Tom’s Image Gallery

Me

Having trust in Humanity is important. Trusting your fellow humans is a virtue. If you trust someone online, you’re stupid. Trust me. Here’s how I intend to prove it to you. Triskaidekachronistic Counter-clock Clock (943 KB) is a potentially virus-infected file. Worse yet, the file is executable. You can download it for free. Go ahead. Downloading is safe. It’s what you do after downloading that puts you at risk, since to be of any use to you the file must be executed. Gotcha. Triskaidekachronistic Counter-clock Clock is a Windows screen saver. You people on Mars — I mean Macs — I’m sorry, the screen saver is god — I mean good.

Images

Creating images on my computer was a hobby of mine from 1995 to 1999.

In 1998 Rainbirds came in 61^st in a raytracing contest!

Fiction

The “Tom’s Image Gallery” (TIG) images feature in a cycle of plays called Magicus Oculus. In 1999 (after the images and before the image gallery) Magicus Oculus was rejected by publishers and literary agents. In 2005 the interactive TIG rendition (oBook oDition) was turned down.

The concept of computer generated art is explored in a prose story, Computers Making Music or Berliner.

Project

Especially if you are an agent or a publisher, listen up, you, take heed — I consider you collectively responsible. My fiction “must” become unpublishable. Art is never superfluous. To finish the project, for closure, Computers Making Music or Berliner must be Web fiction, HTML. That is not to say, staging and publishing Magicus Oculus is now superfluous.

TIG is being updated and edited by me. In the near future TIG could be a saleable commodity. It would be an unusual but not, in my view, an impracticable enterprise. I might sell the Website on a CD. I’m working on a Windows installer.

If you appreciate my work and would like to support the project, you can buy an image. Images cost UK £2.00 (about US $4.00) and UK £2.50 (about US $5.00). The images are saved in 24-bit PNG format. Click ‘Buy Picture’ on any page with an image and the ‘add to cart’ button on the order page to purchase an image. Visit the Gallery Shop to make a selection.

Navigation Panel

The panel is really a frame. Please do enable the panel/frame. Enter TIG in frames view.

Disable the panel. Switch off frames view.

Browser

If you have JavaScript turned off, you should enable it.

Tested browsers are (Windows 98, Windows XP): Opera 5.0, 6.0, 7.11, 8.5, 9.1, 9.27; Safari 3.1; Netscape 4.04, 4.74, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.02, 7.1, 7.2, 8.0, 8.1.2, 9.0.0.5; Firefox 1.0, 1.0.7, 1.5, 2.0.0.6, 2.0.0.13, 3 beta 5 (Minefield); Mozilla 1.0; Internet Explorer 4.01, 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0.

Avoid Netscape 4, 6 and 8, Opera 5 and 6, Firefox 3 beta 5, and Internet Explorer 4 and 5, if you can.

Mac OS X: Safari 2.0.4; Firefox 2.0; Camino 1.0.2; Flock 0.7.4.1; iCab 3.0.2; Mozilla 1.7.13; Netscape 7.2; OmniWeb 5.5; Opera 9.01; SeaMonkey 1.0.4; Shiira 2.0.

Flash

Adobe (Macromedia) Flash plug-in (optional). Test your plug-in. (Flash version 6 minimum.)

Midi

A MIDI plug-in (optional). Windows Media Player or QuickTime. Or Crescendo MAX.

Mp3

Any MP3 player (optional).

Internet

Connection, any speed.

PDF

Compatible viewer (optional). To view Magicus Oculus in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) you need a viewer capable of displaying PDF version 1.3 (Acrobat 4.x) files.

Java

A plug-in (required for the Java Slide Show). Upgrading to the latest Java Runtime Environment improves performance.

Video

1024 × 768 screen resolution (or higher) at 96 dpi (or better), 8-bit 256 colors (minimum).

HTA Browser Object

TIG probably has one of the most sophisticated HTA browser objects anywhere on the Internet — due in large part to a notable absence from the Internet of HTA, I HTA (hasten to add).

How does an HTA browser object work?

Instead of opening a Web page online in your browser, you open the page locally. The page displays within an application window. Not just any application window, that is: a HyperText Application (HTA) window.

If you’re interested in creating HTAs with navigation buttons (that really work), have a look at the script sections in the sample code or download the example (9 KB).

What are the requirements?

Starting TIG as a HyperText Application requires Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher. You can launch the browser object in two ways.

Cache Method: “Run” (or open — do not save, then run) index.hta. (Click on the link.) The browser caches index.hta before it launches. This may take several seconds while the server begins the transfer. The file is 5.23 KB; it will open. Don’t panic. It’s worth noting however that on some browsers you are only permitted to save the file.

Save Method: Download htas.zip (6 KB). (Click on the link.) The ZIP archive contains three HTA browser objects, a MIDI jukebox (1), an MP3 song (2) and TIG (3). Extract midiload.hta (1), tchaser.hta (2) and index.hta (3). Keep the files together in the same folder. In TIG in HTA mode you can open midiload.hta and tchaser.hta. Run index.hta. (Double-click on the file.)

Why don’t more people have HTA sites up and running on the Web?

HTA bucks the trend. The trend is to develop plug-ins and add-ons for browsers. The strength of HTA is that it is deployable as an HTML interface. It does not have the functionality to browse the Internet because it is not a browser. That makes it difficult to sell to the masses (of us out there on the Web) who do nothing but browse the Internet using a browser, Firefox, Safari, MSIE, first and foremost as a browser object, and as a means of distributing offline Web pages. Most people wouldn’t buy it. Would you? Do a Google search typing in the words “HTA” and “security” and you’ll see what I mean. HTA has been dealt a blow because the extension .hta and the content-type application/hta tend to be misused by hackers. The content-type vulnerability was patched, and malicious HTAs are with us for keeps, apparently.

What can you do?

Don’t click on them. Data Execution Prevention (DEP) on Vista may protect you by stopping legacy ActiveX controls from running inside HTAs.