greetings programs! or the force is with you!

Sci-fi cults are still the rage, seems we never want it to end after we are immersed. As a kid I was into Fireball XL5, Stingray and Super Car, they were science fiction series produced with marionettes, you know puppets instead of real actors. They had all the elements that are standard science fiction fare today, including the special effects. Google Gerry Anderson the genius behind them, very interesting. He also did Space 1999. Gerry's knack was great story telling, truly entertaining. Yeah I did the Lost In Space and then Star Trek thing, I can't recall the time frame. The most thrilling ones for me, Tron and Star Wars. As someone interested in building and furnishing design and then computer graphics, I was armoured by this visionary designer named Syd Mead. He had his hand into these movies. But the intriguing part was that the technology to produce the movies was being invented while the movies were being made. I get into the supplemental special feature discs because I just got to know how they made the movies. Tron was made before they had personal computers, before Jobs, Gates and Torvalds became names. It was a Unix world. What we enjoy today in graphics was pretty well worked out while Jobs and Gates were kids. They were progressors of the technology not inventors of the technology.

On my Linuxville (Xubuntu) desktop, I have an application called VLC or VideoLan media player. With the help of a few codecs (the stuff that reads video file formats), I can play consumer DVDs on my computer. What's so cool about that is the smaller display is so sharp, the detail is startling. The larger TV screen is fuzzier and because you sit back away from the screen you miss some details. I captured a screenshot of Princess Leia in the guest quarters of Bespin, Star Wars 5. I thought the architecture was stark but excitingly futuristic. And Tron, I might as well watch the movie again and again. Yes, I do collect YouTube videos, they are great for instructional subjects and of course jazz music. I really like to see the musicians in real-time performance rather than listening to doctored studio work. There are musicians who play the Chapman Stick instead of guitars and EWI (electronic wind instrument) instead of the traditional saxophone. I haven't the time to be fanatic, but to be able to amuse myself once in a while is fun.

A friend pointed out to me about video cams. You know how attached some are to their cellphone cams, but PC cams are not so utilized unless you count YouTube vids. My thought is that the Jetsons' have arrived years ago only we still can't get the videophone act together. To be able to call your friends, see and talk to them is wrought with problems. Oh, they can see me, am I presentable or will my exposure be misconstrued as porn peddling? Jane Jetson talked behind a mask when necessary, we all could have an avatar, a digital persona. We even have a big name for it, telecommuting or teleconferencing so as to isolate that activity from our daily telephone use. Hard to believe we are still uncomfortable with the concept of videophones. I guess we need a degree of privacy and anonymity. Still I would like to be able to call and see my parents, kids and grandkids, the phone call and occasional trip is just not adequate.

Predictions, yes, the mouse will slowly disappear, the mouse pad will become the pen pad. The wireless pen will be perfected. Walgreens will sell a matched pen set, a regular pen and a digital pen. The keyboard will be replaced by a digital display that has a virtual keyboard and able to double as pen input pad. The pen pad will be flexible of course. Ipods will be bluetooth, in fact the Blackberry will have ipod functions integrated into it. The ear-piece will access your phone/ipod/blackberry by voice and you will be assimilated. There will be no difference between TV/home theater equipment and computer equipment. All the elements will be interchangeable and reconfigurable. Your Blackberry will be a true universal remote as it becomes aware of all your bluetooth connections. The desktop computer will shrink to laptop size, yet still be component based. This new unit will extend the capability and power of a standard laptop. You will even be able to stack them blade server style, link them together for more power. Look for a read/write DVD for big files, movies but for small files, the jump drive will be here for ever. I hope the read/write CD stays around. Will hard drives vanish? Perhaps in the long term, but they are supreme for huge storage. You might see flash memory on the motherboard for the operating system and installed applications. Your Home directory or My Document directory should be put on a separate drive just for safety and security's sake. CRT's will become extinct to most users. If these thing aren't happening or don't, I remind you how hard it is for Yoda to see forward even via the force.

spitting out ideas

I always thought that in the present times of generational confusion and economic limitations it's good to see what you can do with what you already have. The caveat is that we want something new and not a remake, retro or sequel. So I am proposing a few ideas.

1. Instead of chanting foreign oil independence with the motive of maintaining present oil use levels, preach conservation, industries, materials, processes and machines that use less oil. By using less we have more. How much oil does an electric car or hybrid use compared to a regular gas car used by a typical driver. We have diesel/electric trains but no diesel/electric trucks. Now multiply all that times all the cars and trucks on the road. It's basically the marketing folks who think we can't or won't change.

2. To give you geeks something to do, how about a wing processing unit. Instead of buying a whole new computer and ditching or recycling the old one, a wing processing unit could plug into existing computers to add processing power. Dyne:bolic Linux has the ability to move processing load to faster networked computers. The wing processing unit only needs a cpu, memory, ethernet, maybe a CD player and would appear as a tiny server. I could keep my present desktop a lot longer and just upgrade/replace/add a wing processing unit. Less waste all around and cheaper to build.

3. Beam me up Scotti! A new wireless phone attachment, not the Borg-like ear piece but a lapel badge/shoulder pin. I could stay at my computer in the other room and not chase after the handset when it rings. Also being a comm link I could tell my wife I got it with out yelling through out the house. Would be great at an office too.

