End of Semester

I can't remember the last time I blogged. It's been ages since I finger-fiddled on the keyboard and produced a post worth reading. Due to lack of popular request by my faithless fans :) I am now escaping the work I have sitting on my shoulders. It's the end of the semester - a hectic time.

All I'm looking forward to now is hitting the snow slopes and getting my shoes icy. Only a few days left and then I'm "free" (almost free..there's still an avalanche of work coming my way). I hope everything goes smoothly.

Stay tuned for more on my post-semester adventures :). Until then it's me writing to you from my research lab...

Take it easy folks...

Quite a surprise!

I was notified by a friend that I was famous...lool and was told to open this link....:D
Click Here!

Twitter - Good bye "In a Petri Dish"

I created a twitter account a long time ago. I used it for a day or two and found it useless (or so I thought at the time).



About a week ago two of my friends (@ghorab and @fk82) assured me twitter was unbeatable and that I was wrong to abandon it. So I gave it a re-shot. At first twittering on the main website was annoying. I remedied this by downloading TweetDeck and it made a hell of a difference! I was able to keep track of posts, mentions, people to follow...etc and learnt the jargon of #'s and @'s fast :).

Twitter is an awesome way of following the news. Its not just the mainstream news that you can follow but everything from political figures's opinions to entertainer's feeds and regular peoples' thoughts. You can follow blogs, websites, friends, activists, entertainers, ...etc.

Twitter is the heart of the micro-blogging world. It's easier to write on since the posts are limited to 140 characters. On the other hand you cant fit a detailed post into the 140. Will this make a difference? Will the micro-way see the 'au revoir' of macro-blogging? Will I stop posting here? I don't consider twitter posts as real "written" blog posts. They are just an update like a facebook status. So I guess I'll continue to populate this useless blog with more useless posts :). If twitter takes anything away from this blog it would be time. I spend a lot of time on twitter keeping tracking of worldly updates.

If you're not on it, give it another shot...and follow me @tgaaly. See you in the twitter-sphere!

One Small Step Closer to the Ball of Cheese

I checked the weather forecast and to my delight found no "scattered thunderstorms". It was going to be clear skies and a bright full moon. I rounded up my telescope and camera gear and headed out to see the full moon clearer than I've ever seen it. It was magnificent! The big ball of cheese we take for granted that sits up there illuminating our night sky was filling up my lens.

I attached the regular 20mm lens and could see the whole moon within the field of view. Then I added the 3x Barlow lens and could see the craters up close and personal. I also tried out the 6.3mm and again got a clear view of the detailed war-like terrain on the face of the moon.

I saw the Tycho crater clearly with its streaks flying out like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. I saw most of the seas (the darker depressions on the surface) and many more craters recording the history of the battered sphere.

After viewing it through the lenses I decided to hook it up to my camera and snap some pix.

Here's what it looked like through the 20mm lens.



and here's how it looked through the Barlow lens:









It's magnificent how man has set foot on this natural satellite (God Bless Nasa - if you don't believe in the conspiracy :)). If you think its a conspiracy, watch the Myth-busters episode on proving whether the moon-landing was a hoax.

The moon's diameter is quarter the size of earths. Its mass is 1/81 of the earth's mass. The average distance between the earth and moon is 384403 km. Despite the distance my telescope has succeeded in showing me it like I've never seen before by my naked eye. Truly amazing.

[My telescope is a 127mm Celestron]

Cmd + ~ = Mac shortcut to switch between windows of the same app

A friend of mine told me that CMD + ~ on a Mac switches you between windows of the same application. I remember trying this before but it didn't work. Maybe I mistakenly did not have many windows of the same application open and expected it to switch between everything (windows of different apps and the same app).

Im happy with this discovery. I just need to get used to using it :D.

Angers, une belle ville

France is a beautiful country. I saw it briefly a few years back but this time round I spent a week in the country. I only spent one day and night in Paris. The rest of my stay was in Angers, a city Southwest of Paris and located in the Northwestern part of France. The train ride from Angers to Montparnasse station in central Paris blew my mind away. I saw endless flat plane fields. The scenery was filled with greenery, sunshine, endless farms. It looked like hobbit land in Lord of the Rings. I saw giant wind turbines moving majestically and towering over small farm houses. It felt surreal.

Angers itself has a population of about 150k. Its not as small as I expected. The bus ride from my hotel to the central area took around 30-45 minutes. I walked around down town, visited the castle, saw the massive cathedral and ate fondue. I'll leave you with some pix that I hope capture the beauty of the place that had me spellbound.

I miss you Alt + Tab!

If someone were to ask me what I missed most about windows. It would be alt+tab. That was the best thing ever. Now on mac alt+tab does not switch between windows of the same application, instead it switches between windows of different applications. This continues to drive me nuts. I've looked for 3rd party apps to help me with this but so far have found nothing reliable. If anyone has any information about this, please let me know.

ISS Flies Over

After missing the longer duration fly over of the ISS (International Space Station) yesterday which was publicized via email, I went out today to see it again. It appeared for 2 minutes and rose from the NW and set in the NNE. It looked like a fast moving medium-bright star. I managed to snap one lousy shot of the thing. You can see it in the image below (you have to click on it to see the tiny spec in the center of the image, just to the left of the trees). I posted a cropped zoom in of the white spec.





This is the actual thing (image source: wikipedia):



The ISS is a joint project by the US, Europe, Russia and Japan. Other parts have been built by other countries but those space agencies are mostly responsible for the construction which started in 1998 and is scheduled for completion in 2011. It is the largest satellite orbiting Earth and currently there are 6 astronauts living aboard it.

