There used to be a real energy to French electronic music. Between Daft Punk, Justice, Something a la Mode, Madeon, David Guetta, C2C, Joris Delacroix, Birdy Nam Nam, etc.
Now I feel like the scene is mostly American. Any modern French electronic artist?
For those interested in writing their own JPEG decoder (a highly recommended exercise --- it doesn't take all that long, actually) I suggest these two detailed articles:
Of course, there are also plenty of other "write a JPEG decoder/encoder tutorial" articles out there, of varying quality --- which if anything proves that it's not actually so hard. The standard contains a surprisingly simple and elegant flowchart description of the Huffman encoder/decoder.
The more modern JPEG 2000 encoding based on wavelets can be pushed much farther before visible artifacts appear, and includes a surprisingly efficient lossless mode. Of course,
all this improvement is rather moot until common applications actually support it.
That was 12 years ago, and J2K is still pretty much unknown outside of niche applications. I'm not sure what they mean by "surprisingly efficient lossless mode", but decoding J2K is slower than regular JPEG by at least an order of magnitude if not more. The lack of articles about how to write decoders/encoders, or even just how it works in detail, is another sign of its relative obscurity. I've been studying the standard on and off for a few months, intending to write an article or even a decoder, but haven't gotten around to it yet. It is certainly an order of magnitude more complex.
I take a long sequence of random numbers, using only digits 1-8, like
29834572498741387972573179875938893507418675309
Let's say that goes on for 105 places. Each user then gets an auto-increment ID that I mod 100 (divide by 100 and take the remainder) and add one. I start at that index of the long sequence of digits, and take six characters. If your ID was 112, mod 100 would be 12, plus 1 is 13. Starting at the 13th character, I take six characters: 413879. Then prefix with # - #413879 - and you have a pseudo-random hex code, with neighboring colors being pleasantly visually related.
If it's a dark background, I use letters A-F instead.
If the contrast is insufficient, I'll change a character in the sequence here and there, but it's a lot faster than calculating a new color for everyone, and while everyone doesn't get a unique color, my opinion is that color isn't what makes them unique, it's their username; the color is an extra hint for those able to see it.
EDIT: I called this, when I came up with it a very long time ago, the "sliding doors" technique. I'm sure I'm not the first to do something like that, and it was before the similarly named (abut unrelated, functionally) image replacement trick was popular.
Idea: Color each username based on a hash of the username.
'#' + username.md5().take(6).join('')
I did it for a chat I once built, users liked it, and it helps you keep track of who said what. Though I added some styling to keep it legible, like a 30% white blend, a stroke, and a drop shadow.
