Writing code with MS Paint

http://i.min.us/ikq8hS.gif

by jitbit • 15 years ago

167 52 15 years ago

i.min.us

ja27• 15 years ago

I thought it would be actual opcodes and run - if you could save to a raw, headerless bitmap from Paint.

lubos• 15 years ago

oh common, I thought it was freaking awesome until you ruined it for me

lordlarm• 15 years ago

Can anyone please contribute to how this works?

perlgeek• 15 years ago

The maker of the picture wrote the code first in a text editor, and then for each triple of ASCII characters he found the corresponding RGB value, and set one pixel to it.

Since the bitmap is just a header (the mojibake you see at the start of the text file) and then a bunch of data bytes, the data bytes can be read as plain text again.

jcl2• 15 years ago

Some other things to note:

He is filling in the image from left-to-right, bottom-to-top. That's the scanline order of the data in BMP files, which means he is entering the code in the order it appears in the file.

Also, the image he is filling in is eight pixels wide. This is important because the row data in BMP files must be padded to a multiple of four bytes. Each pixel in a 24-bit image takes three bytes. If he had picked a width that wasn't a multiple of four, he would have had garbage padding bytes in the middle of his code.

rheide• 15 years ago

I'm guessing the bmp format happens to look like ascii for certain pixels with certain colors.

I wonder if this works in reverse. Maybe we can program the Mona Lisa in C.

JoachimSchipper4• 15 years ago

C code is too "random" to produce nice images. You can use the least significant bits to hold some data; Google "steganography" (this is just the most basic).

piaskal• 15 years ago

It's pretty smart, but very simple. He just puts character ASCII codes into RGB fields in color picker. In 24 bit bmp format those values are saved directly to the file.

kbutler• 15 years ago

Simple BMP files consist of a header followed by pixel data.

By selecting the colors for individual pixels that correspond to the ASCII characters in the source code, a BMP is created that contains the source code.

This seems completely useless, until you realize that early computers were programmed by flipping switches to enter the binary values the operator wanted to set...

Then you realize that this is entering human-readable high-level language code that would have to be compiled, and with a header that will fail to compile, so yes, this is completely useless. grin

s2r2• 15 years ago

I thought it would be for „Piet”...

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

d0m• 15 years ago

The use of .gif instead of a flash movie or also pretty ingenious (and a bit oldschool!).

Samuel_Michon3• 15 years ago

I'd say that using Animated GIF is adhering to web standards, using Flash is old school.

drzaiusapelord3• 15 years ago

How is this a web standard? There really is no standard for video files and if there was, no one is taking gif seriously. There are proposals and half-assed implementations. Hell, not only do gifs look fucking terrible they're also a huge waste of bandwidth.

I'd rather just get served an mp4 file or even an embedded flash object instead of this. The only reason why there are so many gifs in the world is because its easy to find free hosting for them and email. Its still a piss poor format for video.

Not to mention, the gif people tried suing everyone once. Not exactly the paragon of open you think it is. Don't let Steve Jobs' rivalry with Adobe make you fall in love with sub-par formats. He's glad you uncritically parrot his thinking, but its really not doing anything for you.

ssharp2• 15 years ago

On Safari, the animation got really slow after the file was saved in Paint. So much so, that I lost interest and closed the tab.

jitbit• 15 years ago

It doesnt get slow, it's just the guy pauses... (typing the filename outside of the frame, so we don't see it)

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

The massive GIF was killer on my iPad, but at least I got to see it.

fish2000• 15 years ago

What's nice about this is that the color palette he creates in the course of doing this looks as though it'd work well for a syntax-highlighting theme.

grigy• 15 years ago

Looks like lots of spaces make the picture grayish.

jgrahamc• 15 years ago

That's nothing. On the Sharp MZ-80K (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_MZ#MZ-80K_group) every byte had a printable character that was accessible from the keyboard (see: http://www.ratedesi.com/i/pic/3wuv_OoCvJ8naM:/Com-Museum-Sha...). The screen memory was just a part of the standard memory accessed by the Z80 processor, i.e. the screen memory could be executed.

Thus it was possible to write a program using the following steps:

1. Write out the Z80 assembly code

2. Convert to opcodes

3. Look up the opcodes in the character map and type the appropriate character on the screen starting at top left

Then you could execute the program by calling screen memory (which was possible from BASIC).

Happy days.

