Graphics was a blast and I learned a lot about OpenGL and how it operates as well as getting a good refresher on linear algebra and matrix operations. We did a lot of work in both 2D and 3D, and one of my favorite projects was implementing L-Systems in 3D. L-Systems are methods for iteratively generating fractals, one of the most famous of which is the Koch snowflake. We also did some modeling, all of which had to be hard coded which was a pain since every time you made a change you had to recompile the application and run it again. One of my other small grumbles is that we had to work using X forwarding off of the Linux servers since we were required to write code for only those machines. While it was sometimes frustrating, it was ultimately very rewarding and taught me a lot about how computers handle graphics internally and will really help me as I write plugins and extensions for other graphics applications.

Much more aggravating and much less interesting was my Intro to AI course. The material itself was interesting and in some cases useful, but the way the course went made it the worst class I have ever taken. The biggest problem was that there was no communication between the Professor and the TAs, so no one knew who was managing what project, or what exactly was supposed to happen with the homework. Additionally, very little was ever covered in lectures, so the whole class was completely dependent on a book which the professor forgot to have the bookstore order. In all, it ended well, and I apparently understand AI well enough to get an A, but I don’t really know how to apply anything I “learned” in this class.

On the summer front, I am still looking for a job and doing design work in the meantime. I have finally started doing some icon design for the WPI Helpdesk in earnest which I expect will be done in the next week or so. It has been really fun to try and come up with ways of representing some weird things like “Emeritus Professors.” I am also starting to do design on a larger scale and have a couple projects in the works that I will be starting on soon. One of the big things I did in the past few months was for a couple friends of mine who started a web hosting company. I did their site and logo for them and would highly recommend you check them out at http://alacrityhost.com. I am also working on another project with a few friends which is a freelance work hub for us for design, software development, and consulting. I will post more details once things get more firmed up, but it is something I am excited to start. If you are looking to set up a website and would be interested in a quote from me, just shoot me an email.

I also took a digital music cours during A term which was a lot of fun, and more of a sound art class than a music class. We worked with non-traditional methods of creating music and sound such as modulating voices or recorded sounds and trying to stay away from strict timing and rhythm in our work. It isn’t something I would do for a living, but it was a really neat class and was a good course to take against some of my harder classes. A term I also took Human Computer Interaction, which was also really cool. As a designer, and more specifically a web designer and programmer, HCI is very important to my work. Making sure people understand the ideas I am trying to get across is key, and can be very difficult. I learned some great ways of analyzing user interactions and designs to help improve them.

In B term I started on my Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) which is designing and running a survey to help WPI’s counseling center to understand why students may or may not be going to the center for help and to assess student’s general knowledge about the center. It has been fun working with the center, and our advisor is one of the best at WPI. B term I also took Webware which was a breeze, but did introduce me to Java Server Pages which are interesting, but really frustrating to work with in the context of the Google App Engine. One day I spent several hours working with my professor to figure out why some JSP pages would run fine on the local implementation, but would not run once they were deployed to the server. Eventually he gave up and just gave me full credit for it since even he couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Probably the best course I took this previous semester was my Intro to Digital Imaging and Computer Art class. It seems silly to some people that I would take this class, but it is required for my IMGD major, even though I am not really working on the requirements for that anymore. It was a great way for me to finally become comfortable with Photoshop and really push the limits of what I could do with Maya. I finally understand the different blend modes that are available in Photoshop and other programs as well as better ways of doing selections and filling in empty space. As for the work we did in 3D, I have figured out that I suck at building models, but I am really good at lighting scenes and applying textures to surfaces.

This next semester should also be quite interesting since I am taking some interesting CS courses such as Computer Graphics and Computer Animation, which will be really challenging, but really neat. I am also going to be finishing (hopefully) my IQP and looking for more internship opportunities this summer.

I have also been somewhat busy doing design work, and I am building a new site for the design firm I have finally picked a name for: Nuro Design. I am also moving most of my hosting over to a new webhost, Alacrity Host which is run by some friends of mine, and I highly recommend their services. The new site should be up soon, and will feature my portfolio of design work, but some of it will be maintained here under the design section. More of my work will be going up here in the meantime, so look for an update to that effect in the next couple of weeks.

