James Potter's avatar?

So, -after two pages-, can anyone provide any details about in what browser (make & version) on what OS, (version, kernel, SP) this thing happens?
(as I catched the word “right-click” I almost can guess the OS part).

And one detail that still has my atention is the -since the beginning- mentioned "FILE"type in stead of gif.

It seems to behave oddly. I saved it and looked at it with my .gif animator, and it shows a 1/20 second flash of an avocado and five seconds of blank frame, looped indefinitely, as its controls would seem to indicate. On the website it sometimes works as expected, and sometimes the avocado remains for long periods. If I scroll the page so that the avocado image is half-off the screen, when I scroll back again, the half that was visible remains, while the half that was scrolled off is once again blank. If I reload the page a couple of times, the av goes back to apparently normal behavior.

I did notice that the avocado image frame has its “remove by” control set to “background” while the blank frame’s is “nothing.” This means that the avocado will be painted over with the webpage background, basically erasing it, as the blank image replaces it, while the blank image will simply be painted over with the avocado without being wiped. Maybe this has something to do with it?

The blank frame appears transparent on the forum, but looks white when I view it offline.

I don’t think it’s showing parts of other people’s avs specifically; it seems to retain screenshot clips of other areas as well, sometimes above or below it, but always from the same horizontal position as the av. I was writing this reply, and clicked the “back” button to look at the thread again, and the av showed a piece of the “Attach file:” block that appears a few lines below/left of the reply input window. Something about this particular .gif seems to confuse the browser in some way.

(border added…)

jp_avclip_1.jpg

Microsoft Windows 98 4.10.2222 A
IE 5 6.0.2800.1106

It saves as a .gif for me.

good idea, heres what it looks like when i saved it.

vbac38eedbb.gif

On my home dial-up connection, your avatar blinks on and off.

On my office network connection, your avatar displays the problems being discussed. Other people’s moving avatars are displayed in place of or superimposed over the avacado.

I use Internet Explorer at both locations.

I see it in IE6, Win98SE. That’s all I have here. I’m not at work this week to check from there.

Weeble, indeed it picks portions of the screen that may or may not be avatars, but that are at the same horizontal position. I think you’re onto something with that ‘background’ and ‘nothing’ thing. I don’t know enough of anigifs to value your remark fully though.

It saves as a gif for me as well. The type ‘file’ that I mentioned, refers to a right-click on the avatar in the unicyclist.com display, and then Properties.

This is not ‘a problem’, this is an intriguing issue!

Klaas Bil

Wait, that’s not true. I also still have Netscape 3.03 Gold (don’t laugh). What I see there is a brief flash of the avocado, and the remainder of the time it is a blue rectangle, the background colour of unicyclist.com, such as you see at the top of this screen. No funny behaviour at all - maybe except for that blue.

Klaas Bil

I assumed it was James having fun by updating his avatar several times to include a random avatar from another user flashing by for one frame and then flash the avocado.

I only noticed the funny business once when UniBrier’s cuckoo clock showed up in the upper right hand corner of James’ avatar before the avocado flashed. Just James having a little fun. No technical funny business going on, just regular old avatar updating funny business. I should have saved the avatar that included the cuckoo clock but I wasn’t thinking of archiving it for future proof at the time.

If you save the gif it doesn’t include other people’s avatars. I have saved the gif, and weeble did it too. But it’s the rendition on the screen that does it, and a screenprint preserves it. Here is an example with handyandy’s avatar.

And here’s another, with part of forrestunifreak’s avatar. I could produce dozens.

jamespotter_forrestunifreak.gif

I just viewed this thread with IE and I saw that HandyAndy’s avatar image got mixed in with James_Potter’s avatar. I wasn’t seeing that problem with Firefox. Looks like it’s a bug in the way IE does animated GIFs.

Here’s my guess as to the cause of the problem. IE (or the library that IE uses to display animated GIFs) is not properly clearing a screen buffer that it uses. It starts to paint a new animated GIF without properly clearing the buffer of a previous animated GIF. The two images end up getting merged together. I also noticed that James’ avatar didn’t animate properly when it was mixing the two avatar images.

Interesting little display bug. Must be triggered by the way James’ animated GIF was created and the way it deals with transparency.

Rather than take a screenshot, Jagur attached the original avatar itself onto his post. The attached .gif seems to behave perfectly normally. Maybe there’s something about the way that the forum page displays an avatar that’s different from how it handles an attached .gif, even though they are the same image.

WooHoo, yeah…thats right! props.

that avatar really doesnt like TylerHeartLess’s avatar. on my pc its going crazy, changing every 2 seconds.

That is really cool! Has anyone cracked the code? I’m interested to know how the avatar does that…