What is ASCII Art? What is ANSI? and more!

I added a significant amount of content to my ASCII Art Academy page on my site. I answered there in short what things are. I explain all this stuff in detail in various articles, but I think it is good to have a short and straight forward version on the main Academy home page as well.



Here are some examples:

What is ASCII Art?
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is a text format standard for computers. ASCII art is text art that was created on computers who use this ASCII standard. The text art created on the IBM PC, which use text characters beyond the ASCII standard are also called ASCII, even though it is technically incorrect. The IBM PC become the most widely used computer in the world and people called things ASCII, even if they were not. There is no sense to debate about it, because it won't change what already happened.

What is 7-Bit ASCII?
The difference between 7-bit and 8-bit ASCII is pretty simple, assuming that you have a keyboard with the latin alphabet. 7-bit only uses characters that you can find on the keyboard. 8-bit uses additional characters that you cannot find on your keyboard, but which exist in "text mode" of the old MS DOS operating system. MS DOS hat 256 characters for text mode. Some of them are control chracters and not visible, such as Carriage Return, Line Feed (Line Break), the Tab character or the Escape character. The standard US-ASCII characters are the first 128 chracters of the character set, where 97 of them are usable for text and ASCII art.

What is 8-Bit ASCII?
8-bit ASCII art uses primarily characters after the 128 chracters of the US-ASCII character set. You cannot find those characters on your keyboard and could only generate them via programming code, special editors (like TheDraw or ACiDDraw) or by pressing the ALT-Key and then type the character code (a number between 128 and 255) on your numeric keypad, while keeping the ALT-Key pressed. Those upper or "higher" characters are suitable for basic graphical elements, such as box borders, corners. Those characters are unique to the IBM PC and MS DOS and are not compatible with other operating systems, such as UNIX, Linux or MAC OS.

What is ANSI?
ANSI is unique for MS DOS by Microsoft and the IBM PC. ANSI is a set of control sequences to manipulate the appearance of the text on the screen, to bolden text, making it itallic or blinking and to add some colors to your text. There are 16 pre-defined foreground colors, where 8 of them could also be used as background color.

The use of ANSI control sequences (called Escape sequences, because they all started with the ESC character) required special editing software, because unlike the 8-Bit upper characters, is there no easy way to generate those sequences by hand. In order for MS DOS to process and interpret those control sequences properly, a special driver had to be loaded, which came with the MS DOS operating system by default. The file for this driver was named "ANSI.SYS". This is where ANSI got his name from, which is sometimes confusing, because ANSI also stands for the American National Standards Institute, the organization who defined the US-ASCII standard.

And more...
I also added examples of the character sets 7-bit and 8-bit and the ANSI color schema. I also added a grid with the mapping of ANSI colors to HTML colors and their ESC sequence code.

New ANSI Tutorial
Another goodie that I finally added was a good and detailed ANSI tutorial by the artist Zerovision of the young ANSI art group called "Blocktronics". It uses the example of a picture that shows the movie character "Chucky" and how he re-created the picture in ANSI. It explains shading techniques and more in detail, why ZV decided to do this versus something else, etc. Very useful for beginners.

Group Update
It is funny, but I joined as of today a new computer group. Something that I didn't do for the past 10 years or so. I thought I am too old for this stuff, but then, it is a revival of an very old group by a bunch of very old guys like me (in terms of Scene life). The group is called "Canadan Pirates Inc." or CPI. A group with roots in Canada (duh) and some cracker scene history. The revived group does not do any cracking and warez anymore though. It will focus on Music, Intros, Demos and also scene history preservation, something that I already do for a few years now.



I chatted today on Facebook with Rod aka MadMax, co-founder of CPI and he asked me, if I would join. I was in touch with Rod for a while already and also had multiple lengthy phone calls about verious things, mostly whining about the lost past hehe. I said yes, so here I am... new member of CPI. :)

Well, that's some news.... I hope you will like the new content. I am out of here now.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC (and CPI)

The Berlin Wall History - Lessons Learned ... Again

I did a long and detailed post about the Berlin Wall in June, titled "The Berlin Wall and the Walls between Us". It also included a 13 minutes extended edition of my video "Berlin Wall - Lessons Learned". It was already version 3 of the video (Here are the links to version 2 and version 1 of the video as well, just for the sake of completeness).