The Webcomic Archive’s new look.

On the back end of things there I set up the update as a cron job on my web server. For those unfamiliar with cron it is a way of scheduling things to run and it works really well. Currently all of the comics are updated every hour, but I am having some problems with formatting download strings so they are not always up to date. I also tried to streamline some of the download code only to discover that I did a good job the first time around. All told the download script (in perl) is about 120 lines without comments which is really good considering my first effort (in C#) was close to 1000 and was for very specific archive formats.

I have also extended the number of comics I am keeping in the archive to 25 and the list is still growing. All told I read around 60+ comics and I may one day have all of them up there, barring any major difficulty. If you have any comics you would like to see there, please click the link over on the Archive and let me know what it is. If you have a suggestion of a comic I should read I am always willing to hear about it, but be warned, I may have already read it.

The freelance work front is also going OK and I have a couple jobs in the pipe that I am still working out details on finishing. One would be an e-commerce site which would be great for me because that is one of the areas of web I don’t have as much experience with and would really like to do. If you know anyone looking for web design services, point them my way and I’d be happy to talk to them about their needs and hopefully work something out. I am also finally getting used to CS5, and let me tell you it is awesome. The new features make it easier to work with and give a designer many more options and much more power. I still can’t get over Content-Aware fill in Photoshop; it is a dark magic.

For anyone who remembers Vector Hammer, my tutorial series, I am thinking about doing more with it (read: I haven’t done anything more yet, but I plan to) so any suggestions for what you would like to see would be awesome! I am starting with Illustrator tutorials but I am willing to do them on just about anything I am good at. Programming, Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, whatever. Well, that is all for today so I leave you with a little design project of mine that I had piddled with for a while. Enjoy!

As well as doing some web design for the page, I did a little graphic design and knocked out a logo and the header since I try to generate as much of a site’s images myself rather than recycling them. The header is a tracing of a picture my sister took of the Rocky Mountains when we were at the condo one time. The logo I originally thought was going to be a placeholder, or something which would drastically change, but it turns out everyone really likes it. It is a stylization of the view from our property, and I thought it would give a good feel and contribute to the overall look of the site.

For their site I also did some Flash development which can be seen on the Properties page. I built an XML customizable slideshow in Flash after many hours of battling with ActionScript. Everything is scripted, nothing is based on predefined animations, which makes it much easier to customize. Basically, you provide it with an XML document which breaks down into pictures which contains fields for the title, the description, and the URL of the image. It pulls this data, downloads the images and fills in the template I have defined. I haven’t worked with Flash in a really long time, and this reminds me why. ActionScript is the worst language I have ever used with the exception of Scheme (a LISP derivative used in WPI intro CS classes). On mroe than one occasion, Flash decided it didn’t know what some of the predefined libraries were and refused to import them. I eventually (read 20+ hours) was able to get everything working to a point, but I still have quite a bit of work to do as far as customization goes.

The toys I mentioned earlier are in fact the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection and associated services. CS5 Master Collection is really nice, and a huge step up from what I had been working with, which is CS3 Web Premium. Really all I needed was everything in Web Premium plus InDesign and Premire. The only package all of these come in was Master Collection, and I decided I needed them badly enough to fork over the cash for it. I was able to get a price reduction since I do own CS3 Web Premium, so I didn’t have to pay the full $2,500 price tag for it. I am looking forward to doing more tutorials with the new Illustrator tools and learning them myself. It is really nice to be able to do elliptical and transparency gradients at last.

I am also working full time at the WPI Helpdesk and am classified as a full time student since I am taking two classes, so between those and my extra projects I have been keeping busy, hence not updating this at all. I am trying to update more frequently, but every so often I forget that I actually have a blog. Is there anything you would like me to write about? If you think of something, feel free to comment!

At the moment, I am doing some web design for my parents, and it is far less frustrating than building my own site, since I already have a good system for working. It took me a couple tries on my site to get a workflow that I can use, and it is working great for me. I am also using a content management system which is new to me, Drupal, and it is fairly intuitive to work with. It has similar features to WordPress, but is more suited to static content rather than a blog-style site. Which is perfect.

