Weeks 10 and 11

These past two weeks we have been using Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop, Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, and Google's Picasa program to create digital images and simple video. Paint was old hat, of course, as I have played with that program at least since junior high school. Adobe Photoshop is a program I'm not as familiar with, and the layers function and rendering function drive me nuts. Since I have taken CST 101 before, I have used most of these programs before, so I at least have a little experience with them. However, it's always good to have a refresher. I had never used Picasa before, so it was fun to learn a new program. Though, I found that I don't really like Picasa as much as Windows Movie Maker and iMovie.

Pretty much all of the images I've been using for this class have come from creativecommons.org, which helps me locate material that I can change or use for other things as long as we cite the source. I think the section in the book on the concept of fair use is interesting. According to fair use, copyrighted material can be used for educational purposes (3rd ed. p. 334) without having to obtain permission from the original artist/writer. That basically means we could have used any images we wanted, since everything we've done in the class has been for educational purposes.

I posted a video to YouTube for the first time. I kind of feel that I'm probably not much more or less secure that I as before, seeing as I have a Facebook and MySpace account, where I often share personal photos and other personal information. The book points out that we all can enjoy privacy by deciding not to reveal anything to anyone, and we choose to reveal info in exchange for real benefits (p.347).

Week 9 - Part 2

Today we did the butterfly debugging activity. I'm supposed to share what process I used for debugging the web page, but honestly, that wasn't the hardest part. Debugging the page was easy. I didn't have to add in any new code, I only had to fix some very, very minor errors in the existing code. There was a space needed in one spot, and quotations needed in another spot, and it actually took quite awhile to realize that the file names for the pictures were case sensitive for getting them to appear on the page. After doing that, the hard part was actually figuring out what the URL was for my page. I didn't realize until the end that I had one extra folder that I left out, and I didn't need to include the ".html" at the end. I also ended up re-naming my file to the original name, which was a little confusing in my opinion, but that's what worked. So in short, the debugging was easy, and the hard part was just uploading my stuff to the web server and getting a good URL.