Kristo Vaher

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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Social Media

The following is a brief opinion-piece of Marika Lüders’ “Conceptualizing Personal Media”, available here.

Paper by Marika Lüders was an interesting read and mostly dealt with social influence over new media and mass media and how every individual can nowadays play a role in mass media and its implications on larger scale. This is especially evident in recent years, with the term ‘viral’ becoming almost everyday in use. While Lüders paper did not discuss the word, usually it is the individual achievements – blog posts, comics, video clips – that become viral and become influental part in media and mass media in general through new media channels, while otherwise might be considered personal in every other sense of the word.

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Lev Manovich

The following is a critical review of this paper.

Having dealt with the concept of New Media as part of my studies, I had not read Lev Manovich’ interpretation of the concept before, despite being aware that he is one of the more known names related to New Media. While the book is relatively old by today’s standards, having been released in 2001, especially in the field that is constantly changing, I did not approach the chapter with prejudice. As expected, Manovich begins by listing various technologies that are most common to the concept and are most often tied with New Media. He believes that this is too limiting a way to define New Media. He asks how can we define media as ‘new’, if all it does is simply store information more efficiently than before?

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Cornell Box

The following is a critical review of this paper. While this was not part of the course task, I still attached it with the course tag for those who might find it interesting.

Having some experience with digital art and the ‘illusions’ of cinema, I was interested in reading and reviewing the text the very moment I noticed it. Manovich begins with an interesting example of a legendary Greek painter painting grapes of such a quality that they deceived birds, making them think that these were real grapes. Such an early example of illusion created through art rings true even today, when specific schools of art still aim to replicate real life as closely as possible. This is no more true than in computer games, that attempt to achieve visual realism and movies, which attempt to merge these very same illusions with real stock footage.

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Keyboard smileys!

I must admit that I have read far too many articles on interactivity in recent weeks. But this has given me a couple of thoughts I would like to share. I dealt with interactivity in one of my recent posts in relation to a course I am taking in university, but I am now going to tackle the other side of the coin: the less ‘academically correct’ personal side. If we consider interactivity a property of technology that attempts to mimic and support – in the long run – as closely as possible interpersonal relationships, then this can have a serious impact on how we communicate and keep in touch in general. We have only recently been introduced to such a world, but it will be our children who will grow up in this new ‘network of emotions’, where we share private details of our lives with not only friends, but also strangers and have that impact on their perceptions of us.

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Intellectual Property?

Following is an opinion and short summary of this chapter from Brian Martin’s book ‘Information Liberation’.

Copyrights and Intellectual Property related problems are of great personal interest to me as a developer looking to set up his own start-up company in the future, so it was great to read Brian Martin’s views on Intellectual Property, even though I considered myself fairly up to date on problems related to it. Martin begins the chapter by outlining what intellectual property is and how the modern technology, such as digital documents and transfers, have made sharing information easier and how it differs from ownership of physical objects.

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Multi-touch

After reading couple of white papers on interactivity, one by Jensen and another by Kiousis, it became apparent that interactivity cannot simply be defined. Both authors looked into papers previously released and attempted to find the meaning of the word through the works of others, but since most of those views differed from one another significantly, it was apparent that interactivity cannot really be defined so that it becomes satisfactory to majority. This was why both Jensen and Kiousis ended up making compromises in their definitions. The more detailed and scientific the definition becomes, the more there are views that disagree on certain aspects of the definition, or the more restricted the definition becomes without being as encompassing as ‘science’ would demand.

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Shh!

This is a post written while keeping in mind the students at Tallinn University, but the same applies to any and every user of public WiFi. The original article that is being referred to is available here. It deals with a Firefox extension that can be used to listen in on public WiFi network communication.

The following is a must read, especially since the students use public WiFi in Tallinn University quite a bit. Programs have existed for the following for many years, but the fact that it is now available as a simple extension, is very problematic. In short, if you ever use a public unsecured WiFi, then you are in danger of your privacy being compromised just by another user in the same network, using a web browser with a small extension.

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Following is an opinion and short summary of this paper by S. Kiousis.

Kiousis’ paper acts almost like a sequel to Jens F. Jensens paper previously looked at here. It deals with the similar problem that Jensen dealt with, attempting to define Interactivity. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he ends up in a similar situation as Jensen, without a clear definition (or explication, as the title) of the word. Instead Kiousis hopes that his work allows others to reach a better end result in the future by somewhat showing the way to future research. Large part of the paper dealt with – somewhat similarly to Jensen – going over previous definitions of the word (including that of Jensen in numerous occasions). Despite using Chaffee’s framework, most of the steps were covered with quotes and references.

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