Similarly this made the inclusion of machine code in BASIC programs possible. I would optimize BASIC programs by including machine code subroutines stored as characters in REM statements. It wasn't hard to find those REM statements in memory (as the program was loaded in a fixed location) and call subroutines in the REM statements to speed things up.

IIRC correctly I used the same machine code in REM statement trick on the Research Machines 480Z (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINK_480Z) but this involved non-printing characters and thus it was not possible to LIST the entire program and so I typically stored all the machine code in lines numbers less than 100.

Which reminds me. On the 480Z there was an 800kbps network using coax. A friend and I disassembled the BIOS and reverse engineered the API (a software interrupt) used for sending and receiving data which enabled us to send arbitrary packets of code to any machine running our interrupt handler.

The receive buffer was only 128 bytes, so we would send the machine code in the packet and the receive handler would execute the packet inside the receive buffer. Amazing how much stuff you can do 128 bytes at a time. We wrote a network management package that used this functionality.

Xuzz• 15 years ago

More recently, the JailbreakMe iPhone jailbreak used the screen to store the kernel shellcode, since the framebuffer was in a known memory location in both the kernel and userland.

Here's a picture I found of it executing the screen: http://img101.imageshack.us/i/ipts.jpg/

Hilyin• 15 years ago

Wow, I jailbroke my iPhone and always wondered what that was. It was top most on the screen, I thought it was a bug. This is way cooler.

manfrin• 15 years ago

Can anyone explain this in terms that a nonprogrammer like myself might understand? This sounds stupefyingly interesting, but I have no idea.

gaius3• 15 years ago

It's funny, I've just gotten a Cherry G80-11900 TouchBoard keyboard and I was thinking how much it's like the RM 380Z keyboard I used at school...

mrcharles3• 15 years ago

So, I was bored after seeing this last week when I submitted it to HN, and so I whipped up a quick python script to shove code in to a BMP file. I bashed it out quick and didn't bother cleaning it up, but here it is:

https://github.com/mrcharles/codemap

Output from image.py: http://www.bluh.org/codemap.bmp

Sadly there's still a bug, I think it has to do with alignment padding, which causes a null byte every 520 characters. When I get bored I'll fix it.

I think I'm going to write code though to try and make "pretty" images from source code, though in the end it won't be human readable when you open the file.

lloeki• 15 years ago

Make the image width a multiple of four? (thanks to this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2415202)

mrcharles3• 15 years ago

Yeah, I know that's the fix, I'm just too lazy to do it. When I belted it out I forgot to think about that and then I didn't notice the nulls until someone pointed them out. Oops.

ot2• 15 years ago

If C++ supported the backwards comment "\\" meaning "everything before this is a comment" described by Stroustrup in http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf, it could be compilable right out of Paint

gaius3• 15 years ago

Haha brilliant! Why didn't they adopt this? Or is there a C++ compiler that does support it?

jcl2• 15 years ago

That doesn't strike you as a really bad idea? Quite apart from the maintenance nightmare, consider what happens if you need to include a backslash in a string.

Read the paper... It also proposes limiting all identifiers to one character, using Wingdings as variables, and overloading whitespace as an operator. ;)

ot2• 15 years ago

Have you noticed the publication date, in the abstract?

iM8t• 15 years ago

Anyone knows if there's already a code to convert strings of code to images like this? It might be fun to make a few images like that.

runjake• 15 years ago

2 options:

1.) Google 2.) Read the two threads that were posted here 20 minutes prior to your comment. (Hint: search for "codemap" in page).

shii• 15 years ago

This reminds me of 4chan's Cornelia[1][2] (and previously 4chan.js[3]) scripts from a few years ago.

[1] http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Cornelia

[2] http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2010/08/09/painting-...

[3] http://encyclopediadramatica.com/4chan.js

hernan7• 15 years ago

Am I the only one dismayed by how drab the resulting image looks?

SageRaven• 15 years ago

This is a pretty cool hack, of sorts.

There's a hacker conference (I forget which, I think it's "the" demo scene con -- any remember Unreal from the early 90s?) where one of the events is creating a binary executable that is also a displayable image. Or maybe a playable sound file? Anyway, the same basic idea, and when I stumbled across the submissions, I thought it was a really neat concept.

PlanetFunk• 15 years ago

To minimise page size I pack the javascript for my html5 game - Last Man Standing: A Zombie Apocalypse - into a png and load it using canvas and eval.

It packs my 51KB minified source into an 18KB image file.

Works a charm :)

Writing code with MS Paint

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