Ok.

Locofoto.net , authorship-project version is done.

Is decent (me thinks). It has a lot of php going on, with a crazy amount of loops and stuff. BUT it does have room for improvement. I should have put a list of users where people can simply click and see their pictures (if the owner allows them). Maybe a little friends network, which makes perfect sense for a site like this.

I would like to improve the site. Now without the pressure I might be able to keep adding bits here and there to make it a bit more friendly. The loading of saving pictures for further editing is not happening at the moment. I need to work on the flash bit for that, and if I do that I should use some sort of switch for the php to recognize if the picture has been edited before or not and act accordingly. For now I am going to rest a bit and try to do the essay on time

Anyways, I am happy with it. Let’s see what the mark says afterwards.

blah blah blah blah.

I thought my project would be in better shape by this stage… hey, don’t get me wrong , I think is looking nice.

the problem is , as usual, the code syntax.. action script for some reason is not doing what I want it to do… which basically sucks… big time.

Anyways… I’m going to get it working I’m sure… and when I do that everything is downhill from there, and the site will be usable.

While doing the great amount of testing i’ve been doing on my laptop-server and on the uni server, I found out yet more areas that need to be improved… but then, the whole site is a big thing waiting to be improved… I reckon i’ve learned a lot about how php handle things and its possibilities, and same with flash. I’ve always known flash is powerful, but is still so annoying to work with it that sometimes it just kills me.

I’ve already asked for some help with the flash bit, and I am going to try to make the whole site a bit more user friendly by adding a couple of graphics and simplifying the process, cos right now you have to click “continue” like a zillion times. to see anything… but again, that was part of the developing stage where I am still.

Hopefully the site will be usable by tomorrow in the afternoon. The problem is that the mySQL uni server is a total disaster and when everybody is working it just dies, and as most of everybody’s pages the first thing they load is the connection to it, means that pages don’t work cos they can’t connect to the mySQL server. Which is already a HUGE problem while we try to test our sites in the impserver.

Our demonstrators never told us, but I am wondering if we should have used the…

msql_close();

…command at the end of our pages, since that may close the connections and open a new one on the next page, instead of leaving many connections open… but I am no expert and I have no idea if what I am saying makes any sense. joe? matt?

anyhow… wish me luck.. I really think my site have some sort of potential but for the hand in I wanted to prove that I can use and make something useful out of php and mySQL… while providing a website that people can, somehow, USE for themselves…. considering i’ve never used either before this project and think i’ve done aright… but at this stage I already realize how I could have done things a bit different to make it even better… but that’s part of the learning , isn’t?

-j

Ok.

My project have moved on at an amazingly steady pace… which is good I think.

small update: the uploaded files now resize *almost* properly, the script I am using maintains aspect ratio which is good, the problem is with images that are a bit wider than the usual 4:3 ratio…

Also, the website now have a more self explanatory text in english, which is going to be useful, since I pretend to go on a first public-beta release soon… Besides that now there are 5 usable graphics and in general is very nice. I would like to post the address, but so far the website is residing on my computer and although I have done some testing on my server with people checking the site from the internet, I rather wait until I move it to university server, hopefully I will do this week.

My dilemma now is about the “sharing” bit. There are two solutions. The first one (and the most unlikely to implement) is using flash to take an snapshot, then generate an jpeg.. the problem is this technique is not very practical,consumes a LOT of cpu and the process is slow in general… and this has a shortcoming that is that the user wont be able to “edit later” in case they want to save their progress and continue later…. the other option and more related to the technical skills required for this project is to use a “live” system… how live? well, all the positions of each used object are written in a table that holds them for further use. If you are the original editor, you will be able to move them around on a later stage, if you are not you will be able to see everything, but no editing… that is a first stage, I would like in the future to let other people edit the pictures if the original editor allows them too, or maybe allow SOME people, like his friends or something. Right now im working on that system and I already got some ActionScript to get the information, now I need to find the way to send it to PHP on the server, so it can be written on a given table.

Wish me luck, I think is not impossible and I am slowly getting grips with ActionScript.

 -j

Ok, on my site people will be able to upload pictures. (duh!) So far the filter is set to take jpeg’s but no gif’s or anything else. Should I add the .png file type?

