blinking area of jpeg - how?

Factual Questions
1

It’s a picture of a car with its turn signal flashing.

http://cakeru.image.pbase.com/image/23973814.jpg

I found it in a Fark thread - http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=744041 (scroll down to the user “cranberryzero”)

The properties say it’s a jpeg. When I tried to save it, IE would only allow me to save it as a bmp, which is not normal. I went to my temporary files and copied the jpeg to another directory. I drag/dropped it into IE to display it. I just got the little red x indicating a failed load. Then I drag/dropped it into MS Paint. It displayed correctly, but without any blinking, as I expected.

Is this really a jpeg? Or is some kind of processing on the image server involved? How does this work? Thanks in advance for your help.

2

It’s an animated GIF, not a JPG

3
      • It’s actually a two-frame gif file, save it with a gif extension and it will open in a gif editor or any other suitable graphics program. The server is renaming it somehow, and “view page source” is blocked also (in IE and Netscape–even with Javascript off)–I don’t know how they did that.
        ~
4

It is indeed a GIF image. The file has been saved on the server with a JPG extension, but most browsers also look at the file content to determine what kind of image is being used. In this case the binary content of the file is clearly in GIF format (i.e. the file content begins “GIF89a…”).

The browsers are just recognising that it’s a GIF image with the wrong extension.

The reason you can’t view source is that there isn’t any. The link is direct to the image file, so there’s no supporting page around it. The only source available is the binary data that comprises the image itself.

5

It is GIF and I have no problem seeing the HTML source code but holy shit, over 100 photos in one page! Someone ought to learn some basics about designing web pages.

6

In opera it’s possible to view source on that image, and doing so reveals that it starts with “GIF89a”, indicating that it’s an animated GIF.

7

FARK is a forum much like this one. The page isn’t designed, so much as each photo comes from an individal poster. It is a photoshop “contest,” and each picture is a post to the message board by a poster wishing to enter the contest. People then click the “vote” icon to cast a vote for pictures they like. The photoshop contests have themes, of course, and the theme for this one was “pop culture icons betraying their ethics.” The joke in this case is the General Lee driving politely and obeying the Rules of the Road (I guess, unless the street name or something else has significance of which I am unaware).

I hope this makes sense, I just drank a lot of vodka a short while ago.

8

Maybe the fact that the image of the General Lee is flipped so it has right hand drive (but is still keeping right) has something to do with it. Probably not (but the joke is a bit obscure).
Actually, quite a few of those fark-fakes seem a tad obscure…

9

I saved the image and opened it in Irfanview, which noticed it was a GIF with the wrong extension, and offered to rename it. Nice feature!

10

I didn’t stop to read the page but even this SDMB breaks the threads at 50 posts and Fark should break them at 20 or 25 at the most.

11

IE will also do this for any image type if your cache (“Temporary Internet Files”) is full.