Software Soapbox III - Graphics

Graphic and 3D rendering software is among the most expensive - at least if you want good software - and complex on the market. The price is high for many of the same reasons as office packages: most companies cannot survive without graphic software capability of some sort or another; however, unlike Office software (which has been around for as long as personal computing), which has a number of competing entities in the marketplace, graphic software - a relative newcomer (at least compared to other programs) - has very few options. "Photoshopped" is a de facto verb anymore, a testament to the dominance of Adobe's $649 package.

Although Photoshop is by no means a poor program - unlike M$ Word, in order to take advantage of today's computing power, Photoshop has to be a massive RAM eater - the price is enormous, far more than most students or "commonfolks" can afford. It's also not alone. Here are some of the best graphic programs on the market, along with price:

Adobe - Illustrator - $499
Corel - DRAW - $399
- PaintShop - $199
Autodesk - Maya 3D - $1249 - no, not a typo

Where to turn if one is a poor college - or poor graduate - student? If, for some laughable reason, one doesn't have around seven hundred bucks to spend on a software package?

1 - GIMP - Availability - Mac (X11), Windows, Unix
GIMP is the open-source answer to Photoshop. Fully-featured, powerful, reliable, and customizable, GIMP runs in the X11 shell for Macintosh OS X and uses about the same amount of memory as a complete Photoshop build. I'm a graphic junkie, and spend probably twenty hours a week performing hard core graphic work that puts my poor iBook G4 through the wringer (hey, my Ph.D. program is in Communication, Rhetoric, & Digital Media, after all). I've used Photoshop and GIMP for years, and I must say, GIMP does everything that Photoshop does and more. It's about a 90MB download, and uses as much RAM and processor as PS, but the cost beats all hell out of Adobe's latest expensive offering. GIMP is, simply put, the best open-source Photoshop competitor around. It is very stable: the only time I had it shut down while I was running it, I was working with five images, each of which averaged about 2000x1500 pixels, at 300dpi resolution (photographic quality - screen res is about 72 dpi). Basically, I ran out of memory (at the time, I only had 256 MB of RAM, I've since upgraded to 384, a basic requirement for high-end graphic work anymore). A full user's guide, screenshots, plugins, and support forum are available at the website. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND it to anyone who frequently works with images.

Download it and learn more at http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net, the homepage of the GIMP community.

2 - Inkscape - Availability - Mac (X11), Windows, Unix.
Inkscape is a vector-based drawing program, the Adobe Illustrator & Corel Draw counterpart to GIMP. Whereas GIMP is strictly a graphic manipulator, similar in function to Photoshop, Inkscape is an artist's package, allowing users to draw vector and pixel-based graphics that can either stand alone or be incorporated into other graphic programs (the default file format is .svg). I've just begun using Inkscape, but as far as I've been able to tell, so far it is as powerful as its corporate counterparts. A simple example of what Inkscape does is seen in the ratings stars in each entry of this page. Supported features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons metadata, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape is not quite as stable as I'd like, and the menus are somewhat confusing when one first starts using the software; however, it is an excellent offering, and there is a good deal of promise for future releases. It is relatively stable, but there are still a few bugs to be ironed out, especially in the X11 shell versions in which a restart of the shell is required when switching from Inkscape to GIMP. Still, I recommend it, and hope to see more from it in the future. The website offers screenshots, documentation, support forums, and downloads. Overall, I recommend it, and I'm sure that it will improve with time - and far outstrip it's corporate counterparts.

Download it and learn more about it at http://www.inkscape.org, the community's website.

3 - Blender - Availability - Mac, Windows, Linux.
Blender is the first and only fully integrated 3D graphics creation suite allowing modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, realtime interactive 3D and game creation and playback with cross-platform compatibility - all in one tidy, easily and free downloadable package! Blender is quickly being transformed from an impressive 3D creativity tool to a full-blown games and new media design application. The site offers amazing support, from tutorials to manuals, to a user forum. It runs in native format in Mac and Windows. This package is highly recommended. It demonstrates the power of the open source community and displays the talent of its developers quite well. The website offers incredible support, from tutorials to manuals to a user support forum, as well as an amazing art gallery that puts Blender's abilities to the test. Definitely give this one a shot.

Fatherhood

At 2:27 a.m. on 5/28/2006, my lovely wife gave birth to our beautiful daughter...



All are well...

