The Olympic torch is passing through Canberra at the moment (it’s probably finished its public tour by now). I’m not entirely sure why, given it’s a bit of a detour from the path between Greece and Beijing. I suppose it’s to help build support for the Olympics, but it’s not as if you need much hype for such a major sporting event in sport-mad Australia. Especially since it’s being held in roughly the same time zone as us.

I didn’t bother going to see the torch, as it’s not exactly super important to me. Given this is Canberra, it’d be attended by a mix of Chinese nationals and supporters (we’ve got a big multicultural mix here), combined with the protest groups for Tibet or Falun Gong that seem to have permanently camped outside the Chinese embassy. I doubt there’ll be any violence, but the whole show just doesn’t seem like my kind of thing.

Apart from not doing anything regarding the Olympic torch, which unsurprisingly has not taken a lot of effort, I’ve been spending a bit of time thinking ahead for what I’m going to do with the website after I complete my studies in a couple of months time. I’m most likely to be wrapping up my Ph.D. thesis write-up in June, but I have not yet got anything definite planned for after that.

I’ve still got dreams of starting my own on-line game business; selling indie games over the ‘net to make a living. I’ve got plans for how I could get that up and running, but it’s not without a whole truck load of risk. I’d probably be burning through my savings pretty quickly for the first year at least. So the question I’m debating is whether I go for broke by running with the online business idea full time, head into a more traditional career path, or (my current favoured option) a blend of some type of possibly part-time employment that also allows me to run the online business on the side.

This isn’t something I’m going to decide upon very soon. I’ve still got a couple of months left before I’m done here, and it wouldn’t be amiss taking a couple of months holiday afterwards. I’m moderately astute at saving money up for a rainy day, so it’s not as if I’m going to be begging for scraps this year, at least. But it is something that now the end of my formal education is nigh I’ve got to keep bubbling around in my mind so I make a decently informed decision.

School’s out for a fortnight here at uni. Which as a PhD student who is tutoring means I get two weeks of unfettered PhD write-up time. I’m pretty worn out from the teaching and marking over the last couple of days, although it just might be lack of sleep catching up with me.

I’ve also noticed a few more trackings from Inkscape fans to the tutorial I made for Order of the Stick avatars. I’m guessing people need Inkscape tutorials. Once my PhD write-up is over I’ll write up some more (general purpose this time).

I need some practice with the new version however. And practice in general. I’m not that much of an artist really, and my cartooning really needs some brushing up.

I’ve started playing around with Inkscape 0.46 by just giving it a spin in creating a character using my old techniques:

1. Sketch out a draft with pencil on paper.

2. Resketch it using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape on a draft layer
3. Construct the figure out of basic shapes and curves (this is the long part)
4. Put in any special effects, shading, corrections and what-have-you.

This is a pretty early concept for the character “Eight” that part of one of two ideas for a webcomic that I’d like to launch later this year. I still haven’t made up my mind about the little details like colouration and accessories.

So far the process for creating this character isn’t working - not because of the final output, but because it take so freakin’ long to do. I don’t know if it’s because I’m out of practice in the whole Inkscaping, but it could just be I don’t have an efficient process. To test this, I’ll give making this character another go, but this time using a more traditional inking based approach - both digitially and on paper. I’m rubbish at paper inking and almost as rubbish at digital inking, but it’s something I should at least try to see how it turns out.

My tutoring schedule runs one week on, one week off. This week is on, and so it’s pretty teaching intensive, which means PhD write-ups tend to drop off for a few days as I use my energy towards teaching

Part of the problem work wise is that I’m teaching a fourth year course (Computer Vision). Despite how good you think you know the material it’s always hard to teach a third year or above course as the material is never trivial. You invariably have to relearn things and then think about how to explain them. In my case I have to learn some things for the first time, as most of my computer vision knowledge was self-taught for the purposes of my research and I’ve focused on the areas I need.

My favourite subject to teach/tutor is second year algorithms and data structures. There’s usually an equivalent in every computer science course. It’s one of the first purely computer sciencey subjects a student will learn after getting to grips with a programming language. As a topic it’s also the sort of thing a good programmer will already need to know for their work, so it’s a breeze to refresh on the theory. You can then concentrate on figuring out the best way of teaching it to students, which is the fun part.

