Why no, vector artwork is not universally superior for lines

I’m cook­ing up a book­let for a study camp at the minute that has a sim­ple grid-lines (ruled maths paper) back­ground and ini­tially traced it with Illus­tra­tor because it looked, err, lin­ear enough to be a fair can­di­date for such work.

The trace had to be a lit­tle eclec­tic for realism’s sake, so I didn’t just do the redraw with Ctrl + D trans­form ninja skills, but let the soft­ware trace it. Big mistake.

It was one of those things that InDe­sign got a lit­tle upset about the com­plex­ity of — which is okay — and had to import as encap­su­lated post­script instead of as native vec­tor data — which is also okay. Trou­ble was, it wasn’t just bor­der­line too-complex, it was stu­pidly over the edge. I stuck it on the A-Master (which keeps me sane and the .indd file­size down) and got to work for about a week on the rest of the con­tent and so forth. As we get closer to press (I was aim­ing for today… oth­ers appar­netly have dif­fer­ent ideas) I’ve started doing the Indd->PDF shuf­fle and dis­cov­ered the absolute pain of wait­ing for it to “ren­der” (basi­cally that’s what it’s doing) the EPS onto every page as it cre­ates the PDF file.

I endured this for about two days and then finally snapped this morn­ing, went back to Pho­to­shop with the source image and processed it to make it look sim­i­lar enough before past­ing the raster scan into the A-Master in the traced thing’s place.

As if by magic, the gen­er­ated PDF size dropped from 55MB to under 4MB.

Raster images are your friend.

p.s. hope­fully I’m back here now. Am away next week with GPRS Inter­net only, then in New Zealand (with Inter­net, albeit with uncer­tainty about hav­ing a com­puter in the accom­mo­da­tion). Yes, busy as ever. On Face­book quite a lot, because sta­tus updates are more man­agable than full blog posts!

# by Josh on June 18th, 2007 Tags: , , , ,
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The Bourne Ultimatum (and Vuze)

I’m some­what excited about this film. 1080P Bourne Ulti­ma­tum trailer on Vuze, my super duper peer-to-peer net client of choice at present. Ludi­crously fast, mostly legal con­tent, send­ing me over quota quite read­ily. This month will end in pain, I can tell it now!

# by Josh on May 12th, 2007 Tags:
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Must stop tinkering with electricals

Oh my good­ness I can feel myself turn­ing into an aspir­ing engi­neer. WHY ARE MY INTERESTS SO COMPLETELY SCHIZOPHRENIC? And no, I have no inter­est in being a highly lit­er­ate, well-read engi­neer that is capa­ble of com­mu­ni­cat­ing well, so don’t even sug­gest it. Mostly because I do an Arts degree and am not ter­ri­bly good at com­mu­ni­cat­ing to start with (I make sim­ple con­cepts take hours to explain, but if given those hours things should hope­fully be abun­dantly clear and open for inde­pen­dent explo­ration + thought… so I don’t really know how the teach­ing thing would/will go. Fact is I suck at talk­ing to peo­ple in nor­mal con­texts with­out a mas­sive focus on particulars).

Any­way. I’m kinda pissed off with myself for want­ing to take the thing down any­way and try fix­ing it because that is SO GEEKY and anti-social, etc. Like, I’m sure there’ll be a quiet hour or three in which I can do that with­out appear­ing such, but… bleh. Dis­lik­ing… var­i­ous things. Oh yeah I’m talk­ing about a pro­jec­tor with RETARDED MGA (26-pin, 3-row. Used as AV fea­ture con­nec­tors on mid-90’s Matrox cards and pos­si­bly later, D-SUB part impos­si­ble to source with a day’s notice.) CONNECTORS that SO NEARLY match up to VGA VESA spec as to be indis­tin­guish­able. The only dif­fer­ence is two pins for some kind of dig­i­tal IO… even device ID pins (intro­duced in DDC spec for sup­ple­ment­ing pro­pri­etary ID bits man­u­fac­tur­ers were start­ing to use any­way, appar­ently) are the same. The dig­i­tal IO pins seri­ously should have been saved for some other socket, because this causes so much unnec­ces­sary pain. Grrr.

