Digital Arts Service Corps - fun

What's Going On.

gariet cowin — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:51:12 +0000

Hey everybody! Long time, no blog.

Things have been crazy around here as of late, but now that it is spring break, I have one week without OLLIE gigs to catch up on everything that I have been neglecting. That means four short movies to edit, some DVDs to create, and a website to build. We'll see how much I actually get done.

In other news, I managed to put together another Kirsten Academy class (after nearly 3 months without one). The topic this time was stop-motion animation! Check out the movies we made here. We used a program called iStopMotion, which can be purchased online for about $40. Recently, however, I was talking with Andrew of YVXN/NYMAP fame, and he recommended a program called FrameThief, which is actually free!

So if any of you want to make some stop-motion movies as well, download FrameThief, find yourself a digital camcorder and a firewire cable, and get to it. It's as easy as that. If you watch all 5 of our movies (which are all very short), you can see that we used a variety of materials; construction paper, magazines, clay, coloring books, buttons, etc. It was really easy and lots of fun. In fact, there have been requests for an encore lesson. If I ever get around to teaching a second class, I'll try to put together a tutorial video as well, so that all of you can see how easy it is to make your own animation.

After which, I might declare a cross-country CTC VISTA supershort animation contest! Anybody interested?

Ooh, CTC VISTA word cloud!

Ben Sheldon — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:46:36 +0000

I've been playing around with tag and word clouds lately. Clouds are basically interesting (and esthetically appealing, in my opinion) ways to visualize the prevalence of words. Words that are more prevalent show up larger/darker than more rare ones. Oftentimes you will see Tag Clouds which show how many posts there are in certain categories (we have one on the CTC VISTA Digest).

Below is a word cloud made up of all the posts on CTCVISTA.org. This isn't the categories, but the actual posts themselves. It was created by a very nifty website call TagCrowd.com.

An interesting side note is that, excluding common words (and, like, the, pronouns, etc.), we have a lexicon of 7,369 unique words on the website.

<!--
begin tag cloud : generated by TagCrowd.com
Feel free to modify as long as you keep this notice.

This code and its rendered image are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/

For commercial licensing, contact Daniel Steinbock, daniel@steinbock.org
-->

created at TagCrowd.com

Xen: Instant Karma

John Miller — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 23:06:26 +0000

Imagine if you could run Windows XP, Mac OS X, and multiple versions of Linux on the same computer. That's already a reality--you just have to reboot to switch between them. Now imagine that you could run all these operating systems at the same time on the same computer. You could run MS Word 2003 at the same time you're running Safari, all while programming in Eclipse. It's possible. The technology that makes it possible: Xen.

Xen is a virtualization technology that's based on Linux. It lets you run multiple virtual computers ("guest" operating systems) on top of one master operating system (called the "host" OS). In other words, you can run Windows and Linux on the same PC at the same time.

That's the sexy use, anyhow. Xen's already in use by hosting companies to give customers their own computer. Instead of having to give customers a physical PC, Xen allows the hosting companies to fit many virtual computers onto one PC. If the customers don't need much computing power, why not?

At the Community Software Lab, we're in the process of putting together a Xen-based server so that we can emulate our current network of servers from within one machine. Instead of having to prepare a new computer to become a server--install hard drives, memory, network cards, cd-rom drives, load the OS via cd-rom--we can type a few commands on the Xen server and have a working virtual computer in about five minutes. What once took a day to do now takes minutes.

The kinks? The Xen server has to share its memory among many virtual computers, and these days, people's personal computers use 256 MiB, 512 MiB, 1 GiB, or more. This puts a limit to the number of virtual computers that can fit onto one host machine.

We're working the kinks out of our test server (now running computation-friendly virtual machines), and as soon as we hear from our server supplier, we'll be putting together the production server.

Computer virtualization is nothing new, however. IBM's been doing it in their mainframes for over 40 years. VMWare is a widely-used virtualization product. Various video-game emulators have been around for a while (I beat Rygar using good ol' Nesticle, all while surfing the web). Xen just seems most promising for the moment.

I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine--not Keyboard, Video, Mouse!). New in the 2.6.20 Linux kernel (the core of the operating system that handles memory management, task switching, networking, etc.), KVM might give Xen a run for its money. I'll try it out, but with time invested in Xen, that's where we're headed for the moment.

Good morning CTC VISTA Project

Richard T. Anderson — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:07:05 +0000

Good Morning,

Well, the sun is rising here in Michigan on chilly Friday. My computer is now by the window, so I can look out on the sky, the trees, the road, and the apartment complex office.

Yesterday, Jeanne, my supervisor, said, "It's the last good day for a bike ride." She was probably right. It was unusually nice yesterday and it's supposed to get colder starting today. But you never know. There could always be a 60 degree day in December. This is Michigan, after all.

Work has been keeping me pretty busy, the last couple weeks. MoLLIE was out at a school nearly every day for two weeks. Now we're settling back into a lighter schedule. And I really want to focus on developing an audio class. We don't have surveys in yet telling us that that is specifically what the community wants, but I'm starting to think I should just proceed as if we have. Not having the survey's is just a way of procrastinating on doing something that I've never done, and thus is scary.

So, I'm going to go over my syllabi (syllabuses?) from my audio production class at Grand Valley and think about what would work for a beginning and advanced class. Seems like a good starting point.

In life news; I got a car. I've been without a car since July. And it really is no good in Grand Rapids. The public transit has improved over the years, but it's still not great for much besides going to and from work, and even then only if you are on a bus route (which fortunately I was).

Having a car means I can go out some nights. Especially nights when there are open mics for me to go and play my guitar and sing some songs.

My roommate and I are finally having a "house"-warming party. Which also doubles as a post Halloween, post-election celebration. And it's seems to have a six degrees of seperation aspect as well. If any VISTA's are in GR on Saturday, let me know, I'll give you directions.

Well, I'm probably already going a bit long for a blog. So I think I'll say adu.

Peace,

Rich

Recoil magazine

Richard T. Anderson — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 15:26:17 +0000

While at the PSO I wore a black t-shrit that said Recoil on it. Recoil is the name of a local free magazine printed on newsprint. On the front is a magazine devoted to local events and advertising, articles about and interviews of bands (local or those coming to town) and reviews of CD's local and national. On the back is a satire magazine of fake and funny news articles a la "The Onion".

I was wearing this shirt when we took the big group photo. That photo that greats us when we all when we click on"vista blogs". The word Recoil has been removed from my shirt. I'm guessing someone thought that it was a possible copyright issue or something. But I hardly think a local Grand Rapids magazine will be suing AmeriCorp for use of the logo.

Bizaar.

In the words of Sam the Eagle, "You are all weirdos."

Peace,

Richard

CTCNet Conference Video

danielle martin — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 19:07:26 +0000

Check out the video of VISTAS at this summer's CTCNet Conference.