Ben Scott <dragonh...@gmail.com> writes: > > Some of you may have seen xkcd #1110, "Click and Drag", from Wed 19 > Sep. If not: http://xkcd.com/1110/ > > Some people have analyzed it. If it was a conventional image, it > would be 165888 x 79872 pixels (W x H). As a 32-bit uncompressed > bitmap, it would be almost 60 gigabytes. Printed at 300 DPI, it would > be 46 feet wide. The xkcd page uses HTML "stitching" and a lot of > blank fills to accomplish this in about 6 MB of images.
Yes. In addition to being more space-efficient, the particular technique of sparse-tile-stitching in use on that comic also actually helps to frustrate attempts at downloading the whole thing or otherwise `seeing the big picture'. I initially wrote a quick script to try brute-forcing the problem on the computer+network rather than spending too many brain-cycles reading the JavaScript code, and found it thwarted by the unholy amount of hole-iness in the map: you can't just start at the center, walk until you hit `the end' of the world, and then jump to the next row or column and walk back toward the opposite edge, because it's not a single landmass contiguous in all directions. So I gave the (slightly obfuscated) xkcd JS a more thorough reading, revised my script, and downloaded all of the tiles using slightly- less-brutish force. Haven't had time to stitch them all together myself, yet. On the whole, I find that comic to be an amazing adventure in both moral amibuity and moral-ambiguity. > Someone created a zoomable version (like Google Maps): > http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/ Run the browser window full-screen, > and it's impressive, despite being a black-and-white stick figure drawing. Hm. If that site actually provides a distinct set of tiles per zoom-level, that might make a neat easter-egg in FoxtrotGPS.... -- "Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))." _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/