Clete’s Blog

For the past three hours, I have gone through a Photoshop learning experience. My fiance and I decided to make a “collage” of all of our friends, with a twist. We decided to make USA Game Lounge characters for all of them. Without further ado, here is the picture that we conjured up (Click to enlarge):

First, I had to use the roundabout way of getting a large image of the characters as described in my previous entry. Then, I made some minor/major adjustments within Photoshop, like removing the WeeMee logo. This was a pain in and of itself, because it would often mess up a person’s feet (it was overlapping). After that, I changed things like hair color and the like. After the entire thing was nearly complete, we realized that one of the characters was missing shoes, so I had to cut out a shoe from someone else and paste them in.

Then, we realized that the middle was a little bit bland, with nothing in the middle. So, we searched deviantART for a sun vector. We stumbled upon a very simplistic sun figure, but sadly, there was no print available and the picture had some flaws. It was too small to use to begin with. Additionally, we wanted to have 8 spikes instead of 12, since we had 8 friends in the pictures. So, I fired up Illustrator and did my best to imitate the picture (since I was going for a simplistic style). The sun turned out very nicely.

Next, I plan on cutting out all of the characters and making their backgrounds transparent. The problem is, this will take a long time to get perfect. So, I am just going to do that later. After that, I plan on drawing a sky in Illustrator with the help of a cloud tutorial (or just using a blue gradient).

So, here is the order of people, starting at 12 o’clock and working clockwise:

Nick, Steve, Jean-Anne, Clete (me!), Ashley (my fiance), Liz, Alex, and Melanie.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about, go to the USA Game Lounge. You can create your own avatar on the website (they are scalable vector graphics, so they look sharp). Sadly, they do not offer very good solutions for downloading your character (check below for a picture). The largest size that they offer is around 200 pixels tall (and it has a lot of white space in it). Well, I wanted mine larger. So, being the experimenter I am, I decided that I would try to enlarge the Flash SWF and take a screenshot and crop my character out. Turns out that it’s actually easier than that.

In order to obtain a picture of your character with a completely white background, follow these instructions:

1) Login to your account.

2) Click Edit Profile

3) Right-Click anywhere on the page and click on “View Page Source”

4) Press Ctrl+F (find) and type in “75.jpg”

5) Click Next (you want the second instance of 75.jpg)

Select the entire link from the text in the line of 75.jpg. It should look like this:

…/weemee/height/75.jpg

5) Now, change the link up a little bit. Note that 75 is the height of the image that you want. I found that, if you raise the number above 1075, it maxes out and will spit out blank pictures. So, try 750 or 1075:

…/weemee/height/1075.jpg

6) Go to the link! You now have a larger picture of your WeeMee. Photoshop away. The only downside to this is that you will not receive a picture with your character’s facial expression. The character is always smiling.

Yes, I know some people could not care less about this post, but I don’t think anyone else has tried this trick before, so I wanted it to get posted out there. The characters are cool looking, though.

I know that this is a few days old, but for those of you who don’t know, Blu-Ray has won out over HD DVD. I have been an avid supporter of Blu-Ray from the beginning. Let me start by reasoning my support of Blu-Ray:

It is the better technology. Just like Betamax. Blu-Ray has more capacity per layer, which allows for better quality. Blu-Ray stores 25GB per layer, whereas the HD DVD can only hold 15GB per layer (there were talks of increasing the standard, but it did not happen).

Now for my sillier reason: Microsoft backed HD DVD. In my opinion, anything that Microsoft backs should be abolished. Additionally, I am a big fan of the Playstation 3, which uses Blu-Ray discs. If HD DVD had won, it would become much more expensive for Sony to manufacture and support Blu-Ray, since they would be the only ones manufacturing the obsolete format.

