Photoshop Tennis
<----This is what i did in class.
I had never heard of this so called Photoshop tennis before a colleague of mine, whom we shall refer to as "Dave" told me about it. Needless to say i was intrigued by this game that commrads from all over the world shared delight in. So, I took it upon myself to learn more about this unique behavior.
The following is an accurate representation of the events that happend between the hours of 1600 and 1800 hours January 31st year twenty naught seven:
As i picked up my cell phone i knew exactly what needed to be done. I hit my speed dial and the events of days past slowly came to mind. My colleague, Dave had given me a very rough run down of how this thing worked. Apparently, you are supposed to pick a theme and edit a variety of photos to accommodate that theme. What happens, is you take an image and make certain alterations within an alloted amount of time. When the time is up you send your work in progress to your partner. This is called a volley. After a set number of volleys a third party evaluates the changes made by each player and decides who had the better technique, originality, and any other quality you feel necesary to your match...
"Hello?" My friend whom we shall call "Marco" picks up. Marco is a friend of mine from back when i lived in NC. When it comes to software Marco is always in top gear. About a thousand years ago when i was in middle school, he was a comrade that i would edit web pages with. I quickly tell him the situation and after a short deliberation, we decide on a theme.
Vehicles I picked the initial image, and i picked it because it looked to have many possibilities. This is what i picked:
The volleys would be 10 minute increments and that was all we decided on because Marco could not spend to much time delving into the details. As a result we did not have time to find a third party judge. The first thing that i did was to add the monster truck wheels to the boat, that was kind of difficult because i had to find a monster truck oriented the same way as the boat. I used the lasso tool and the shift + ctrl + I to delete the inverse of what i selected and then just copied the same tire 3 times. I then used the lasso tool to cut out the back tire to fit behind the boat. Next, Marco did something crazy and spliced the boat car into a line up of airplanes and shrank down the boat car to be in proportion to the airplanes. Next switched everything to grey scale and then added the non grey scale sky background. Next, Marco added the nuclear blast. Lastly i added some color highlights to the boat car and added jets flying around in the sky. All of the jets are actually from just two jets, and i just changed the scale and rotation of them. Also i did some color blending to make the jets seem to be actually flying around in a dark sky nuclear blasted sky. This is the final image:
As you can see a lot has changed. My final verdict on this is that is can be very fun if you have lots of spare time on your hands.
Delicious reading
I read several articles today that were absolutely captivating. They were also all very long. In fact, i did a word count on the three articles i found and they totaled 10,876 words. I then totaled another article i found about form and computation and that article was only 5,603 words. However trying to be the avid learner and academic that my parents tell me i am, i read all 10,876 words of the three interesting articles.
these are the articles i read
The first article i read was actually an interview with Tim O'Reilly. Basically good ol' Timmy is really pro open source software. The premise of his little symposium was to tell all the rich and powerful guys what the ten most common misunderstandings about open source software is and then smash them to smithereens. Well Timmy I think you are on to something here. BUT, i am not convinced. I will tell you what i am convinced of after reading this article. I think that open source is something that can be every bit as reliable as closed source software. I did not know that the internet was so heavily supported by open source applications. I also did not know that large corporations relied on open source applications like Perl. I am now looking at open source products in a new light, i thought they were all things like Linux and Red Hat and that their main function was to make life difficult for Microsoft. I was wrong.
However when we get deeper into the presentation, things start becoming a little more gray. Basically to my understanding one of the biggest fears of using open source software is that: you wont be able to make money, and people will steal your stuff to make a profit themselves. In terms of the money issue, what Tim says in a nut shell is "Its like the internet, you will make money off things that use the internet." The only problem is that he is basically asking you to take a leap of faith, we arn't sure what the next ebay will be that uses the fruits of open source and we don't even know if there will be anything like that. Tim said "It is harder to predict the future than it is to make it." So there you have it, who knows if releasing all your code will bring your company profits, but hey it might! Also according to Tim we will be able to rely on college kids and programing gurus indefinitely. He says "The key contributors to most open source projects today are a mix of university researchers, developers internal to companies who use that particular open source package in their work, independent consultants who profit from the increased visibility their participation brings them, and developers sponsored by companies who have identified a clear revenue stream associated with that project." I mean, if a developer is gaining revenue from a project, why would they let other companies have access to that project? Obviously open source is amazing and could be something as big as the internet, but Linux has been around for over two decades.
Personally, I'm with my pal Tim. But i don't think that all the bourgeoisie execs and ceos will be quite as thrilled as my pal is. You see, I get the impression that since Tim is such a big player in the stock market he hopes that he will be able to pull a "Google" (stock wise) in the upheaval. But, thats probably just cynical. I wont pretend to know a much about open source or business so take my conclusions with a grain of salt. I will just re-iterate that this article has made me think about open source software completely differently and i am now wiser. Sweet.
The next article i read was Democratizing Software, also about open source. The Democratization of software is a fancy name of switching to open source. My comrade Dave is very interested in open source software. OK, well this guy Brent Jesiek is writing what looks like a thesis paper, or just a plain old paper. He is taking a close look at how technology and software effect us in terms of social freedoms, commercial interests, and other heavy issues. Let me say, after reading both of these articles i feel like i know a lot more about open source. But its still confusing.
