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.

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.

Once that was done, I moved on to a relate project where a user could pan, zoom, and move through different fractals, and save any of the views along the way. A friend and I built one which worked back in high school but it was lost somewhere in between, and so I started from scratch. I took the framework from my console and other graphic applications and turned it into a simple fractal explorer.

All these programs target the new .NET 4 platform (Windows only, sorry) which is still technically in Beta. The reason I targeted .NET 4 was because it adds native support for parallelization. This is really nice for work with fractals since they are processor intensive, and parallelization allows for more thorough use of your processor if you have multiple cores.

I will be making all these applications and their source public, so anyone who wants to can download them, change them, and play with them. Until .NET 4 is officially released, they will lightly supported beta versions, and once .NET 4 launches, I will support them through some kind of other platform.

Until I get the apps up (I am still doing testing to make sure they won’t utterly break) have fun over on my Fractals page!

It seems to react differently every time I use it. Sometimes it works just fine until I try to combine two polygons, when it just does it wrong and crashes. Other times I have to restart it withing 5 minutes of working because it is behaving wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I am coming to love it for a lot of reasons, but it could be cleaned up and made to run better. It is really awesome that I can create a ploygonal model, then bind it to a skeleton and make the skeleton react the way I want in under ten minutes. It is also really cool that you can add realistic fur and hair to objects simply by setting a couple sliders and brushing it on. I am having a blast in this class, but it is occupying a ton of my time.

I now have a greater appreciation for many of the animated films out there simply because I am seeing how much work goes into making animations work the way you want and still look good. Today, I spent 5 hours in the lab and got 20 seconds of animation for my time. I am working with simple skeletons and animating only one object. Professionals are spending hundreds of hours to get seconds of video, and that is just the animation, then you have to wait for the render. Granted, most big studios use a render farm, a cluster of computers where they send files to be rendered and a managing program splits it up so it takes less time, but rendering my 20 seconds of video at draft quality (320×240, 24fps, low quality shadows and lighting) still took 15 minutes. When I do my full render, it is going to take me several hours just to get output!

I am also thinking that I could get by doing 3D animation professionally, and so I may add it to my set of skills. It is fun to sit and jiggle the sliders back and forth, moving your creation around and watching it do what you have told it. Animating is a lot like programming, only it is way easier to see exactly where your time is going and what you get out of it. The satisfaction of getting my figure to move the way I wanted was the same as finishing a programming project and publishing it. It is a really great feeling to watch your character jump and dance around the stage you have created for it.

Are today’s fads and trends similar to poodle skirts and rock’n'roll from the 50s? Are younger people more attracted to technology? I have a slight view bias on this since I attend a tech school where the entire population are self-described “geeks” or “nerds.” Even here, there are people involved in non-computer fields who are very internet savvy, and spend as much time as I do online. Is there something physically or psychologically different about the younger generations which draws them toward the internet and online interactions?

I have heard various theories on how younger generations are more “A.D.D.” and switch their attention between topics more frequently than older people. I have not seen the statistics on this, but I don’t think it is actually a rise in ADD, but a difference in how we think, based on the technology we had growing up. I think young people are predisposed to new technology, and that it isn’t just for what we had growing up. The tech changed so rapidly that we had to deal with new game consoles every few years, computer upgrades more frequently, and toys becoming more electronic every year. I think this allows for young people to adapt to new tech better, and use it as thoroughly as it can be used.

Of course, I am merely speculating, as I have no formal experience or training in psychology. Viewing it from the perspective of a twenty-something college student it seems interesting that each subsequent generation since the 70′s has been more tech-oriented, and it has been accelerating at a rate equal to that at which computers have been developing. I wonder if my generation will end up where our parents are with current technology when we have children of our own. Will I be calling my son weekly to have him fix my holographic mail?