Back on topic, the death of HD DVD came by slowly. Part of Blu-Ray’s success was certainly from the millions of Playstation 3’s that were being sold and used as Blu-Ray players. I have to credit Sony for making the Playstation 3 a wonderful Blu-Ray player. Even today, it is one of the best Blu-Ray players out there that is affordable (I know; I had a Playstation 3). In December of 2006, the tide changed on HD DVD (click for full view):

The quality of movies that were released for both formats may have swayed the market some, but I believe that the determining factor was the Playstation 3. In early 2008, many rumors spread that, at CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Warner would announce that it was dropping HD DVD in favor of Blu-Ray. This is when the ball really started rolling. A few days later, the rumors were confirmed to be true when Warner formally announced that it would drop HD DVD in favor of Blu-Ray. I believe that, by this time, people were ready for the war to be over. Rumors circulated that HD DVD’s fall was imminent and that Paramount would announce it’s love for Blu-Ray. Both of these predictions came true, but about a month later. On February 19th, 2008, Toshiba announced that it would stop production of its HD DVD players by March (right around the corner) and that it would pull all of its HD DVD players off the market. This announcement had so much power because Toshiba was the largest backer of HD DVD. Shortly thereafter, Paramount announced that it would be switching to Blu-Ray production. These announcements signaled the death of HD DVD. “The future is Blu.”

What could have been done that would have given HD DVD more success? Microsoft should have waited to release the Xbox 360 with a built-in HD DVD drive. The games should have been in the HD DVD format. The HD DVD camp tried everything that they could in order to ensure that HD DVD would win the format war. They slashed prices far below the prices of Blu-Ray players. Still, Blu-Ray was able to win.

If you wish to see a good history of the format war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray, check out Engadget’s perspective.

In the future, expect to see HVD emerging. HVD stands for Holographic Versatile Disc. It is still in the research process, but claims are that a single HVD can hold up to 3.9 terabytes of data. That’s 4.28809535 X 10^12 bytes, or 160 single-layer Blu-Ray discs.

Mansfield University requires that all Windows users, who live on campus, install SafeConnect. SafeConnect is an application that runs silently in the background and ensures that your computer has antivirus software and antispyware software installed. It also forces Internet Explorer to pop up with an alert whenever the campus feels the need to do so. Additionally, it logs all of the user’s internet activity (linked to his/her login) and it can “quarantine” (deny all internet access) anyone who is not in “compliance.” (e.g. anyone who does not have antivirus software installed) Sounds like a great tool to keep a large network safe, right?

Wrong. SafeConnect is horribly inefficient at doing its job. It constantly fails to register with it’s mother-ship, denying the user access to the internet for long amounts of time. Sometimes, a reinstallation of the SafeConnect client and a reboot are necessary in order to get the connection running. SafeConnect also stops BitTorrent from working. This is a major issue for me, as I download Linux ISOs once every other week or so (testing purposes). I realize that 95% of BitTorrent users are using it for illegal purposes, but what about me? Besides, SafeConnect doesn’t stop limewire, edonkey, or many other Peer2Peer networking programs! SafeConnect is, at best, a meager tool for network administrators. Anyone running SafeConnect on their network clearly needs to brush up on their reading of the Communist Manifesto.

I had previously found a way to set up McAffee Antivirus so that it only scans .txt files. Then, I set it up to exclude .txt files. Essentially, all McAffee was doing was fulfilling SafeConnect’s requirement for antivirus software and wasting precious RAM. About 50-75 megabytes of RAM, to be exact.

Since IT is arrogant, ignorant, and in general, a bunch of morons, I decided to take matters into my own hands. My first idea was to get a friend in there to change my user policy so that I didn’t have to have the SafeConnect client installed. However, this would probably end up badly for me. First, my friend (who is not hired yet, but may be soon) would be fired. Secondly, I would be permanently banned from the campus network. So, after a bit of researching, I found a simple solution. This solution is so simple that I had thought of it previously, but pushed it aside.

All that I had to do in order to circumvent the SafeConnect client installation requirement was to change my “User Agent” variable for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Simple, right? It is amazing that one simple little trick can circumvent such a picky and pestering system. A couple of registry entries and one Firefox variable change later, I uninstalled the SafeConnect client and McAffee’s antivirus solution. To my amazement, it works perfectly! I simply changed my user agent variable to report that I was running Firefox on Linux rather than (Firefox/Internet Explorer) on Windows. Viola! Case closed.

I am still unable to use BitTorrent and I am still being logged by IT, but as far as I know, they don’t check logs unless something is amiss. Or so I hope. However, if I owned a house at the moment and paid for any form of connection, I would still be logged by my ISP. Still, on the other hand, campus IT is so much more terrible and evil than any ISP could ever be. If all of IT decided to pack their bags tomorrow, I would be right there with them to wish them good riddance.

Amendment: If you wish to view your user agent string, please click here.

For detailed instructions on how to change your user agent string, please check the comments.