My essay about Web Technology

Our second study course by Anton Eliens is Web Technology. In Web Technology - as you might guess – we should inform us more about how the web works and learn to make for example our own homepages using html. We were still working on our video project during this course but we finally finished it a day before presentation. The presentation went quite good although I was pretty sure we won’t make it in time because in our group were some members who didn’t really make their work in time so that those who had to work with the material of the others had less time than planned. Because of me being the one who made the XIMPEL stuff which is the last step in the project, I had to hurry up. But I am glad we really made it in time in the end. To come back to the course, we had some new assignments. One of these was to make a “worst page”. Sounds stupid but I think it was one of the best assignments so far, because on the one side, you need to deal with the technology needed to program such a site and on the other side it can be very funny to make an annoying webpage.

As I already knew how to deal with HTML and PHP I knew the structure of these languages as well. That made it quite easy for me to learn how to include JavaScript and CSS into these documents. For my worst page I looked for a way to reload the page continuously after a specified amount of time. This is quite easy solved by using an AJAX function (which is in a way only JavaScript). So I reloaded the page 3 times a second or something like that. Then I wanted to implement a function that changes the position of the window as well as the size every time the page is reloaded. Using some random functions and searching for the commands to change the position and size of the window using JavaScript I soon had what I wanted. After that I searched for some annoying music which I found in a Japanese song. I added some sound tracks to the song using Adobe Premiere and then implemented the music as background music for the webpage. Then I searched for some annoying gif’s I could use for my background. As I found them I implemented one of them as default background and made another random variable which gave the webpage another background each time the page reloads. Finally I implemented an annoying text with random color black or white and put a mouse over event on the text which would again call my functions to change position and size of the screen and additionally call an alert function to open randomly between 1 and 20 times. This is the link to my worst page: http://ewi1544.ewi.utwente.nl/c.berg/worstpage/newhtml.html

But you will need to open it with the Mozilla Firefox Browser and please make sure your speakers aren’t too loud and you have no tabs opened you won’t find back. Although if you know how to, you may close the window easy. Just make sure your cursor stays on the most top of the screen to not activate the mouse over function, then simply close the window by pressing CTRL (German: STRG) and W.

To conclude the Web Technology course I would like to give a brief review. At first I think it wasn’t very logical to give us due dates for reviewing the group work that are before the final event. The same happened in the first course where we had to review our fellow students before really getting them to know. Although we could have changed that afterwards, but then why make a due date before?

Furthermore I heard from some students that we did not really learn anything in these courses and that we had to learn everything on our own. I personally had not really a problem with that but that might be because I did most of the stuff here in my last school. So for some students who for example did not write any line of code before or did not even know what HTML is, well they had a big problem learning all these things within a very short time. But then again I think you learn more if you did it yourself than just by hearing from any professor how to do this and that. By trying yourself you understand better what you do and you can remember it better. This tells me that there should be made a compromise between these two extremes. Although I really must admit that our teacher provided a very good support either by e-mail or personally. All in all, this course was a big deal better than the last and I really liked it although it made me work a lot.

My essay about ‘We Create Identity’

In the beginning of the course I was really confused about what this all could be about. Especially Anton Eliens’ homepage improved this feeling of being confused. I was wondering what he is expecting from us and tried to figure it out of his lectures. After a while I realized two things. The first thing is that he wants us to be able to present ourselves and how to sell ourselves in a good way (hopefully an understandable translation of the German phrase “sich gut verkaufen koennen”). The other thing is that he wants us to experience the web, which worked really well at least in my opinion.

To underline that I am going to explain you what I already learned. The first thing was the blogger. I have never read a blog before (shame on me) and never searched for something like that. But in case of your assignment I created a blog on blogger which was really easy to do. Then I searched for things I can add to the blog (beneath these simple things like links or pictures….). I found out that it is very easy to add many gadgets to your blog. I used a list of interesting links, a video bar gadget as well as the blog archive and the fish gadget (the one window where fishes follow your mouse arrow and eat the food you can put by clicking).

Most other things I learned are because of the interactive video project (I will come later to this). At first I experienced the Google documents and Google presentations, which I never even heard of before. It was kind of fascinating for me that you can edit your work with multiple persons at the same time because I had the problem of not being able to even open a Microsoft Word document while another person is editing it.

Another important thing I got to know is the Google groups. There it is really easy to create an own page with several features. We did so for our group RiG (come to this later too). But because of the fact that this is repeating with the blog thing I am going to switch to the XIMPEL part. For that I need to explain our interactive video assignment first.

Well we had to form groups which members have the same interests in case of what the video should be about. My group is called RiG which stands for “Reality interacts Gaming”. Our themes are fitness and education, so that our interactive video will be about that. Our concept for the video is that we introduce a fat, lazy student who got just broken up with his girlfriend because of him playing too much computer games. Then there is an opportunity for the student to change his life, he sees an advertisement about a new game which makes the player do more sports and learn more for school or university. As player of this interactive video you can decide whether to play the game or not (of course this is only one of many choices). If you do everything right you can make your avatar an attractive, intelligent and sporty person. To realize the interactive part in the video we needed a program called XIMPEL.

I already have some programming experience so I am the one of our group who does the XIMPEL part. After realizing that XIMPEL is not a user friendly click and drag program as you often have nowadays I started to figure out which data of the XIMPEL-package stands for what. Then I started to read the code and tried out my own examples. In the end I really can say that the name (S/X)IMPEL fits. Furthermore I learned how to edit videos using the Adobe software. After editing I had to consider the problem of how to convert all the videos we made into the same format, size and so on. Luckily I already had a program for that before. The program is called SUPER and I think it really is. It is not only for free it can even handle more formats than I know. Therefore I made the first interactive video part we already showed in our course.

Now I would like to change to another theme than just the ‘We Create Identity’ course.

I would like to tell something about my expectations and hopes concerning the whole study program. Many things we did so far are the creative part of our study and almost only what we did on our own belongs to the technology part. Regarding this I hope our study program will become a little more technical. I am especially interested in C++ game programming as well as game programming in any other language. Therefore I would be very delighted if we implement these themes in our study program. What I would like to do is a simple game like for example the classic Mario. This is because I am very interested in how you design these “progressive environments”.

Presentation of our interactive video project

Last Friday we had to present our interactive video project. Therefore two of my fellow students organised a good location, drinks and something to eat for the visitors and of course for us. It was a quite successfull event with nearly no technical problems and a good amount of visitors at least for the first round (the event was divided in to two rounds). To show you the results of our work:
RiG interactive video
Also I already found the work of some fellow student groups online:
Bananas
Irresponsible use of media
Alien Invasion
Busje komt zo
Urban Mayhem

Hope you enjoy these