Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

Don’t Be Alarmed Now

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Old Artsnova Blog
The Old Artsnova Blog

Yes this is the Artsnova Blog. The new look is a result of finally taking the time to modify my old Wordpress theme template so that my blog is fully integrated into my web site. While my blog and web site were on the same domain, they had been created separately at different times. While I created my own design for my web site, at the time I set up this blog I just went with the default Wordpress theme modified with a variety of my own tweaks over time.

The result was that my blog and web site:

  • had entirely different looks to them
  • had different page layouts
  • had different navigation systems

The bottom line was that for a visitor it was like going to two completely different web sites. This meant that visual branding suffered and that cross traffic (going from blog to web site and from web site to blog) suffered.

The new blog design now matches the Artsnova web site in that it uses the same basic page layout, design, color scheme, and uses the same navigation system. I have deliberately kept a couple of minor cosmetic differences. The purpose of these visual differences is to help visitors distinguish between those pages that are a part of the web site and those pages that are a part of the blog. The visual cues are use of a different background color for the content area (white here on the blog); a slightly different background color for the navigation sidebar (a lighter shade of blue on the blog); and the addition of the text Digital Art and Space Blog Reflections on Art, Computer Graphics, Photography, Space and Astronomy to the masthead for the blog.

I hope that you enjoy the new look and feel of the Artsnova Blog. If you encounter any problems with this new design, please let me know.

Thanks and have a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

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New Wacom Tablet: Intuos4

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Wacom Intuos4
Wacom Intuos4 Medium

Wacom has just released its new line of pen tablets - the Intuos4.  From the product write ups it looks like it might be time for me to upgrade. I currently use an Intuos2 tablet with my desktop for all my “real” graphics work. My Intuos2 was an upgrade from an older, smaller Graphire tablet which I still use on occasion with my laptop at home and when traveling.

I must say that once I started using a pen and tablet combination for my graphics work, any time I went back to use my mouse it seemed like a giant leap backward. For the Intuos4 it looks like the biggest advances have been made in the areas of pen sensitivity and responsiveness - the very features that attracted me to the Wacom tablet in the first place. If you have never used a pen and tablet in your graphics work, take this test. First, with a pencil and paper write in cursive your signature. Then, with the paint program of your choice, write your signature using your mouse. You will see that your mouse-created signature is no where near as smooth or as natural looking as your pencil and paper signature. Writing using a tablet and pen is very much like writing using traditional media. While not as versatile as a traditional paint brush, the Wacom pen is as close as you can come digitally.

I am not going to go into a detailed list of the Intuos4 features - there is a good summary of the features at the Amazon Wacom Intuos4 Medium Pen Tablet product page.

Once you’ve bought your Intuos4, you will be able to download several pieces of software that come bundled with the product. The software consists of the following two plugins for Photoshop:

  • Nik® Color Efex Pro™ WE6
  • Wacom Brushes 3.0 for Photoshop

and your choice of two of the three following software packages:

  • Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 Windows or Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Macintosh
  • Autodesk SketchBook Express® 2010
  • Corel Painter Sketch Pad

Given that I already have the full blown versions of Photoshop and Painter, I would download SketchBook. While I wasn’t able to find any information about Autodesk SketchBook Express 2010, I did find the following about SketchBook Express 2009.

Back to the Intuos4, it is available in four sizes (dimensions given are for the active area):

The size of my Intuos2 puts it somewhere between the size of the Medium and Large Intuos4. Based on that I will probably upgrade to the Wacom Intuos4 Large Pen Tablet as it is somewhat larger than my Intuos2 and is just over $300 cheaper than the Wacom Intuos4 Extra Large Pen Tablet. Also, the footprint of the Large is a manageable 18.7 x 12.6 inches whereas the Extra Large consumes a hefty 24.5 x 18.2 inches of desktop space.

Only one question remains: when I upgrade to an Intuos4, what will happen to my old but trusty Graphire since my Intuos2 will be reassigned to laptop service.

Ad Astra, Jim

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Posted in Computing, Digital Art, Graphics Software | 2 Comments »

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Space, Art, and Web Programming

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
Algorithmic Waterfall
Algorithmic Waterfall

Space, art, and web programming - that’s what I’ve been spending all my spare time on lately for which postings to this blog have suffered.