The CIA - Best in Civilian Hands

Troubling: one of many fitting descriptive terms concerning the Bush nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden as the next director of the CIA. The bipartisan congressional outcry - Republicans as well as Democrats hate the idea - especially in our current antagonistic political environment, speaks volumes. Hayden has, as our president states, "vast experience," in intelligence-gathering; however, because he is, first, career military, and second, active career military, he does not belong at the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The history of espionage in the United States is scattered: although we have always used spies, it wasn't until 1946 that we employed them full-time. When crafting the National Security Act in 1947, which created our full-time intelligence system, Congress made a conscious decision to place intelligence-gathering fully in civilian, rather than military control. There are several reasons, foremost among which is that in the U.S., the military has always been under civilian control: our founders, while realizing that an effective military was necessary, realized that if a military is not adequately controlled, it can be used to take control of the government. This is an intelligent maneuver: recent world history alone holds countless examples of too-strong executives using the military to turn democracy into dictatorships. Thus the civilian "commander in chief," who is limited by our constitutional system of checks and balances.

"It hasn't happened here" is a foolhardy, illogical excuse. If it hasn't happened here, that doesn't mean it can't. It only means that we haven't yet had the proper convergence of situations in which "it" could, and did, happen. Four-star generals are exemplary military figures; however, career military officers are insulated from the realities of civil liberties, including due process, by nature of their chosen professions: the military, for a very good reason, is not democratic. Military officers exercise absolute authority under the rules of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: soldiers follow orders; they have no room for debate. Citizens do not follow orders, again for good reason: they must debate in order for our republic to operate properly.

We need a civilian head of the CIA. We need someone who understands accountability to the people, not just the President. Our intelligence operations, military and otherwise, must be centralized - just as the rest of our governmental operations are - under civilian authority.

Mike Nifong should be disbarred

The nation has by now become completely inundated with news reports about Durham DA Mike Nifong winning the primary election; an election that many consider to be the reason he came after the Duke Lacrosse team so hard and fast in the media in the first place. I think, honestly, that he should be disbarred for violation of the rights of the accused. Regardless of what one thinks of the case itself, it is hard to ignore the manner in which he so blatantly violated the rights of the players, trying the case in the national media before physical evidence of any sort had been gathered. Now, the city of Durham has seen itself dragged through the mud in newspapers and national television outlets of all kinds, partly as a result of his disgusting pandering to the worst voyeuristic desires in all of us.

When the national media visits Durham, it goes to the worst parts of town: this so that they can fit the story to Nifong's vision of an elite institution whose rich students run rampant over the poor local citizenry. The national news photographs show perhaps 5% of the city: I lived there for four years, in three different apartments all over the town: central Durham (3-5 min from downtown), southwest Durham (near Chapel Hill), and North Durham, near I-85 ... and Duke University. I delivered pizzas (love the graduate school life, don't you) to people living in subsidized housing (what many call "the ghetto"). On the same route, I wound my way through some of the wealthiest suburbs in North Carolina - million dollar mansions on PGA golf courses. I also visited every type of home in-between. Durham was, and remains, a typical mid-sized city in the urban south, the northern corner of the Triangle metropolitan area.

What you don't see is the other 80% of Durham: the arts, the mecca of small specialty shops, the majority of the citizens who don't realize that they live in a hellhole dominated by northeastern college elites - because they don't. The Research Triangle Park - huge for pharmaceuticals and computer technology - is entirely within the city limits of Durham: billions of dollars of research and development that share a zip code (277##) with the disgusting hole portrayed in the media. Think about that.

Back to the topic. Mike Nifong should be disbarred, not re-elected. Why? He tried his case in the media: we had a classic case of the first amendment (free press) clashing with the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments (rights of the accused: include impartial jury and speedy trial, as well as due process). The media had help: it was hard to turn on the damn news or open a paper without seeing his face. He manipulated a photo lineup: for traditional lineups, you're supposed to have five "fillers" for every shot of a suspect; instead, he had the police show her only photos of lacrosse players who were at the party. He ignored photographs and phone records placing one of the two arrested players far away from the house at the time of the alleged rape.

Regardless of what one thinks of the case, this is negligence. Prosecutorial misconduct - call it what you will. The man should be the night manager at a bowling alley, not trying cases in a court of law.
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currently on miPod - "Come Back" - Pearl Jam

Happy Birthday, Hubble!

Sixteen years. The Hubble Telescope has been functioning for sixteen years - with only periodic maintenance from shuttle technicians. It's still in use. Question: how long do we use our computers without upgrading? I stand amazed.

Visual Rhetoric and Politics...

