Request for livejournal geekage.

[baratron]

mmmmm... I have chocolate milk. Ok, it's soya milk - but still yummy with Crusha milkshake syrup. The bottle said I should dilute 1 part syrup to 7 parts milk - who are they trying to kid?

Anyway, I have a request for all the geeks of maths, graphics and code-writing out there. I suppose that narrows things down rather, but feel free to link to this post if you think you know people who might be interested. I have a problem with livejournal, and I need some help to fix it.

You see, I use colours to help me better keep track of who's writing what on my friends page. My default style for friends is one that I created specially with coloured strips along the left-hand edge of people's posts. You'd be amazed how much more quickly I can skim using this. Now, I want to add some more people to my friends list, but I have run out of colour combinations.

What I want firstly is for someone to produce a web page showing all of the sensible colour combinations of the standard 256 colour "web-safe" palette. I emphasise the word sensible for a good reason. Whilst I could work out how many colour combinations there are just by using factorials, what I'm interested in is the number of useful combinations. For example, dark blue on dark green will not produce a legible result. Then, when I have this, I or someone else will be able to work out the number of combinations that are dissimilar enough to be useful for my purpose - there are only so many yellow on green combinations that are distinguishable at a quick glance. Then, I'll be able to recolour my friends list so as to be able to use my friends page usefully again.

Does this make sense? I imagine I've not explained it very well, so feel free to ask for clarification.

Comments

[baratron.livejournal.com]

You may find this useful: it's a list of all the colours included in the livejournal web client.
http://webica.com/livejournal/palette2.html

[aegidian]

Then, I'll be able to recolour my friends list so as to be able to use my friends page usefully again.

okay ... just a little ob-com/avoidant perhaps? What's wrong with having some friends share a colour? Can you not distinguish them by their user pictures and name?

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Mine are colored by where I know the person from because there aren't enough color combinations I like.

Interesting problem

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Once I was supposed to be doing something very boring with operating systems, as were other researchers in the room. Instead we had this little heart-monitor kind of thing for the computer saying how each of the bits and bobs were doing and how busy they were, and we spent the afternoon working on a cool algorithm to get all the bars all to be a very different colour. We drafted in people from the machine vision group and generally went completely over the top in wasting a Friday.

It's not quite what you want, but I hacked up two tables of things which are a table of the best contrasting foreground/background combinations and, more usefully, the background colours which are maximally different to all the previous ones (second table).

What you want, I think, is something in-between. Something that distinguishes based on foreground /and/ background colour, but I haven't worked out how to do that yeat and it's time to EAT PIZZA AND GO TO BED! I hope this might be a bit useful anyway, and I might have another look tomorrow. (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~dans/colours.html)

Re: Interesting problem

[kaet.livejournal.com]

Damn, can't close m'e own tags. What is the world coming to?

Request

[hiddenpaw.livejournal.com]

Can I be Black text on a Blood read Background

Pleeeeeeeeeeeeees [:

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's great. Not a complete solution, but getting there. Let me know if you find anything else :)