Regruntled.com

Lately I’ve been playing with Paint.Net, yet another paint program.  This one is free, but not open-source.  It allows people to write plug-ins in C#, my favorite language for image manipulation.  CodeLab is a plug-in that helps you write plug-ins.  CodeLab is free and open-source.

It’s hard to describe how enticing to a computer nerd the idea of “tools to build tools” is.  It’s Nerd Heaven!  The only thing better than tools to build tools would be tools to build tools to build tools.

But let’s put CodeLab to the test.  I want to shuffle the colors in an image.  I want to replace the reds with greens, the greens with blues and the blues with reds.  Here is the code inside CodeLab:

void Render(Surface dst, Surface src, Rectangle rect)
{
    ColorBgra CurrentPixel;
    ColorBgra NewPixel;
    for (int y = rect.Top; y < rect.Bottom; y++)
    {
        for (int x = rect.Left; x < rect.Right; x++)
        {
            CurrentPixel = src[x,y];
            NewPixel = CurrentPixel;
            NewPixel.R = CurrentPixel.G;
            NewPixel.G = CurrentPixel.B;
            NewPixel.B = CurrentPixel.R;
            NewPixel.A = CurrentPixel.A;
            dst[x,y] = NewPixel;
        }
    }
}

This was so easy that I wrote a few more plug-ins.  Here is how they look in the Paint.Net menu:

The rest is anticlimactic. I took a digital photo of a flower, reduced it to six different sizes, and used my new plug-ins to color-shift each size in a different way. I stacked the flowers and flattened the layers.

I’d like a child bear, please! Not a warm soda, but a child bear.

Information Age Prayer offers to say your prayers for you for a small monthly fee.  By machine.  Of course, one never knows if something like this is a spoof or not, and in fact the best spoofs hover right on the edge of plausibility. 

But if Scientology is not a spoof, maybe this is not a spoof either.  Spoof or not, it is very elaborate:

Information Age Prayer was founded in 2009 with the aim of helping those who are unable to pray as frequently as they would like. By using the latest technology in text-to-speech synthesizers we are able to provide the service at very affordable rates.

 

All Jewish prayers are voiced in English, with the computer speakers facing Jerusalem.

 

All Muslim prayers are voiced in English, with the computer speakers facing Mecca.

 

Your privacy is protected, all prayers are not audible outside of the Information Age Prayer location. While it is certain that God hears the prayers, we cannot guarantee that other supernatural beings do not overhear or otherwise obtain knowledge of them.

That last part is unsettling.  Another supernatual being… listening in… taking notes… making a list and checking it twice.  I suppose that could happen without the computers, too.

See also: Spamming God.

Marketing psychology, or just bad translation?  Maybe it’s supposed to be “Deluxe”. In the US, “Simply Bacon!” might sell better.