Adrian Herbez Rotating Header Image

Posts Tagged ‘tools’

Cryptogram maker script

I sat down to work on the cryptogram solving interface from the last post a bit, only to find that the CoronaSDK API reference site was down. So, I decided to spend the allotted time working on a support tool instead. I wrote a simple Python script that:

  • reads in a list of statements from a file and, for each of them:
  • randomly generates a substitution cipher
  • encodes the statement into ciphertext
  • prints the original statement and the ciphertext version to a file

Nothing spectacular here, but it will make testing a lot easier, and will eventually grow into a proper content-creation tool. It’s almost usable as such as-is, but I want to add in some heuristics for estimating (and perhaps even adjusting) the difficulty of the resulting cryptogram.

projects , ,

Purple Profiles

example output from the purple profile toolIn the wake of recent suicides by LGBT youths, some people have been wearing purple to show solidarity with LGBT youth and remind them that it does get better. I created a small PHP script to make it really easy to purple-ize a given JPEG, along with an option to add “it gets better” text to the bottom.

To try it for yourself, go here

projects , ,

Out-of-Office tool

This was one of the tools I built during my time at Linden Lab. It is meant to make it easy for employees to indicate when they will be out of the office, and to easily see when their teammates will be gone or otherwise unavailable.

I developed both the back-end (MySQL/PHP) and front-end (HTML/JS) components of the system from start-to-finish, though I owed Johnhenry Righter a big debt of gratitude for making it actually look good.

projects , , ,

Tex Calc

screenshot of the texture calculator

screenshot of the texture calculator

While Second Life offers everything you need to apply complex textures to your objects on a per-face basis, it can be really tricky to determine the appropriate repetitions and offsets to get a specific portion of the texture onto a specific face.

I’ve created a tool that sidesteps the issue and allows users to interactively click and drag a selection box around a given portion of a texture. The program then calculates the necessary offset / repetition values to have the selected region appear on a face.

To use the program, download the zip file from here. Read the instructions below, or scroll down for a video.

After opening the program, load your texure image (JPG, GIF, BMP, or Targa) by clicking on the “load texture” button. Once you’ve done that, click and drag anywhere in the image to define a rectangular region. As you drag, you’ll see the region you’re selecting highlighted in red. When you let go of the mouse, the program will display the necessary repetition and offset values in the top-right. Using the specified values in SecondLife will give you the selected portion of your texture.

If the highlight color isn’t to your liking, click somewhere in the color swatch region to select a color that you would prefer to use (something that will contrast with your texture), and click on the “dot” button. The color of the selection dot will change to the color you selected, and further selections will be in that color.

You can also change the color of the horizontal and vertical guide lines to provide better contrast. To do that, select a color from the swatch and click the “guide” button.

projects , ,

Comp and I make beautiful music together

As the quarter draws inexorably closed here at UCI, I’ve been finishing off this quarter’s classwork. Still in the works is my paper for Antoinette LaFarge’s seminar on Virtual Identity, but my project for Digital Signal Processing with Chris Dobrian is pretty much done. I say “pretty much” because I probably won’t be able to resist adding more features, but it’s a lot of fun to play with as is.
If you’re intrigued, head here to read about it and download your own copy.

projects , , ,