I thought I'd just throw out this idea (inspired by an earlier post about a school computer club) before I might forget it:

What do you all think about having resources for [high|junior high|middle] school computer clubs (centered around programming) at TPU? We could go as far as providing a section of the site with forums, member list, links, etc., for each one, or something less involved than that.

I don't know how much work that would make for you guys. But I think that it would be a good idea. I've wanted to see about starting a computer club at my school..

That is an excellent idea.

Should try and get the IGs admins to submit articles on a regular basis. like every 2 weeks or something.

DragonWolf: Would you do that?

This autumn I'll have time for that but during school terms, writing an detailed article every 2 weeks would be quite a pain sometimes.

Yeah, I have to work 32 hours a week and go to school 32 hours a week...I can't touch my machine at home anymore, I go home to sleep, shower, and then leave now :(.

every 2 weeks I'd do it. I don't mean a particularly lengthy article. Just short tutorials..
Doesn't have to be 2 weeks even. Monthly..

I mean if you had like 4/5 of the regulars here writing monthly articles by the end of the year you'd have a pretty comprehensive article/tutorial database.

I work full time, 9am to 6-8pm Mon-Fri. An article wouldn't take me more than an hour or so to write, and I like writing them ^^

I'd put more time than that if I had to write articles.

I don't think a set of short tutorials would be of any use... On the other hand, having a database of short, code-oriented "Tip & Tricks" text would be different.

I think it's the "article" word I didn't like.

Up to you guys as to what you want written and over what period. But having a set period and trying to encourage members to write them would obviously help the site.

I agree with the general idea that we need to do something to wake up the IGs but I'm not sure this is the best idea.

Is there still an article submission thing on here or was it removed?

IG's haven't even been _started_. They haven't been declared officially good to go so that we can advertise and get people to join them. They're also still have the wrong format from when I switched from LG's to IG's. Admins in them can feel free to restructure to have just suggested exercises and no sections. =)

Also, as I've said a million times before, I think it's a mistake for TPU to be about "content" instead of people, so that "articles" would be out of place. You can look to a non-age oriented site for learning and reference material.

I think getting 1/5 of the regulars to write a monthly article would be amazing if it could be pulled off. I'm a pessimist and don't think it can be done. But I'll write an article, any thing to help the spread of knowledge.

WHY write articles? Could someone give me a reason why this would be helpful at all?!

A community-oriented newsletter would be good. If we worked with YPN we might have the membership to do it.

I'd say go for a structured tool in order to allow clubs or even classes to create their home space here. But it would not be wise to rely on only current TPU members. Providing proper search engine work in order to find those that are looking for such a tool would be worth the while, I'm sure. Specifically "Teachers / Instructors and their computer based clubs" I think most schools requier there to be an instructor endorsing the club, and from there it is student run -- but it doesn't hurt to try to entice the instructors themselves into the place.

I think it would be best to provide an alternative to authority-figure based club stuff.

Psion, great idea! Hey, who originated that earlier post about the computer clubs...? :-)

PS--the computer club idea got through the principal, but we haven't had our first meeting yet (school just started). We have a meeting scheduled, though. So it's going well.

Psion, articles would be a great way to actually teach people stuff! I know that it is important to have interactions with people and all that, but having actual content is not a bad thing. If someone could sit down regularly and make some interesting stuff then why not let them have at it?
IMHO the articles could have to do with whatever you want. If you are into doing "tips and tricks" then you should do that and someone else can do tutorials if that is their thing. But really it doesn't have to be a BIG deal, it just seems to me that it would be a nice accent to the site.

I havn't been paying attention, would these be meant to be distributed in tree-ware at the actual club? 'cuase I agree that actual physicalness would add to the purpose.

I haven't read the whole thread but it does seem like a good idea IF you got people to actually make use of it. The only problem I see is if it got popular there would be server space and bandwidth issues (right? I don't know what kind of service plan this site is on, but I assume it is bandwidth limited)

That would not become a particularly large issue until we become bigger than slashdot.

Linux_Penguin, there is no point in having articles here. There are no good articles about programming that are only worth reading for teens.

You keep saying that over and over...why not start devlocus.org or something similar as a repository of interesting programming articles and other things that wouldn't be just targetted at teens and syndicate them here? (weren't you planning to do that?)

The articles are sure useful at youngprogrammers, What are we going to loose?

mop, TPU's purpose is to do stuff that can be usefully done in a manner unique to teens. Articles *do not fit*.

Perhaps such articles could be submitted to YPN, and we could link to them if there were relevant places to do the linking?

I like the computer clubs stuff.

I'm entering a national scince compeition, I'm thinking of trying to devise a new graphics compression method(I don't have a clue how jpeg works, but I have a sneaky suspicion it may be the same as the idea I have. Or I'll compare language suitability for certain tasks.

<waaaaay OT>
Does you "idea" perserve all image data or is there a loss?
</waaaaay OT>

Its not for compressing, its a way of enhancing.

I'm not sure how effective it will be, besides, it'd be more interesting than comparing language efficiency.

