Reflective Post

Blog Content

During the sixteen weeks of posting I tried to keep content very broad, coverng all aspects of networked media production. I took careful measures to ensure all posts reflected some personal insight relating to the issue at hand. I avoided annotating information that had already been established, such as lecture notes and wikie's. Instead I used these sources among others for ideas as posts, once I had some direction I would further research a topic so that I could present a non-bias opinion/angle on that particular subject. I also tried to avoid using information from one primary source such as wikipedia, I wanted to demonstrate an overall understanding that can only be achieved by looking at different sources, i.e bigger picture.

Audience

My primary audience are people who are interested in network media practices. Particularly people studying/working in that field. I found that posting my opinion of other colleges posts such as the post Media Royals, sparked interesting controversial debate that resulted in additional posts in resolving that issue. Not only is this interesting for the reader but it also encourage me to further investigate my own understanding of network media practices.

Connectivity

Other all my Blog did not receive much traffic despite using a range of web advertisement services, one of which being technorati. I could have focused more on following other colleges and reflecting on their content instead of basing my posts around the latest media issues, or even balancing the two. The most popular posts was content that challenged/contradicted an opinion of a college, this is reflected in the number comments for a particular post. Other traffic sources include spam from people promoting their services through comments.

Web Services

Blogspot did provide a number of useful services that helped maintain, enhance and assist in writing posts. The Blog Archive located on the top right of the page neatly arranged posts in chronological order. This helps viewers to navigate the blog's infrastructure, selecting particular posts that is of interest. Further more, the blog role just below the blog archive is a great feature that allowed me to add relevant links to other blogs that I found interesting. What I thought was neat, is that Blogspot provided a service that allowed other bloggers to follow me, likewise I could follow them. Lastly Blogspot provided a feature that allowed me to past HTML/Java-Script into a gadget that I could then display in my side bare. In a post called PRESENTATION, I touched on data visualisation and used a word clowd generating web service provided by http://www.wordle.net/create to generate the underlying HTML code for the discussion of that post.

Stem Cell Research

A Short Synopsis

I was browsing the tastiest book marks on the web, aka D.E.L.I.C.I.O.U.S, and stumbled across an article on how a patient had recovered their eyesight through the use of stem cell treat

ment. One question kept circling my mind; to what extent

can man play God? Before posting uneducated conjectures of this issue, I decided to play it safe and do some background research. If I haven’t caught your attention so far, read on....

Embryonic Cells
Note, that not all stem cell research involve creating, using and destroying of human embryos. Although in recent years the media has had a strong outlook on the topic of embryonic stem cell research. But why use embryonic cells and not other cell types? The answer lays in the embryonic stem cells maturity and their potency. Unlike other cells, embryonic stem cells are subjected to differentiating to any other type of cells needed by the human body. This offers medical treatment for a range of conditions, such as extensive repair of human tissue, degeneration conditions and genetic diseases. The drawback is that to be able to use embryonic stem cell treatment, embryonic cells need to be first generated through in vitro fertility (IVF). IVF tends to generate allot of unused embryonic stem cells that are discarded. This raises many sensitive issues. But first let’s look at some alternative solutions.

Alternative Solutions

With concerns of sparking further controversial debate over the morality and ethical attitude towards stem cell research, researchers are working on techniques of isolating stem cells that are as potent as embryonic stem cells that do not require a human embryo. Researchers believe that human skin cells can be coaxed to "de-differentiate"and revert to an embryonic state, although more studies are needed to be carried out. It has been found that the fluid surrounding the fetus contains potent stem cells. Lastly researchers are working on techniques of reprogramming adult stem cells to behave differently, the trouble with skin these cells is that they are subjected to DNA abnormalities caused by toxins and sunlight. Although researchers are working on better techniques it may be some time until they are perfected.

Ethical Issues

There are many opinions on whether Embryonic debate is ethical, personally I think it should not be allowed as the destruction of an embryo is in fact killing the potential of a living human. Some believe embryos are not equivalent to human life while they are still incapable of surviving outside of the womb. Others question that if abortions are legal why can't they be used for medical research? These and other questions have no one solution and may have a varying opinion form person to person. I encourage you to broaden your knowledge and make an educated opinion on your understanding of stem cell research, until next time :p

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell_controversy

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2008/09/26/dnt.mo.stem.cell.cure.kmbc

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article6122757.ece

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/3344413/Stem-cell-treatment-helps-restore-eye-sight.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cirm/3200176372/sizes/sq/

Web 2.0 is ________

Uninformed Web 2.0 Members

What exactly is Web 2.0? Allot of people are oblivious to the fact that they are participating members of the Web 2.0 era. But to describe Web 2.0 in one paragraph would only scratch the surface. So I an offer an alternative solution... I will highlight some of the key features of Web 2.0 and provide resources for further investigation.

