ASCII World Cup

Richard writes to tell us that the web is bringing you the next step up from watching those world cup matches in high-def. As the self-proclaimed "best, most ridiculous, most redundant graphical implementation of ASCII", ascii-wm.net brings you the 2006 World Cup live via your telnet window.

Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[Short Circuit]

I tried it. It says, "eam starts 10min before game."

So when's the next game?

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[klingens]

tomorrow 4pm GMT or so

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[nb caffeine]

Noon EST tomorrow (June 14). Todays games are already over. First Match tomorrow is Tunisia vs Saudi Arabia.

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[zebs]

Good luck connecting to it.
I tried earlier during match time only to be told it'd maxed out on connections.

Whats needed is a replay of a previous match.

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[bobthesloth]

This'd be an excellent idea. More so since this has been a really good cup so far.

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[mmontour]

I tried earlier during match time only to be told it'd maxed out on connections.

This is Slashdot. Surely somebody here can whip up a network of mirrors in time for tomorrow's game...

("netcat ascii-wm.net 2006 | netcat -u 224.0.0.1 5555" to bridge it to a local multicast stream, an inetd-launched daemon to handle client connections, round-robin DNS for load balancing, etc.)

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[nacturation]

This is Slashdot. Surely somebody here can whip up a network of mirrors in time for tomorrow's game...

("netcat ascii-wm.net 2006 | netcat -u 224.0.0.1 5555" to bridge it to a local multicast stream, an inetd-launched daemon to handle client connections, round-robin DNS for load balancing, etc.)

Sounds good. Let us know when your mirror is up.
 

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[advocate_one]

but no good if HE can't connect in the first place...

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[eggman95]

I wonder how many connections are allowed? It's hard to stay in the kitchen area at work to watch the entire game. Watching it in ascii is better than nothing!

Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.

[Mr. Sketch]

Next game: Ukraine v. Spain: 9:00am EDT Jun 14

From google (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=world+cup+20 06+schedule&btnG=Google+Search&lr=lang_en%7Clang_e s [google.com])

Too bad theres no game airing right now...

[nb caffeine]

And I get espn360 through whatever deal is worked out between my ISP and fifa. Damn, I was really looking forward to how "ridiculous" it really is

Better than the standard ASCII we see.

[mythosaz]

This is about 100x better than ASCII Goatse, which is much more common :(

Re:Better than the standard ASCII we see.

[Anonymous Coward]

but not as fun as Deep ASCII [ljudmila.org] ;)

In case of slashdotting...

[RobertB-DC]

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

So much for reporting on ASCII art. *sigh* Where do I find that bunny sig virus?

Re:In case of slashdotting...

[ewhac]

So much for reporting on ASCII art. *sigh*

You can thank the Goatse assholes -- literally -- for that.

Schwab

Re:In case of slashdotting...

[leviramsey]

You can thank the Goatse assholes -- literally -- for that.

I thought there was only one Goatse asshole...

Back in my day.....

[rueger]

You know it strikes me that probably 90% of the Internet audience these days would have no clue what ASCII is, much less how to telnet into the server.

On one hand, that's slightly sad - I remember being able to type faster on a C-64 [c64.com] than the modem could transmit - on the other it's amazing how far technology has come in only a decade.

My other thought is to ask the likelihood that FIFA [fifa.com] will shut them down as an infringing activity.

Re:Back in my day.....

[wetfeetl33t]

You know it strikes me that probably 90% of the Internet audience these days would have no clue what ASCII is, much less how to telnet into the server.

On one hand, that's slightly sad

Actually, I remember the days when we didn't have telnet. We actually had to go to the game, and we were grateful for it!

Re:Back in my day.....

[Jakob777]

How dare you suggest that we get out of these chairs and out into that sun filled land we abandoned long ago...

Wait? do girls like soccer?
HELL YEAH GO BRAZIL!!!

Re:Back in my day.....

[Dionysus]

Brazilian babes at the World Cup [aftenposten.no]
Swedish babes [aftenposten.no]
Trinidad & Tobago babes [aftenposten.no]
Italian babes [aftenposten.no]

Re:Back in my day.....

[Farmer Tim]

You know it strikes me that probably 90% of the Internet audience these days would have no clue what ASCII is...

Interesting you say that: "ASCII" was an answer to a clue in a crossword in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald.

Offline telnet

[aliquis]

Where I first heard about the ASCII WM someone asked if it worked offline aswell...

Re:Back in my day.....

[RESPAWN]

You actually have a good point. The other day a group of my friends, most of whom are a little older than I, got on the subject of porn which turned to the classic Deep Throat. Anyway, I mentioned that I had only seen the ASCII version (http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/deep.htm). Well, needless to say, nobody had any clue what I was talking about so I had to spend about 10 minutes trying to explain before I gave up.

When is the next game?

[antdude]

When is the next game to watch via telnet? This sounds cool. I would like to see examples too.

No Game Right Now

[Anti_Climax]

I guess I'll just keep playing Text Mode First Person Shooters [icculus.org] while I wait

Re:No Game Right Now

[TheShadowzero]

Or some nethack.

