Vyoma

Not bad better what I could do, I can't not free hand like that, just that text is somewhat of a let down. I would have gone with a simple black brush and wrote my name within the picture itself.

 

Thank you saint-michael. Yes, the text is somewhat a let down. I thought of all sorts of things - but now that you mention about a simple black brush - I guess that was a good thing. It just never crossed my mind at that particular time.

 

 

Good work Vyoma

 

For the drawing, did you use a mouse or graphics tablet?

and why did you use gimp? part of the competition rules to use open source software?

Why did you not use paint.net, its also open source ?

(and no its not from M$)

Or do you just hate M$ with its .net framework?

 

Anyway good work, you can really catch the atmosphere.

But I don't really like the hair, they look "bulky" like in the '70s

I know it's very hard to do correct hair (be it in a 2d or 3d program) so I appreciate your work

Was it your idea to let look it like a water painting?

 

Thank you tommydanger.

Wow! Lot many questions. I will try to answer them all.

I used mouse for drawing it all - I do not own a tablet.

Why did I use GIMP? Well, it was not at all part of the competition rules. Heck! I had all sorts of people using all sorts of advanced software like PhotoShop pitted against me. I just do not own Photoshop and I had to go for a Open Source Software.

Why did I not use Paint.net? Well, I am not sure - I did try it before - but I preferred the User Interface of GIMP better - just a matter of personal preference.

Yes, I do hate M$. Period. I prefer not to indulge in .NET framework too.

 

You pointed that right about the hair - yes, it does look a bit bulky. Some of my friend too pointed it out. I wanted to get a flowy look, but it just ended up sor of bulky - - I need to work a lot on hair and fabric dynamics.

 

Making the work look like water painting - that is actually a by product of the process I used to develop it from 'Concept Sketch' to this point. It would have ended up with a bit more realiastic - if not photo-realastic look if I had a lot more time and a lot more vizualization skills. I need to work on that too.

 

Basically, the process I used to create this work, was to go from broad brush strokes in concept sketch layer, to more details with smaller brushes in seperate layers. As a matter of fact, I can actually get back the work from my archives, seperate all the layers, remove and rework on that hair part now. I might do it some time in future - but I am working on other personal projects now.

 

Thanks again, all you guys for your reviews.

Out of the things that our good saint-michael has indicated, I have personally used Blender and Wings. They are Open Source and I could use them - the rest of the others (I am not sure of all) are commercial software and cost a load.Between Blender and Wings - the choice comes down to extent of modelling and features required. Wings is good for object modelling purposes and have a very sleek user interface (UI). Blender on the other hand has a bit of complex UI that might take some time to learn and get around with - but after that it is a great tool. It contains most of the basic features and a little more that any other commercial softwares may have. And Blender is also great for a technique called 'Subdivision modelling'. I do not think though that Blender supports 'Patch modelling'.

A really good attempt there, talktime. May be you should have posted it in a seperate thread, but anyway - here is what I think.

 

May be you should work on the luminance of the car, the person in the car (is that Homer Simpson?) and the bridge also. The issue is, the sun being behind the subject and co-subjects, it might appear more as a silhoutte - of course you can add some detailed variance as I did for my picture - the mermaid has some details due to ambient light - but in your case - the luminance is more stark. That way, you would have to make the bridge, the car and the person in it much more darker with faint detailing. Especially the car has a bold highlight facing the view point - which is very odd, and makes the picture look un-natural.

 

I do not have much experience with real photograph - drawn object - composites but this is my opinion.

Wow, great perspective on the whole area of SEO. I must admit I totally agree with what you have said and couldnt have put it any clearer. Its just a matter of time spent on how user friendly, etc your site is. Nice one Vyoma great post.

Thank you tezza. As far as the perspective goes, some part of it I learnt it being here at Xisto forum. That is the plus point of Xisto - you get hosting as well as you get knowledge. So, most of that post you can say is what we guys here have to say - well almost. Hang around here, and you will enjoy.

This is a competition entry I did for a forum few days back. It was done from scratch and was created using the Open Source graphics software GIMP.

Mermaid On The Sea Rocks

Copyright © 2006 Mahesh ‘Vyoma’ Bhat

 

Yes, I know - the wordings are a bit sloppy. I was reaching the deadline and I had to submit it. So, I just did something and did a composite and submitted it.