I’ll source real parts upon return to Syd­ney if I haven’t ‘acci­den­tally’ dropped it from the back of a rapidly-moving vehi­cle before then. I am suf­fi­ciently pissed off at the eBayer who neglected to say that absence of cables meant impos­si­ble con­nec­tion. Despite list­ing PC and video input in item specs. Bas­tard. Grr grr grrr. Okay I’m done being angry at the world now. Time to go fin­ish pack­ing then throw crap in car then sleep for… six hours, then get pink slip for car because it goes out of rego in the mid­dle of the week away (!) and THEN drive with peo­ple south­wards to Ori­ent Point. And in that week I’m hop­ing to do stuff with people/read books WAY more than geek­ing. Will see how this goes. :-/

# by Josh on July 3rd, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
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Cru study camp party live visuals

Went pretty well I’d say. Not that it’s really my call to make :) Seemed rather short despite my lack of fore­sight result­ing in me stand­ing for the dura­tion (I for­got to get a chair and then there were peo­ple in the room and chairs were too far away. Ones with arm­rests weren’t an option because they’re incon­ve­nient). Stand­ing was, how­ever, a neces­sity. Video was com­posed largely from ana­logue loops, with every­thing ulti­mately run­ning through effecTV. It did work amaz­ingly well (IMO) but it was a bit of a pain not to be able to use com­pos­ite cap­ture, which would have meant a big­ger cam­era not so con­strained by a USB lead. Just qui­etly, my web­cam kicks arse. Like, with plas­tic explo­sives or some­thing. It’s great even in low light! Obvi­ously it drops off into the nether-regions, but still… all-round goodness.

The grain wasn’t really a prob­lem any­way, because most of the vision was inten­tion­ally grungy/the input was only a seed for fur­ther dig­i­tal gen­e­sis, so that was cool. I’ve got to get the com­pos­ite input for this com­puter work­ing before I do another one of these things or get a real cap­ture card, though, because it’s a pain hav­ing only one cam­era. Usu­ally I’d flick it around to a light source bright enough that every­thing would flare out and then repo, or switch to a heav­ily dis­torted effect, or slide my fin­ger over it (it’s a web­cam, okay?) to black. The vision mixer didn’t get a work­out because I couldn’t get TV-out work­ing prop­erly in time (mostly because effecTV’s fullscreen mode did weird things to sync on com­pos­ite out­puts, but hey, VGA worked).

I’ve really got to learn how to use Pure­Data before next time, too. It looks so incred­i­bly pow­er­ful, wow. I don’t under­stand where it out­puts sources/runs, though. Looks great for rout­ing and fil­ter­ing stuff to the hilt, but where that all ends up is beyond me! Again, hope­fully before next time.

It just occurred to me that pretty much every cam­era with IEEE1394 on the planet can be used as a V4L source. D’oh. Maybe I should finally buy a real cam­era instead of some bor­ing cap­ture hard­ware. Cap­ture hard­ware doesn’t NEED to be bor­ing, if you’re in a Win­dows envi­ron­ment and need a device that does real-time effects… but I’m not $2500 enthu­si­as­tic about all this just yet. And prob­a­bly won’t be until it starts to have some abstract kind of earn­ing poten­tial… which I’m pretty okay with­out, but nev­er­the­less, it’s dif­fi­cult to jus­tify that going into a hole of depreciation.

So… for next time, more cam­eras mixed (with vision mixer) into cap­ture device, more cam­eras using FireWire, more effects custom-designed using Pure­Data, and dig­i­tal vision mix­ing with FreeJ. I’m happy with VGA out­put because you’re push­ing native res­o­lu­tion to the pro­jec­tor that way. I’m also not too con­cerned about PC resources/performance. Tonight I’d say it was online for 3.5 hours with­out a glitch (with the excep­tion of a kick-out 10 min­utes in, and I was still par­tially set­ting up and wasn’t par­tic­u­larly in the mid­dle of any­thing), run­ning from a USB source. There used to be a time when that would just not have been pos­si­ble with con­sumer gear (the cam­era cost about $90 – 110, which means it’s a rather-decent web­cam. Prob­a­bly, at this stage, one of the more expen­sive com­po­nents of my setup!)

Oh, and I didn’t get to record any of the per­for­mance, sorry. Gem recorded another person’s per­for­mance for me ear­lier in the evening, but I’m too tired to share that right now… prob­a­bly tomor­row, before Selo comes to my house and kicks my dog… err I mean camera’s SD card mem­ory. I gotta do it before this month ends, because I’m now hilar­i­ously over quota. It’s got to be all because uploads count, seri­ously! I’ve been doing nearly 1GB a month to Flickr alone. Any­way. Stop­ping ram­bling and start­ing sleeping.

# by Josh on June 30th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Telstra Bigpond support

I hadn’t called sup­port for at least six months. I did, yes­ter­day, because our router went on hol­i­days and I’d neglected to keep a local copy of Big­pond clients, etc., and knew they had a super-secret-accessible-without-authentication FTP site I could down­load one (for the record, it’s 61.9.192.138 under dist/ with anony­mous auth) from. Because I wasn’t going to pay a net cafe/couldn’t be both­ered walk­ing the 1km to the near­est one, and because I couldn’t find an open AP to steal wire­less from(!! and I drove nearly a kilo­me­ter try­ing to, even the usual places were out!).

