http://www.thebroth.com/blog The Global Mosaic Fri, 22 Jun 2007 05:24:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Today we've released Puzzlebee, an application for the Facebook platform. Puzzlebee allows you to create jigsaw puzzles from your own photos and share them with your friends! If you have a facebook account, here's the link to the application: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2356957881 Experienced real life jigsaw fans will be pleased with the game mechanics. ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/213/jigsaw-puzzles-on-facebook TheBroth server gets more RAM and some software updates. During the 24-48 hours, expect intermittent outages where TheBroth is not accessible. There's exciting new features in development but they require that the server is updated. We'll have 2 more GB of RAM in it, and we'll install a number of software ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/212/server-upgrades-please-expect-downtime TheBroth as a platform for collaborative art will soon see whole range of new art forms. One of the coolest art forms, graffiti, will soon enter open beta. NOTE: If you like to test the new graffiti mode, please message Zaphod B to gain access. So what does that mean ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/211/new-art-form-graffiti Popular news aggreggator site Digg.com censored user stories that contained a hexadecimal code that would allow the circumvention of the HDDVD copy protection. Users reacted and inundated the web site with new stories about the hex code and Digg's decision to remove stories, ban users and even delete user accounts. ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/210/angry-users-teach-digg-a-lesson Today I had the privilege to attend a conference organized by education.au in Perth, Western Australia (my home town), entitled Challenging how knowledge is created. The highlight of the conference for me was Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. His vision is for every person on the planet to be given ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/209/meeting-jimmy-wales-founder-of-wikipedia-in-perth PNG is a very effective format for graphics, offering loss-less compression. It worked particularly well for the older type of mosaic artworks that were made out of unrotated and untextured tiles. However, it's no good no more. What happened? The new feature of tile rotation and in particular custom textures introduced ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/206/artworks-in-png-and-jpeg-format This post compares transfer time and execution speed of several methods of data exchange between the Flash player and amfphp-enabled gateway on the server, written in PHP. Our test results indicate that for larger arrays (with approx. 1000 elements), using strings performs better than transferring array objects or mysql result ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/205/flashamfphp-data-transfer-using-strings-is-fastest We have recently improved our gallery views by making the thumbnails larger and clearer, thanks to switching from PHP's GD library to Magickwand, a PHP API for ImageMagick. Features of now having larger thumbnails in the gallery views: Example thumbnail 20% larger thumbs: now 146x90 px (was 130x80 px) better image quality - a ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/204/better-image-thumbnails-with-magickwand Since the inception of TheBroth, we wanted to be able to rotate the tiles. This would make artworks possible that look like real mosaics, instead of the somewhat computerish, pixelated artworks that are the result of upright square tiles. Interestingly, tile rotation has no effect on the thumbnails, by which ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/202/tile-rotation-not-noticeable-in-thumbnails Seeding room colors by uploading an image with the colors you want should be easy, yet many consider it somewhat of a black art. What if you run out of tiles of a certain colors? A new feature makes it easy to reseed the colors of a room, down to ... http://www.thebroth.com/blog/201/room-reseeding