Gran Turismo split  time calculator

Splits and sector times in Gran Turismo 5 replays

In the new Gran Turismo 5 the splits or sector times can be found in the bottom left of the replay screen – Live Timing Monitor. Split times can be watched from either the race or time trial screen. Or after wards your best lap replays or full race replays can be watched in the replay theater in GT-mode.

The splits and sector times will be updated while your replay is running. So the correct splits will show up when your car passes the sector timing lines at the track.

Splits and sector times  in GT5 is in a different format, than we are used to from the earlier releases of Gran Turismo. The time for each sector is shown rather than the total split time at the sector line. I guess it will be easier to see, where and how much time we lose or win  in each sector, but harder to use the splits as a target when we race?

If you have chosen a best lap replay, it won’t show the sector or split times for the last section on the track. If you watch the replay in the Replay Theater in the GT Mode the the replay is abandoned, when your car crosses the finish line, and therefor the last sector time won’t show up. To get you need to do the split time calculation yourself. Many people probably won’t care about this missing feature, but as an avid old school Gran Turismo Online Racer I often need all the split and sector times to report together with the final lap time.

Old school online racing

Old school online racing has been held in the Gran Turismo community several years before real online racing started. In short you drive a specified race being off  line and report your time and split to the race steward. Times are verified by uploads of your replay to the race steward or the GT board your are racing on if necessary. These kind of online races has been done for many years and will probably go on for years still to come. One the best places to get familiar with this kind of GT racing is the Weekly Race Series at Gran Turismo Planet.

Updated to handle all Gran Turismo tracks

I have updated the split and sector time calculator to deal with all the Gran Turismo tracks. From Autumn Ring Mini to Nürburgring Nordschleife no matter how many sectors each track has. If you need more sectors, than the calculator currently is showing, just push the “Add extra input field” button.

Beside being more flexible the code behind the calculator is being much nicer and more dynamical.

The background is that I got this mail from a reader, who need to  choose a random student from his class to answer questions.

Tom wrote:
I am a teacher and we have to randomly choose students to call and answer questions.  Right now we use popsicle sticks with name on stick.  I would like to be able to set up 4 classes,  type in the names of the students from the class and have the app pick a name out of that class randomly.

Beside choosing persons randomly such a random app  also can be used to random pick all kinds of objects or items from a list. Script is programmed in JavaScript.

Choose random person script

Here’s a very simple but useful script, which choose a random student  from a list of names.

function choose_student(){
    // Add your own student names to the class list
    var class_list =  ["Marge","Maggie","Lisa","Bart","Homer","Apu","Burns"];

    // Random numbers are made
    var randomNumber = parseInt(Math.random() * class_list.length);

    // Student are chosen from the class array with the random number
    var name = class_list[randomNumber];

    // Name is shown in alert box
    alert(name);
}

1. First you make an array (a list ) with the names of the persons you want to choose from
2. The Math.random() makes random numbers between 0 and 1. By multiplying it with the numbers of students of the list (found with the length function) and flooring it all with the parseInt() function, we will get a number between 0 and numbers of students in the class minus 1.
3. The person in the position of the random number is extracted from the list and saved in a variable. (the item in the first position in an array is called with the index number 0 like this: myArray[0])
4. Finally the chosen students name is shown in JavaScript alert box.

And finally you just need to call the “choose random student”-function from your HTML.

<input type="button" value="Chose Random Student" onclick="choose_student()" />

Download example script

You can download an example choose random person script here. In the script you can find both the above pick random person script and the pick random student script I made for Tom. All is integrated in a complete HTML file ready to launch in your favorite browser.

The example script is integrated roughly into my name generator script, but it should give a good overview over how to accomplish the task of picking random persons from simple lists, and how to integrate a simple random application into a HTML page.

Is it the above method truly random?

In short no, but semi randomness is sufficient and adequate for the purpose of selecting random persons for none scientific reasons.

Read more about true random numbers and names.

clipped from web.archive.org

Flipmytext can flip text upside down, flip words, reverse single words or the entire text. Everything can be pretty messed up using the flip text generator.

Here some text that’s upside down:

uʍop ǝpısdn sɹoʇɐɹǝuǝƃ ǝɯɐu ǝɥʇ ɯɹoɟ sǝɯɐu ǝɥʇ dıןɟ oʇ ɹoʇɐɹǝuǝƃ ʇxǝʇ dıןɟ ǝɥʇ ǝsn

Here some text that is  flipped over

srotareneg eman eht mrof seman eht pilf ot rotareneg txet pilf eht esu

Use of a flip text generator

You can use the flipped text at facebook, myspace and at other socials networks. As I said it’s pretty useless but quite fun, and it might impress you friends.

Upside down generator

If you wanna play with it yourself you check this upside-down character mapping. The side also holds a upside down generator, but this generator only can flip text upside down and nothing more.