Web 2.0 is YOU!!!

How do you feel knowing that your apart of something but don't quite understand what it is? Lets take a

step back. Web 1.0 allow users to log on to the internet and consume media. In the dawn of the internet

pages were static and information were generally provided by a centralised source. Similar to how

traditional media distrabutes content using a NewsPaper.

References

http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=613

http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Data Visualisation

NOTE: This post relates to project two, a copy of the visualisation can be obtained from here.

Introduction
The idea of these graphs is to forecast the type of contextual information within a given book. A user is able to discern the dominating theme of a book by analysing the growth and decline of word frequencies. Furthermore, the graphs present interesting information on many layers. One of which is the shift in the frequencies between the Old and New Testament. From a historical context, this suggests that the Old and New Testament were written in different periods of history which is defined by the religious beliefs and attitudes of society at that time. The following subheadings go on to discuss the challenges and processes that were involved in designing the graphs and the reasons behind the different decisions.

Challenges
Choosing A Project
The initial challenge was to define the scope of the project. This required me to assess the specifications and benefits of each project option. Among many of the specification, time management was a leading factor. Not thoroughly analysing what each project required and the associated skill set needed to fulfill those requirements really had an impact on the productivity and time management of the project. Initially, I was intending to choose the option that required me to create a geo-narrative using Google Maps. My idea was to develop a photographic tour of Canberra but due to transportation and technical constraints using Google Map's application programming interface (API), this was not achievable. As a result I was force to reassess the situation and consider a different option. Data visualisation appeared reasonable but not straight forward as I first assumed.

Gathering Data
The challenge in gathering data is that I had to ensure the data was accurate and reliable. For an observer, this would guarantee that information extracted from the visualisation was genuine. Secondly, I wanted to choose a data set that was unique and discrete. The type of visualisation I anticipated relied on data that wasn't continuously changing over time. I figured that data gathered algorithmically would eliminate accidental errors and the the need for human interaction. My first attempt for gathering data proved problematic. I intended to develop a program using the C language to analyse an electronic version of the Bible (King James version). However, I didn't take into account the functionalities needed before starting out. As a result, I ran into difficulties in maintaining code as new features were added. I resorted to an open source analysis tool called TextSTAT-2. The only drawback is that I had limited knowledge on how word frequencies were gathered and was obligated to rely on TextSTAT-2 judgment.

Visualizing Data
The initial challenge was to choose an effective visualisation tool. Having only limited knowledge using Excel, I decided to create the visualisation in MS-Paint. The drawback with using MS-Paint is that all the house-keeping is done by the user. I found that drawing the grid and calibrating the data along with connecting the lines to be very tedious and visually difficult to comprehend. After perfecting the graphs in MS-Paint I decided to use a web-based visualisation service called ManyEyes instead. ManyEyes, unlike MS-Paint, took care of the internal house-keeping and provided useful features that allowed users to interact with the data. Unfortunately, many attempts to upload my data set failed to be recognised despite massaging the data and working through detailed tutorials. With only one option left I resorted to using Excel. All the computations for normalising the data were done automatically and Excel had no trouble associating the data with its visualisation.

Processes
Choosing The Themes
The process of choosing a theme required looking at key words and determining if they related to each other. I looked through each book of the Bible and wrote out a list of key words for each particular theme. Then I did a rough analysis on the frequencies of the chosen words and omitted words that did not produce reliable data sets. I was particularly interested in data sets that gave a varying average in word frequencies throughout all the books. This decision was based on the fact that an observer could analyse the frequencies of different books and easily compare them.

Extracting The Frequencies
A soft copy of the Bible I used for this project can be obtained from here. Unfortunately TextSTAT-2 didn't allow analysis of multiple sources. This constraint required me to separate each of the books into different text files. Once partitioned, I had to open each book with TextSTAT-2 and individually query every word frequency. With 15 queries in each book and a total of 66 books this process did take some time. To eliminate potential inaccuracies I had to enter each word twice. Furthermore, I had to make the decision of whether or not I would accept variants of the same word, e.g. love, Love and love's. I decided to include the variants as it's just the grammar and not the definition that is changing.

