How can a browser extension alter the image - image

I have an April fools prank in mind and I will probably need some time to figure it out, so that's why I'm early:
I want to install an extension in the browser (needs to target botch FF and IE, so a cross browser implementation would be best) of my friend so that if he hits the news page he is visiting every morning, a fake image will make him think that he has been selected. The problem is, that I cannot just swap the images. I have to use the actual image from that website and put his head on the body of someone else.
I do have some graphics guys that can do that sort of stuff. My problem over here is to hook into the rendering process and do my own alterations to the image before it gets rendered. That is, taking the image, doing stuff to it and then passing in the modified image to the browser so that it is being redered instead of the original one.
Is that possible using extensions? If it may be only possible with eihter FF or IE, I might get him to use the browser of choice but I'd highly appreciate your suggestions, code snippets and starting points for research. Are there browser extensions that can do similar stuff?
Cheers everyone. There is a lot of reputation in that game so I don't care if it takes weeks or even months to complete the job.
Thank you guys, looking forward to suggestions!
Max

I think your intentions are harmless, but I must warn you: not all people may find your prank funny. But if you are sure that your friend will enjoy such a prank, it's really easy to set up.
You can use BFilter with site-specific filter to replace the image URL (it is very easy, just look at its examples and documentation). So when the user tries to open the web-page he will see your image instead of original picture. BFilter can be used as transparent proxy. I do not know how to setup transparent proxy in Windows, so you have to figure this part yourself. Alternatively, you can configure all installed browsers to use your filtering proxy.
You can use any other filtering proxy instead of BFilter.

Related

Full Image slider

Hi i'm looking for an image slider to sit full background, ideally with a nice fade effect for this site. http://www.markcoffeyphotography.co.uk
I have one in my site at the moment but i'm not so happy with it and i'm looking at recoding the site more efficiently (hey its my first CSS, html site so give me a break).
I'm pretty new to coding so any help breaking what i need to do down to get the result would be really appreciated.
Thanks.
It may serve you well to venture into Wordpress. There are many themes, plugins and lots of community help out there. Additionally, check out Twitter's Bootstrap framework to get you started on clean HTML/CSS/JS.
CodeDrops has a lot of jQuery (and other front-end) tools.
This one looks nice too.
This one has the fade effect you're looking for.

How to access unrelated browser window?

