April 10th

[Astral]

Jeeze, how bad was that spelling >.<

[Bengaley]

Jeeze, how bad was that spelling >.<

No worse than your usuall, Astral.

*headruffles Astral*

[Astral]

No worse than your usuall, Astral.

*headruffles Astral*

Haaay! *straghtens out his fore plume* ^_^

[Astral]

I've looked back and I think your right about them shouting "Hail hunter of shadows." the words are just broken up with extra letters added

[Bengaley]

Its... dialect.

They're speaking English (Or whatever language it is, that just happens to be translated magically into English...), but its... a very broken one.

Think, a very thick Southern Accent put on top of a very thick New York accent, with a nice heavy scottish brogue.

There's another word after Shadow, though.

[Astral]

Hmm, yeah there is isn't there?

[Bengaley]

Yup. Wraiths, I think, or specters... or... yeah.

[Squirrelly61104]

HUCHAILUL = Hail
HUCHHUNUNT UT ERUG = hunter
OFUF = of
SUSHUCHADUDOWASHSUS = shadows

I work at an engineering firm. If you think that was hard, someday I'll have to post some of my bosses scribbled plan outlines to you.
Now there's a challenge!
(the brownie speak does add a nice touch, tho!)

Hmm. If the brownies are just here to say thanks, great. If they want to hire Quentyn, I think I see a disturbing trend.
First client, Nessie brother.
Second client, effectively Colin.
Third client, brownies?
What next, microbes? Seriously, I've heard of 'shrinking client bases', but this is ridiculous!

[Astral]

"My clients were less then happy about the penicilin box I offered them"
Microbes, that should have some interesting implications for comunication.

[Hajikki]

Yeah, squirrelly's got it figured. I guess I could just see the words in the text. It comes from all that Boggle playing when I was younger...

[The JAM]

[...unWARP!!!]

Good evening.


Is anyone else "hearing" the Brownies speak in a tone similar to Ewok/Jawa?

[Mwalimu]

About the JPGs...

Every time they move a location, be it on a server to another server, or to even another folder on the same computer, they lose quality.

Its something that irrated me to no small ammount, as I tend to move my files around monthly in futile attempts to become organized at least on my computer. My early spritecomics are pretty much gone.

PNG files do not work the same as JPG. While larger and longer to download, they're also higher quality over time, as well as actually a better quality to begin with.

Trust me, PNG is best for webcomics.

I'm not sure what sort of copying or moving you're talking about here, but a JPG (or a PNG, or any other type) is simply a file, a long string of bits, and it can be copied or moved to your heart's content without affecting the quality of the data or the image, so long as there are no actual data errors in the process - those usually tend to be flagged by"invalid sector" or "bad data" or other similar errors in the coping process; for a data error to occur without being flagged as such is almost unheard of nowadays.

There are numerous image formats, but for the current discussion, we will consider three types:
Uncompressed, such as BMP and TGA
Lossless compressed, such as PNG. Lossless compression means that it is a digitally perfect copy, and PNG has about the best compression ratio of any lossless format.
Lossy compressed, such as GIF and JPG. Lossy compression allows much smaller file sizes without noticeably affecting the image quality to the average human eye.

Once you convert an image to a lossy compression fomat, there is some loss of quality in the process. Each time you convert it to a different (lossy) format, resize the image, change the compression parameters, there will be some degradation of image quality. But for this to happen you would have to be using software that specifically handles image files in a way that mucks with the image format. Doing a normal copy or move of the image file does not do this and does not affect the quality of the image.

[Ann Vole]

I wonder if they are going to sell him cookies (or is that the Girl Guides?)

now he's out of dangure his aperance is back to normal, although I do admit his fore plume looks much whiter then before.

He was licked by the White Stag again:
http://npc.keenspace.com/d/20050314.html

three minute load times per page ain't fun)...

What I did before high speed was to open each page in a new window (using the calender at the bottem) starting with the last one you want to read and working back to the first one you want to read. The number of pages you can have open depends on the buffer size of your machine and browser. I then just close the windows as I read them

Lossless compressed, such as PNG. Lossless compression means that it is a digitally perfect copy, and PNG has about the best compression ratio of any lossless format.
Lossy compressed, such as GIF and JPG. Lossy compression allows much smaller file sizes without noticeably affecting the image quality to the average human eye.

Actualy .gif is a Lossless compression format too and .png was made to replace .gif because of legal issues on the ownership of the code that makes the lossless compression in .gif. There are more colours alowed in .png so file sizes can be quite big if programs are not used to reduce colours (same goes with any format).