I think .png is not as widely used for anything and much less for pictures. The thing is that *in general* I want to restrict the uploaded images to actual pictures of something preferably people, not photoshop artwork or stuff like that. Since the main idea is people sharing their pictures “with a twist” (ha! it starts to sound a bit boring now) with their friends.

If you have a suggestion on the topic, or you are a avid user of png’s for family pictures and parties, please leave me a comment.

ta.

-j

As you can see now, my project have a proper name. It wasn’t easy, but I finally found it.

locofoto.net is not related to trains… for those of you who don’t know (im sure plenty of you DO know) loco means crazy in spanish… so you know where this is coming from. I have a prototype of a little flash title which will show the purpose of the site more clearly, but is not done yet and is not high on the priority list.

So far things have moved along on the project. I have a working login/registration page, which interacts properly with the database, then I also have a little page where each user can see the pictures they uploaded. Today I started to work on the nitty gritty of this project which is the flash interaction with the data of the database. I already had a little (horrible) interface on the flash side and now I am triying to get it to work with the data from the database. The problem is, as usual, FLASH itself. It doesn’t matter what they tell you, of what you think. Flash is extremely unfriendly to work. I am sure the only reason flash keeps looking the same as the first few versions is because that’s how they learn to use it. I’ve used many different pieces of software and I have to say Flash is the most unfriendly one. Nothing is clear in flash, everything is a mistery and if you try to find a simple answer on the web, what you get is extremely complex examples that don’t work. Hopefully Adobe will do something about it, as autodesk did with autocad. at first it was all text based and you needed to code to use and design in autocad, today you have a great amount of graphic tools that the new users can quickly learn, or you can still use it the old school way and both ways work perfect. I guess I am paying the price of the problems we had with flash tutorials last year. . . anyways, i’m doing my best and is working so far.

The PHP thing.. the PHP issue. . . I don’t find PHP that intimidating and actually I think is quite straightforward once you have an idea of what’s going on. And I think the problem has been that the approach in the first couple of weeks wasn’t the correct one. We were never told why would we need php, we were just told what it can do in very basic terms, and I think some of us still don’t know exactly what is php. But in general terms , im getting the grasp of it. I have to say that getting the grasp on how dreamweaver can make the communication with the DB and the generation of php code for me has helped me a lot. Meaning that I don’t spend hours coding but I just tell dreamweaver which data I want from the DB, or what data I want to write on the DB, what to do with it and keep moving. Dragging the little lightning symbols is quite an useful thing to avoid typing variables and stuff. Slight modifications of the code are sometimes neccesary but nothing too complicated.

I really want this to work out. I still have to figure out a few things, but I have a feeling that I am getting stuck in things I shouldn’t get stuck at. Which sucks of course.

Hopefully functionality will be ready for the hand-in date. Hopefully it won’t matter if it doesn’t look as pretty if it actually works.

-j

The past week the subject of the week was about copyright, or the ownership of ideas

At first I thought it was going to be about how should we handle copyrighted material in case we wanted to deal with that. But then I noticed it wasn’t precisely about that. It was more about setting up a critical view of the issue of copyright. Not critical meaning to critize it but critical to understand it and analyze it.

While checking the list of recommended reading, the key reading was in a book called Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I checked what was it about and decided to buy a copy of it. Is possible to argue that I need to do more reading on the subject and I agree, but that read lead to a totally new point of view about copyrights and its pro’s and con’s and the considerations we should have about this issue. This point of view I’ve never had before.

Before coming to the UK, I was doing some work in production of videos, and we faced the issue of copyright with some sort of fear and ignorance. In general we tried to avoid the issue. In one of the projects, as it was going to be publicly broadcast we decided against using the music we choose in the first place, which lead to us making the music ourselves. We were not musicians and the piece was quite simple. But it worked the project was for the Red Cross which meant the payment was just enough and hiring a composer was simply going to be too expensive. We took the risk and I think it paid off somehow. The only thought of triying to clear the piece of music we wanted to use was a project waaaay bigger than our small red cross video promotion project as a whole.
The second example was a corporate video that was never going to be publicly shown, only within the company… and the issue this time is that they wanted to use an specific song from a recording artist. And the truth was, we had no idea how to handle the issue. We were young people with no money for lawyers asking questions about something that no one reaaally knows about. Was it fair use? (I think it was) no one was going to make money *because* of the song, it was there only to complement the images. At the end we leave it up to the company to decide and they used the song. Were they really going to get sued by it? I don’t think so, but still that cloud of uncertainty was very unconfortable.