Escape from Planet Doom

Our game design course project is up and live. It's a bullet hell shooter (a specific type of shoot 'em up games) with a twist of comic drama.

Try it out (Escape from Planet Doom) and let me know what you think. Use w-a-s-d keys for moving your ship and move the mouse to aim. Beware of the drama ;)!

Here are some snapshots:

King of Kong

"King of Kong: A fistful of quarters", a documentary about the best of the best in classic arcade video games. The story is about the rivalry between Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe over conquering the high score position of Donkey Kong :D.

If you dont want me to spoil it, dont read any further and read it after you watch it...



Billy Michell was the first gamer to get a perfect score in pacman and has been known as "the greatest arcade video gamer of all time". He owns a restaurant and sells a line of hot sauces :). He's quite a unique individual. Steve Weibe, on the other hand is a high school teacher who challenged Billy to Donkey Kong. He also held the record for Donkey Kong Junior but Mark Kiehl stole the title back just yesterday (April 19, 2010).

What the drama of the documentary does not show is that the current high scorer is a third guy - a 35 year old plastic surgeon from new york - Dr. Hank Chien who recorded his score via DVD just last month (April 8th). It also does not show that Billy stole back the position after Weibe took it in 2007.

Just watch it...

Color Harmony

Do all colors go together?

Obviously not, there are contrasting colors, colors that match and colors that don't match. There are primary colors, secondary colors, tertiary colors and many more hues and levels of saturation. Color theory has long set out to find colors that work well together and appear to be in harmony. Color theory can be traced back to the 15th century with the works in principles of colors by Leonardo Da vinci and Leon Battista Alberti. Sir Isaac Newton started the tradition of color theory with his theories on primary colors in the 18th century.

The color wheel can be traced back to the 18th century. Boutet's color circle/wheel can be seen below. This was drawn in 1708. It depicts hues of primary, secondary, tertiary and complementing colors.



As time passed the color wheel got more detailed. The one sketched below was created in 1908.



From this color wheel, harmonic color schemes can be composed. Here I describe the basic color schemes:

- The monochromatic classic scheme is one that is based on levels of saturation and brightness of a single hue. An example of this is the grayscale which I've seen in games and looks exceedingly soothing.

- An analogous color scheme focuses on colors that are adjacent to one another on the color wheel. Only a limited number of hues are selected.

- A complementary scheme involves colors on opposite sides of the color wheel.

- A split complement color scheme takes an analogous color scheme and adds to it the complementary analogous scheme on the opposite side of the color wheel.

- The triadic takes three analogous color schemes and puts them together so that they form a mercades benz kind of symbol over the color wheel. This can be seen below.



- In addition to these color schemes, there is also the double complementary scheme or tetradic scheme which is similar to the previous one but involves a pair of split complementary schemes over the wheel.

For a more detailed description of these as well as the pros and cons and tips on using each, visit this link.

It is very important to pick your colors, saturation and contrasts well and iterate over your color schemes. The more you experiment and get feedback from others, the more you master this art of producing harmonious color schemes. Color schemes also depend on the art style that you are coloring. Some color schemes go well with certain art styles and badly with others, so think, visualize and iterate.

Revolutionary Learning

What youtube has brought us is way more than hilarious moments that break the monotonous cycle of work and viral videos out of control. It has brought about a revolution in learning. Now the lucky bastards of the younger generations can tap into this immense resource of knowledge and information right under their fingertips.

I cant get over the power of learning through visual means. Those of us who thrive on imaginary visuals thought up in the chambers of our brains that allow us to comprehend new things, find youtube and the like an amazing source for learning new things. Things we never thought possible a few years ago.



The days without internet were not long ago for those like me who can still remember the days when the term "Internet" started spawning off the tongues of friends more well-read than I. I can remember the first time I heard it. I couldn't comprehend it.

Anyway, nostalgia aside, say we wanted to learn a song on the guitar. Back in the day, I was lucky enough to be learning during the internet phase but before youtube had matured. I used to read tabs off the net, print them out and study them hard. Nowadays a simple search on youtube will show you a person playing the guitar and playing the song that you want to know how to play and chances are you'll find a visual tutorial on how to play it.

The power of visualizing something has been inscribed in the history of man, for example, the ancient Egyptians conveyed detailed stories of the afterlife in vivid pictures. The steps a man goes through as he is judged before the Gods, is carved out and painted on walls of tombs and temples for the people to see and visualize what happens in the afterlife. Vision is the most powerful sense people have. It is the most perceiving of our senses.



It goes without saying, that the ability to record visuals and transmit them over the internet is an amazing capability. For example, I took a course in linear algebra and found videos from Professor Strang at MIT. In them, he explained linear algebra in a simple way. This was extremely beneficial. I was not physically present in the classroom but could see what was going on. The alternative would be to filter through books on the subject and write up notes or something.

So I'm happy to be witnessing this powerful means of conveying knowledge and thought I would share this with you.

Augmented Reality

Recently I had a computer vision assignment that was loads of fun. The assignment was on calibrating a camera based on images of a calibration grid (checkered board shown below) from different angles.



Once the calibration was done using linear algebra we were able to project clipart images onto the calibration grid. This is the same as the projected advertisements you see on football fields on TV.



Then we augmented images with 3D structures. The first was a 3D cube which looks like its sitting on the calibration grid. Its a bit hard to see the outline of the cube in the image below, so you may want to click on it to view it enlarged. The second is a 3D mesh object which is projected onto the grid.





zoomed in...

Tablet!

I recently bought a tablet to channel out my art skills to the world wild web. I've been wanting to buy it for a bloody long time and finally did about a month ago. I've fallen in love with it :). I'll leave you with some stuff I created for the game design course.
Hopefully soon, I'll link you to the game so you can play :).