So I know this might sound crazy, as it is technically a security concern which I understand. So I'm just trying to find out if there's any ideas on how to handle something like this.
Anyways, long story short, I was told to look into figuring out a possible way to scrape information from another browser window/tab. I have been asked to do this because, and I know this sounds crazy too, but the users of our website are incompetent enough to not be able to copy/paste and or type correctly something from a different website. I know it's tough for some to have to have several things in their workflow, but this is basically what they do: Go to their first website (after logging in) and bring up a record with information on it...including an identification number. Then, the user should take that number and go to the second website, our website (after logging in), and type it that number in a textbox (and eventually do some other stuff). But we have found that getting that identification number from the first website to ours is difficult for them. Some copy/paste correctly, some copy/paste too much text from the page, some write it down on paper then type it in our website, and some just seem to have trouble visually "copying" the number from site to site.
What I was thinking was that this could happen: the user would have already brought up the record on the first site, then they would come to ours. They could click a button, and that would run whatever I/we here come up with, that goes and finds the other browser window, finds the specific text needed, and puts it in our textbox. Sounds simple, right? HA.
The first website is not owned or managed by us in any way, otherwise this might be a little easier.
A little bit of background information: unfortunately, I'm technically targeting IE >= 10 through 9, so if there's a solution just for this (why I tagged vbscript), then that's great. If there's a broader solution (like with an applet or browser extensions... http://crossrider.com/ ), then that's even better, but not important. If it helps, we already have a hidden applet on the page that accesses the OS (yes, it has the mayscript attribute on the element so it is able to), so I thought that could be something to incorporate with. Also, the way I expect to know which window/tab to access is by URL and/or document title - either will be very specific.
We cannot install stuff on the users' computers, at least something outside of the browser (like extensions). I'm not sure how browser extensions work, so I'm wondering if they'd need to be "installed".
I know of HTML5's postMessage, but it only has partial support in IE (and none in IE <= 7)...and the partial support refers to not including exactly what I might need. It also requires that the other website be listening (which we don't have control over, but technically might be possible to include). So it doesn't count :)
The things I found with Java are to possibly find the list of processes currently running, but I don't know how to access/control one. Especially how to access the browser's Document.
And vbscript...I just don't know. I don't know if it's just me, but I can't seem to find good documentation on it, so I'm not sure what can be done with it.
Even if I could get control of the other browser window, I don't know how I would get information from it (like the DOM).
I'm not looking for code, just ideas...I'll do the research. And although it may sound impossible, don't just brush it off because Javascript can't do it - I haven't.
UPDATE:
I ended up developing a browser extension with http://www.crossrider.com/ which wasn't ideal, but works.
You could use a bookmarklet for this ... the user would have to drag the bookmarklet into their bookmarks bar on their browser, but if doing that wasn't beyond your user's abilities/the technical restrictions you've mentioned, then you'd definitely be able to send the information you need back to your site that way.
You'd just need to give your users instructions to:
i) drag the bookmarklet into their bookmarks bar on their browser
ii) go to the website in question and click the bookmarklet
you could code the bookmarklet so that it would grab the info you need, and redirect the browser to your website. All done in one click.
I think you may be thinking about it in the wrong way when you talk about posting from one 'window' to another. You could write the bookmarklet so that it would do a http post of whatever information you wanted into your site from the other site, and it could also redirect the window that they were looking at when they clicked it (the other site) to your site. Or if, for some reason, you didn't want to redirect the the window that they had the 'other' site in to your site, then you could add a listener to your site so that once the bookmarklet had posted the info you require then the window with your displaying could automatically update. The first option would make more sense and be easier though.
Maybe to open the other site from button/link resided in your site using window.open() method?

Alternative til jQuery Lazyload

I have searched and searched, but didn't find what I was looking for, so sorry if it's already there. I did a photo blog for a friend and used to implement jQuery Jazyload (http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload) to load all the pictures along the way, however, it doesn't work in all browsers anymore and he stopped developing it. I heard of http://www.sebastianoarmelibattana.com/projects/jail/, but it will need a lot of extra text and code when you have 500-1,000 pictures on one site. Also I want to be able to load the images lets say 1000px, before they appear in the window.
Do anyone have suggestions/solution or else, to get the problem fixed?
You can view his site here: www.theblackguido.com (NSFW)
Thank you in advance.
Kristian
It is the part of automatically removing image src which does not work anymore. Version 1.5 released Dec 23, 2009 provided alternative where you must alter HTML and store image url in original attribute. I renamed it recently to data-originalto be HTML5 friendly. I also updated to documentation which better explains how to use it.
But yes. The way Lazy Load used to work is not possible anymore. Before you could just drop in the JavaScript and it handled everything automagically. Due to changes in new browsers you now must alter the HTML.
PS. Lazy Load is not dead. It was just orphan for a while.

