MID-TERM

With the mid term upon us i haven't been doing much college work or even thinking about the subject of college too much. Taking the opertunity to relax instead. I did start my JPEG/GIF project though and that is coming along nicely. Hope to get it finished possibly by next tuesday.

WEEK 8

This week we looked at image file formats including GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) which uses 8 bits per pixel. It has at most 256 colors and it's compression is lossless and is ldeal for logos and graphics.

        We also looked at run length encoding which replaces multiple occurences of an item by stating the number of times that item appears. Turning an image on its side 90 degrees can either make run length encoding more or less usable therefore changing the file size of the image drastically.
        Progressive downloading was mentioned which gave the user a blurred preview image of the image they were downloading. This is not of much use anymore as everyone has high speed broadband and instantaneous downloads and could only come in handy on a mobile website.
       JPEG (Joint Photographs Experts Group) was created to make a standardised digital file format in which the degree of compression can be adjusted. It is the most common image file format on the web and is ideal for landscape images or any that don't use run length encoding.

       We also talked about luminence and chromanence, the brightness and color information in an image. Humans aren't great detecting changes in chromanence so files can be compressed by throwing away lots of the chromanence information whereas luminence information is very noticable to the human eye and can't be compressed too much without degrading the quality of the picture to anyone viewing it.

Week 7

This week we talked about image compression. The differences between lossy and lossless compression was explained. Compression ratio vs quality was covered, which will be a large part of our assingment 2.This will involve a report on the trade-off between size and quality in JPEG and GIF images.

 

 

We talked about how to effectively reduce the number of colors in an image to a significant degree without having it look blocky. This can be done by either using the closest color available to the deleted one in our reduced palet,( color look up table). Dithering is also useful in that it prevents banding of colors.

Week 6

This week in class we discussed search engine optimisation. Basically how to best use a search engine to better find your website. Without using shortcuts which in the long term will get you in a search engine's bad books and end up costing you. Search engines only search text, images and any layout such as logos and diagrams other than text are ignored.

                     Using keywords seems to be the best way to use search engine optimisation as long as the keywords are relevant to your site. This should be done for each page of the site not just the home page. Abbreviations are also best avoided as this can represent several things across the world.

WEEK 5

This week in class we talked about directories such as DMOZ and how they differ from search engines and what advantages and disadvantages they bring. We also talked about spiders, bots and web crawlers. How they search the internet for pages using links form one site to another, and how you can put code into your web page that instructs them not to view certain unfinished pages of yours. They will usually ignore these pages but they don't have any obligation to do so.

                 Also mentioned was sponsored links provided by google. How they are clearly marked as sponsered links as opposed to the normal web search results displayed prominently on any google page. Alternate search engines were mentioned such as Bing and Altavista but even with unlimited resources poured into any search engine's development it's unlikely any will catch up or realistically rival google. It turns out that any google search does not search the internet, but a saved time point of a relevant section,  that relates to the search. 

WEEK4

This week we were introduced to file transfer protocol, otherwise know as FTP. We were shown many of the commands we would need to use to transfer files to a server and also how to remove or copy files. We implemented this is the lab, to varing degrees of sucess. Below is the link to my website.

http://praxis.cit.ie/~mclovin/keith/

We also taked about the google online marketing challenge and broke up into groups. Here is the team i joined.
Dream Team                www.auto-spa.ie
Piotr Kawalec piotr.kawalec@mycit.ie
Rokas Lukosevicius
Tracy Nixon
Michael Mahoney
Keith Halpin

Over the weekend i will have a more detailed look at the google online marketing challenge website and try to come up with some question to put forward to our client.
          
We also had to complete a  NewsU.org Online Course and do a short quiz at the end. It was quite interesting.

WEEK 3

This week we talked about patents, trade marks and trade secrets. A patent is similar to copyright only you need to take action and actually get one from the government preventing others from using your invention for 20 years.
                Trademarks are usually a distinctive sign or logo but can also be a sound or character. Trademarks are often registered but don't have to be. Trade secrets i.e coke-cola's secret recipe must have reasonable steps taken to keep it secret. In doing this it remains a trade secret and nobody else may use it.
        We also talked about sampling in music and were asked to decide what in our opinion constitutes fair use of sampling music and what is just blantant exploitation, basically what works involving sampling would be an original work involving samples and what is very derivative.

       The following song from p.diddy uses a riff from led zepplin's kasmir. It features jimmy page from led zepplin so he must aprove. I personally think it's not a great song despite the sample and that kashmir is a classic. In my opinion it is fair usage as clearly jummy page was involved, and must have been paid for his original work. Yet if no steps had been taked to involve him then it would have been highly unfair and would constitute profiting from someone else's work.