CST 205 Module 4

This week we finished and submitted our Midterm projects. I worked on a CSUMBerize and a Spring themed photo filter. We also took an interesting look into audio files, and worked with .wav file to make our own new noise files. It was relatively simple to change the sequence, volume and even the order of the different audio files. It was also nice to get the opportunity to work in a subgroup with A this week, as we worked on labs 8 and 10 together. Lab 8 was more work in the audio department while lab 10 was creating a text-based hangman game using loops we went over.

CST 205 Module 3

This week we reviewed some interesting material. We began by taking our first foray into git and github, setting up accounts and going over the basics of the system. I look forward to using git more often as we collaborate more on larger projects in the future. I was able to work on creating a St. Patrick’s Day card for the holiday, and quite enjoyed working with the skills I’ve learned thus far in creating the card. We also spent time going over what we will be doing for our midterm project in this course. I plan on working on my CSUMB filter and a Spring themed filter for my project. Besides this we finished our peer and self reviews this week, which helped me to look at my limits and see where I can improve in the weeks ahead.

CST 205 Image Portfolio

Rose-colored glasses

The roseColoredGlasses function takes a picture, cycles through all the pixels and decreases that pixels green and blue values. The result is that the picture takes a pinkish tint as if looking through rose colored glass.

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Negative

The makeNegative function takes the red, green and blue values and subtracts them from the max rgb value of 255 so that the color of each pixel is switched. The result is the creation of an image that looks like the negative of the original image.

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Better black and white

The betterBnW function cycles through the pixels of a picture and balances the rgb values to get the luminance of each pixels. This value is then set to the individual rgb values of the target pixels resulting in a very clean black and white image.

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Bottom-to-top mirror

The bottomToTop function takes an image and cycles through the bottom of the image. It then copies the color of each pixel and sets that color to the pixel opposite it on the top half of the image. This results in a mirroring of the image about the center.

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Shrink

The shrink function takes an image and creates a blank image that is half the length and width of the original image. It then copies every other pixel from the original to the copy resulting in a shrunken copy of the original.

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Collage

The collage allows you to choose images that will be modified using previously created functions and places these images throughout a page sized image.

Results	Code

Red-eye Reduction

The removeRedEyeFromPicture function cycles through the pixels in an image and compares the pixel to a few different red colors. If the color is close enough to the red we are looking for, the original pixels color is changed to black, thus fixing the red eye.

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Color Art-i-fy

The artify function takes the pixels from an image and checks their individual rgb values. Depending on the original values, it will then set the pixels to either a low, medium, or high rgb value. This results in an artistic image in which the colors take on an intense appearance.

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Green screen

The greenScreen function takes a front image and a background image. It then cycles through the front image and if the pixels is close to a green color, it does not copy that pixel onto the background image. If the pixel is not green however, then it will copy the pixel at the same location onto the background image, thus combining the two.

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Homemade St. Patrick's Day

The stPatrickCard function takes three images, it first goes through the clover image and if the individual pixel is green, then it copies the pixel into the top right corner of the base image. After that it goes through the cat picture and if the individual pixel in the cat is not white copies the pixel into the bottom left of the base picture. After that the function writes a “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” into the center of the image. The resulting card is written into the directory and displayed.

Card	Code

Line Drawing

For the lineDrawing program I used two functions, one to figure out and return the luminance of an individual pixel and the other to actually do the line drawing modification. After cycling through the pixels in the picture we check the pixel to the right and under the pixel we grabbed, we then use the luminance function to compare the luminance of the pixels and decide whether to make the pixel we are focused on black or white.One problem I faced while working on this function was to be sure and check if we had reached the greatest x or y value possible for the picture, otherwise we would be attempting to grab pixels that did not exist for comparison. If this occurred, I made the non-existent pixel point to the pixel we were currently looking at since there would be no difference in luminance.

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CST 205 Module 2

This week we continued our work looking into photo manipulations with Python. It was quite interesting to create a variety of functions that would transform pictures in different ways, such as mirroring, shrinking, or rotating an image. I personally had quite a bit of fun going through the short lessons given on codecademy. These projects were simple and clear ways to understand Python’s syntax as well as programming concepts in general. We decided to switch our meeting days this week, from Thursdays to Mondays, so that we will have more time to actually work on our module’s coursework prior to our meetings. It was quite interesting to see the collages that were created by some of the other classmates, and the modifications to the various images were at times very amusing.

