

as for my current signature banner, yes, it too is a work in progress.

468 x 60 is enough for 3 x user banners, since they are normally 19 or 20 pixels tall each (worst case I can just use 3 rows of transparent pixels at top/bottom of GIF).

I can remove the 5 second pause at the front of the loop easily, just thought for anyone still on dial-up perhaps it would reduce 'playback' stuttering (assuming there is any, which is unlikely).

 

[audiovoodoo]

You know... I may have mocked but there is something quite nice about that one.

The one big problem I have with it though is the size of the file. 5.7Mb is just to much to embed in any web page. I'm on a fast cable connection but this thread now takes an age to load the page.

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Wait until it gets its own sound-track. :lol:

I've got several 1,200 to 2,000 frame GIFs too, that one is only 728 frames or so. (At a very small resolution, 28.08 Kilo-Pixels vs 307.2 Kilo-Pixels+ for others).

I don't know why it is taking so long to load this page either, since all the images are cached locally.
Even while still loading from forumz.tomshardware.com the GIFs are grinding away. (FYI: The web-server the images are on is not part of my LAN).

I should host a VM web-server and shape it to dial-up speeds to get a better feel for some user experiences. But even on threads I've never posted in the forumz are crawling to a near halt.

 

[audiovoodoo]

Could I make a suggestion here... You obviously know your graphics and to talk of VM servers etc suggests that you could put together a good web site. Why not accept the limitations of a fan bar and make one that pulls people to your site..

Its a nice graphic but I cant see it getting to just a few 100k without loosing a lot. Better to take people somewhere you can really show off..

Just my 2c.

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

First and foremost, Happy New Years, Hope we all have a good 2007 - looking at March/April [personally adjusted] forecasts we are going to have one of the best years in IT for a long time. Sure everyone is almost sick of hearing these two subjects though.

We got 1 metre of hail (yes - hail, not snow) on some main suburbern roads down here in Canberra (which is North of Melbourne FYI), just a few hours before New Years, so put quite a hamper on the celebrations, but they felt 'hollow' anyway. Like... a random Tuesday with meaningless Fireworks (7 minutes of, nothing large scale).



Hehehahaha, you can read right through my [medium term] plans.

I am considering getting a web-site going, something more central than the 3 links under my sig, and making the image a link too.

What file size do you think is acceptable for a 468 x 60 banner anyway ?
Would it matter if it was a 10 or 60 second loop (eg: If it was 60 seconds, would the acceptable file size, be 6 times as large when compared to a 10 second loop, in your opinion [and anyone else that feels like posting]).

I wasn't even aware that banner sizes had standards until the other week... well I was, but 768 x 64 seams (or seamed) more realistic for 800 x 600 (worst case) viewing than 468 x 60. (Which is the res I made the current sig in, then had to bilinear resampled it down, distorting the aspect ratio in the process).

Learning process I guess, It's always the more basic stuff that trips me up, which is nice because it makes it easy to fix.

Ironically I've learnt more in the Test Posts section of the Forumz in 2 weeks than a typical quarter spent (ed: wasted) in the CPU section.

Isn't exactly the sort of thing I can do overnight, as I am no DreamWeaver MX guru. However some software that was demonstrated to me on a Mac has pretty much convinced me to become at least 30% Apple Mac user (23" TFT, but only attached to PCs for now ), and 50-70% 'typical-ish' PC User (and up to 20% other, eg: PlayStation 3 [maybe], Sun SPARC, PowerPC, Solaris, Linux, etc).

Can avoid vendor lock-in and just pick the best of any 'sphere' of IT to meet my needs (cost, time/speed, easy of use or maximum functionality / tweakability).

... getting back to the point though, with the software demonstrated what could take me a month (as a spare time + beginner) in DreamWeaver MX would take me a weekend with iWork (I think it was). Then it can be tweaked in DreamWeaver sort of like post-processing photography. That alone makes it worth the extra cost IMHO - because a hobby shouldn't be about wasting time, it should be about investing it.