On the subject of space exploration, I just finished reading Camp Century City Under the Ice by Walter Wager. Published in 1962, the book provides a general overview of Camp Century - a nuclear powered “city” then all of two years old. Existing below the surface of Greenland’s glacier, this base allowed for year round occupation and observation of the ice cap and polar winter.

I learned about Camp Century from a friend and decided to create a presentation using Camp Century as an analogy for a moon base. The number and nature of the challenges faced by the team from the Army Corps of Engineers that envisioned, built, and maintained Century were strikingly similar to the types of problems facing lunar base planners. The book’s author also foresaw this when he wrote:

Since Camp Century has already demonstrated that young Americans can survive in miserably isolated outposts under bitterly adverse conditions, the US scientists planning the Free World’s first lunar output will approach their immensely more complex assignment with a certain amount of confidence.

With respect to art, I’m still working my way through the Processing book I wrote about previously in Processing: Finding Beauty in Math. In fact I created the image Algorithmic Waterfall using Processing and techniques I learned from the book.

I have also been reading Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer by James Faure Walker and published in 2006. It’s an interesting read with the author making points that I both agree and disagree with. Once I’ve finished it, I’ll post a more extensive review here.

As if space and art weren’t enough, I’ve also been busy working on the National Space Society’s web site. One of the hats I wear in life is that of chairing the National Space Society’s Web Oversight Committee and the Website Redesign Committee. We (we being our team of volunteers) recently completed the deployment of a new CSS drop down menu and, more time consuming and troublesome, the conversion of a thousand plus web pages from an ancient, no DOCTYPE, malformed version of HTML to XHTML compliant pages. The next phase is to create a new graphic design for the site and get it deployed. I’d really like to have the design portion done by the end of August and the actual deployment completed by the end of September, if not sooner.

Ad Astra, Jim

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Context Free Art

Saturday, May 17th, 2008
Context Free Art
Context Free Art Example

My favorite aspect of digital art is the seemingly endless possibilities for mental and artistic exploration it provides. For example, I have only just begun to learn how to use Context Free. Context Free is a graphics program that creates an image based on a set of written instructions. These instructions are termed a grammar and consist of rules and parameters. These rules are saved in a Context Free Design Grammar (CFDG) file.

For me, this is reminiscent of the way computer graphics were created back in the early days. Unfortunately I do not recall the name of the programming package I first used to create graphics on an Apple II+ back circa 1982. Having no input device other than the keyboard meant that the only way to create graphics was programmatically.

The colorful geometric figure above was created using Context Free. The program I wrote to create this illustration is shown below.

// A sample Context Free CFDG
startshape Art
rule Art {
draw{ hue 120 sat .5 }
}

rule draw {
SQUARE{ b -1}
SQUARE{ s .995 b 1 }
draw{r 30 s .995 hue +1 }
}

In brief, the above program works as follows. To begin, the startshape directive tells Context Free the name of the rule to start drawing with. In this case the name of the rule is Art.

The rule Art consists of one statement: an instruction to execute the rule named draw. You will note that the draw statement has two parameters. The hue parameter specifies the color to draw and the value of 120 corresponds to green. The sat parameter specifies the saturation of the color, in this case 50%.

At this point control is passed to the draw rule. The first statement, SQUARE, tells Context Free to draw a square. The parameter b is used to specify brightness and the value of -1 corresponds to black. So a solid black square is drawn. The second statement, SQUARE, tells the program to draw another square. In this case there are two parameters. The s parameter is used to specify the size percentage. In this case .995 tells Context Free to draw this square at 99.5 percent the size of the last square drawn. The parameter b, used to specify brightness, is given the value of 1 which corresponds to white. So a solid green square is drawn. If this were the last statement, then the result would be a simple solid green square (from the second SQUARE statement) with a black border (from the first SQUARE statement).

The magic happens in the final statement. The draw rule is directed to execute the draw rule. When a statement or function calls itself, this is referred to as recursion. The beauty is that in this new call to the draw rule we can modify the initial drawing conditions. The r parameter tells Context Free that the first thing it should do is to rotate the drawing angle by the number of degrees specified, in this case 30. The s parameter instructs Context Free to reduce the size of whatever is to be drawn to 99.5 percent of what was drawn last. Finally, the hue parameter says to increment the value of the hue by 1.

