RTÉ Sport soccer

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Summer Finally Here


Well, the exams have come and gone. No more stressing out trying to remember the formula for a poisson distribution or how to say how many people are in my family in italian (Nella mia familglia ci sone sette persone) btw.
                   Time to relax, turn off the brain and concentrate on losing weight and getting fit for the summer. I have been getting into running this year, started out with the CIT fun run 5k  back in april, which i did in 40 mins or so. Which is very slow but i was glad to just complete it.
 
  Next up was due to be the  http://www.todayfm.com/shows/weekdays/ray-darcy-show/JoinRayFor5K.aspx but in the end i was so broke that week with my 2 months rent due that i couldn't afford the petrol money to killarney and back :(
After this i decided to do the 4 mile part of the Cobh annually 10 mile run. I did that in 42 mins and was very happy with that. And the third and final race ive done so far was The Cheetah Run (4 Mile) in Fota which i managed in 37 mins and 13 seconds, alot faster than i was expecting. Just signed up for a 10k in late July so i'll be training for that over the coming weeks.

Friday, May 10, 2013

WEEK 11


Google Analytics was delved into again. It can be very usefull to find out what parts of your website work best and who to aim it towards. You can see what percentage of your audience are new or returning visitors. Your Bounce Rate may indicate that the add used to direct traffic to your website is misleading. The Average Duration of Visit is also shown.

The Service Provider used to browse your website is shown, as well as screen resolution. The keywords used to find your site are shown. Using all this information you can tailor your service to a specific demographic. And general improve any areas that need work.


Saturday, May 4, 2013

WEEK 12


Search Engine Optimization was discussed again. First topic to be mentioned was description meta tags, and how we should use simple to understand URLs to convey content information easily on our websites. Creating a simple directory structure was recomended, along with using keywords in our URLs to help acheive a higher google ranking.
Only using one URL for a page is best as otherwise the google ranking can be split. If location is important then using a local address such as http://www.daft.ie/ is recommended. Your site should use well formed HTML or XHTML code and easy to read text. Anchor text sets up links to other pages or sites, and using keywords in the actually link is best.
Avoid puting text in images. You can use robots.txt to get a search engine to ignore unfinished pages of your website, but more secure methods of hiding sensitive data should be used.
In the second class blogs were talked about, how they were precursors to other more popular social media. Anyone can create a blog but not everyone will find an audience. Social media has had a large inpact on how our modern society communicates, twitter has become a faster way of breaking news than news channels. I personally don't watch much news on tv, prefering to use my twitter feed to find interesting stories and online articles.

Thursday, April 25, 2013


WEEK 11
Google Analytics was delved into again. It can be very usefull to find out what parts of your website work best and who to aim it towards. You can see what percentage of your audience are new or returning visitors. Your Bounce Rate may indicate that the add used to direct traffic to your website is misleading. The Average Duration of Visit is also shown.
The Service Provider used to browse your website is shown, as well as screen resolution. The keywords used to find your site are shown. Using all this information you can tailor your service to a specific demographic. And general improve any areas that need work.






 
58
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Saturday, April 20, 2013

WEEK 10


 We looked at Google Analytics. How web servers keep logs but they involve alot of raw data and this Google Analytics is a much more useful alternative. As it is free and is more user friendly.
To track the information a specified Google Code must be on every single page of your website that you want to track. Once signed up to Google Analytics the statistical information can be viewed on our blogs. You can also see what countries your site is viewed from, or what browser was used while viewing it.

Pageviews by Countries

Graph of most popular countries among blog viewers
EntryPageviews
United States

623
Ireland

346
Germany

60
Russia

49
Japan

20
United Kingdom

10
Australia

4
Canada

4
Egypt

4
Greece

4

Pageviews by Browsers

Image displaying most popular browsers
EntryPageviews
Internet Explorer

719 (63%)
Firefox

175 (15%)
Chrome

144 (12%)
Safari

57 (5%)
Mobile Safari

17 (1%)
Opera

7
Mobile

5
Java

3
Netscape

3
RockMelt

3

Pageviews by Operating Systems

Image displaying most popular platforms
EntryPageviews
Windows

981 (86%)
Macintosh

52 (4%)
Linux

35 (3%)
iPhone

30 (2%)
Android

17 (1%)
iPod

8
iPad

6
BlackBerry 

3
Other Unix

2
Nokia

1

Saturday, April 13, 2013


                                  GIF & JPEG

We had already looked at image file formats in class, including GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) which uses 8 bits per pixel. It has at most 256 colors and its compression is lossless and is ideal or 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. Run length Encoding needs long runs of the same color to be successful. 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. Dithering can break up expanses of the same color which makes Run Length Encoding difficult.

 Progressive downloading  gives 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 standardized 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. Luminence and Chromanence are 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 noticeable to the human eye and can't be compressed too much without degrading the quality of the picture to anyone viewing it.

              PNG
 

 

PS1 is 600 KB (615,246 bytes) as a PNG.

 
Below you can see in the line chart representing the size of the image as the number of colors are reduced by saving the image as a GIF  on  Photoshop.  In my opinion 64 colors provides the best value as the file size is dramatically reduced while still providing a good quality image. 32 colors would be the lowest acceptable number of colors as it still is quite good.
Adjusting the color palette scheme to perceptual or adaptive does not affect the file size to any significant degree.
 

 


                                             JPEG Quality Levels
 


PS1 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 8 becomes 141 KB (145,043 bytes).

PS1 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 6 becomes 117 KB (120,826 bytes).

PS1 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 4 becomes 94.8 KB (97,134 bytes).