 

Comments and critiques are welcome.

 

I have already put up a post on that particular forum that details the process and steps I went through to create this piece of work. If anyone is interested, (and if it is ok with the moderators), I will post it here too. Please let me know.

Well, no. I have not used such softwares. I am not even sure those things would actually help much and make great differnces if our website itself was not Search Engine friendly. I think, that is all it takes to drive traffic to our website.Basically, we need to make the web pages in our websites as semantically correct as possible. That means, say bye-bye to the old table based layout designs, and switch to CSS designs. Why? Because, even if we use SEO utilities to submit to n-number of Search Engines, it will be of not much use if the Search Engines do not know what our web pages are about. When we go for a table based design - all our content is seen as a tablular data and naturally no words get weighed and no keywords are tagged to our page by the search engine - broadly speaking. On the other hand, in case of CSS based designs, search engines know what the heading/subject of the content is; it knows which of the words are important - because they would be marked by <strong> and <em> - emphasis.That should also be followed by placing proper words in <h-> tags; and using <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>.The SEO softwares may help in generating links from high PR site, but it is bound to be found out and marked as Black Hat sEO, there by placing penalty on our webpages.Even the search engine submitters - I am not sure how that would help. Think about it - how many majorly used search engines exist? Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and a few more - the count could be made using our hands. And the rest of the lot are not that traffic driving. We need to ask ourself a question, as to wheather we want to spend money in submitting our website to those search engines that themselves get low traffic. The highly used ones - we can ourselves go and submit it - because there are so few of them.Yes, SEO does help, but in my opinion most of these softwares are there just to make money for its creators. If we build our websites logically, and put a bit of human effort (ourselves or we pay someone to do it), that should be sufficient to drive traffic to our site if our website truly offers unique content or good service.For example - look at Xisto. The forums are so full with people because Xisto give great service. Word of mouth itself has made Xisto to have such a huge member base. Also, Xisto has rich and unique content in its forum - that is why (I am assuming here), it would be getting large amount of traffic. It does have some SEO tweaks on the forums - for example - if you look at the URL of each thread, you will see that it is rich with keywords from the subject of the thread. It is such things that actually make a difference.Yes, one cannot though deny on the fact that good back links from highly trafficed sites do serve in increasing our website traffic. That can be only achieved by employing a link exchange or buying links from them. But when we attempt this we need to remember that we should try to get relevant traffic as opposed to just about any traffic. I mean, a traffic full of people who are interested in medical sciences will most probably not have any interest in a site dealing with contemporary paintings. But a traffic containing mostly digital artists have higher likely hood of being interested in contemporary paintings too.Wow. That was quite a mouthful. I would better stop now. Hope this stream of words is useful to some.

Well, that is not what I thought was Homeopathy. As far as I know - but be aware that I am not a expert in the field - Homeopathy deals with treatment of symptoms. Say some one has a particular ailment, a dose of substance is given that would make the patients body to generate antidote for it. Hence, if you know about Homeopathy, you would not that the doseage given is very minuscule. The Homeopathy does just serve the purpose as to trigger the actual generation of the medecine or anti-dote in the body of the patient. This is the basic philosophy or modus operandi of Homeopathy.Now, it is my strong opinion that Homeopathy, if sought after must be used against slow acting or chronic diseases and not the fatal and quick ones, due to the way Homeopathy works. This is strictly my opnion, and I think it is a topic of debate among the circle.

tezza, could you please elaborate on some of the examples of SEO Utilities and softwares? Because I do not know of any of those. As far as I knew, SEO was more a practice and process than a particular piece of software.

 

And with respect to the effect of SEO? Well, I think that I recently have seen the effect of proper placement. (I will do another post on that - because I have been thinking of discussing that). So, SEO does work, and it does get relevant traffic to your site or particular page - but I do not know how a particular piece of software can help you acheive it stand alone. I might be wrong, of course, because I do not know of any SEO softwares.

Up until now, I have been using a 'Transitional' DTD for all my webpages. I heard it somewhere that W3C is suggesting everyone to use 'Strict' DTD. That way, the standardization of browsers would see the light of day.But I find it a bit hard to actually stick to Strict DTD in some senarious where all the content is not under my control in dynaic senarios.

