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!

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!