I am not easily impressed by software these days either, when it comes to software I expect it to be production quality (not the 'current' definition of production quality - which high-school students can better for 'free'). Good, In that it should mirror hardware and minimize bugs and annoyances before being sold to the masses. It is easier & cheaper to make good software than good hardware, Good not always meaning high performance in every case either, yet so few software companies remember how to make 'Good' software.

My PC instinct hinted towards a BSD Kernel, but with a nice GUI, and high quality video drivers (which most Linux / BSD distributions lack). Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 simply blew me away when I saw an 'experienced' Apple user demonstrate them.

eg: Load every application installed (which included heaps of apps not in the standard offering in this case) at once, with just 1 GB of RAM.

No 'Your pagefile is growing, You may get some out of memory errors while this is happening' warning messages.

No 'excessive, and needless really, paging to/from disk'

No 'massive slow down' when using more Virtual Memory than installed / available Physical memory.

The abilility to have a 'Tetris' style 'best fit' layout zoomed out of every 'window' visible.

GUI elements did not go 'all white/grey' while being paged to/from disk (I have no idea why Microsoft give the OS Disk Cache priority over the GUI elements when it comes to paging 'unused' data - fucking stupid design IMHO - always pissed me off).

A GUI that puts Windows 2K, XP, and Vista to shame

A task scheduler, and resource management (eg: GUI vs Disk Cache, Data vs Instructions, etc), that puts some Linux and Unix distributions to shame.

Highly responsive UI.

All the 'annoying things' that need manual setup are highly automated and easy to 'accidentally learn how to use correctly'. eg: System backups - which 96% of users don't keep.


Now I want to get a PC / Apple Mac hybrid setup going, even if it means 2 PCs, 1 Apple Mac, a KVM, a Logtiech G5 and/or MX518 and/or MX510 mice, Windows Digital Media Pro keyboard (which is certified for Mac OS X use), and one (to start with anyway) 23", 16:10, DVI, Cinema HD, Apple TFT display.

It has been so damn long since my computing was more pleasurable than painful, sometimes going so far as call counter-productive. Most of that has been related to (1) the quality of [Windows] software over the last 10 years getting worse every passing week, and (2) always using 2nd hand monitors that only meet 70% of my requirements, just at 15% the 'potential' cost for something nice.

 

[audiovoodoo]

Happy new year oh eater of bandwidth :lol:

I'll keep the answeres short:

Not sure on exact size but I would say WELL under 1mb as the TOP end limit. Personally I still remember the old days and hacking my main web site graphics down to speed up page load... Made all the difference that extra 100Kb I saved :lol:

Keep it short. 60 seconds is way to long. You are dealing with computer users.. We have no attention span!

They ARE getting better.

Yes.. I've seen that MAC too.. Just don't let the guys in the Linux forum hear me mention it As I said in the thread down there I'll certainly consider it when it comes time for a new machine. Linux is cool but just not as integrated. Besides.. they have Parellas and I can always run Linux.. And you never know.. If I see a cheep SPARC myself... It sounds to me like you are looking at a Mini.

I've got an MX510, its good but I'm not sure as good as the hype. I used to use a KVM to have a Windows and a Linux box and it works nicely. I even used to run dedicated cards in each box for intercommunication along with a card connected to my router.

The monitor sounds nice. I treated myself to a low end 19'' a couple of years back and still love it. It's only 1280*1024 but I can read it comfortably without my glasses after a long day and it rules out any need for SLI

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

Happy new year oh eater of bandwidth :lol:

My sig is only 64 KB now, so could make it with 4 - 8 times the frames, and change the duration of each frame.

The MX510 was fantastic - when it came out, along with the MX500
The MX518 and G5 have superceded them though.

 

[audiovoodoo]

That's not so bad. I can't help but think though, as a kid I lost days of my life to the adventures contained in a 16Kb game.. Have you ever had a look at some of the demo scene 64K intros? What you can do in 64K is frightening.

 

[TabrisDarkPeace]

I always thought of it as "what commercial software companies do with 64 GB" is frightening.

"It only takes one bad line of code to crash the stock market of an entire country / nation."

Not to mention what a mere 500 bytes used to be capable of (and in some ways, still is).

(Yeah, I've seen the 64 KB demo's, most using Direct X and libraries already on the PC though - pretty smart designs).

 

[audiovoodoo]

test