That was yes­ter­day. Today, I called again because I couldn’t get it un-setup. And got the most com­pletely and utterly clue­less tech­ni­cal sup­port per­son I’ve ever encoun­tered. Not to sound misog­y­nis­tic or any­thing, but… well, no male tech has ever come close to this woman’s sheer level of clue­less­ness. She hadn’t heard about their MAC address lock­ing auth which has been going on since the begin­ning of time. Obvi­ously, this was an imped­i­ment to get­ting things work­ing when clearly it was a lock­ing prob­lem. She read me an SM server IP address off some sheet she had (which, so she claimed, was the way they did things now… yeah, righto. I’m now con­nected just fine with­out any such defined server, thanks) which I entered — of course — to no avail. Then I asked if she knew whether I should be using a SM or a DCE auth server, in light of the fact I’ve been con­nected for a cou­ple of months with­out any prob­lems (no joke… when Tel­stra works, it’s the most spec­tac­u­lar thing in the world. Get­ting it up and run­ning is often quite a dif­fer­ent story.) and she said:

“Uhhh I don’t know… SMTP server? Hmm…”

*josh bangs head against desk*

Some minute and a half later she realises, “Oh, that’s about email, right. Let me check that for you.”

Uhh, yeah, that’s what I wanted you to do three min­utes ago. *waits on hold*

“Well, I just spoke with my super­vi­sor and they don’t know either.”

Please, give more sup­port con­tracts to the Indi­ans. They know more than support-script-monkeys in Aus­tralian call centres.

So, next ques­tion — can you tell me when I’ve shown up as authenticating/connecting in the last 72 hours?

I know what the answer to this ques­tion should be, because they’ve been able to do it before. Hers was “Oh, hang on… oh dear, this is too tech­ni­cal for me.” *Raised eye­brow, before vio­lently rip­ping limbs from tech-support voodoo doll reserved for this pur­pose* Real­is­ing the irony of her state­ment, she laughed air­ily, “And I’m meant to be the sup­port per­son!” Oh, really? *Starts to warm sol­der­ing iron for use in doll’s eyes* Unsur­pris­ingly, she couldn’t fig­ure out what was going on enough to answer my question.

She pro­ceeded to launch into the stan­dard “Oh but you said you were using a router and actu­ally we don’t sup­port those so I’m sorry we’re not really trained in how to use them…” I was tempted to cut her off and start set­ting it up on another com­puter now to prove it still wasn’t work­ing, but thought the pain had gone on long enough. So she con­tin­ued with her “Bad user, you and your stu­pid non-desktop-solution that uses third-party routers.” Nev­er­mind that these routers fea­ture Telstra-licensed heart­beat soft­ware (at least, one would hope so, because bpalo­gin is GPL’d and router firmware cer­tainly isn’t!). I could see the “con­tact the man­u­fac­turer” rec­om­men­da­tion com­ing — it did — but then she threw out another gem that can’t pos­si­bly be ignored. She pro­ceeded to actively rec­om­mend a third-party sup­port com­pany to setup my Tel­stra Big­pond Inter­net con­nec­tion, as though they’d some­how be able to fix my (Telstra-induced) MAC lock­ing problems.

At this point I took the doll down­stairs, and left it sit­ting on the gas stove.

Adden­dum: I have encoun­tered good female techs plenty of times in the past… I’ve just never encoun­tered any male techs this bad. I think it’s prob­a­bly a result of moronic gen­der equity cor­po­rate poli­cies, whereby they employ use­less females to make up the num­bers — sim­ply because not many work in the indus­try, doubt­less at least in part because of the “clue­less female” flack that some appar­ently cop. Proud to be a part of the prob­lem. *rolls eyes* It was said in jest, live with it ;-)

# by Josh on June 23rd, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Migraine predictor

Bejew­eled is cool and all, but it’s become com­pul­sive already. Just to con­tex­tu­alise this a bit, Aaron half-seriously asked if I were autis­tic a few weeks back after I asked if a TV displaying/playing noth­ing (black screen) could be turned off because of the noise the tube made. Also, I get pretty bad migraines some­times (there’s one com­ing now, but I want to blog this before I for­get and twenty min­utes will hardly make a difference).

When I’m in sig­nif­i­cant pain (be that mas­sive headaches/migraines w/ var­i­ous assoc. symp­toms, or gen­eral other ill­ness… vom­it­ing etc., or spe­cific phys­i­cal pain) my first motive to “alle­vi­ate” it is sim­ply dis­trac­tion. I’ll start by hop­ping between thoughts as rapidly as pos­si­ble because every thought I land on some­how I man­age to link back to the prob­lem at hand (i.e. pain), and I can only avoid com­ing back to that by ran­domly jump­ing between thoughts before fol­low­ing them to their “log­i­cal” (read: present cir­cum­stan­tial) con­clu­sion. This is, inevitably, pretty use­less… and when I finally give up on find­ing dis­con­nected thoughts I set­tle for pat­terns. If it’s not a headache (i.e. I don’t mind my eyes being open) I’ll trace lines on what­ever sur­faces I can see, or, if I can’t see (/don’t want to open eyes), I’ll invent patterns/logical prob­lems. Which I can never remem­ber after­wards but am aware occurred. And pro­ceed to solve com­pul­sively until the pain dis­ap­pears (gen­er­ally where replaced with sleep).