It's always interesting to me to look at political sites (for either party) and think about the visual rhetoric expressed by the content. Not photographic content, which is far more interesting on political parody pages; standard party websites haven't yet stooped to manipulating photography on their main page. I mean backgrounds and minor graphic details such as buttons, banners, and color interplay, graphics that people don't study, that people don't internalize and filter as they do standard print artifacts such as alphanumeric text and photographs. One of the purposes of rhetorical criticism is the production of "metaknowledge," explicit understanding and evaluation of messages that pass through our lives.

Make no mistake: these graphics are messages, deliberately crafted (whether consciously or not) to convey a general feeling; thus the danger of allowing them to pass unfiltered. How do such things become messages? Think: how many images, sounds, and pieces of text just pass through your mind without a second thought? How do we "know" what things mean? We know because human beings are social animals: we communicate. Rhetoric is not necessarily windy, neither is it necessarily poetic or otherwise discursively exaggerated: Moliere reminds us that, while almost none of us speak poetry in the day to day, all of us speak prose. We persuade. We argue. We debate and discuss. We also unconsciously consume discourse: when was the last time you looked at a Stop sign and thought about it?

Like the stop sign, political visuals are deliberately crafted: color and shape have definite meanings in politics. A map can be seen as nothing more than a political artifact, a representation of perceived borders: I am here, I am not there. Look at the planet from space, and you see no borders. The use of a map shape in a political site, with colored pieces in the shape of smaller map shapes, has a rhetorical purpose. The Republican National Committee homepage uses map and color messages in a subtle and brilliant fashion. If you want to see the maps of which I speak, you can visit this page.

The first map, which was used in a "Donate" animation, shows faded red and blue. Keep in mind that the rest of the site shows only dark, blood red. Fading in this context suggests uncertainty: we're winning, but we haven't won. It enhances the effectiveness of the large, red button reading "Donate," in all caps, and does so quite subtly, in a way that the average visitor won't notice. The second map shows a bloodred "heartland" with isolated blue spots that represent highly urban areas. This, too, is a rhetorical appeal, one designed to demonstrate that first, 80% of the United States is "Red" country, and second, that those folks in big cities (notice the blue swath in the Northeast, following the Canadian border, and along the California Coast, the very immigrant southwest, and the isolated blue islands in cities such as Chicago, Charlotte, Indianapolis, etc) don't agree with the overwhelming majority. Its brilliance lies in its subtlety: the map is only a physical representation of space, and ignores population entirely. We all know that the popular election was not an 80/20 landslide, but this map displays something entirely different: power and victory.

In the interest of fairness, I should mention the Democratic National Committee homepage, which engages in similarly suble rhetorical devices. The bloodred map of Iraq in the center of the page has two major implications that immediately come to mind: first, the blood spilled in the nation, and second, an implication of political responsibility. The blood of the Iraq war is placed squarely in the hands of the Republican party (despite the fact that a number of Dems voted to go to war). Another interesting visual is the dollar bill button on the right hand side of the page, which is labeled "Republican culture of Corruption," the latter word in gray. The dollar bill is a subtle reference to lobbying money, which many Dems are tied to as well. The gray: think what you will of shades of gray or corruption. Here I must admit that I wrote about the visuals on the RNC site earlier in the semester: I'm working on the DNC visuals right now for a different paper, so my criticism isn't as broad as it otherwise would be. Nonetheless, you get my point: visual elements such as these are subtly designed to enhance the party message.

This is, of course, exactly the goal, as it is on all such pages: political parties want three things from visitors to their websites: votes, donations, and volunteerism. Party sites are designed to appeal to current party members, active or inactive. Active party members can learn the party's stance on current events; inactive members can be informed as to just why they need to be more active. Undecided voters may visit to learn party stances, but the odds are likely that they'll also be looking at the opposition: if they seek information, undecideds are far more likely to go to traditional news media outlets. Opposition members may visit, but only to shake their heads and mutter terrible things about "spin," then return to the homepage of their party of choice and gleefully read what they'll see as accurate, informative news.

Make no mistake: these graphics are deliberate constructs. Graphic designers and website creators have far too much control over color and pixel definition for it to be anything but. Whether conscious or not (some of it may be unconscious, but I doubt that most of it is), these are rhetorical devices. If the cornerstone of a deliberative democracy is an informed citizenry, then twenty-first century democracy demands that we become informed not just of textual and photographic content, but of the subtle, background content that enhances the former two.
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currently playing on miPod - Symphony no. 3, second movement - Schumann