Won't work

[mobby_6kl]

As somebody already said, there are no games played right now, but even if there were, nobody would be able to enjoy it because "Too many connections" was the error I got during all but the first few matches.

Re:Won't work

[Nuskrad]

I just tried about 10 times in the space of a minute and managed to connect

I can't view it.

[The MAZZTer]

telnet.exe is no longer included with Windows starting with Vista.

Luckily we still have putty.exe. :)

aa in linux?

[Daxster]

Isn't it easy enough to whip this up easily with aa and a TV decoder in *nix? Now that it's been /.'d. good luck watching now.. so do it yourself ;-)

Re:aa in linux?

[mattyrobinson69]

if you have a DVB card, its something like this:

mplayer dvb://"bbc one" -vo aa

i cant remember exactly

DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII

[Viking Coder]

I once coded a DICOM Part 10 image (CT data, MRI data, etc.) viewer in ASCII. It did panning, zooming, measurements, regions of interest, cine'ing a stack of images - you name it. All of the image rendering went through an ASCII filter before being thrown onto the screen. And the images were surprisingly detailed even for a fairly large font size.

In other words, it was possible to do actual medical diagnosis with ASCII-rendered images. Terrifying, huh? Well don't worry, it never made its way into a Rad

Re:DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII

[x2A]

Think it would be a bad omen if, by chance, a word appeared like 'cAnCEr' in the ascii art? Or would you shrug it off as just a coincidence? :-/

Re:DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII

[Viking Coder]

Yikes! I hadn't even thought of it. You scare me. Go away!

Re:DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII

[gwgwgw]

I'm an active programmer in the field of Industrial Computed Tomography. It'd be fun to add a filter like that to our viewing possibilities.

Do you have the algorithm in a form I might be able to use?

Re:DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII

[Viking Coder]

This is an incredibly easy way to do it:

Select a mono-space font, like Courier. This makes things infinitely easier.

Figure out the size of a character in pixels, in the font size you're going to render at.

The next thing you do is to make an array of every single ASCII character that you want to use, and order it based on intensity of the characters in the font you're going to render in. (Start with space, period, little-o, capital-X, to make things easy for yourself.)

Figure out your display area, say 1280

Re:DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an even easier way: aalib [sourceforge.net].

Re:DICOM Part 10 image viewer - in ASCII

[selfdiscipline]

Why would you ever do such a thing?
It's not fair... I can't work up enough motivation to even write simple games or chat clients or dynamic webpages.

Ascii art MRI ?

[DrYak]

you're just one sick bastard... ...do you still have the source code ?

Lame work proxy

[b00fhead]

How may I circumvent^wavoid^wwork around the web proxy at work? Is there a, I dunno, telnet web portal somewhere? Obviously I'm asking Google the wrong thing. BTW, AussieAussieAussie! OiOiOi!

Re:Lame work proxy

[mattyrobinson69]

knock together some scripts, host a webserver which gets the content and creates 10 seconds worth of 'pages', write an webpage that pulls 10 seconds worth of pages at a time using the javascript xmlrpc object, then renders them. obviously, you'l have to work out how 'fast' the telnet server is redrawing the window for the redraw loop.

i'd do it and hook it up to my girlfriends dvb card using mencoder and netcat, and write change channel buttons into the webpage, but i just cant be bothered.

Re:Lame work proxy

[b00fhead]

Holy convoluted-way-about-it, Batman! I was thinking a Java client that would retrieve Telnet frames wrapped in HTTP data packets from an external server. All the server would have to do is put HTTP headers on the Telnet packets.

Re:Lame work proxy

[mattyrobinson69]

yes, but that wouldn't be web-2.0 would it?

Better than I thought it would be

[necronom426]

I tried it yesterday. When I first connected I had an ASCII plan view of a football pitch, so I was expecting an "O" to appear for the ball and move about during the game.

It wasn't that at all. It was the live picture converted to ASCII. It was impossible to see what was going on when it had a wide shot of the field (i.e. most of the time), but when it cut to a close up, you could quite easily make out the people moving around. You could also see the on-screen captions appear.

Totally useless, but brilliant in a geeky way :-)

BTW, games start at 14:00, 17:00 and 20:00 BST (I'll let you convert that to your own time).

Slashdotted?

[ewn]

down now:

me@here 1:telnet ascii-wm.net 2006
Trying 213.129.247.65...
telnet: connect to address 213.129.247.65: Connection timed out

Have we just slashdotted a server using plain old _telnet_?

I think I'll...

[GWBasic]

I think I'll watch this tonight on my high-def TV!

Doing this at home - heres how

[Grimwiz]

I have a mythtv server, to make it work at home you need to:
Stop the mythbackend processes from using the dvb capture cards.
Make sure that ~/.mplayer/channels.conf exists from a previous dvbscan.
In your xterm, - the mouse and choose a small font, then drag the window back to a suitable size
Run the following command: DISPLAY="" mplayer -vo aa -framedrop -menu "dvb://five"

As this was a quick hack I stopped there, but for

Subtitles

[Wahngrok]

It's a great way to watch while at work. I especially like the subtitles. They obviously use a quick and dirty translation of a german newsticker. Most of the time the gibberish only makes sense if you re-translate it back to german. :-)