Slashdot Mirror

Recently, I've had two readers come looking for some obscure graphical tools. Their requests were similar enough in a sense that I felt I would post them both in a single article. For those of you who remember, there was a tool that would display Tux the penguin in colored text from the Linux source code. Well, I'm sure there are several tools like that out there creating images out of things more interesting than that. This article is for those people looking for those or similar programs.

Eli asks: "Ages ago on Slashdot there was a post of a company in England who would take a picture you sent them and they would return it to you as a poster with every pixel in the original represented with a greyscale character. It was nifty, but it cost money. Then a few days later, someone posted a Gimp Script-Fu that did the same thing, for free, in full color, with any user supplied text file. I used this for ages but have since lost the script. Do any of you old skewl dotters happen to have this in an archive somewhere? Has anyone made improvements to it? It's not in the /. archives. I'm sure it was pre-Andover days."

And this related question from Panu Hällfors, which is asking more for a specific website than a software tool, but I figure there is a software tool behind there somewhere: "Some time ago there was this project of making a huge image montage in which small Linux-related images would make up a picture of Tux. I used to check out the preview versions every now and then and even submit a few pictures myself. But now! Where's the site? What has happened?

Neither their site nor their email account (linux@remotepoint.com) seems to exists anymore. Does anyone know who were working on the project and where they are now? I'd like to see the project go on, if possible."

So I'm sure there is software out there for creating an image out of specified text or even other images. What packages are out there? Which ones do you use?

Amoeba Protozoa asks: "How do I implement a load-balenced, layer 4 switching web-server? Would it be possible to mix O/Ss? Besides your incoming bandwidth, where do the bottlenecks occur? I would prefer to use Apache, Linux or BSD, and be able to utilize mod_perl or PHP to access a shared MySQL database. I would like to make this setup as scalable as possible."

Amoeba Protozoa writes "Here is an amusing and well written interview with Edward Teller, atomic science history's own real-life Dr. Strangelove." It's in Scientific American. And at one point, Teller threatens to throw the interviewer out of his office if he mentions Dr. Strangelove "three more times."

Amoeba Protozoa has the first Quickie for the day: The Linux Image Montage Project needs logos to create a montage poster. If you have a Linux related logo, send it to them. mazeone sent us a link to the always excellent NTK which has a great note about Bruce Perens at the start, (And yes, I read NTK too ;) And now a whole bunch of fun little links that have been building up: PopeClayton sent us a link to a Homer Simpson Fortune File. cpfeifer sent us a link to another O'Reily Book Parody. Zibalatz sent us a link to a MacBeth Star Wars Parody. rpm sent us a link to the Magic Nipple. It predicts the future. Sorta. Now we have a few more Porn Parody sites: desertAngel sent us Amish Porn and Gambit32 sent us telephone sex. Both are hilarious. The Only Anonymous Coward sent us a link to an emergency Security Alert: apparently a dangerous bug was found in GNU acronym. An anonymous reader sent us an important page: a Guide to Babes for Geeks. Follow these to the letter. Oh wait, most of us probably already do. That might explain my social life anyway.

Amoeba Protozoa has the first Quickie for the day: The Linux Image Montage Project needs logos to create a montage poster. If you have a Linux related logo, send it to them. mazeone sent us a link to the always excellent NTK which has a great note about Bruce Perens at the start, (And yes, I read NTK too ;) And now a whole bunch of fun little links that have been building up: PopeClayton sent us a link to a Homer Simpson Fortune File. cpfeifer sent us a link to another O'Reily Book Parody. Zibalatz sent us a link to a MacBeth Star Wars Parody. rpm sent us a link to the Magic Nipple. It predicts the future. Sorta. Now we have a few more Porn Parody sites: desertAngel sent us Amish Porn and Gambit32 sent us telephone sex. Both are hilarious. The Only Anonymous Coward sent us a link to an emergency Security Alert: apparently a dangerous bug was found in GNU acronym. An anonymous reader sent us an important page: a Guide to Babes for Geeks. Follow these to the letter. Oh wait, most of us probably already do. That might explain my social life anyway.