The draw rule is then executed using these new initial conditions. And when the statement to call the draw rule again is encountered, the initial conditions are again altered by the parameters. And again and again and again. The draw rule will be called over and over until the size of what is being drawn shrinks down to nothing. When this last draw is executed, it returns control to the draw that called it and so on all the way back up the chain until control is finally returned to the Art rule.

Writing programs for Context Free can give you a nice mental workout. The program shown above is a very simple one that just scratches the surface of what is possible. You really should give this software a try. And I’ve saved the best for last: the Context Free software is free. You can download a copy for yourself from the Context Free web site.

Go ahead - give it a try. Jim

Posted in Algorithmic Art, Computing, Digital Art, Graphics Software | 2 Comments »

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Doomed Diskettes

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
Diskettes
The Doomed Diskettes

I recently undertook the Herculean task of going through all my diskettes, moving their contents onto my hard drive if worth keeping and then disposing of them. I had been pretty good about backing up data files and program installations to the extent that over the years I had accumulated in excess of 1800 diskettes. I haven’t actually used diskettes for several years now, all of which were created on old PCs. Going back through these diskettes was like going through a dust laden trunk from the attic. The worst part of going through all my diskettes was that the data transfer rate was agonizingly slow. You get used to the speed of CDs and USB memory sticks and then you pop in a diskette and drum your fingers as you wait.

This was not my first experience with migrating to a new media. Recall that 3.5 inch diskettes were preceded by 5.25 inch diskettes. Try today to find a disk drive able to read those! But that transition was very simple given that those diskettes (at least the ones I had) only held 720 kilobytes of data and I didn’t have very many of them. That was a piece of cake migration. This was different: 1800 diskettes able to hold 1.44 megabytes of data each. Not only did I have an order of magnitude difference in the number of diskettes but each diskette held twice as much information as their predecessors.

Amongst my old disks I did find quite a few surprises. The best gem was a diskette containing the source code and executable for the classic computer game Colossal Cave. I can remember playing this text-based adventure game in college - accessing the host system it was on over my 110 baud modem. If memory serves me correctly, this game was the original computer Adventure game.

Some of the other software I came across included:

  • CorelDraw version 2 (1991)
  • Windows 3.0 (1990)
  • PhotoFinish 1.0 by WordStar (1991)

The oldest software I found was IBM DisplayWrite 4 dated 1986. DisplayWrite was IBM’s first word processing software for the PC and an abomination it was. Rather than use it at work, I went out and bought a copy of Samna’s Ami Pro which was later purchased by Lotus and became Word Pro. I also found a diskette of software and references to BBS’ (Bulletin Board System). BBS’ were computer systems that you would dial into with your modem - the only way to fly in those pre-Internet days. Most of the BBS’ I wanted to connect to were a long distance phone call away and this was back in the days when long distance calls weren’t cheap.

The oldest data files dated back to 1989 and consisted of tables of data on near Earth asteroids. I also found backup copies of all the issues of Spacewatch and PSF News from the time when I was the editor of those publications.

At the finish of the project, the stacks of diskettes to toss numbered in excess of 1,700. I kept about 70 diskettes containing software, system utilities, etc. and another 20 blank diskettes. I next went through the files I had copied to my hard drive more closely, deleting those I considered either unimportant or redundant. At the conclusion of my project, I had just over 180 megabytes worth of files. It’s remarkable to think that of the files contained on over 1,700 diskettes, I was able to write all those I kept to a single CD with room to spare.

It’s even more remarkable to consider the great strides that have been made in data storage. In the early 1980’s diskettes could hold only 100 kilobytes of data. Today I have a portable USB hard drive that fits in my pocket and holds 250 gigabytes of data. Measured in terms of my 3.5 inch 1.44 megabyte diskettes, that’s the equivalent of 177,777 diskettes! (See Math Note 1 below) Here is another analogy: if each of my 1.44 megabyte diskettes had been filled to capacity, then my entire collection could have been written to four CDs or just one DVD.

Just as work grows to fill the available time, so to do files grow to fill the available space. When I started working with graphics files some 20 years ago, the files were small enough so that a number of them could fit on a single diskette. Today the size of my graphics files has grown to the extent that some consume the bulk of a single CD. And liberal use of a digital camera means that I now have tens of gigabytes of RAW files to back up. Now we have music and videos as well. At present I have in excess of 20 gigabytes worth of MP3 files and I expect that number to continue to grow. And there is every reason to believe that this trend will continue.