Anyway, just felt I should update you on my doings, and tell you that more Vector Hammer is in the works, and should be out in the next couple weeks.

For the past couple days, I have been overhauling the site design. I liked the original two column setup, but I wasn’t super happy with the way it actually turned out. I figured I would just do some small modifications to the theme, which then turned into a major set of changes. Most of the base code is still intact, but I almost completely rewrote the style sheet to reflect what I wanted. I got the base layout working really quickly in my primary browser (Chrome), and like every web developer, I now had to turn to the other browsers for testing, and Internet Explorer became the bane of my existence.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and I happen to like starting with the top. The header is made up of 3 divs which get aligned with CSS, and they cooperated quite well with Chrome. I then rendered my page with Adobe Browserlab, which is awesome, to see the differences between how my page would render in the different browsers. It turns out, that every browser, including Chrome, wasn’t doing what I wanted. Turns out I am using the Version 5 developer build of Chrome, which has a bunch of changes to how it displays HTML. After a bit of tweaking with padding and margins, I had it all working in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, but IE 7 still wouldn’t cooperate. I spent so much time trying to work out the problem that I was getting very frustrated, and decided to move on.

I then started tweaking the way the columns were set up. I wanted to keep the two column layout, but combine them into the same box. Like the header, the main body is composed of three div elements which get aligned with CSS. This was much easier since the divs weren’t stacked, but side by side, making it easier to figure out what was wrong. I kept having problems with the background not rendering at the correct height, then discovered the many options of the display CSS element. After that, it was a piece of cake to get right.

After getting the main body working properly, I moved on to small tweaks in the way posts and pages get formatted. I changed the post headings to display datestamps, categories, and a divider between the heading and the post. I also added a divider between posts, and tweaked the way that links display. At this point I also did a redesign of the tabs, which I wanted to keep but update, so now instead of all CSS elements, I decided to go the classic way of images.

At this point, I was basically done with modifications, but had to go back and fix the way that IE7 was rendering the header. I tried everything I could in the CSS to get it to work right, but it refused to constrain two of the elements (the navigation bar and title) within the third. I tried changing margins and padding, the display type, every CSS trick I could think of. Eventually I went to check the XHTML for the page, and discovered that I was using <span> tags instead of <div> tags. I changed them, and presto, it worked.

If you read this whole post, congratulations, and please leave me some feedback on what you think of the site. I like to get as many opinions as I can and incorporate some of the elements people point out.

I have been using tablet PCs for the last 4 years, and I have been very impressed with how versatile they are and how useful they can be. In high school, my class had tablets for three years, and I was one of only a few to heavily use the tablet features. I did my math homework on my computer, I took all my notes in ink, but I didn’t really use it very much for any graphic design or other artistic work. I decided that I like the tablet PC features enough to get my own tablet for college, and it has proven to be an excellent investment. In high school, we used the HP TC4200 and TC4400 business class tablets, and I now have a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet which is even better.

The Intuos4 Series tablets from Wacom

The main draw of tablet PCs is that you have a pen, sometimes called a stylus, which you can use to draw right on the screen in digital ink, or use as a mouse and keyboard with an on-screen input panel. Tablet PCs are in use in many industries from healthcare to education to construction to engineering to art. Tablets are a very versatile tool and very natural and intuitive to work with. Writing on a computer screen is no different than writing with a normal pen and paper, which makes it easy to transition between the two. Using the pen as a mouse is also very easy since you simply point it at where you want the cursor, and it moves the cursor accordingly.

For professional artists and designers, one of the downsides to tablet PCs as opposed to a professional graphics tablet is the precision of the pen. For example, many tablet PCs have precision in the pen at 1000 lines per inch (lpi), whereas the new Intuos4 series of graphics tablets from Wacom have over 5000 lpi of precision to work with. Tablet PCs also tend to be smaller and more compact for portability, around 12-13 inches diagonal, and many designers use very large tablets with an active area diagonal of 17-22 inches. However, tablet PCs provide a key feature many traditional graphics tablets don’t: the ability to see what you are doing underneath the pen. The Intuos series of tablets give you great precision, but it takes much more time to get used to drawing where the image appears elsewhere. Wacom’s Cintiq series of tablets do provide this feature of integrating the display, but are very costly at $1000 for the 12″ model and $2000 for the 21″ model. I would love to have a Cintiq, but I will give up the extra precision for a tablet PC which gives me the same features plus being a full computer.

