Scope

Download scope.jar
Download .java.policy
Download java.policy

The original title of this little diversion was “The Internet Kaleidoscope”, but that was too long so I started calling it just my kaleidoscope, but that was too hard to type and I almost always misspelled it. So, it wound up as just “scope”.

The scope is a sort of browser. You give it a starting URL, such as the address of your favorite site, and it downloads that page. It doesn't show it to you though, it just shows the pictures. It draws the pictures at random places on its screen. IT then finds any pages linked from the starting page, and loads them. It grabs the pictures from the page and records the pages it links to. And so on. This means that you might wind up looking at pictures you don't want to look at. It is amazing what sites link to. It also means that scope is a huge bandwidth waster. I have put in checks to keep it from being to terrible, but it still uses a LOT of bandwidth. Don't run it at work.

The result is a sort of collage, or if you have a broadband connection it starts to look almost like the shifting images in a kaleidoscope. There are buttons to slow it down or speed it up. Of course, the actual speed is determined by the speed of your Internet connection and the speed of the web sites being read.

Scope is written in Java. Java is very good for developing toys like this. But, Java is designed to keep applet from using you computer to do things you don't want. That means that Java does everything it can do to keep Scope from running in the browser. There is a good chance that the scope running in this web page will not do anything interesting for you. There are several things you can do to correct that:

You can go over to Sun and download and install the JRE. Once you have installed the JRE you need to restart your browser. After that the applet should work. It will ask you to approve a certificate when you just go to the page, but it should work.
You might not want to install the JRE, it is a large download after all. In that case try downloading the two text files linked at the top of this page and put them in your home directory. Then restart your browser and try the applet. Those files let scope do anything it wants to do on your computer. But, only scope gets that privilege.
If none of those work, well you can download scope.jar and run it from the command line. You just type the command “java -jar scope.jar” without the quotation marks. If you have Java installed on your computer this should work. If not, well go back and install the JRE.

I wish I could have made this easier to use. But, Sun and Java have been fighting over Java in court for years and so MS support for Java is very very very poor. Not to mention that getting all the tools and certificates needed to make this work correctly is simply too expensive to be worth while.

If you know how to make this easier, please tell me.

Just enter a URL and press start.

If it doesn't work read the top part of the page.