Web Page Rendering Capture

I start with describing the problem itself. Rather than a problem I'm looking for a better solution. I have a asp.net page which has a bunch of images and a link underneath it, Each image is infact the latest rendering of the link underneath it.
I scheduled a bat script which runs every hour to fetch the images through IECapt a web page rendering capture utility. One thing am annoyed about this utility is it takes a lot of time for the 20 images I have and for few because of the flash content it misses to take the actual screenshot of the website.
Now I like to know can this rendering be done by traditional programming am not interested in using any utilities. I'm interested in trying this. The solution need not be necessarily a C# based am ready to try in any other language. Because it gives me a chance to learn.
Thank you.
You should probably look at moz-headless-screenshot
You should be able to embed the functionality you need.
http://blog.mozilla.com/ted/2010/07/29/moz-headless-screenshot/
he also provided a sample embedding client application called moz-headless-screenshot.
This is a simple command line tool that takes a URL, image size, and output filename
and generates a PNG screenshot of the webpage.
You should look into browser shots:
http://browsershots.org/
They do what you want to do for lots of different browsers. It is even open source.
There's no simple-simple solution for what you're asking to do. This is because rendering HTML, CSS, and Flash is actually a very sophisticated process.
If you're up for quite a bit of coding, you can use the Gecko engine (which powers firefox) or another open-source web-browser core (ie Dillo) to render the page onto a custom canvas. Then save that canvas to a file. Unless you implement support for browser plug-ins, you won't get Flash this way, though. You could try using Gnash or its like. Good luck with that.
I don't know of an open-source project that already does this. It would be neat, though :-). If you write something, please push it to the world; it would be really cool to have a "get a screencap of this URL" tool.
One way is to use IRobotSoft web scraper. You can design a robot to go to the URL every hour, and capture the whole web page as an image via a function CapturePage(imagefile).
I am not sure if it will be better than IECapt though.
We have used ACA WebThumb ActiveX Control (http://www.acasystems.com/en/web-thumb-activex/) quite successfully to capture parts or whole of a web page in the web server and then to write them to a file, just passing in the url. It performs fast enough for our need.
I am not familiar with IECapt, but this might be something you might want to have a look at.

Best way to make a newsletter slideshow kiosk for the office?

So, I've been tasked with making a kiosk for the office for showing statistics about our SCRUM progress, build server status, rentability and so forth. It should ideally run a slideshow with bunch of different pages, some of them showing text, some showing graphs and so on.
What is the best approach for this? I first thought of powerpoint, but It should be able to take the images from a webserver so I can automate the graph generation procedure. I would also like to take text from an external source when showing "Who broke the build" or some page like that.
I have no doubt that ready-made systems exist, but I don't really know where to look for them.
Is this easy/hard in powerpoint? Or are there an ubiquous app that everybody but me knows about?
I would recommend creating it as a series of web-pages, which uses Javascript or the meta refresh tag to cycle though the different pages. Simply full-screen the browser on a spare machine, and connect it to a projector/monitor/big TV.
This has lots of benefits:
it's trivial to display images from an external server (an <img> tag)
it will cost nothing to setup (it can run on basically any functioning machine), and runs in a browser
it is quick to do (you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility, or different screen resolutions as you know the exact machine you are developing for
it's expandable - while what you describe is probably possible within Powerpoint, but if you do it as a web-page, you can use Javascript (or a JS framework like jQuery), and it's very easy to serve the pages via a web-server, then you can use any server-side scripting language.
Basically, you would have a series of files, say slide001.htm, slide002.htm and slide003.htm. Slide 1 would redirect to slide002 after 30 seconds, slide002 to slide 003, and slide003 would redirect to slide001..
The specific things you mention: graph generation and "Who broke the build" text:
Not sure which CI tool you use, but many of them generate graphs anyway, so that would be required is having one "slide" with something like <img src="http://hudson.abc/job/proj042/buildTimeGraph">
For the who-broke-the-build text, you would be easiest to run the slides as .php files served though a web-server, using XAMMP.
Then you would have a function that scrapes your CI server for whoever broke the last build, and in one of the slides, you would have <?PHP echo(who_broke_build()); ?>
(Obviously if you know some other language/system better, use that!)
The final benefit I can think of is that, if you serve the files through a web-server, you can allow people display it locally, say as their browsers home-page.
Thanks. I found jqS5 which did most of what you mentioned.
It requires 1 document where every h2 becomes a new slide.
I can then use the meta-refresh to reload to next page every 10 seconds. When I reach the end of the slides, I pull data from an aggregated RSS feed from all the different systems in order to pull information.
http://staticfree.info/projects/jqs5/

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