After reading the book I understand everything a bit more. Or better said, I understand that it wasn’t much because I was a 22 yr old triying to make a project with some honest work. But because the whole copyright issue today is quite messed up and complicated. I wasn’t aware that copyrights were implemented in the first place not only to protect the author but also to promote creativity, and that at the same time it was limited to promote more creativity. Which sounds a bit odd, but seems to work.

It was interesting. Lessig suggest more balanced copyright laws. In his view we are going to a extreme where excessive control will harm the production of new works in a wide range of media types. But of course.. it makes me wonder how is it possible to change that trend? Unfortunately is pretty similar to the feeling I get about the political situation back home (but that’s another story)… It looks like an extremely tough challenge. . . but it looks possible. Which is something after all.

The author of the book is current chair of the Creative Commons project which uses copyright laws to give power to the authors/creators to decide how they want their work to be distributed and copied without having to pay shit loads of money in lawyers. Is not a free for all actitude, but a honest take on how authors can decide to reserve some rights instead of the usual All Rights Reserved.

-j

Ok.

Before the weekend I was under the serious impression (after hearing a couple of arguments floating around, sorry no links to what I heard) that my idea of using flash and relate it to a database and let people do a couple of small things with their images to share with their friends was suddenly a very bad idea.

A very bad idea when it came to achievability. (is that a word?) Apparently just the thought of using flash and php/mySql is enough to cause massive headaches. The thing is, I am a little stubborn, not only that, but I think my idea have some sort of potential. Of course to develop it fully in two/three weeks is a great challenge. Still, my target is to get some sort of functionality. People able to login, upload pictures and do some post, online editing on them, then use that snapshot and share that with friends and family and have fun while doing it.

At first I needed to set up a test enviroment on my comp.. I once installed Apache web server, ages ago for something I dont remember now. Today I installed that, then the php module (which didn’t work straight away) and then a mySQL server. I followed the the strongest suggestion I saw and went with phpMyAdmin for administration. That made me wonder why they don’t use that in the uni, since that MySQL Administrator that we use on the macs seems to be filled with bugs… of course.. it looks “prettier” than phpMyAdmin.. but if it doesn’t work and people are having problems… what’s the point?

After I got everything worked I decided to try a couple of tutorials I found on the web about integrating flash and php/MySQL. That provided key understanding on how possible my idea of managing images and data from databases was (or not) possible. And I am glad to say that results looks promising… it also look like shit loads of work, but if the potential is there, why not?

So yes. Today Monday Oct 30th I manage to test flash loading info (including images) from an mySQL database. I think that is a very important step.

My next mission is to “develop” a little flash app to play with the images in the way I want to. It shouldn’t be that hard.. but again, this is Flash we are talking about, and we know it could be a bit temperamental . . .

Anyways. If I achieve what I want in Flash, I’ll let u know.
Comments / Suggestions are always welcomed.

-j

Ok. I still have some reading to do about the theories. . .  but let’s talk about the assigment.

 I’ve been thinking really hard about what to do for my project. And one of the things I’ve decided at some point was to try to focus the interactivity on pictures. Meaning? that I do not want to deal with uploading videos, or with having just an online forum with some text.

The brief calls for a “online community based website where people can interact and share media artefacts and information.” … yeah.. right easy ….. not so much!

Basically we can do whatever we want with that guideline. Of course one of the things that most of us (students) try to do with every project is to make it somehow original.. even if is not *too* original (i think) we really try to add something to it to make it different. And at least for me that is very important, and even more important than the technical skills themselves.