Maybe for some reason, the ImageShack servers were not available to you. I just cannot affort to put up those images at my site - I use ImageShack, in articles when I need to show pictures.

Overlords! The great admins! I call for thee!

Smite the cron job failure and set us free!

 

No - seriously guys. I really need the cron to be running properly. I have had a lot of activity at my site lately and I do need heavy clean up jobs to be running. The cron failure message (that I have quoted above) is almost spamming my mail box lately.

 

Is there anywhere else that I need to raise the ticket or something like that?

vujsa, recently I too did see some spam/junk posts here around the forums and at times I did use the report button.

 

But I did not know the dangers of replying to such topics. Thanks for bringing it to our notice, and in the future I will be sure that I use only the 'Report' button and not the 'Reply' button to indicate junk, spam or plagiarized material here at the Xisto forums.

And additionally you should also try to create a sitemap for your site and then submit it to Google Sitemaps - https://www.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2F - It does a real good job of picking up the information of your site.

It may take some time to initially get listed by Google through Sitemaps, but once you do that, you will be amazed by the speed with which it keeps tab of your site. Whenever I add something to my site, I have a system setup that automatically submits the new sitemap to Google. When I check the logs, I see that Google Bot visits my site within a day and sometimes even after 2 or 3 mintues, and has all its cache updated with the latest content on my website.

The system I am talking about is available in Drupal CMS but I belive similar analogus components should be available for right about any other content management systems. On the other hand if you are building your site by hand, then I think, you will need to put a little bit of more effort to get the sitemap up and then submitting it to Google.

The sitemap is not just good enought to be submitted for Google - I have seen that it does a good job at other aggregators - like FeedBoy aswell, so that you need not rework on the sitemaps again and again for different sites. Ofcourse, I do submit seperate sitemaps to aggregators because my site is a mix and mash of quite a few different topics.

Yeah. What one thinks as a good traffic, I think it is very relative. It is relative to the person and the actual amount of bandwidth load the server can take. I always stay well below the 1 GB mark here at Xisto where it gives us 5 GB, and so I think I have got a well enough buffer.A update though... I have had really good traffic though and because of that my Google Adsense revenue has gone up a little bit. Not that I was making a great amount earlier, but it seems to have already gone above the usual monthly amount I used to make for past few months.And knight17, I think you are right about the content. I had had another article of mine 'dugg' there earlier and it had not attracted much traffic. But this random name generator that I coded and put up at my site, really seems to be in demand and I am getting hits from both Digg and Google name generator specific search keywords.

Hmmm. Then downloading from trusted sources like Ubuntu and SuSe should hopefully not be a problem. I have finished downloading the CD images and it does not seem to be infected by any virus. I have even burnt the Ubuntu ISO image onto disc. Is it safe to try and boot that disc?

Thanks for that information Kyro. It was just that I was worried the sudden influx of traffic would result in the flagging of my site by the Google Adsense algorithm. I believe it is not just the IP address and such things that they keep track of with their alogrithm to preven fraud - they must be running some analysis on the traffic gradients and such higher derivative values that clearly put some suspicious activity in the open.But if it has not been flagged and warned earlier, then I think it is safe. And yes Kyro, , more traffic means more visitors - that means more eyeballs - and hopefully that would mean more clicks. Hope I can make a few dollars out of this Digg Effect. (Thanks for introducing that term too).

Nice start to what I expect will be a worthwhile series of articles.

I look forward to more.

Where is the image of the Old McDonald's music sheet? At home on your piano, because I couldn't see it on your page.

 

I have hosted the images as ImageShack. There are three images in the article and all should be visible. The old mac donald piece is the last one:

This would state that, every bar has 4 beats in it. Now, before we look at the different notes, let us see how the 'Old MacDonald' tune would look, if we write it up in this:

That is about it. It packs all the information about notes and timings, and it is a standardized form. Now, you can give this piece to any musician - to almost any instrument player - and he or she would be able to play the tune of 'Old MacDonald'.

Can any else not see those images from ImageShack?

 

Mark, wowee! And lots of cookies to you. The changes you suggested really make the write up sound more humane - cause whenever I write it seems to come out a bit sterile.

