Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Friday August 17, 2007

Another problem with raster graphics

Now, don't misinterpret the title-- I have no issue with raster graphics themselves when used correctly. The issue I have is many people unknowingly use them incorrectly and leave it up to the poor interpolation in browsers/mail clients to try to do the right thing. They're trying to do a bunch of things at once, so you end up with corporate logos that look all jagged.

There was a time back in 2001 or so when I was looking forward to SVG and others delivering the vector goodness that we should have had back in the mid 90s (NeWS anyone?). Sadly, it doesn't seem to have come to pass-- with the exception of plugins like Java with JavaFX Script and Flash.

Maybe it's a fault of mine, but this makes me think of whomever is using rasters in this way as an amateur. It immediately lowers their credibility in my eyes. I probably shouldn't think this way, but I guess because I spent some time massaging pixels and Bézier curves, that sort of thing bothers me....

Kind of like shoddy software on cell phones bothers me.... but that's a rant for another day....

Thursday August 02, 2007

A Complete Open Source Stack: Hardware to Web 2.0

I'm a bit delayed in posting the slides, but not so long ago I gave a talk at both the UUASC and the local IEEE chapter CompSoc meeting.

The talk had originally been assembled for SCALE5x. Despite the "L" in the name, SCALE is an Open Source conference, so demonstrating Sun's involvement in Open Source by showing various technological bits (OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris zones/DTrace, PostgreSQL, OpenJDK, NetBeans and Glassfish, all working together).

Both were well received. I think a lot of it was new to the IEEE folks, but many of the UUASC people had seen some of the bits and pieces in full presentations over the years.

Presentation is here.