Saturday, November 28, 2009

*Insert Some Witty Phrase Using the Word "Windows"*

It took me a day to get Windows 7 back on my computer. There were obstacles every step of the way. I decided to wipe my Windows partition and start from scratch. My Windows 7 update disc would not validate a fresh install: even though there is no technical reason, it wants to see an older version of Windows present in order to do its thing.

The workaround learned from the internets is as easy as it is sad: install Windows 7 twice! On the second install, it sees itself and thinks it's updating an older version of Windows, even though it is itself. Wow. Anyway at least that worked, even though mysteriously, writing itself over a copy of itself takes 90 minutes. Installing my stats program of "choice" (I actually don't have a choice, it is the least crappy program on the market) was the next hurdle. It would crash on launch, even on this virginal install. While it disables the screen and the mouse, the rest of the computer works. I know this because my laptop can access the files on the desktop just fine, whilst the screen is frozen. Bizarre.

I am officially out of ideas trying to get the stat program to work. I will resort to an alternative way to use this program, by using VPN to tap in to the University computers and use it remotely. It's not as elegant as running Windows in a window on my own computer, but I kinda really need this done.

Labels: ,

link : 10:58 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post
 

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

It's Always Time to Make Fun of Microsoft

Microsoft is such an easy target of ridicule that it's almost out of style. Like the current administration, they can't do anything without some twist that is either seedy or inept. That is why it is refreshing to see a whole new way to make fun of Microsoft: the What If? The procedure is to take an established technology product by another company, and go through step by step with what Microsoft would possibly do with the same product. The best one so far is a video of what Microsoft could do with the iPod packaging. No, not the iPod itself, since we all know that Microsoft would make it the same color as my poo. But, what would Microsoft do with the box the iPod comes in?



Another one I've seen is what Microsoft would do to the gmail interface

Good thing Microsoft doesn't design anything important, because that would be ridiculous.

Labels:

link : 10:00 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post
 

Thursday, May 24, 2007

We Have a Winner!

Fellow cartoonist Winter told me about Inkscape, an open source vector program. It does everything I use in Illustrator, but for free! I whipped up a traced image with a speech balloon in around ten minutes using it for the first time. I am definitely impressed.

Around 10 minutes worth of work made this in Inkscape.
{I traced an old scan I had on my drive and added a speech balloon in Inkscape. OMG!}

Labels: , ,

link : 8:20 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post
 

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Trying New Things

My exploration into cheaper programs for comic making has been mostly fruitful. Running GIMP via X11 works very well. It's way faster than Photoshop CS2, and I'd say favorably comparable to the CS3 beta I had been using. Rapidweaver turned out to be a lot more like iWeb than Dreamweaver. I didn't learn how to code XHTML for nothing so I kept looking for a more hands-on web design program. Pagespinner was the best solution I found. It has a coding window and a preview window that runs off of Safari. It's fast. It doesn't have some of the conveniences of Dreamweaver, like GUI editing, so my first foray into coding a table took a while. It also lacks a strong FTP function where it synchronizes only altered files, and other features. Another program, Cyberduck, fills that void very well.

There is no replacement for Illustrator though. It's line smoothing feature is unique as far as I can tell.

Using all of these tools, the next segment of issue 3 is done! It covers pages 5, 6 an 7. I'm off to Peru in a week and a bit so the next part won't be on the web for a while. I'm going to take some reference photos before I go though so downtown Columbia and the Cosmo Skate Park don't look suspiciously like Lima.

Working on my comic with Pagespinner.
{Pagespinner at work. In the background, some Warcrafty action.}

Labels: ,

link : 7:45 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post
 

Friday, May 18, 2007

Soy! Soy!

A few months ago I invested some of my savings in the stock market. My portfolio is a whopping 5 shares in several different companies. I'd rather not divulge too much about my financial information on the internets but I'll toss out a tidbit: one of my companies is Apple. Shocking, I know. Who knew I was a fan of Apple? The stock has been doing well recently with new Mac announcements, favorable financial reports, and the upcoming iPhone launch. Anyway it recently started actually turning a profit for me by surpassing the $10 commission fee I had to pay to buy it. Isn't it weird how I have to pay a commission fee to buy and sell stocks unless if I have $25,000 in my account whereby the fee is waived? It takes money to save money I guess.