Why the different versions? Well, there are multiple reasons.

First, I improved my editing skills and was able to do things better where I was unhappy about in a previous version of the video.



I also got access to new or sometimes just better quality sources. One of the latest discoveries was a high quality video version of the episode "The Berlin Wall" from the National Geographic TV series "Turning Points Of History". That 45 minutes documentary virtually contained the video snippets of all my video sources about the 1950-1970s that I already had from elsewhere (stock footage, public domain etc.), but in much better quality.

I spent the last few days on version 4.0 of my video. This time I did re-created it entirely from scratch. It's not just an edit of the previous version. I even re-cut, re-edited and re-sorted the sources again. This version is a whopping 30 min (almost) long.

Note: Google Video messed something up. It shows only the first 5:41 minutes of the video. I will re-upload it again and try to figure out what the problem is. Once I have the full 30 minutes version up and working, I will update the links in this post.

Google Video seems to be fine again. I used the Google issue period to make some enhancements to the video. It is now also slightly longer than before and surpasses the 30 minutes mark now. (30:20 min or something like that). I also updated the Link to Mediafire.com and got the AVI file-size reduced thanks to the use of H.264 video and AC3 audio compression. It's about half the size of the previous Xvid/Mp3 encoded version, which I deleted.

I also refrained from using any music that might infringe a little bit copyright here and there. It is using all Classic music (with the creators dead for far longer than 50 or 70 years). It is in some cases matching even better than the music that I used before, but unfortunately not always. I had to make some compromises for the sake of legal purity :).

Music Credits

• Samuel Barber "Adagio for Strings"
• Richard Strauss "Also sprach Zarathustra"
• Richard Addinsell "Warsaw Concerto"
• Carl Orff "Carmina Burana, 1st mvt 'O Fortuna'"


• Franz Schubert "Serenade"
• Georges Bizet "Carmen Suite No. 1 & 2"

I don't think that using the National Geographic documentary footage (logo blurred out) is an issue, because they also just used stock footage from CNN and other media sources. This video is not commercial in nature and CNN and others should not have a problem with my use of their stock footage.

So here is the 30 min video



Backup link to video at Google Video.

Link to video in .AVI format and 640x480 resolution at Mediafire.com (Large! 282 MB)

Feel free to comment and tell me what you think about the video. I am also open for any suggestions, praise and criticism :).

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Cirque du Soleil's Music Concert 'Delirium' Video

Cirque du Soleil's music concert and arena show "Delirum" is now running in Movie Theatres. You cannot see the show live anymore, because it is finished touring.

However, you can see it on the Big screen at the moment and hopefully soon on DVD.

I finally got around creating a longer sneak preview video, which I had on my to-do list for some time already. The news that the show stopped touring and is now shown in movie theaters made me realize that it won't be for long anymore and a DVD will be available and no need for me to spend time on editing together a nice video hehe.

So here it is now, a 28 minutes long sneak preview of some segments of the show. I think it is a record... yes, it is. The "O" and "Mystere" videos were "only" 21 and 22 minutes long.

As a special bonus, both, the handbalancing (Andrey Koltsov) and hoola hoops (Irina Akimova) acts are covered completly (yeah! hehe). Editing video on a PC is still a bitch and it took me longer than I wanted to. Not the editing, but the rendering of the final video :(. God, I hate this "codec", "DirectShow Filters", "Video for Windows" crap and all the problems that come with it.



Backup link to video at Google Video.

You can also download the entire video in 400x300 resolution and .AVI format from Mediafire.com here. Other Cirque du Soleil videos of mine can also be downloaded. See a complete list at this URL.

For more Cirque du Soleil visit my Cirque du Soleil primer.

Something else...
A side note about my blog here at RoySAC.com/blog.

Have a look to the right side and you will notice a new text box below the text box for the email subscription to my posts via Feedburner.

