You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson

August 22, 2003 10:03 AM

Before this FPP gets deleted for being the daily double, can somebody tell me what exactly is going on here?
posted by 40 Watt to Etiquette/Policy at 10:03 AM (11 comments total)

Whoops, too late.

That was fast....
posted by 40 Watt at 10:03 AM on August 22, 2003

Looks like voodoo to me.
posted by timeistight at 10:13 AM on August 22, 2003

DBAPaul has our numbers apparently.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 10:14 AM on August 22, 2003

I believe it's a php scripted clever misuse of the img tag. Not sure though. Perhaps someone who knows could tell me too. (wasn't worth a FPP or MeTa but I figured someone might see it in a soon to be deleted thread and explain [or bring it to MeTa for me :P)
posted by DBAPaul at 10:16 AM on August 22, 2003

I was just coming here to do the same thing. How cool is that? Doing our numbers would be pretty cool - but compressing them into an auto-generated image is as slick as shit. Is that this imagemagick thing I hear about (and keeps not getting onto fink)?
posted by bonaldi at 10:17 AM on August 22, 2003

sub "do" for "ask" pls.
posted by bonaldi at 10:18 AM on August 22, 2003

oh sweet jesus. I'm sorry. Reverse the ordering of that. I'll get my coat (and strangle myself with it)
posted by bonaldi at 10:18 AM on August 22, 2003

He's placed an IMG tag, pointing to an externally hosted image, in his post. When your http user agent makes a request to his server for that image, it triggers a script keyed to that filename via god-knows-what url rewriting or filetype handling voodoo. The script echoes some environment variables, and resolves your IP address via interNIC, then dumps that info into a jpg, and outputs it to your user agent as requested.

/guessing

you might also have fun with this
posted by scarabic at 10:25 AM on August 22, 2003

god-knows-what url rewriting or filetype handling voodoo

That's what I said.
posted by timeistight at 10:46 AM on August 22, 2003

When you call the image file (which is really a image creation script) you pass your IP and other machine info in the http headers along with the request. This is part of the http standard, and no magic is occurring. The script just reads the headers and uses them to create a graphic on the fly.

If I was doing this I'd use PHP and the GD library, but ImageMagick would work also. Pretty cool what you can do with PHP to generate dynamic images. I'm using it here to display realtime graphs of site activity.

GD will actually let you do true color manipulations of images down at the pixel level. So in theory you could use it to make a website the performed Photoshop manipulations on any image on the net.
posted by y6y6y6 at 11:00 AM on August 22, 2003

i spent a really long time installing that G.D. image library this week.
posted by goneill at 3:18 PM on August 22, 2003