4. On the desktop the browser could be the front end to the operating system and access the whole computer. It could be customized like a web page, use icons, links, whatever, yet be the internet browser and file manager like KDE's Konqueror only better.

The Linux class explored DSL and Puppy Linux and we did it through Virtualbox on a Vista machine. Although Linux is exciting in any form to me, Virtualbox does present limitations that require tweaking so it's not in the way. Vista did as it was supposed to do, present us with the blue screen of death when the system crashed. Virtual machines can be touchy at times. DSL or Damn Small Linux is only 50mg on a CD and can be easily put on a jump drive. You would be impressed at the applications included in this really portable Linux. Puppy is Puppy, fresh, agile and quite complete. I just got a version of Puppy called Grafpup, just right for the graphics minded, like yours truly. By the experience of the class DSL and Puppy ran just fine from the live-CD or installed on a hard drive. Oh, I didn't mention ReactOS which is supposed to be an open source version of MS Windows. It was interesting to see and even though it's in the early stages of development some promising stuff is there. It probably would have run better out side of Virtualbox also.

On a personal note, I am trying to find time to get my artistic act together. The many public libraries have a zillion books on Photoshop, Illustrator and other Microsoft platform software. The latest Linux and graphics applications are documented and explored on the web, the libraries have near nothing. Shame on them. You have to realize that Linux was born on the web and lives on the web to this day. But at the library I did find many books about the history of computer graphics and computer art. Yes, there was computer art before Mac, MS, Photoshop and all that. I laugh at young people for what they don't know that was started just before "their time". No, the chisel and stone was before my time too.

the secret of brand-X

You know in every movie you get a kick out of there is some scene that is memorable. The one where the Joker dressed as an artist goes through the museum with boom-box and spray paint making adjustments to great works of art in Gotham City. Or in Star Wars, Luke discovers "open source", I mean the force. He gets reminded by a whisper later " use open source Luke", I mean "use the force Luke". Obiwan says "you have entered into a wider reality" or something like that. In the DOS days, I remember the free trade of software. It was sporting to put your stuff out there for others to use and fiddle with. Soon however, this practice faded away. The software got better and user rights became pinched with price and user agreements and copyright restrictions. Software became marketable entities. Of course with continuing improvements and growing user base, prices go up also and user restrictions become binding but veiled threats (who reads those things anyway). There is word of mouth, ads, and of course comparisons. The psychological leverage of a name brand says that buying this you will succeed. Why then open source?, because guys with the best engineered sneakers in the world are consistently beaten by guys with running shoes made from recycled tire treads!!! Today you have a choice to spend the bucks or "borrow" a copy or get for free the means to manipulate a Bezier curve. If the Bezier curve is a standard in vector graphics, you are paying good money for what if the priced and free programs do the exact same thing. So you are aspiring to get into computer graphics, want to play with the tools before you commit big bucks for a "professional graphics suite", or you are considering putting it all on the back burner because you can't afford to get the "pro tools", yet. You need to change your thinking, open source is here to meet your aspirations and demands. Without the man, walking or running, a sneaker (any brand name) is just a foot covering. If you become great at Bezier curves, it doesn't matter the software that does them. So, in this corner, Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator, in the other, behind the brand-X mask, GIMP, Inkscape, Sodipodi, OpenOffice.org Draw, Scribus, Xara Xtreme to name a few. Let the developers compete, but you the user can reap the spoils because you are "the user".

There is a difference between computer aided drafting and fine art drawing. Drafting involves the accurate dimensions of things and diagrams closely tied to grids for neat efficient appearance. Fine art drawing on the computer is a lot of eyeball judgment. With fine art drawing, there are pen and tablet devices that are a little better than drawing with a mouse. But the main thing is the required methods to get things done I call a work flow. Work flows are how things are done, draw a line, adjust a line, erase a line. Then working with layers is so different than doing it on paper. The advantage is that you can isolate elements, adjust only those elements without effecting the elements on other layers. Say you have a background and a foreground with your picture. You could trim around your image so that the background would show through when viewed together. Then you could change either the foreground or background at your discretion.
The most wonderful thing on a pencil is a large eraser, on a computer it's undo and redo. Computers also allow you to cut, paste, drag, drop and other useful things that are very labor intensive on paper. You can setup a pretty snazzy art studio with a decent computer, some graphics applications, a scanner, color printer and a determination to fit your wild ideas into the constraints of work flows to express them. Constraints, what constraints? Well, if you are working in bit-mapped graphics or pixel graphics this is one thing. A bit or pixel say the size of the head of a pin when blown up will look like the tile on your bathroom wall. The little picture becomes a mosaic of colored squares. It resembles the original but is a blocky representation at best. Vector graphics on the other hand are computer generated end points. When you blow them up they retain the proportions of the original, no matter how big you make them. So, you can do a little vector drawing and print it out on a big format. We say it's scalable. The bit-mapped graphic closely resembles traditional art work with pencil or brush. Vector graphics is something born on the computer and uses the computer's math power to represent a picture.

In Linuxville, the tradition is not to make you a consumer, but give you the tools so that you can do things yourself. You can start doing stuff right away because all is free or low cost. And if you think I am trying to persuade you into the Linux fold, you are correct, but I recommend also you investigate open source software if you are inclined to stay with the Microsoft powered PC. Today there is no need for the wallet to limit your access to software and the skills to use them.