The thing is, these are usu­ally strate­gies I semi-consciously employ after recog­nis­ing pain. Today it was different.

I would close my eyes at work, try­ing to focus on an aspect of a rather gnarly CSS sit­u­a­tion (web-geek stuff, to demystify/ungeek this post) , and sud­denly the var­i­ous sym­bols in the game would be re-arranging them­selves (or, I would be con­trol­ling them but with­out even think­ing of the game) in my [per­ceived field-of-view? is there a word for imag­ined vision once you close your eyes? I take it that’s nor­mal… it’s not imag­i­na­tion and it’s not synes­the­sia, so… I think that it’s nor­mal]. Nor­mally I can feel headaches com­ing, but some­times I’ll just have a really dull one from star­ing at a screen for too long… it doesn’t par­tic­u­larly bug me and, if any­thing, I was pretty good with screen-time-focus today. Any­way, I leave work and go to bible study at Ant and Sarah’s flat, and am com­pletely fine (if remark­ably full of food fol­low­ing din­ner and Ant’s, err, “21st” cake) until we’re pray­ing… at which point I shut my eyes again and am com­pletely unable to con­cen­trate on what’s going on around me. I’m more aware of a headache when I open my eyes again, but it’s not significant.

Later, Gem is dri­ving back home (for which I’m so thank­ful, because, as will become clear, I really shouldn’t have been dri­ving) and I shut my eyes for a moment — you know that moment, as a pas­sen­ger at night where you can just lean your head back and enjoy dark­ness, momen­tary rest? Then, by the time I open them again (two sec­onds later, max), every­thing is that much worse. I really want to go back to puz­zles in my head to dis­tract from (now appar­ently oncom­ing) migraine.

This is all really strange. These things aren’t meant to hap­pen on their own, its some weird reflex that’s meant to hap­pen when you’re allowed to shut your eyes and clench your teeth to respond to headaches, not before… time to crash. Speak­ing of which, that’s what I’m going to do now. *rearranges puzzles/sleeps*

# by Josh on June 8th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , ,
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IE6 Scripting security

Well, IE is noto­ri­ously inse­cure, but today I was hit with one par­tic­u­larly stu­pid (though sup­pos­edly not undoc­u­mented — some­one on WSG had encoun­tered it before and alle­vi­ated much pain!) ‘fea­ture’ of the browser. Basi­cally, I’ve been depen­dent upon PNG alpha chan­nel work­ing. Hey, the design isn’t mine and I’m just try­ing to make the CSS work with as few images as humanly pos­si­ble — though I have realised I have one that isn’t required, but can’t be both­ered chang­ing… because once I’ve slated my markup, I only ever add things to it as required, and never work back­wards. Oth­er­wise, I wind up in a per­pet­ual cycle of markup opti­mi­sa­tion that cul­mi­nates in a loss of prob­a­bly under 2KB over about as many days. Tis bad. Must post the way I do CSS/markup work­flow here some day, coz it’s some­thing I’d be inter­ested to see other people’s processes of and how dif­fer­ent it is/isn’t from my own.

Any­way! Digres­sion aside, I was using IE5.5+‘s filter thing (pretty well doc­u­mented PNG fix with some caveats… it’s the best we can do until IE7 in all its splen­dif­er­ous glory drib­bles from Microsoft’s front door. Don’t ask me where that came from.) with great suc­cess, but for the inces­sant secu­rity warn­ings every time I loaded the page. Yeah, great, this really looks usable. Not. Every twit using XPSP2 is going to be pretty happy to stay on a page when their browser is blurt­ing secu­rity warn­ings at them… and don’t get me started on IE7’s pro­posed phish­ing alert thing that lets users report false pos­i­tives. Dumb users (i.e. 97% of the pop­u­la­tion) are going to be scared away regard­less, and mali­cious users (i.e. 2% of the pop­u­la­tion) are going to write viruses that exploit the report­ing mech­a­nism to let sites through.

Wow. This is a really windy post.

Okay. On topic (hah!). The moral of the story is, don’t exe­cute web pages locally. IE won’t trust you. How­ever, if it’s on any ran­dom web server (I ended up installing Apache on loop­back), IE is per­fectly happy to let it exe­cute what­ever the hell weird kinda code it wants. And that, kid­dies, is why we all love Microsoft.

# by Josh on December 29th, 2005 Tags: , , ,
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