Points On The Line

I have'nt updated this site in a really long time, so I'm glad to be getting back to doing so. I mean there really is no point me having it and not using it for the things I had planned. I've just been really busy of late. I'm trying to redevelop the Gram Vikas website and it's not been as easy as I thought it would be. I'll write more about that later.

Recently I started playing around with a neat new tool called Inkscape. Inkscape is what is called a vector image editor.

A little about digital images

Most images that you see on the internet are what are called bitmap or raster images. Which means that the image is made out of a grid of tiny dots. This is a good thing when you are trying to save an image that has subtle tones and irregular variations, the grid can store this data. It assigns a colour to each slot, and the image is good to be displayed. The problem with this approach is that it then becomes impossible for you to increase the size of the image without losing some quality. So if your grid is 200 slots (or pixels as they are called for digital images) wide and 200 pixels tall, then to increase the size of the image you have to create a few more pixels that originally existed. Just duplicating the same colour over a four pixel block won't work well because the sharpness of the image will go. Better methods that the one just described have been developed to scaled up the size, but none of them are really perfect. So how does one go about creating an image that can be displayed at any size? Well the solution is to use what is called a Vector image.

About Vector Images

A vector in Mathematics is can be thought of as a ray segment. It is a line with a length and a direction. In the physics vectors are used extensively. I brought up the subject of math, because math is essentially what composes a vector image. Here a grid to describe things is not used, instead images are described using vectors and another mathematical construct called Beizer Curves. A Beizer curve is just a mathematical way of describing a curve. The advantage of describing things with mathematics is that things can be scaled easily. If you want to increase the size of an image, just double the size of every measurement in the image. So double the radius of a circle, the length of a line, etc, etc. No quality is lost. The problem with vector images is that it is impossible (as of now) to store photographs taken by a camera or so similar device directly into this format. It is also hard to produce very photo-realistic images with this format, and these pictures almost always have to be created manually which takes effor.

Why I'm playing around with this program

Well, I'm trying to develop a logo for this site, and I thought that I might as well have a logo that is scalable to any resolution I choose. I think I'm going to start by recreating the Gram Vikas logo as a Vector image. When I am done I'll post the result here (as a bitmap because browsers arent very good at displaying vector images directly).

The auditory medium

I've always wanted to write speechs. Well not speechs so much, as to just talk about something. I dont know about other people, but I think that there is a singificant difference between listening to something and reading about it. Both are very effective methods of communication. So sometime in the future I'll be putting up audio recordings of me talking about things. I do have one speech planned, something that I've just occasionally fantasized about giving. The speech is simple, me in a powerful position in the government giving after it has just been elected, or something to that effect. I plan on recording this through a really neat program called Audacity which is a pretty powerful program. It's not as snazzy as some of the commercial products that I know of, but it fits my needs and won't burn a hole in anyone's pocket.

Well, before I can put up audio files on my website I need to update some things on the back-end so that the audio files can stream seamlessly. Kepp an eye out for these.

By the way, if you're interested in reading more about the differences between vector and bitmap images read this article on About.com