PS1 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 2 becomes 67.6 KB (69,302 bytes).

PS1 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 1 becomes 60.0 KB (61,440 bytes).

Bit depth for all of the above JPEGs is 24.


 

Below you can see in the line chart representing the size of the image as the number of colors are reduced by saving the image as a GIF  on  Photoshop. .  In my opinion 64 colors provides the best value as the file size is dramatically reduced while still providing a good quality image. 32 colors would be the lowest acceptable number of colors as it still is quite good.
Adjusting the color palette scheme to perceptual or adaptive does not affect the file size to any significant degree.
 

 The second image PS2  shown below has a size of 472 KB (483,530 bytes).

    PNG






JPEG Quality Levels

PS2 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 8 becomes 100 KB (102,716 bytes).

PS2 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 6 becomes 82.3 KB (84,364 bytes).

PS2 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 4 becomes 64.0 KB (65,575 bytes).

PS2 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 2 becomes 53.7 KB (55,089 bytes).

PS2 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 1 becomes 42.3 KB (43,355 bytes).
 

                                                        

The third image PS3 shown below has a size of 436 KB (447,070 bytes).

When this becomes compressed as a GIF it now has a size of 138 KB (141,774 bytes).
 

 JPEG Quality Levels

PS3 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 8 becomes 88.0 KB (90,167 bytes).

PS3 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 6 becomes 72.2 KB (74,029 bytes).

PS3 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 4 becomes 56.1 KB (57,531 bytes).

PS3 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 2 becomes 43.4 KB (44,459 bytes).

PS3 compressed to a JPEG at quality level 1 becomes 38.6 KB (39,570 bytes).
 

Below you can see in the line chart representing the size of the image as the number of colors are reduced by saving the image as a GIF  on  Photoshop. .  In my opinion 64 colors provides the best value as the file size is dramatically reduced while still providing a good quality image. 32 colors would be the lowest acceptable number of colors as it still is quite good.
Adjusting the color palette scheme to perceptual or adaptive does not affect the file size to any significant degree.
 

COST/QUALITY TRADE OFF

When deciding what quality level of JPEG to use graphs such as the one above can be very useful in visualizing the trade off. Personally I think anything at Level 6 or higher for a JPEG will still result in a very high quality image at a fraction of the cost/file size. So for me a Level 6 quality JPEG is the best value quality setting. The lowest acceptable quality setting would be Level 2 but the quality while still acceptable in certain cases shouldn’t be used to much.

While researching this quality trade off I came across the following information:

What many people don’t know is that there is a quirk in the way that Photoshop defines its quality range. [...] Quality level 6 is the last point in which Chroma Subsampling (Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing less resolution for chroma information than for luma information, taking advantage of the human visual system's lower acuity for color differences than for luminance)  is used. At Quality level 7 and higher, no chroma subsampling is used at all. With the amount of color information encoded now doubled, the file size would have naturally increased significantly at this level versus the previous level.

However, it is likely that Adobe decided to allocate the various quality levels with some relationship to the final compressed file size. Therefore, Adobe chose a poorer luminance and chrominance compression quality (i.e. higher level of compression) in Quality level 7 than Quality level 6! What this means is that the image quality of Quality level 7 is actually lower than Quality level 6.


Guidelines For Web Developers.

The web is also full of different kinds of image media. You can have photographs, icons, buttons, badges, and tons of other graphics.  Comparing quality between a button and a photograph just doesn’t make sense. Take notice of the many different graphics you have throughout a website and consider optimization techniques for each one individually.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

WEEK 9


This week in class we talked about Digital Video Compression. Alot of films use 24 bps, video without compression would be very large and is not practical to use in this way. So compression is almost essential. There are two main types of compression:   Intraframe and Interframe.
Intraframe operates on a single frame and Interframe exploits the similarities between frames.
               When compression occurs an image is divided up into blocks. Only blocks that are significantly different from those in previous frames are transmitted. Block Based Motion Compensation works best when objects are parallel to the camera plane. Zooming and rotation are no good for this.
                Frames coded using Intra-Frames are called I-Frames, and frames coded using Inter-Frame compression are called P-Frames (Predicted frames). B-Frames are frames that can use information from the previous frame like P-Frames but they can also use information from frames ahead of itself, making it bi-directional.

The second class was all about podcasting. People can do this through downloading audio files from a website. But it is more common to use an RSS feed, which stores the podcasts you are subscribed to at regular intervals. So when you go to check the latest podcasts there is no dowloading time making it seem instantaneous. Meaning there is no need for streaming when using podcasts. I-Tunes is the most known and widely used service for this.
                 Anyone can make a podcast and put it online,giving the podcaster a potential global audience. Sometimes a radiostation or professional organization can edit an actual radio show and put it up as a podcast. Such as http://www.todayfm.com/Music/podcasts.aspx . In this format the songs played during the day on the radio show cannot be played in full because of copyright. The most common kind of podcast however is amateur podcasts which don't have to adhere to any regulations and as such can broadcast whatever they want no matter how much language is used. The podcaster can be as drunk or out of it as he/she wants and this makes it far removed from radio shows which need to be regulated. My favourite podcast network is: http://smodcast.com/home/ .
             This network grew from one or two podcasts around 5 years ago into the large network you see now. Most involve Kevin Smith (Director of Clerks, Dogma, Zack & Mimi Make A Porno, and RedState) talking with a co-host for an hour or so. While it used to involve one podcast recorded each day it developed into an internet radio station, where shows are recorded live each day and then later become a podcast available for download as before. Some excerpts from various podcasts have also been made into short cartoon available on youtube http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL58D4A3CB5FBA7DA9 .