Designing the least JPG compressible fabric pattern: http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/2010/what-is-the-least-jpg-compressible-pattern-camera-shooting-piece-of-cloth-sca …. This is the anti @ericlaw
| HTTP Content Coding Token | gzip | deflate | compress |
|---|---|---|---|
| An encoding format produced by the file compression program "gzip" (GNU zip) | The "zlib" format as described in RFC 1950. | The encoding format produced by the common UNIX file compression program "compress". | |
| Data Format | GZIP file format | ZLIB Compressed Data Format | The compress program's file format |
| Compression Method | Deflate compression method | LZW | |
| Deflate consists of LZ77 and Huffman coding | |||
Compress doesn't seem to be supported by popular current browsers, possibly due to its past with patents.
Deflate isn't done correctly all the time. Some servers would send the deflate data format instead of the zlib data format and at least some versions of Internet Explorer expect deflate data format instead of zlib data format.
I've just updated Encode-O-Matic with a Guess Input Encoding feature. When you start Encode-O-Matic or when you use the 'Guess Input Encoding' menu item from the 'Tools' menu, Encode-O-Matic will try out various combinations of encodings and guess at which set seem to apply to your input. For instance given the following text, Encode-O-Matic will correctly guess that it is percent encoded, base64 encoded, deflate compressed text:
S%2BWqUEhLLMoFUulFpXnZQLogMa%2BkmCuPqxzILk%2FMyeHK4QIAI've just put up an update for Encode-O-Matic with the following improvements:
I've looked at my web server logs previously to see if anyone had used my Web Frotz Interpreter and until recently didn't realize that awstats (the web server log report generator) was truncating the query from my URL, so I couldn't tell that anyone was actually using it. But after grepping the logs manually I've pulled out the URLs of visitor's text adventure sessions. If you'll recall, my Web Frotz Interpreter stores the game state in the URL so its easy to see user's game states in the web server logs.
I've put some of the links up on the Web Frotz Interpreter page. Some of the interesting ones:
This post is about creating a server side z-code
interpreter that represents game progress in the URI. Try it with the game Lost Pig.
I enjoy working on URIs and have the mug to prove it. Along those lines I've combined thoughts on URIs with interactive fiction. I have a limited amount of experience with Inform which generates Z-Code so I'll focus on pieces written in that. Of course we can already have URIs identifying the Z-Code files themselves, but I want URIs to identify my place in a piece of interactive fiction. The proper way to do this would be to give Z-Code its own mimetype and associate with that mimetype the format of a fragment that would contain the save state of user's interactive fiction session. A user would install a browser plugin that would generate URIs containing the appropriate fragment while you play the IF piece and be able to load URIs identifying Z-Code files and load the save state that appears in the fragment.
But all of that would be a lot of work, so I made a server side version that approximates this. On the Web Frotz Interpreter page, enter the URI of a Z-Code file to start a game. Enter your commands into the input text box at the bottom and you get a new URI after every command. For example, here's the beginning of Zork. I'm running a slightly modified version of the Unix version of Frotz. Baf's Guide to the IF Archive has lists of IF games to try out.
There are two issues with this thought, the first being the security issues with running arbitrary z-code and the second is the practical URI length limit of about 2K in IE. From the Z-Code standard and the Frotz source it looks like 'save' and 'restore' are the only commands that could do anything interesting outside of the Z-Code virtual machine. As for the length-limit on URIs I'm not sure that much can be done about that. I'm using a base64 encoded copy of the compressed input stream in the URI now. Switching to the actual save state might be smaller after enough user input.
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