In the "something completely different" category today, anonwhat has created an image-to-ASCII art tutorial that takes in an image and, using PHP's GD functionality and a bit of logic, transforms it.

In this tutorial, we are going to create a simple web-based ASCII Art Generator. The concepts found in this tutorial can be applied to other languages. [It is] a simple ASCII Art Generator takes in an image, grayscales it, pixelates it, then prints out a character for each block on the pixelated image based on how “dark” the block is.

The tutorial walks you through the steps needed to make the simple script. It analyzes the image looking at the "blackness" (a combination of the values from imagecolorat and imagecolorsforindex). ACSII characters are then substituted for different "blackness" ranges with the result looking something like this.

Kevin Schroeder has posted another excerpt from his "You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?" book to his blog today. This time it's from the third chapter that looks at character encodings like UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1.

I realized that while this 3.5-year PHP consultant knew Unicode, UTF-8, character encodings such as ISO-8859-1 or ISO-8859-7, I didn't understand them as well as I thought I had. With that I threw this chapter in the book. Knowing about character encoding is what many developers have. Not as many truly understand it. In this chapter I try to de-mystify character encoding as a whole.

The excerpt introduces character encoding and what it really is - a translation for the computer to be able to handle the human language. The problem comes in when multiple tools try to define the same sort of letters/chatacters in different ways. He gives an example of a "hello world" string in a normal ASCII format versus one from the EBCDIC format and how it would be rendered by an ASCII-understanding browser.