 Anyways after some research and my decision to do something with pictures, I would like to do a photo-sharing site (yeah! that’s  o r i g i n a l  , isn’t?) with a small twist… Of course; I have to check if such thing exists, but if it doesnt and I manage to do it even remotely properly please don’t steal my idea, unless not before I make some profit out of it (you know joe, for the well being of $ociety and all that stuff Jefferson suggested …..  :-)   Well, joking aside, the idea is for people to be able to share their pictures as they do in many sites already, but at the same time give some very basic, easy-to-use tools to put text ballons, symbols, maybe dribbles on top of the pictures and share them like that.  I think is a good idea, but of course there is the issue of achievability (is that a word?). I think it would be a step further in sharing pictures with just a caption at the bottom and giving the user an online tool to make their pictures funnier is better than pretending them to open Paint in windows and do it there.

 Of course the first thing that comes to my mind in how to achieve this task it to do it in Flash, and my small research showed that integration between php/mySql and flash is possible as it is with HTML.  The workshops have come handy. Sometimes is hard to look at the big picture during a php workshop but I think the tools are there. Now I have to dig deeper into flash to see how can I make this happen and I already have a couple of ideas going thru my head. And is probably going to implicate a decent amount of database use.  I already know is possible to load jpg’s from “outside” in flash dynamically, now I need to figure out how to give the user the power to move some symbols, and then somehow take a “snap-shot” for it to become the shared artifact.

There are also other considerations as image sizes and so on that need to be sorted out. But I think is possible. Of course there are a couple of ideas to give this a sense of community.. maybe lets user fiddle with friends pictures, but first I need to get the functionality working.

Comments are more than welcome, and discussion is encouraged.

See ya around.

 -j

Well, back to uni after a very nice summer back home….

The first unit we are going to take this year is called Authorship and after just one week there is a couple of reflexions (sp?) about it. First is that the whole “traditional” idea of authorship is being somewhat destroyed and rebuilt by new media. Usually when we refer to new media we only think digital artifacts, but then when you think again you realize that is not only “digital” media. Is also how this enables a new way of interaction between… well, between everything! We are talking that 15 years ago a mobile phone was useful to make just phone-calls. Today not only I can play games on my mobile, but I can also mix sounds (never actually done it, but MotoMix is there as an option). I can take pictures with it and share them instantly with my friends. All this with my old cheap phone… is nothing compared to the new ones.

So, how is Authorship being rebuilt by new media? I am sure not all of us, but some of us have been part of this process. I remember I used to participate and check 3D imaging sites while trying to learn 3D Studio Max. A very common thing to find on those on-line forums is a Work In Progress area where users of all levels simply show their work and ask for suggestions on how to improve it. People responds with all kind of suggestions. Some are quite simple, but some can totally change the look of any given work and make it look impressive… and it raises the question on how the original author (artist) would have finish its piece without the other people collaboration. Would the piece be totally different? Maybe the impact level of the piece increased quite a bit during this WIP process and because of this process.

At the end all this suggest that we need to somehow (re)define the term authorship. In one of the lectures this week the lecturer asked us if youtube.com was a “common authorship” example. At first I thought that it was not, since all the clips that people upload are different from each other and not related to each other. There is no common ground, or goal to be achieved. Is just a very horizontal platform on which thousands (millions?) of clips are being showed. The problem is that is possible to argue that for the creators of this website maybe that was the objective. So if that were the case, then they (and their users) are authors of something. But maybe each user is author of their clips and the website is simply a platform for sharing them. So how we define the authorship? are the website creators authors of this massive phenomenon? is possible to say that youtube is like one piece of artwork in a museum that are just a splatter of paint with no straight sense but some people appreciate for whatever reason? or is it simple a platform, nothing special of sorts like a folder full of kiddie drawings with no (apparent) artistic value and with no established author ? maybe they all belonged to a group of kids in some kindergarten class…

Maybe the definition of authorship refers to a single group or individuals , easily identifiable. It appears that when we try to establish authorship in a massive scale (like the youtube users) the concept can’t cope with itself and gets destroyed and rebuilt into something harder to understand.

Maybe we need to wipe the traditional definition and start writing a new one. But then if we do it today, we would probably use something like a wiki, and suddenly our definition will stop being ours… and then authorship could disappear… again!

-j

ps. I haven’t read enough on the subject yet. I am planning on posting again after I collect more information on the subject.