So Brent talks about a lot of different things in his article. He and others like Feenberg have thought about the impact of technology on us on a completely different level than i am used to. So to break it down, when you have closed source software bad things happen. For example, software and hardware are obviously heavily reliant on one another. This one time intel put a tracker on their processors and there was a big hoopla. People said their right to privacy was being infringed and it was a mess. This probably happened because they (intel) knew what kind of software was for sure going to be running through their processor. Also, closed source software generally leads to non open ended, non scalable, non flexible, worse quality programs than those of open source programs. Why?!?! Well, you see there is this thing called the "Hacker ethic" and a part of the hacker ethic is the hacker way of thinking. This states that they like the ability to expand and improve the program they are working. This is opposite from programs that are closed source, like MS Word, which are characterized as "stable." Cool, thats cool, but what if this whole open source just proliferates a "closed source" style community
again!!!??? well according to Brent, "its worth the risk" in not so many words. PLUS! we will have a ton of cool new toys. But seriously, according to Brent even if we do revert to our old ways we will still be better off than before so hey why not. Although Brent had compelling and hart felt evidence in support of this valient effort i still dont think that it is feasable. The only way America or the world will move to open source is if china or someone else does it and then they look like they are getting such a positive result that we or the world will be left behind. It also seems like this open source movement is putting a lot of faith into the hope the people will take time to make awsome programs for their own enjoyment.
Alright, time to wrap up this little foray. The last article is a devils advocate to the first two. Maybe thats not even the best way to describe it, more like the negative side of the equation. The first two articles were heavily promoting open source, but if it is really so great why does it need promoting? Well, not everything is as great as it seems. Creating programs in open source almost always happens from separate locations, and working remotely is much more difficult than working in isolated team. Also, the people writing the programs are generally the extremely computer savvy, so a lot of the cool features they add might be lost to the average joe. Finally, source code is extremely complicated so the number of people who can actually do something with an open source is limited. So the debate continues. Is open source the way to go?
After reading all three of these articles i have come to some conclusions. Open source is like the final frontier of the programing world, no one knows whats out there and everyone is afraid that if they go they will get lost and like it or not never be able to return. I believe that major companies will be very hesitant to open their source code to the community. However if something big happens, like some guy gets rich from his garage making some program that is open sourced. Well, if something like that happens i think we might see changes. Never the less, open source programs are something to be looking at.
CSS Editing: Attempt one
This was my first attempt at CSS, i must say that i am fairly pleased with myself, you see i am from the old school web editors circle. About a thousand years ago when i was in middle school with my little comrades we would have little battles between ourselves. We would see who could make the coolest web page. Mine wasn't the coolest, but it was still pretty fun, and i still remember the tedium of writing html code. So comparatively this CSS is immensely easier. I remember one of the hardest things to do was making tables in your web page. With CSS its a few simple lines and the css and content can be separated, so its less confusing! I mean, the flexibility and ease is staggering. Although i will be the first to admit that i am not yet an expert on CSS i think that for this first assignment i have gained a plethora of knowledge on the subject for a first go around. What i have done was manipulated the background and foreground color scheming as well as overlayed a background image setting the mood of the page. I have also altered the intentions as well as the activated and non activated hyper text links. Furthermore i attempted adding custom styles to the box1 and box2, however i ran into several problems. When i inserted the html tags it would sometimes seem to change the make up of the entire page and not be restricted to the contents of the box 1 or box 2. I feel that if i were to see someone adding custom styles to the boxes i would be able to do it with the knowledge that i have gained from reading the tutorial. This assignment was insightful and fun, i have certainly learned valuable tools in the web editing genre.
Digital Image resolutions
www.alpenglowimaging.com/resolution.htmThis article was very thorough. I felt like i learned a lot that i thought i already knew about. I did not know that there was such a discrepancy in the definition of dpi. I had always thought that dpi and resolution were the same thing. I now know that it is more complicated than that. Dpi can refer to dots printed, or dots projected and depending on which you are referring to will mean something different. Also, i did not know the difference between scaling and resampling. This is a valuable piece of information to know if you wanted to print out large professional quality images.
I think that it's really funny that something that I have delt with so much was so much more complicated than i knew. I will defiantly be able to approach photo editing with a clearer understanding of what i am doing to the actual image, and what kind of image quality i can expect from scaling or resampling. This was the most interesting to me in the article.
This is especially useful knowledge to me because over my winter break i was in China, and i took over 1000 photos between Beijing, Shanghai, and Lijiang. I am not very experienced in image editing so this is especially relevant to me. I am planning on creating a photo journal of my travels and having the highest image quality is important for my presentation and my portfolio.
Revit
Revit is really cool. It will one day replace CAD because it is so much easier. It is so much easier because many of the complex multistep commands that you execute in autocad are streamlined into one command in Revit. Revit is slowly being integrated into the cooperate world. More and more architecture firms all over the world are starting to use this revolutionary new software. Revit is free right now, but it still is one of the most powerful pieces of software to roam the streets of cyber space. Autocad is a great program, with quite the reputation. However like all great dynasties its reign of power will one day come to an abrupt and unpleasant end.
RSS feed
An RSS is a function that allows you to quickly find out if a site has been updated with new content. If it has you can then see that new content. This tool is very helpful to someone who spends a lot of time reading bloggs or getting podcasts. However, there are some problems with the RSS, there are several versions of RSS and as a result you may not be able to get certain feeds due to incapability. However the RSS is still a very powerful tool.
Why i picked this
I picked blogger because, it was free and my screen name was available on this this site.