What does this all mean? The continued evolution of data storage technology means that the medium we save our files on today will not be accessible in the future. Combine this with our ability to save files of ever larger size in ever larger quantities. The bottom line is the next migration from CDs and DVDs to their successor could be a real nightmare - a task too hard even for Hercules.

Happy Computing, Jim

Math Note 1: Okay so I have a portable USB hard drive that holds 250 gigabytes which works out to be equal to the storage capacity of 177,777 3.5 inch diskettes. The picture at the top of this post is of a pile of something over 1,700 diskettes. That pile measures about 30 inches long by 14 inches wide and 13 inches tall. So a 5,460 cubic inch volume of space can hold 1,700 diskettes. Assuming the same degree of packing, it would take 570,980 cubic inches of space to hold 177,777 diskettes. That’s 330 cubic feet or a space that is approximately 7 feet long by 7 feet wide by 7 feet tall!. Imagine all that squeezed into a space that fits in my pocket.

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A Temporary PC Speedup for Graphics Work

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Laptop
There are times when I have my laptop disconnected from the network and I want to do some serious graphics work. Because graphics software is very CPU intensive, I want my graphics program to have as little CPU competition as possible. This is especially true when I am working on very large images in Photoshop or running a render using one of my 3D applications, be it Lightwave, Mojoworld, or Bryce.

Now I could use the Windows Task Manager to go in and one by one shut down processes that I know aren’t needed. Or I could use the Windows XP System Services tool services.msc to accomplish the same thing.

There are a few problems with this approach. First I need to remember what processes to shut down each time. Being disconnected from the network allows me to shut down quite a few additional processes like antivirus, firewall, and other internet-related processes. On a typical Windows PC, this can be a rather lengthy list. And once I know what I want to shut down, I have to find each process in the list of processes and manually shut them down one by one. What a pain.

My solution was to automate the process. I had previously created a directory on my laptop called a_Utils which contained a variety of DOS batch programs I had written. One thing I did when I created this directory was to make sure that it was in the Windows Path environment variable - a variable that tells Windows where to look for programs. This variable can be set on Windows XP as follows:

  1. Right click the My Computer icon and select Properties
  2. Click on the tab labeled Advanced
  3. Click on the Environment Variables button
  4. In the System variables window, locate the variable Path and select it by clicking it once.
  5. With Path selected, click on the Edit button at the bottom of the window.
  6. In the Variable value field, go to the end of the field, add a semicolon if one is not already there and type in the full path to the directory that contains your batch file.
  7. Click the trail of OK buttons back to the System Properties window
  8. Click the OK button

In my directory a_Utils I created a DOS batch program file named !KillTasks.bat. This file consists of a list of taskkill commands. Taskkill is a Windows command line program that is used to terminate one or more tasks or processes which are identified by either their process ID or image name. I use the command in the following form:

taskkill /f /im ImageName

The parameters I specify are:

  • /f which tells Windows to “forcefully” terminate the process. In other words, don’t take no for an answer.
  • /im tells Taskkill that I am specifying the image name of the process to be terminated.
  • ImageName gives Taskkill the name of the process to terminate.

So far this has all been rather straight forward. Now the trick is in identifying what tasks or processes you can safely terminate. My method of doing this was to open Windows Task Manager and go to the Processes tab. Looking over the list of processes, the function of several was obvious and I knew whether or not it was a process that must run or a process I could kill. For others, I plugged the Image Name into a Google search in order to determine what the process does and whether or not I could kill it.

Following is an extract of what my !KillTasks.bat looks like. In this extract I am only including the commands for terminating my Nikon camera monitor and Copernic desktop search tool. The actual list is much longer.

taskkill /f /im NkbMonitor.exe
taskkill /f /im CopernicDesktopSearch.exe
pause

I close my program with the PAUSE command. This prevents the DOS window from closing until I press the Enter key, giving me the opportunity to look over the command output. This is just a personal preference on my part.

Now whenever I want to disconnect from the network and do some serious graphics work all I have to do is run my batch program. To make it really easy I created a shortcut to the program on my desktop. One double-click and my laptop is ready for some heavy duty graphics work.

Ad Astra, Jim

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