It's a new search feature for my blog. It only searches my blog and not the rest of the website.

I use Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE) for it and tweaked it to make the results even more relevant. I excluded the "category" pages and the homepage for example. It should actually only search and return blog post pages, if I did everything right and as I wanted it to be. The Category pages and homepage tend to rank high in Google, but they are not that much helpful, especially if you are looking for something specific. :)

So check it out and let me know how it works for you. I am thinking about creating a second CSE for the rest of the RoySAC.com site, which is also getting bigger and harder to navigate every day.

Enjoy and Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Think Different! Be Different!

In case you did not notice, I started blogging a little bit more about political and social subjects recently. There is a reason for it. I spent more time thinking about the things that happened in this world. I did't say that I wasn't thinking about those things in the past, I just say that I did spend more time than usual.

See for example my longer posts about the Crazy Horse Memorial, the Berlin Wall or Nationalism and Blind Obedience to your Government.

This also lead me to create a category at my blog titled "Politics" where I attached all those (more or less) politics related blog posts of mine (including past blog posts from last year or the year before that).

Well that's enough for an intro :).

I stumbled recently across a cool Apple Computers commercial that I don't remeber seen on TV, but that has nothing to say, since I did not watch TV really during the past 1-2 years or so.. thanks to the Internet hehe.

This is IMHO the best Apple Computers commercial of all times and one of the best commercial of all time in general too. Well, and if there is one thing that you can say about the Apple CEO Steve Jobs, then it would be "Yeah, He thinks different!".

The message of the video is clear:

Follow your instinct and ignore what other people might say. The people who thought different and were called all kinds of words by the people during their lifetime are the ones who actually did change the world (for the better or worst).

Changes happen because of people who do not comply with old rules and established thinking and follow through with their ideas and believes regardless of the problems they got as a result of it.



Backup Link to Video at YouTube.com.

The text of the video goes as follows.

Here is to the crazy ones,
the misfits, the rebels,
the trouble makers,
the round pigs in the square holes,
the ones who see things differently.
They are not fond of rules
and they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them,
but the only thing you can't do...
is ignore them,
because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some might see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius,
because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world,
are the ones who do.

Think Different!

Great stuff. Heads up to who came up with this.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Cirque du Soleil & Criss Angel's 'Believe' - A Special Sneak Preview

The news that the new Cirque du Soleil show with the (in)famous magician Criss Angel with the title "Believe" will premier much later than it was originally planned was bad, but there was nothing that could be done about it.

There is only about 1 1/2 months to go until the current premier date and the Cirque is already on "promo tour", which is a good sign. You do not go on promo tour, if you are in trouble and far behind schedule, risking further delays... no, you would be back "home" and work overtime, weekends and holidays to get the thing done on the date you said it would be done.

Well, 16 dancers of the new show and their ceographer were sighted in Los Angeles, California a few days ago. They gave a special performance at the event "So you think you can dance?" and a first real sneak peak of the new Criss Angel show ever, actual footage from the show itself, no talks, no stills, drawings and models.. nope, the real deal this time.

It shows the actual performance to get a glimpse of the things to come, when the new show finally premiers in October 2008 at the Luxor hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This performance was aired on TV on Fox and somebody was kind enough to record it/Tivo it and upload the whole thing to his favorite video sharing website, where I picked it up. I also found a mini-documentary video, officially by the Cirque itself that shows "behind the scene" footage of this special performance called "All in a Day's Work".

I grabbed that one too. Then there was also the very first show teaser that was released.. no show footage (unfortunately), but you cannot have everything you wish for all the time.

Anyhow, I grabbed those 3 videos and added some stuff from a fourth one and some images for a mini video slideshow, with music from the actual show in the background, to round up my video version of all this.

All in all some entertaining 7:22 minutes to enjoy.


Cirque du Soleil & Criss Angels -Believe- Special Preview Video at DailyMotion.com

You can download this video in higher 640x480 resolution and in .AVI format at Mediafire.com here.

To learn more about Cirque du Soleil, their shows and special performances, check out my Cirque du Soleil primer.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC