*BLAMMO * *KAPOW* *THUMP*

That's right people. Duffman and Batgirl are in town! Evil stands no chance with these crime fighters around. Oooooooh yeah *thrusts*

















































Ned Kelly, Inspector Gadget and Wonderwoman also made appearances and they all turned out to be raging alcoholics.

It's lucky you came back!

Well, you're all very very lucky for I found 5 minutes before I go home to post that cool picture I promised. Enjoy. I know, it's a really good looking water cooler - I thought so too

First post in almost two years

Well, you read correctly, first post in two years, after Steve and I killed ourselves staying up all night making flash games. But I deemed this to be worthy of making a post, for the ZERO of you who actually come here.

My friend "Leathal" Leath Mattner is not only on the Intertron, but he has a blog too. NO WAY! I hear you gasp, well, its true. You can find his entirely not suckful and really well designed page (I think he might be gay) at http://www.leathmattner.blogspot.com/

If you guys are really lucky, I'll post a picture later today of something cool....

I've been up for 24 hours

Trying to do our flash assignment due in about 45minutes for david freaking dental surgeon and i'm tired. I had a refreshing cup of tea courtesy of steve's mum not too long ago, that was nice. Had some exciting out of body experiences, dizzy spells, steve lost the plot for a good half hour which was highly entertaining.

Spose I'll post up our uber game here some time for everyone to enjoy. Whether my readership will be able to handle the awesome challenge of helping Billy escape the pits of hell I am unsure, but I shall be sure to laugh at your failures!

moooahahahaha

I feel like pancakes

I'm getting a bit concerned guys

I got 4 hits last month... Whilst its nice to have 4 times as many visitors as Steve, you bitches aren't paying for the traffic. So until you all start emailing me $10 notes every month, stop telling you're friends!@#%

Anyways, check out this sweet website I made. It rocks out more than Jason at a country and western festival. I know you know Jason rocks hard but believe me, this rocks more hard. Be sure to wear protective clothing to avoid injuries.

In other exciting essay news, I was gonna do it on security in the future, but it seems my wildest fantasy of writing an essay on internet security may not be fulfilled. More on this exciting development as news comes to hand (or when Jase talks to me at the end of the tute... whatever comes first)

THe future of the Interweb

Predicting the future of the internet... Not a simple task by any means. Some ideas I'm having so far
-The sheer number of devices able to access it, more than just pdas, phones, computers and portable computers. Things like fridges and tvs.

-Will all our entertainment be streamed over the web? (not with telstra around it won't)

-Education -> Schools probably won't be eliminated completely any time in the near future, but will online learning take on a major role in the lives of many children and adults?

-Holographic video conferencing -> no more grainy webcam images, but real time 3d projected images of the people you are conversing with

-Virtual reality -> Entertainment & training?

-Bandwidth -> Just how huge and ph fat will the pipes be that will deliver all this content and satisfy our needs

Now to choose something and write about it and get "points" from only the bestest lecturer in the whole damn effing world, thats right, I'm talkin about you Big Jase

word up y0

Heres another rad flash I made. The class had to make animated gifs, Steve and I had to make something in flash. I feel I've bettered the world by creating this and sharing it with you, my readers. Yes, all 4 of you. Hi leath!

oh yeah, the flash

There'll be another very exciting post when I figure out what the gay I'm doing my assignment on. If its about the future why can't it be about Cyborgs and lasers? Why does the chicken burger I ate this morning keep repeating on me? Does Jason REALLY look good with a beard?

All these questions and more answered... soon I guess.

The use of sound on the web, for fun and profit no doubt!

The Web's use of sound

The use of sound on the web has been a somewhat tradgic journey. I remember using the web back in 1996 and people thought it was cool to put annoying midi's and other various beeps and noises. This was usually coupled with horrible web design anyway. Together, flashing colours, rotating gifs and midis from hell provided a VERY unenjoyable web experience.

Today this has somewhat changed. With the advent of broadband connections and exciting multimedia applications like flash, its been possible to incorporate high fidelity audio into websites. And, perhaps the most important feature thats been implemented is the ability to mute sound. No matter how great the background music is and how well it complements the site, eventually, it will get annoying. It should be the users choice as to whether they want to listen to the music or not.

Theres something funny about the satisfication one can get from scaring the crap out of someone through sound on the web. I'm sure everyone has experienced this, you get a mystery link telling you to peer closely at the screen watching for a ghost to appear. Then a picture of the chick from the exorist appears accompanied by a blood curtling scream which is so loud due to you having the volume up from listening to mp3s whilst you work. You jump 3ft out of your chair and swear at the person who sent you the link for the next 15minutes.

Now, unlike Steve I'm going to go have a shower and go to bed whilst he spends the next 2 hours downloading fruity tooty loops as hes been capped already this month. Tee hee hee

Fruity sounds from a non fruity guy for a fruity lecturer

The following is a description of the sounds created in last weeks tutorial using Fruity Loops. It explains why the sounds sound like they do and how that sound represents what it does.

A Chair.
When you listen to this file you get the feeling of low bassy porno music. To me this is what a chair represented, a prop in the adult film industry. I feel the sound captures the mood and essence of the industry and is what a chair would sound like.

The Drunk.
When listening to this file you first get a feeling of high speed and randomness. As if the world is spinning and consequently you are bumping into objects. Then all of a sudden everything slows down, confusion and dizziness take over the feeling. You're drunk.

No hands.
Waking up in the morning and realising you have no hands. You scream, you're confused and most of all you're scared. This sound blends all these emotions.

Driving fast and losing control.
Listening to this sound you get the feeling of something fast, something speeding up as it plays. Then all of a sudden it loses control and then stops.

The world's second greatest website (behind this one)

Journal entry for website content, target audiences, benefits and drawbacks

The website that I chose is called Penny Arcade. It is a comic for the online community that spawned from humble beginnings into the online comic with the largest readership on the internet with over 518 650 unique IPs a day

The comic is based on the cartoon lives of two people named Tycho and Gabe who are gamers. As such a fair proportion of the material used in the comics is geared toward a target audience of gamers. Without some understanding of the games industry including products, games and developers and other genres associated, such as anime, the absolutely friggen hilarious humour may go unnoticed until a more generic subject is found. However, it is possible to understand some of the gamer – minded humour without knowing the background to it. The links below highlight this point:

Anime

Gamer 1 Gamer 2

Slight understanding

Generic 1 Generic 2


As you can see, ball bustingly funny.

The content is generated by the crazy minds of the two blokes who have an uncanny ability to ridicule and satire the industry they are a part of so well. The fact it’s done so bluntly and randomly makes it absolute comedic gold. Articles relative to the industry come from news, reviews of games, cons currently going on etc. The generic humour tends to be the more random stuff.

Revenue from this site is generated by advertising (with so many UIPs per day, people are willing to pay to hit the target audience so specifically) and merchandise. (t-shirts, hoodies, stickers, posters, shot glasses etc.)

The only draw back of the site is that the target audience could be seen as “narrow” compared to other websites. But, one needs to consider that the game industry is now a multi-billion dollar one with young children to 30+ adults. So thinking of it as a “gamer” site makes it seem like a small target audience, yet in reality millions of people could view it daily.

OOOOOOh yeah

check out the mega cool animated GIF I made in class today. Its George Bush shooting Mr Hankey (the christmas poo) who consequently explodes into a mushroom cloud of pooh. Yay! Find it
here

Oh and in other exciting news, Steve actually came to class today. You go girl!

Flash fun

Well jase decided to make Steve and I use flash for this weeks assignment rather than photoshop like all the other kids. We're either special or "special" I guess, depends how you look at it.

Now, I'd just like to clarify that Flash made me its bitch during the editing of these. Especially my uber k-rad shoot em up game. In v1.01 when it's released, I'd like to edit the background and get the code happening right. Oh and in case you can't tell, with the pool table one maybe there was someone around here when I did and they subsequently appeared in the Flash. If it registers on your lame-o-meter, please click
here

Flash 1
Flash 2

The .fla files will eventually appear on the live-wirez server, when I remember the details. Goodbye interweb... for now!
Love Slowy

Open Source software and Hacking

Open Source Software

I believe that open source software is one of the most important industry revolutions since the internet. I love knowing that when I download source to compile and run that hundreds, sometimes thousands of people before me have looked over and analysed the code, improved and hacked away at it. There is a feeling of security that there is no malicious or dodgy (trend analysis, tracking software etc.) code. It would’ve been exposed and removed long ago.