Why did I buy stocks? I wanted to retire early lol. I thought that now is as good a time as any to get started. I also figured that I could put my knowledge of statistics to good use. It seems to be a simple matter of studying trends and keeping an ear to the (wall)streets for changes. My stocks took a bit of a tumble soon after I bought them, but they all seem to be on the upswing now.

AAPL is on the rise!
{Apple stock in the past few months. Cha-ching!}

Labels: , ,

link : 1:49 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post
 

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Bring Out the GIMP!

Adobe released their new Creative Suite, including programs that they ate when they bought out Macromedia. I was hoping that their price structure would make things a little cheaper. I guess I should read a basic economics book because if a company controls a certain niche, they can apparently charge whatever they want. Goodbye $100 Dreamweaver. It's now $194. Educational versions cannot be upgraded and the price to buy them new is the same as a normal upgrade. Uh, thanks?

I'm not just here to complain though. The good news is that there are always cheap, even free, alternatives. Enter the replacement players! I've had GIMP on my computer out of curiosity but now I'm learning how to use it in earnest. A program called Rapidweaver claims to be a Dreamweaver replacement. I still need something to replace Illustrator. OmniGraffle is close, but not quite the same niche. Maybe there's something else out there...

Me using GIMP
{I'm using GIMP to add shading to page 6, coming out soon!}

Labels: , ,

link : 12:57 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post
 

Thursday, May 3, 2007

As I predicted, now you can display population density data in Google Earth, thanks to the work of Imran Haque, a grad student at Stanford (boo!) though he was an undergrad at Cal (yay!). His program, gCensus, allows the drawing of polygons over Google Maps, which the Google Map API doesn't do well on its own. Combine that with freely available US Census data and genius happens. Do I get any credit for predicting its development? No? Ok.

Asians in Poway
{This Google Map with gCensus enhancement shows the population density of Asians living in Poway recorded by the 2000 census. My parents' house is marked for reference.}

Labels: ,

link : 3:02 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post
 

Sunday, April 8, 2007

I Just Found Something Called Google Earth

Just kidding. But lately I've been using it to check out places in Peru. Some of the field school students wanted to know where their hostel is located. I scanned over the city of Lima until I found the right place. I guess you can't tell much about crime and sanitation from the Google Earth view. They should make map overlays for crime and population density like SimCity has. Knowing Google, that's coming.

I also looked around the country for archaeological sites. Most have been previously marked so it was pretty easy. You can see how huge some of the city-sites like Chan Chan are.

Chan Chan, from above
{View of Chan Chan from Google Earth. A small vertical bar to the left is a bus, for scale.}

If you want to see my Google Earth collection so far, download these tiny files and fire up Google Earth: Field School Sites, Peruvian Archaeological Sites

Labels: , ,

link : 1:11 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post
 

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The High Price of Number Crunching

I do a lot of work in statistics. In fact, almost all of my work involves statistics. I don't collect data in the field. I don't do things in a lab. I sit in front of my computer working with data sets and spreadsheets. Lately I've been doing a lot of online research for a good Mac statistical package. Right now I use a combination of SPSS and Excel.

SPSS seems like the perfect thing for me (it stands for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). But it's, in a word, bad. It's just bad. I have version 11, which ironically works on Intel while version 13 does not. Still, it follows archaic command line structure under its GUI. Variables can have a name eight letters long or less. No numbers or symbols. What? You can assign labels to variables but that's killing one bird with two stones. And that's gross.

Excel... well Excel is easier to use (which says more about SPSS than Excel) but there are several published articles on how you shouldn't use Excel due to its inaccuracy.

In the statistical package market there are a few alternatives. Aabel and Stata are both up-to-date to work with Intel Macs. The problem, they're around $500 each, and that's the student price (it's almost as expensive as.. a PS3!). If you're just some guy who wants to do statistics, it's $1500. Additional feature packages are $300 or so each. Why're they so expensive? I guess they're trying to sell to people with grants, but you'd think they would want to aim low and get students to like it first, then sell it to them again when they're professors with labs.

Open source to the rescue! Kind of. R is free, but it's strictly command line. And it's hard. The manuals and tutorials aren't very good. Lesson 2: Add and subtract. Lesson 3: Multiple regression! I got lost somewhere in there. Also, trying to find outside advice for using R is hard in itself because it's hard to Google. The internet has a lot of things, and the letter R is one of them.

Labels: , ,

link : 11:14 PM :  0 Comments : Links to this post