Bob's Lotto Bob's LottoSome students at FSU have apparently put a Lotto page on the Tallahassee freenet.
How did I make the random lotto page? It was easy (but then, my kung-fu is pretty good). The outer html is generated by a CGI-BIN perl script (which I can't point at easily :/) that doesn't even parse arguments. It just emits. That's the easy part.
The hard part was the graphics. Those of you with fancy rendering packages can knock off shaded spheres with a few mouse clicks. My friend with the rendering package was in Tampa today, so I was stuck with Ghostscript and X. Fortunately, I know my analytic geometry and rendering theory, so I wrote an encapsulated postscript program to render one phong-shaded ball.
I then wrote a shell script to sed the prototypical ball to be a specific ball and render it using GNU's ghostscript.
The most time-consuming part was creating the BLotto logo. It was more hand-written postscript, but I had to scan in the image of a penguin. I found a suitable one in a book in the Marston Science Library, dragged it over to the CIRCA Architecture building, scanned it, and dragged it back to my office.
Once I had it on a UNIX machine, I was home free. I loaded up xscribble (a paint program of my own design that no other mortal can fathom) and silhouettized it. A netpbm filter turned the image into EPS which I snipped out and merged into my logo eps.
I used at least the following handy bits:
Another Purple Frog hack!
Last modified: Sat Aug 12 11:07:11 1995