I’ve tutored first year introduction to programming classes too, and while the subject matter is easy the teaching is a lot harder. The problem is that if you’ve been programming for a while you most likely cannot remember what it was like when you first learnt a language, and with programming its one of these things where student go through stages where they need a flash of insight to get from “just don’t get it” to “now I do”. But if you’ve been programming for a while or from a young age you just can’t remember what the bits were you don’t get, as you’ve been breaking problems down into programs all your life. It’s like teaching early algebra to kids (something I’ve also done); it’s really hard to understand exactly why the students are having trouble because you’ve been using letters to replace numeric unknowns for as long as you can remember.

I’ve also been out of the teaching schtick for a while, so my voice isn’t up to the task. On the weeks I’ve got on, I tend to be talking nearly non-stop, and as a generally quiet individual my vocal chords aren’t geared to that kind of use. By the weekend I’ll have probably lost my voice again. Good thing most of what I do tends not to require it.

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what I’d like to do after I finish up my PhD study. I still don’t know what I’d like to do immediately, but there’s still a large part of me that wants to do the whole indie developer thing. I don’t know if I could do this full time, and I certainly don’t think I could straight out of uni, but it’s something I don’t think I should dismiss. At the very least it’d be a good hobby, and with a modest effort it could easily be a decent source of income.

I’ve deviated a lot off my original plan that I wrote a few years back for how to get there (according to the original plan, I’d have been selling games two years ago), and now I’m in the final throes of my PhD I don’t have the time for anything major. But I can still work towards the goal in my spare time, albeit slowly.

First on my list is to resurrect the original purpose of this journal - to get some experience in managing a website. I’ve been letting this site stagnate for a bit too long, defeating the original purpose. So it’s time to reinvent the site and make it look a bit like one I’d need if I were launching the commercial version.

To start, I’ve made a new theme to replace the light, airy minimalist one that was here. This one is loosely modelled off the look of my GameDev journal, although I won’t go as far as making the headers all Comic Sans to emulate the comic book look. I’m debating whether I should put an image as the background; sometimes I find them distracting, but a nice pattern can work well if it’s carefully chosen. I might also play around with the colours a bit once I’ve seen the site in action. I also need to see if this font works well for blogs - I’m not sure how Trebuchet MS handles large blocks of text at smaller sizes.

I’ve also retired the poll I’ve had up for ages: building blocks had been winning for quite a while (probably the game developer influence there!). I’ll try cycling them around a bit more often.

Any suggestions for the site look? Any layout bugs I’ve missed?

It’s the end of the week, and my voice is shot from taking tutorials and labs for the last three days. I’ve been living a life of a quiet research student for years, so my vocal chords aren’t up to the extra stress of hours of explaining things to students. I’m looking forward to a somewhat quiet weekend of typing.

I’ve been somewhat neglecting this site as of late (way too busy, sorry), and I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting traffic from some Inkscape sites for the tutorial I wrote for Order of the Stick avatars. I mainly wrote that for the Order of the Stick forums - I noticed they had a lot of people using Inkscape but were in need of a good tutorial, and the style of that art works really well as a tutorial. But I didn’t expect it to get any attention from elsewhere. It’s good to know that it’s of extended benefit to the community at large. I’m hoping to write more tutorials once I get enough time to do so (it takes far longer than you think to write one of those things!). If you’ve stumbled on my blog from one of those sites, welcome! And I hope you enjoy the tutorial!

I’m also hoping to clean this site up a bit some day soon - it needs a new face lift and a new poll. Unfortunately I’ve got a huge amount of stuff to do right now, so I can never guarantee I’ll actually get to do something until after I submit. I’m looking forward to having less deadline pressure and more time to devote to projects like these - I’m sure I’m due a week or four off after I submit.

Geez, I’ve been meaning to put many more posts in this journal this year, but I keep forgetting to get round to it. I guess it’s partly because I haven’t been up to anything that interesting, with the exception of some of the Python work I’ve chronicling over at my GameDev.net journal (under Trapper Zoid, if you aren’t from there originally).

Today I’ve started teaching tutorials and labs again, after a several year break. It’s a way to refresh the ol’ teaching skills - and the extra cash will be handy too. Today went a bit badly by my view - nothing disasterous by any means, and I’d probably view it as okay back when I was younger, but given I’ve got experience at tutoring I should’ve been a bit peppier and more prepared. Unfortunately though the content of the tutorials isn’t very fixed until right up before I teach them and I’ve been up early in the morning most nights the last month so I’m pretty fatigued (up to three last night preparing for this weeks classes, an hour later than usual).

Hopefully the rest of the week’s teaching will go better now I’ve had one to learn from, but I’m too exhausted tonight to do any extra replanning.

Incidentally, if any of you need to know tips on computer vision, as a tutor I should be up to speed in a month or two

Today I turn thirty. I thought that was important enough to warrant a post in my journal.