 

About the images, I just created them in MSPaint, and uploaded to ImageShack and then am using it in the article. Please let me know if anyone cannot see it. There shoudl be three of them in the "Sheet Music" section of the article.

Yeah Mark420, it still seems to be a problem. I checked up my Drupal logs and it has not run for several days. Here is the mail I get from the gamma server:

From: Cron Daemon <root@gamma.xisto.com> Mailed-By: gamma.xisto.comTo: k.mahesh.bhat@gmail.com
Date: Oct 26, 2006 5:30 AM
Subject: Cron <vyoma@gamma> wget -O - -q http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Add sender to Contacts list | Delete this message | Report phishing | Show original | Message text garbled?
/bin/sh: /usr/bin/wget: Permission denied

I too would be relying much on the cron jobs soon when my member base expands. I would be sending out NewsLetters, but it will be sent in batches to reduce the load on server - but if the cron jobs are not running properly, I am not sure how I would be able to do that.

Well, that is a very useful information ther vujsa. For this particular case though, I do not think I will need that because I can always un-'digg' it. But if it was 'dugg' by someone else then I can use this trick that you showed.Thank you.

OK. I just posted the first artilce on a planned series of articles that I thought I would put at my site that details on the basics of western classical music and sheet music.

URL: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Here is my request: If any of the members here are have knowledge of music, could just go through the article and bring to my notice if I have made any factual mistakes. And those members who do not have the knowledge of classical music, could you please go through it and let me know if it makes sense to you and if the article was clear enough for understanding purposes? I am not that sure on my writing skills, and I would revise it if you feel it requires some corrections.

I have recently mentioned about the random name generator I created else where. And then, I submit this page to Digg.com because I just wanted to see how is the crowd there with respect to this. Well, I get 'dugg' about 2 times and there are several visitors in the past 2 hours.Then I remembered reading somewhere that having a lot of Digg.com traffic into your site could cause a problem with the Adsense Account. I would like to know if any of you who has been using Adsense account has been given any warning from Google on this? Or do you know of anyone who has got such warning or has been banned?

Ah! Forum setup and management - the non technical side. I like this article. I have had a forum before and it failed after limping on for about one and a half years. Why? Well, I did a big mistake that you stated - I hosted it at InvisionFree. Man! It was so difficult to get people there because of the obscure URL. And moreover, I did not make it unique at all. I left it with the default IPB forum skin. Anyway, I have now restarted the forum, but under the domain name of my already running Website. It has not yet got many members, but again, I have not started to work on publicizing it yet. (I have it hosted here at Xisto). Also, I used SMF as the forum engine, and created a theme/skin for it to make it unique. But yes, the topic is such that I will be contesting against some of the big players - that I cannot help because I am very passionate about the topic.

I would actually help you with this effort of yours - but for the Photoshop constraint. It is a very expensive software. Think about it - you are aiming basically at hobbyists, not professionals. It would seem rather unlikely that a hobbyist would be owning Photoshop. The set of amatures having Photoshop would be very small. I would suggest, that you start a website that caters to amatures having any software. To get a image right, that too when done from scratch, the first few steps - the foundation, needs to be propers. And these first few steps normally require just basic features that are available in most of the graphical softwares. I personally use GIMP, but when some one queries me on a particular area, I try to explain to them the general concept and how it can be achieved, suggesting on use of few tools. This, ofcourse is my opinion.

Hurray! I got it.Well, that really is a worthy feat you achieved there. I have still not actually got myself to really understand and vizualize the in-between dimensions that fractals deal with. And with respect to ASM, it was a long time back I was twiddling around with it, when I also did some 8086 coding on trainer boards, and hand built embedded systems on 8051. :Nostalgic:You should though read The Black Book by Michael Abrash - it has got great techniques for optimizations in ASM - both process time wise, as well as foot print wise.

I am not very sure about it. I am very lazy this saturday morning, and I did not want to messup my head with ASM codes. But, I did look through the labels and variables names you had given through out the code.And then I noticed there are calls to the 33h interrupt handler - from the recesses of my mind, I remember that to be mouse handler. Your labeling too states so. Moreover you have stated that it uses graphics resource. I presume it is a Paint kind of program at the very basic level - na... I do not think 500 odd byte COM can hold that.Or Fractal navigation?