Kristo Vaher

Yes, books

With the first semester of my Masters studies successfully behind me, I postponed the selection of Spring subjects for as long as possible, but since the studies continue this week, I looked over the options and made up my mind. Picking up subjects for Spring was a relatively easy process thanks to the work done by IMKE administrators.

I’ll be going over each of the subjects I considered, one by one.

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Electronic Payments

E-payment systems and bank services are everyday and common in Estonia, but both developers and companies, who implement e-payments to websites, tend to ask large sums of money for solutions that should be relatively simple. Having developed e-payment systems for years, I had not put together a single solution for this very common problem until now, when Estonia has adopted Euro as its main currency. This solution is released open source, under LGPL license.

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James Cameron's 'Avatar'

This post is more course-specific than most of my posts here. As part of Generative Content Creation course, this post here will look for examples of generative art, applying the theories studied in previous weeks to these examples. I shall bring two examples, one used to generate both small and large amounts of bodies of text. The other example is used in art, movies and digital rendered art and often can compliment both non-generated art as well as other generated art.

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Hybridisation of Two Iterated Function Systems

The following is a critical review of this paper written for Generative Art Conference GA2007 by Marie-Pascale Corcuff.

Introduction (opening sentences, main topic of the text, summary of the key argument; brief statement of your evaluation of the text)

Corcuff’s article about the meaning and use of chance in artistic generative process and she clarifies early on that chance exists all around in nature, in the alterations of the DNA which allow the life to live. She makes it clear that chance is – in fact – all around us, just like art.

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This post was updated and in some parts clarified 19.12.2010

New Interactive Environments was one of the three online courses this semester that I decided to take and what has become evident now that two of the courses are relatively over with and one is still running is how different each of the courses are. It seems there is no developed standard when it comes to e-courses. While I am not going to compare the courses here, I really do think that differently from regular courses, e-courses are very dangerous for a student to take for variety of reasons, from amount of material to be worked through to heavy organizational differences and quality of the challenges in general. Here I am going to look back at New Interactive Environments e-course, starting from organizational side and then moving on to the content and material. Course was led by Terje Väljataga and Sebastian Fiedler.

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Wiki!

The following is a review of a group wiki paper by Kim Caspar, Argo Ilves, Reimo Känd, Rasa Pachutko, Tatjana Pavlenko, Katrina Tomasicka that is available here.

To jump right into the thick of it, one of the first problems I had with the wiki was that I had to refer to course materials in order to find out what the Wiki was about. In fact, the title of the Wiki (Drawing the Line) was not mentioned anywhere within the Wiki and the other supposed topic of Digital Divide was left unfulfilled within the Wiki itself. First sense I got was that the Wiki was incomplete and when it comes to Wiki papers, it is not a good way to start. Should those topics be filled, I will be adding to this review and might change my initial opinion, for my first reaction after reading the Wiki was that I was reading series of essays unrelated to one another with half the cake missing.

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When I was trying to come up with an activity or series of activities in my life, that would benefit from digital technology, then I found hundreds of little things that might make my life easier and more efficient. But then I decided to leave all of those ideas aside, instead thinking about some of the activities that have already been ‘improved’ by digital technology, but in ways I think miss the mark. I believe that e-lectures, the way they are implemented worldwide today, is not even closely as beneficial to the student, than actual in-class learning. And this is an important point, because every other activity enhanced by digital technology tends to improve the original activity in number of ways.

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Hammer of Digital Technology

This post loosely discusses topics covered in this article by Georg Rückriem

Rückriem defines difference of tool and medium within this concept rather clearly by stating that a tool is a main concept of activity theory in our common understanding and medium is the central concept of media theory and the whole question is entirely about whether these two theories – activity and media theory – are compatible or not. Rückriem then briefly mentions what would it be like, if these two are not compatible. As a result, activity theory would not be able to describe, understand or assess resulting societal changes and would only be there to fix, stabilize or consolidate given social relations.

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Computer Generated Imaging

I personally consider myself lucky for working in fields that are deeply rooted in free information published online. All of my programming languages have free references online and internet is full of not only discussions and articles about theories of programming and software practices, but also thousands of examples of do’s-and-don’ts. While I have still ordered books about software development, I have never felt being forced to do so or missing out if I do the opposite. But this was different in the field of CGI (Computer Generated Imaging), where – as a rather poor student – I spent hundreds of dollars on books about rendering, digital lighting and illumination theories as well as heavy handbooks on various rendering technologies.

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GNU GPL Logo

Having worked as a software developer for handful of years, I have had to both use and deal with software licenses, both free and not. But of all the various software licenses out there, the GPL (and its sibling, LGPL) have been of most notable use. This says quite a bit about the licenses, since GPL and LGPL have laid a large foundation to modern software development. In this post I shall be discussing my experiences with GPL and LGPL from the perspective of a web developer, both when using other software as well as when developing new software myself.

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