Tablet PCs do tend to be more expensive than other laptop options, but recently the prices have been dropping significantly. Tablets are becoming more competitive with the small laptop crowd, rather than the desktop replacement variety mainly because they are priced competitively, but don’t have the power to really replace a desktop machine. Most tablets don’t have good graphics, simply using a low-end integrated type graphics chipset, but a few have gone with higher end chipsets to support better graphics. Tablet PCs also tend to have slower processors and memory, so running multiple huge programs on them at the same time can slow it down. This isn’t necessarily a problem for all tablets though. My tablet has a lot more power than most, but only struggles when I try to run more than 3 Adobe products at once (Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator) alongside Outlook and whatever music I happen to be playing.

The Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC

If you are in the market for a new laptop, I would highly recommend some kind of tablet PC, but look into the business class models like the X61 or Dell Latitude XT series. They will cost a bit more, but they are worth the extra durability and features. Many tablet PCs geared toward home users don’t have the longevity or durability of the business class machines, and break much more easily. If you are in the market for a graphics tablet for your desktop or workstation, you have a few options, mainly from Wacom. If you have the dough, go for the Cintiq series with the integrated display. They have the same precision as the Intuos3 series (about 3000 lpi), and you get the benefit of working on the image. If you sill want the professional level precision and features, go for the Intuos4 or an older Intuos3. They are a little harder to get used to, but are still awesome for graphic design and 3D modeling and animation. If you are on the budget end of the spectrum, the Wacom Bamboo series of tablets are great. They are small, portable, and the new ones even have multitouch input. I keep going on about Wacom because they dominate the industry, but there are other professional options out there at lower prices. VisTablet and a few other companies make products competing with both the Intuos and Cintiq series tablets, but I have not used their products.

So long as you only use the simple style elements and keep everything in tables, IE is easy to work with, and renders everything the same way. As soon as you try to float things, or want to dynamically change the background of a cell, it starts doing weird things, and the really odd thing is that it does different things every time, and does different things on different computers. The biggest problem is getting IE to repeat the problem enough to fix it.

I did all the development for my site in Google Chrome, which I have moved to since it is is more stable than when it was first released, and everything just works perfectly with it. I didn’t even think about how Firefox or IE would handle it until the end, and as usual, IE had some problems rendering the tabs. Interestingly, Firefox also had some problems with the tabs, but a couple fixes in my CSS and it worked beautifully. IE however, was not as pleasant and I ended up having to make a unique stylesheet for it, which was made possible by Microsoft who added a neat feature called Dynamic Comments, where you can do some checking in comments and change the HTML depending on what conditions you set.

To summarize my rant better, Microsoft needs to get on the ball with the W3C standards, and move farther toward passing the Acid3 test. Even Firefox doesn’t get 100 percent, but IE9 (which is still in beta) is still only running in the low 30 percent range. For claiming to be a “standards based browser” IE is way behind the times as far as standards go. Is there a valid reason, or does holding 70% of the market share mean they can just sit back and let other people do more work to make their websites work with everyone?

Getting a little off topic, but in the same vein, I don’t understand why the EU is requiring Microsoft to stop packaging IE with copies of Windows sold in Europe, but not requiring Apple to stop selling Mac OS without Safari. Their basic argument is that Microsoft doesn’t give you to option of using another browser from the beginning, but to be honest, why should they? It’s called good business practice. It isn’t like you can’t get to Mozilla.org and download Firefox and start using that. If the EU is telling Microsoft that they cannot package their products, they should be doing the same to everyone else to make the playing field more fair.

Anyway, I just like ranting about this stuff, though it may have no impact whatsoever on anything.

Acid3 Test – The newest test for W3C compliance in browsers.
W3C on Wikipedia – The organization responsible for web standards