Lenny Domnitser’s
domnit.org

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This is a static archive of the domnit.org blog,
which Lenny Domnitser wrote between 2006 and 2009.

How to Make PNG Images Small for the Web

First, make sure you want PNG. Rule of thumb: JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics.

2 things I do:

  1. Shrink the palette. PNGs usually have room for 224 colors, or 232 including a transparency/opacity channel. If you’re using 256 or fewer colors, you can save your image with an indexed palette, which uses 1 byte for each pixel, before compression. In the free graphics program GIMP, you do this in Image → Mode → Indexed… → Generate optimum palette. Photoshop can do it too, and I’m sure any other good graphics program can. Before you go off saving in 1-bit mode, keep in mind that with antialiasing, there may be more colors than you can count. Savings are in the 75% range.

  2. Compress more. To not be painfully slow, graphics programs use some heuristics to get good, but not totally optimized compression on PNGs. Once you’ve saved your final PNG, and can spare the minute or so, you can use programs like pngcrush or optipng to try to increase compression. I do optipng -o7 mypicture.png for maximum compression. With files saved in the GIMP, I usually get 0-2% off, but I’ve gotten 20% or more off for other PNGs.

That’s it, 2 steps to prep PNGs.

Administrative Note

New blog posts will accept comments by default. Previously they were off by default, and I would turn them on for certain posts.

I think web discussions tend to be pretty bad, especially when using blog software, but since I have such a, er, select readership, I think it should work.

Hundred Push Ups

So I thought, what the hell, and now I’m a few days into the hundred push up challenge.

I made a schedule. Theoretically I’ll do 100 on 16 September. Mark your calendars! I’ll probably video it.

Lookalikes

MyHeritage has some cool face matching software. I look like these famous folks:

  1. Adam Sandler (62%)
  2. Eddie Kaye (61%)
  3. Zach Braff (59%)
  4. Albert Einstein (57%)
  5. Norma Shearer (57%)
  6. Woody Allen (55%)
  7. Anne Frank (53%)
  8. Adrien Brody (53%)

Battle Against Terrorism

Barack Obama said that Afghanistan is “the central front in the battle against terrorism”.

Of course, a battle only has one front. The word he was looking for was war. But Obama is a careful politician and speaker. War on Terror is no longer an acceptable term, since it was created and perverted over the last few years.

When Don Rumsfeld was leaving office, he was asked “With what you know now, what might you have done differently in Iraq?” Of everything he and his co-workers messed up, his answer was “I don’t think I would have called it the war on terror.” He explained that calling it a war creates an expectation of victory and an ending.

In 2003, President Bush said “Iraq is now the central front in the War on Terror.” Barack Obama is using the same language of war to describe Afghanistan, except without using the politically dangerous cliché “War on Terror”.

Like the War on Drugs, terrorism is a police and media problem, not a war. Obama could have said:

If President Bush, as bad a speaker as he is, found the language to push his viewpoint, Obama certainly can and should. And if he wants to present himself as an alternative to the status quo, he should learn from Rumsfeld, who was part of Bush administration and resigned.

“Battle against terrorism” isn’t Change, it’s cheap makeup.