CST 205 Module 1

This week marked the first week of CST 205, our course in multimedia design using Python. It was interesting to take our first dive into Python programming by first working through a few of the Codecademy exercises available online. We learned about some basic Python syntax for creating functions and loops. Using these, we later worked on our group lab on a number of different problems relating to picture manipulation, such as increasing the red in a picture or making a picture into a negative of itself. Together we went through lab #3 and modified, improved, and clarified any problems we had in our programs. One of the highlights personally was the group photo that one of our teammates created for the Silicon Bay team featuring all of us as superheroes with an explosion going off behind us.

CST 300 Module 8

Part I:
Amazon Prime Air:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKdgt_MPFU0&feature=youtu.be
I really enjoyed this presentation overall and felt that I learned quite a bit about the subject. I believe that the topic was covered well, and that it was particularly interesting to include information not only on Amazon’s service, but also similar competitor’s services like UPS. I had a little trouble keeping up with all the information presented during the “Concept of Operations Complexity” slide, but overall I really enjoyed the pacing and look of the presentation. It seems that the team put a good amount of research into their topic and worked well together to create this piece. The quality of the production was very nice, and it helped to keep me interested in the subject matter. Overall, their presentation was geared to a professional audience, and I believe that it provides a clear look at the innovation occurring in the drone delivery sector.

Virtual Reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkuoFz0YPrk&feature=youtu.be
I really enjoyed the virtual reality presentation by the Logistic Solutions team. It was engaging, fun, and informative. Their presentation seemed geared towards professionals, giving a decent overview of the virtual reality products and their applications. The topics discussed were clear, and the teamwork was evident in the creation of the presentation. The research quality seemed quite good, and they covered a wide variety of topics during the presentation. I do think their video presentation was interesting and engaging, and I believe that the team worked well to create a presentation they can be proud of.

Data Loss Prevention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRlL9boscyg&feature=youtu.be
I found the data loss prevention presentation quite interesting. It definitely was geared towards professionals, and quite often delved into specifics of preventative measures for data loss. The quality of research seemed quite high, and the quality of presentation was good. I felt like perhaps more work could have been invested into the slides and ensuring they matched what the topic being discussed was. I also noticed that it seemed to cut off the speaker at the end of the video, and I am unsure what they were going to finish with. While the teamwork is evident, I also thought that the program was not extremely engaging, and sometimes I felt somewhat lost during the technical overviews.

Part II:

Personally I believe that we communicated relatively well for this project, and the course on a whole. With this project in particular the hardest part for collaboration was to have everyone submit their work in enough time for two of our teammates to create the slides and voiceovers. I enjoyed learning with my teammates, and I am very glad that I was placed in a good team. Overall, I enjoyed my first course at CSUMB. I learned a bit about ethics and the video game industry, and about how the future coursework will be structured. I am looking forward to my future courses.

CST 300 Module 7

On the final research video this week we seem to be collaborating well. The workload was divided up so that we each took a 2 minute slice from the total video and worked on adding that to the presentation. Using google docs to collaborate on our slides and scripts, we were able to easily add our parts and work together to edit and improve our parts of the projects. I personally worked on genetic engineering, and had a good time learning about the new methods for transformations.

In Anthony Goldbloom’s presentation, “The jobs we'll lose to machines -- and the ones we won’t”, he discussed how jobs will change in the near future with the advancement of machine automation. It was interesting how he started with the story of his young niece Yahli, pointing to how the job market will be severely different when she is in college from when even he was in college a generation before. He uses this thread as a way to delve into his discussion of how virtually any task that requires repeatable and measurable actions can be given to a computer that can be trained to perform these tasks. In the end he points to how Yahli will probably need to study areas which require novel task solving capabilities, something that machines are not as good as humans at, and suggests that these will be the areas where jobs will still remain even with automation.

Trevor Timm highlighted an interesting question in his presentation entitled “How free is our freedom of the press?” He begins his discussion by introducing us to a writer who discussed the unauthorized government surveillance. Apparently, in search of the whistleblower in the government who leaked this information, they looked though the writer’s emails, phone calls, bank records, and other information and eventually placed the blame on one Jeffrey Sterling. He points to tools that are now being created in order to bypass the ability of the government to find whistleblowers through their communications with the press. It was very interesting to see how he pointed to the importance of press freedom towards the end, and highlighted the need for these services by showcasing an instance where whistleblowers were severely prosecuted.

I particularly enjoyed the “Life After Death” presentation by Don McMillan. His use of humor to illustrate the “don’ts” of powerpoint presentation made the lessons memorable and fun to watch. The general point I gathered from his presentation is to avoid overuse of add-ons in powerpoint presentation. In other words we ought to be moderate in our use of animations, powerpoints and graphs, using them only when we need them and not constantly. The Toastmasters website had some interesting tips for presentations as well. They suggested that you should be prepared, confident, and conversational when delivering a speech. It was also important to maintain eye contact with members of the audience while avoiding insincere gestures.