And its a week off school to go to the Capital of Ireland, and to talk to other teen programmers. Check out http://www.esatbtyoungscientist.com

Two years ago a girl won for devising a new way of sending encrypted information over the internet at much higher speeds and much more securely.

hmmm.
I'm sure I read the same story about some girl from Hong Kong who came up with one of the most secure methods of encryption to date. (Forgot what the method was, I think it was simply the private and public key idea)

"I'm thinking of trying to devise a new graphics compression method"

"Its not for compressing, its a way of enhancing"

???

If you want a simple way to enhance images just run an antialiasing algorithm on them, very easy to come up with, or look up quincunx on google. Compression is easy too, the easiest way I can think of is to take 4 pixels (in a block, not linearly) and average thier color values, then make all four that color, in effect cutting the resolution in half.

OK, maybe what I wrote was wrong.

Its sorta like that simple idea of blocking four colours together except in reverse order, trying to guess what pixel would be inbetween if the resolution was higher. Of course it would be more complex than simply averaging out the two colours on either side or four colours up,dowm,left and right, because that wouldn't be very effective on say a black line on a white background.

Well I've checked out JPEG and GIF, and even though I don't fully understand them, I pretty certain what I'm thinking of isn't the way they work.

Doesn't GIF use run lenght encoding?

rle does not change the image in any way (eg there is no loss in image quality). GIF compression however has some loss, so atleast something else is done too.
Besides rle dosen't provide a very good compression for scanned images (among others), since neighbouring pixels often have a slightly different color.

The thing I want to do here, is enhance images, not compress them, though the most useful useage of this idea would be to send lower quality files over the internet and then enhance them on arrival. But on saying that I'm not even sure it'll get that far. One big problem will be a loss of clarity in the image. I'm gonna start working on the first system of enhancement tonight or tommorrow.

CViper, I'm not sure but I think what GIF does is average each pixels color value to the nearest multiple of 10, so if you had a black line with values like:

00 02 01 03 02 03 00 01

It would change it to:

00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

and then use RLE on it.

It also uses the LZF compression method, which searches for pixel patterns. But the point is for me to design a new method of graphics space saving.(Not Compression)

So basically what you mean is lossless compression (because, by definition, "space saving" is compression)
If you can find a better way to do that you'll be rich

Codered, it's not particularly difficult to implement a very basic losless compression algorithm... it's just that it's unlikely to be original...

Codered, Its called using Winzip. Though it won't save you much space.

Woah woah, why are all these comments directed at me?
Gian: I know
DragonWolf: I know, although I prefer RAR compression for media files
I said if he can find a BETTER way of doing it he will be rich
RDD wants to do this, so direct your comments to him.

Of course I won't develop a better way. I've been coding for 6 - 9 months, I'm not entirely certain. This idea came to me walking home one day when I was trying to think up stupid ways to get rich. The point of this is as a science project for a science fair. Even if I completely fail, it doesn't matter. I will have proved to myself that this idea doesn't work. If it works, I'll be able to have higher resolution pictures.

Ahhh.. those get rich quick ideas that pop into your head..
I soooo gotta try one of them one day ^^

You probably wouldn't be able to make a better form of image compression/whatever without using some form of program that "guesses" what colour the pixels should be or whatever with some sort of ground breaking sentient alogorithm.

GIF doesn't so any pixel averaging. It uses an up to 8-bit value table to map encoded values to real colors. You can then (optionally) apply LZW compression to it. We should all just use MNG (Motion Network Graphics, Animated PNGs) anyway!

It would have to be very sentient to be of any use. I think I'll try and add a bit of sentience to it by seein how much the surrounding pixels vary(You probably won't understand that, it's quite simple though, I just don't know how to explain it) - Say theres two pixels and you want to guess the one inbetween, and theres a major difference, it would pick one or other of the pixels value rather than average. Then if the variation was small, simply average.

uh.. dictionary.com might have an entry for sentience you might want to read...

The image enhancment algorithm is ALIVE! It averages pixels therefore it is...

So basically your algorithm predicts which color pixel would go between the pixels surrounding it? I bet it will still end up looking blocky, similiar to if you were to just turn each pixel into four pixels

Probably. I'm still gonna try it though ... It should work well for photos.

If they where simple images you could just save the file as the instructions used to make the image. i.e.:

imageWidth(256)
imageHeight(256)
drawLine(45, 67, 30, 14, black)
drawOval(60, 70, 20, 10, black, blue)
imageBlur(50, 60, 40, 50, 100)

STOP STARING!! I'm brainstorming! It would be hard to convert old images to that format, but it would have some advantages like on the web for generating images on the fly. Infact, doesn't GIMP have a schemeish language for doing this? Although I think this would be different..

And it could only be fairly simple.. ah well whatever, just attepting at an out of the box thought.

That would only work on very simple images, not on real photos

which is what I implied at least twice...

mop: this type of file format already exist and it's called "Metafile". WMF and CGM uses this and probably a number of other.

nobody ever heard of postscript? it's that way too, and it's in ASCII (you can go in and edit stuff)

You just reinvented vector graphics.

yeah, but vector graphics kill!

One point about this idea is to convert small photos into large ones. It takes an existing image and enhances it rather than compressing a new image.

oooooooh.