• Mike5 (unregistered) in reply to another anon
    another anon:
    anon:
    Fahrenheit? Speak SI, dammit!

    2000 degrees Fahrenheit is approximately "a billion degrees" in Celsius and "a billion - 273" Kelvin.

    I'd hate to shatter your Fahrenheit centric world, but it's actually the other way around - a billion Fahrenheit is around 2000 Celsius.

    Mike5

  • BlueEagle (unregistered)
    <Comment> <Comment> W </Comment> </Comment> <Comment> <Comment> T </Comment> </Comment> <Comment> <Comment> F </Comment> </Comment>
  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to Man of Steel
    Man of Steel:
    The examples given, 87 and 127, don't contain enough bits to encode X and Y in a single number, unless the resulting bitmap is very small. Well I suppose X could have been 0 in both cases and the signature line went from Y=87 to Y=127 but that seems improbable for a signature capture.
    Or, perhaps, X could be 87 and Y could be 127.

    Sure, storing an array of numbers where adjacent pairs of numbers are supposed to be a single item is a silly looking data format, even ignoring the XML nonsense, but this isn't TheDailyGoodIdea.com after all.

    Or maybe the numbers were made up to ilustrate the silly data format, but that's why we all hate the site and never read the stories here.

  • (cs)

    It looks like you guys are missing the fact that maybe one of the requirements was too keep track of the way the signature was written. Too keep compatibility to the max i would have designed something to store each value in Hex (so no need to serialize or something) with 2 initial bytes for the version, maybe 2-3 bytes for a signature, 4 bytes for the number of signature points that follow(0-64k in Hex), and then 6 bytes for each point ( 12 bits for x, 12 bits for y -> 3 bytes stored in Hex in 6 bytes).

    You'd have version information and the initial version would support from the start more than twice the maximum number of points a 300x100 bitmap would have supported and support for 4k x 4k bitmaps.

  • Bonce (unregistered)

    Good spam, I'm off to taipei ladle .com

  • (cs)

    Well, a long time ago I looked into using webservices from a PDA. It seems that the CE.NET guys never came around to creating a serializer as part of the package. I remember finding an example that used some XMS handwritten serialization to transport a signature as an example. It used the same (kind of) format. Maybe the original programmer just stole that example without thinking?

    I went in a somewhat different direction to solve MY problem.

  • Company names need to be used.... (unregistered) in reply to Kazan

    the REal REAL WTF is why did they even think to use a useless technology like XML in this case or JSON or anything else and just use a fricking flat file...

    X,Y X,Y X,Y X,Y

    I can parse it 10,000X faster than any of you guy's fancy technology, it's easily debugged by humans, and honestly has a far lower resource need.

    Why is it you guys think you have to apply a "technology" to things that dont need it?

  • (cs) in reply to Company names need to be used....
    Company names need to be used....:
    the REal REAL WTF is why did they even think to use a useless technology like XML in this case or JSON or anything else and just use a fricking flat file...

    X,Y X,Y X,Y X,Y

    I can parse it 10,000X faster than any of you guy's fancy technology, it's easily debugged by humans, and honestly has a far lower resource need.

    Why is it you guys think you have to apply a "technology" to things that dont need it?

    Blatantly the best solution would have been to use a pen and paper; It's more easily debugged by humans, has less disk storage space needed, and lets you keep a hard copy of it.

    Who needs technology, eh?

  • (cs) in reply to Basseq
    Basseq:
    The uncompressed bitmap data transmitted through the webservice weighed in at about 290KB.
    The resulting XML looked like this...

    So XML is "uncompressed bitmap data" now?

    I think the point is that he was expecting it to be uncompressed bitmap data, up until the time he opened it.

  • Ville (unregistered) in reply to foxyshadis
    foxyshadis:
    JPEG's monochrome encoding is called JBIG. It's based on CCITT fax encodings, similar to LZW-packed TIFF, and has no dct-coding to make it blurry and noisy.
    Even though JBIG and JPEG sound a bit the same, it doesn't mean that JBIG was part of JPEG. Sure, they're both ISO/IEC/ITU-T formats, but so are PNG and WBMP among others.

    So yes, JPEG (...photography...) is a lousy format for bilevel images, so one should use JBIG or other format designed for bilevel images.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Darren
    Secondly, the web service probably required XML input
    Well... Ok. Here we go: <d>x1,x2,x3,x4...xN</d>

    You have your XML.

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to Hoodaticus
    Hoodaticus:
    Don't you see? This way they can use xslt to transform it into a bitmap!

    Template select="/"

    LOL

    / template

    ^_^ And then

    xmlResult.Replace("LOL", "Signature") ;

  • My Name (unregistered) in reply to BBT
    BBT:
    Presumably the thinking was this: [...]
    I think they just tracked the pen coordinates while it was being pressed on the screen in order to construct the signature.
  • hey persto! (unregistered) in reply to Beldar the Phantom Replier
    Beldar the Phantom Replier:
    Dinnerbone:
    Oh god, 273 == -273. The universe goes boom.

    That makes perfect sense iff 273 == i

    Umm.. No.

    It makes perfect sense mod 1, mod 2 or mod 273 (etc).

  • Dot Freak (unregistered) in reply to Naked Jaybird
    Naked Jaybird:
    Neil:
    anon:
    Fahrenheit? Speak SI, dammit!
    Sports Illustrated?
    I imagine the swimsuit issue of SI loses some of its sexiness when transmitted in bmp2xml format.
    Oooh, nice dot dots :)
  • Heavy Lifter (unregistered) in reply to Big Bertha
    Big Bertha:
    Jim Lard:
    I mis-read "gargantuan ladles" in the first paragraph as "gargantuan ladies". Then got all excited when it started talking about the "hot strip mill"...
    I'm a gargantuan lady, you insensitive clod!
    Hey baby, can you carry hundreds of tons of molten steel?
  • Klink (unregistered) in reply to ContraCorners

    lmao!

  • picha encoda (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy

    [quoteReally though, you should just offload the work to the data input device and get it to send you a fricking jpeg.[/quote]

    Compression noob; image without gradients => GIF.

    Unless the supervisors have very artistic signatures.

  • <Fullname><Title>Mr</Title><First Name>...... etc (unregistered)

    I think your getting a bit lost now.... You should use much more xml :-

    <TheWholeSignature> <signature> <FirstPixel> <x> 87 </x> <y> 21 </y> <pixelcolourdepth> 8 </pixelcolourdepth> <timeofpixelcaptured> 09:30:00:01 </timeofpixelcaptured> <dateofpixelcaptured> 01/01/2009 </dateofpixelcaptured> <PressureOfPixel> 50 </PressureOfPixel> <temperature_at_time_of_pixel_capture> 19.5 </temperature_at_time_of_pixel_capture> <temperature_scale> C </temperature_scale> <check_digit> 00043789234092345728034980329850287340980 </check_digit> </FirstPixel> .. .. </signature> </TheWholeSignature>

    Do you think I need a check digit for x AND for y ? or will just the one do ?

  • Smith (unregistered) in reply to <Fullname><Title>Mr</Title><First Name>...... etc

    LMAO

    or should that be <LMAO> LMAO </LMAO>

    or even <LMAO> <FirstDigit> L </FirstDigit> ..... </LMAO>

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