[Greatbeast]

Personally I prefer the younger and slightly cuter look he is in at the moment.

(but thats just me)


Sean

[Capnregex]

Every time they move a location, be it on a server to another server, or to even another folder on the same computer, they lose quality.

A direct file copy will not degrade jpg quality.
Opening the file and saving it again can.

having done a png->jpg conversion of the files using the default settings from ImageMagick I get jpegs that are around 2/3 as large as the png's..
Nice, but it's not a 10-1 difference.

In essence, the comic is simply a large format, high quality, color comic. It's going to take a little time to download either way.

[Bengaley]

The way JPG files were explained to me, is that the file tells the computer about what colors and lines are where and the computer generates something very similar each time.

*shrug*

That and they look fuglier.

[DragonMasterHawk]

To be frank, that's EVERY SINGLE FILE TYPE. All files are strings of data which are read by the program you're opening it in.

See, what's interesting about JPGs is that you can choose how much compression you want. Well, depending on the program. When you say that JPGs about about 2/3s of PNGs, at what percent compression are you using? I THINK the default is around 70%...but I may be thinking of something else. If you use 100%, the file size will be molecular, but the picture will be unrecognizeable. If you use 0%, you'll have a perfect picture, but you may as well be using a BMP.

[Bengaley]

Mmm.

The problem is, with being a fool on some things, is that I don't know that I'm being a fool. I >>KNOW<< that my information is accurate, and to be honest, I have no way of checking, or even think about checking.

Some guy in the pub tol' me is one thing, a friend of mine told me is another

[Aurrin]

Quick breakdown of the most common image file formats:

Bitmap (.bmp)
-This is the most basic of all image formats. Each pixel is stored as three bytes of data. One byte of data can hold 256 values, and they're grouped in sets of three because you need one for red, one for blue, and one for green to describe a color. Because EVERY pixel is mapped out individually, the size on these pictures is colossal, and should never be used for internet upload.

Graphics Interchange Format (.gif)
-GIF is the format of choice for web graphics, because it has the best ratio of preservation to filesize. GIF images work by creating a palate of 256 colors. Thus, 256 3-byte colors are turned into 1-byte colors. You can think of it as a shorthand that takes into account that you're not going to have every single one of the millions of colors possible and uses that to save space. It typically works very well for images that are computer-generated for web layout, or images with lots of well-defined areas of a single color. It can, however, ruin photographs, which may easily exceed the 256 color limit. The GIF format saving on MS Paint is also a very bad converter, so try using something else, like IRFanview (http://www.irfanview.com) The GIF format also has support for frame-by-frame animation, which greatly increases it's popularity. (Yeah, most of the times you've seen a picture that animated all by itself, it was a .gif file)

Joint Photographic Experts Group (.jpeg)
-JPEG files are often the best compromise between filesize and quality for photographs, which have many, many colors in them. The JPEG format doesn't use one, but up to 29 compression algorithms. Which ones are used depends on several factors, including how much compression you chose (the format supports variable compression rates) and what algorithms have been programmed into the software you are using to save the picture. JPEG images are not good for something that will later be printed, however, as they can look blocky even with lower compression rates.
[edit: if you just have to know how it works, look here. Just be ready for loads of linear algebra and highly complicated mathematics.]

Portable Network Graphics (.png)
-PNG files are the best way to save high-quality pictures. They are easily 2/3 or less the size of the bitmap version, but are zero-loss a zero-loss format. That is, JPEG (and sometimes GIF) formats squeeze the pictures down by throwing away information in a smart way such that the picture is still recognizable. But the PNG format keeps every last pixel exactly the way you created it. PNG files are still larger, and thus take longer to download, but are quickly moving up in prominence as bandwidth increases enough to accomodate larger file sizes. ALWAYS USE PNG FORMAT IN PLACE OF BITMAPS FOR WEB UPLOADS. There's simply no excuse not to.

Okay, maybe that wasn't so quick. But maybe it also helped someone. I hope.

[Capnregex]

Jpeg compression first cuts the image into a large number of small tiles.. then it compares those tiles, looking for similarity. It then indexes those tiles and maps them, with appropriate modifiers into the resulting file.. the percent compression indicates how large the tiles are.
If the tiles are large, the data loss is larger, but the resulting file is smaller.
It works on natural subjects best.. people, grass, trees ect.. things like buildings and straight lines on an angle can give it some grief.. again more noticeable with the larger tile size.
as for the % that Image::Magic defaults to.. I didn't check.