Open source software, from my personal experience is more robust, reliable and efficient than a lot of software out there. Commercial products rarely reach this level of optimisation. I know that if I had the knowledge and the need, I could customise the product to my needs, adding and removing functionality as I see fit.

My chosen career path of Network Administrator ensure I’m going to spend a lot of time selecting, downloading, testing and using various open source software. I know just how important it is to the industry. System administrators don’t like not knowing what is running on their systems, which incidentally is one of my many problems with windows.

One topic that was raised in class today I found quite interesting. A fair few people were bitching about the price of software, specifically the applications that the uni uses and they feel the need to have. Not one person raised any concerns with video game prices. This leads me to believe these same people who are up in arms about application prices are the ones who will happily fork over $90 for Gran Turismo 4, Resident Evil 4 or Halo 2. I got the impression that people don’t mind paying for games but do for applications.

There is no difference in the skill levels between programmers that develop these applications; it’s the mentality of the consumer. Granted we all think software in general is too expensive and perhaps if application prices were reduced to something similar to that of games we’d see a decrease (or perhaps an increase…) in bitching about prices.

Hacking

The term hacker has become misconstrued over the years through the media mainly, which has lead to a negative public perception of exactly what these people do and their intentions behind their actions.

People don’t realise that hackers are the ones they employ who are the first to clock in in the mornings and the last to clock out at night, the ones that find all the bugs in their projects and do the best work. When they find something wrong, or working inefficiently, fix it or completely revamp it rather than pass it along to someone else. No, people don’t realise hackers set the best examples and produce the best work. They are the people who will penetrate your system, then send you an email telling them how they did it and how to fix it. Their thirst for knowledge is unquenchable.

They’ve been confused with crackers, people who penetrate systems with malicious intent on the mind, whether is website defacements or collecting sensitive data or simply causing as much damage as possible. These people have no honourable intentions, have skill levels that are far below those of real hackers (who more than likely created the tools they are using to break into systems around the world) and are just menaces to society, much like vandals.

Then there is your hacktivists, people who hack and crack their way through programs and servers with a political agenda. People who deface web pages with messages of the Iraq war, starving children in Somalia and other similar messages with the intent of exposing as many people as possible to the human rights injustices of the world.

My Mate Steve

My mate steve is pretty rad. He's been my buddy for a while and just lately a few new pictures of him seem to of surfaced.

Image 1

As you can see, Steve is a closet Alpaca. Perhaps, one day, if we in Cyberstudies are lucky enough, he'll come to class in his Alpaca form. He has a special Alpaca friend, and sometimes they like to go to raves together.

Image 2

Sometimes Steve is really lucky and his grandma comes raving with him. Wheeeeeeee look at the pretty colours.

As a tribute to Steve, a shrine was erected (heh heh) in a sacred chinese burial ground. The image can be seen below.

Image 3


These images were created in Adobe Photoshop CS. Steve's head came from digital camera photos I've got. The were opened and resized in photoshop (image>image resize) Once the heads were proportional, using the lasoo tool, I traced around the portion I wanted to cut out from each image.

The heads were then pasted onto googled images I'd found, but not before I'd duplicated the background layer so it wasn't locked! The graveyard image is actually a few cut/paste jobs.

The "rave" effect was achieved by using the Neon Lights filter (Filter>Artistic>Neon Glow) Steve's grandma and the glowstick fool were just googled images as well which we copy/pasted in without too much trimming. Before each cut/paste I flattened the image (Layer>Flatten Image) to ensure I copied all the layers. Once complete, images were saved as jpegs and uploaded to some webspace for your viewing pleasure.

Test Post

This is a test post for my brand spanking new Cyberstudies blog. Hoorj!