I’ve been leaving this journal idle for a bit too long. Even though I’m spending most of my time writing up my dissertation, I do spend some time doing other things. Lately I’ve been looking at the use of colour with an eye as to how I can apply it to my artwork.

I’ve never been that brilliant in the use of colour, so I thought it was something to look at as I play around with drawing comics in Inkscape. My feeling is that it would be wise to deliberately limit myself to a palette, so I don’t have to choose from a theoretically infinitely fine colour space. Plus it can help aid the classic palette look that was prevalent in games prior to SVGA.

Choosing a good palette is tricky. I haven’t seen that much on the internet on methods of choosing the best palette for your style of work. To start with, it depends a bit on what colour model you are using: RGB, CMYK or HSL. RGB is the most common used in computer graphics, as it directly maps to the colours used to generate the pixels on your screen. CMYK is used by printers, and is traditionally used by comic artists. Finally, HSL (and its cousin HSV) is nicely based on hue, which is important in ensuring you have a good set of colours that match.

To start with, I looked a bit at the old comic book formats. Those were limited in their palettes for technical cost saving methods; they only had screens for inking for 25%, 50% and 100% for their coloured cyan, magenta and yellow inks. This gives you a very limited palette, which I’ve mirrored with a version in Inkscape as shown here:

However, I’m not limited to using inks. So I made a simple Python script to help me play around with different palette choices (and learn a bit more Python as well). I threw together a simple script that can output a GIMP format palette, which is also the format used by Inkscape. Here’s a copy of the script if you’re interested: it’s a bit scrappy as I threw it together as I was thinking of ideas, but it’s got some useful things in there, such as RGB to HSL conversion (and vice versa).

The current model I’m leaning towards is one based in HSL, centered around the twelve basic hues. These are the hues you get if you go around the colour wheel by thirty degrees: you’ll hit all the primary, secondary and tertiary hues on your way around. I’ve started referring them in shorthand form by single letter symbols:

Most of those hues have their official name, although I had to take a few liberties with the ones that had a clash of initial. “Rose” had to take P for pink, which isn’t that much of stretch. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of a letter I was that happy with for “Chartreuse”, so I thought I might as well call it Lime. Lime is technically either halfway between Chartreuse and Yellow, or if you’re a web specialist it’s actually full green (why I’m just not sure). But if Crayola can call a tangerine crayon “Chartreuse” then I think calling chartreuse lime is a reasonable stretch.

The current palettes I’m looking at have the twelve hues with varying levels of saturation and light:

I’ve also been working on a shorthand code for each of those variations as well. A full hue will just get its letter, but variations in light will get a range of numbers from 1 - 9 either before or after the letter (for darker and lighter respectively). Saturation levels are indicated by lowercase letters at the end, from a to s. Shades of grey are given the letter code “N” (for neutral hue) with numbers for lightness shades, and white and black are labeled “W” and “K” (for key, like in CMYK) It’s a bit subjective as a scheme, but which ones aren’t?

What I’m not sure about is which grades of light and shade I should put into my basic palette. I’m leaning towards having five grades of light and four grades of saturation, as well as the grey shades, as that is approximately 256 colours (a nice round number that works well with palettes). But I’m wondering if that’s a bit too much. I guess I need to use the palette more to find out.

In my efforts to avoid working on my dissertation, I’ve found a new time wasting activity: devising new pangrams. A pangram is a short sentence that contains all letters of the alphabet, like the famous “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or “Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz”. It’s used a lot by typeface designers to test out their new creations, which is where I picked up the reference: I’m planning on making a font out of my handwriting.

If you’re interested in wasting time with pangrams too, there’s a handy on-line flash tool called the Pangrammer Helper which will check used letters for you. It’ll help your sphinx judge your vow as you pack your box full of liquor jugs.

Here’s some of my pangram creations:

Big band; live rhythm: slowfox, quickstep, jazz.
— This one isn’t a complete sentence, but it’s mainly along the same theme and uses a lot of punctuation marks.

Black adze vanquishes jumpy wax frog
— I like the pure silliness of this one.

Amazing quick jump to fly over box's width
— a.k.a “The Mario Pangram”. My favourite so far. I’m currently using this as the test sentence for practicing my handwriting.

My new iMac on the right, collection of USB devices on the left. I’ve got a fair number collected by now, although to be honest none of them are particularly flash. I’ve felt it was better to upgrade with more functionality than with higher spec computer hardware. Now the only thing keeping me from making the game of my dreams is my chronic shortage of time, lack of organisation and general laziness.