Visualising The Data
After the data had been collected I needed to input it into Excel. A copy of this spreadsheet can be obtained from here. Before visualising I needed to ensure the data was normalised. This would allow users to compare relative word frequencies with out the frequencies being dependent on the size of a given book. This process involved taking the frequency of a chosen word, dividing by that book's length and multiplying it by the size of the largest book. Once normalised, it was matter of choosing a visualisation. Excel provided an excellent selection of visualisations and options for customising them. For this type of data set, the line graph was the most appropriate.

Analysis
The gradient of the lines between each book of each theme suggests a change in either content, message or mood. Although it is difficult to predict the author's exact intention or intended meaning without understanding the context in which the word is used. In saying this, the graphs represent valuable analytic information. The following conjectures are entirely based on my interpretation of these graphs which are likely to differ from someone else's.

The theme of Love and Will follow similar trends in the growth and decline of word frequencies. Both graphs present a smooth transition between each book with momentum only increasing for a small number of books. This suggests that the overall theme is consistent with emphasis only given to a select few books. On a different level, the frequency of words could imply that the authors of different books had similar insights. Comparing the theme of Love with Will and Anger illustrates that love is the dominant theme with the word “heaven” peaking at 1200 words in the book of John1.

The theme Anger unlike Love or Will present different analytic information. There are radical changes in word frequencies between all books. This could suggest authors at that time had varying interpretations of anger. Although from a biblical perspective this could imply God's guidance which would nicely work well with the key principles of the biblical teachings.

Cultural ideas are continually changing as society conforms to the social expectation placed upon them through certain historical events. In particular, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and how it revolutionised people's interpretation of biblical teachings. Distinct shifts in frequencies between the Old and New Testament support this consensus. In conclusion, these graphs represent information in an easily interpreted format which otherwise would be difficult to extract a similar analysis by examining the raw data source.

Software Driven Media

Networked Media, as the name suggests involves distributing content over many networks. Networks such as the internet, CB's , radio stations, digital television and the list continues. However this would not be possible if it were not for the aid of software to instruct these devices. In particular scripting languages play a critical role. In fact, what your reading now is a series of tags interpreted by your browser that is displayed accordingly :p, not that you didn't already know. Scripting languages such as java script, ruby and perl have made it easy for people to create interactive and dynamic content. That is, embedded content that operates independently of the page itself. One example of this is an Internet Rely Chat applet IRC, but if you look around i'm sure you will find allot more.

references

Lecture notes

MashUps

The internet is radically changing, people are constantly thinking of new and innovative ideas that revolutionize how users interact with the web. Mashups are a great example, a user is able to combine data or functionality from two or more sources to create a single integrated application, thus creating a service that was not originally provided be either source. Society has realized that it's better to provide tools for users to work with then a fully featured framework for presenting information. Likewise, open source development are following the same trend. Although Microsoft owns the monopoly allot of people are now beginning to adopt Linux. Reason being is that Linux encourages users to have control over every aspect of their OS and even provide open source development packages for creation of home brewed applications. Similar to how web services provide API's to interface with their content. It follows:

• simplicity = limitations

• complexity = freedom

you choose....

References

http://www.flickr.com/photos/qthomasbower/3470650293/sizes/t/ flickr image

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid)

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=mashup&btnG=Search&meta=

Media V.S Reality

It's All Around Us

Ok, it's 1.14 pm and i've just come back from a lecture. Walking to my resident's I stumbled across a rock that trigured a train of thought. Got me thinking about the compossition of the rock, the attributes and properties in which that rock could be used for. Surprisingly enough, it's interesting how human's take pleasure in categorising objects according to their structure. After watching the Matrix the night before, I imagined the rock being represented as a finite set of mathemtaical formula's. In actual fact, all media is not fare from that truth. Abstract as it sounds, the same principles controlling the relation between all materilistic objects are similar principles that governs the relations between all intellectual objects.

The Intelectual Realm

Ok, so you have heard my oppinion but not entirely convinced? If you could record the precise actions of a person playing a video game. Then on another day, replicate those exact actions... in theory after a finite number of button presses your character would end of up at the same spot. Straight forward as it sounds, one may alter those these instructions but also give same result. Furthermore, the sum of two numbers may give a different result each time the operands are changes but the addition process is the same each time it's onlt the context that is different. A composer of a piece of media may want to challange the responder to think a certain way. The principle's used in the creation of that partiular piece of media is similar to other piece's of media that fits into that same gonre, e.g. advertisement. The composer may use different techniques to protray their message but the net effect is the same. Just like, the attributes and properties in which that rock could be used for.... :-)

My Pheosophical Understanding

May of mentioned this in a previous post: "I stongly believe that their is a finite amount of information assocated with every instance of intelect just the context that differs". In all my area's of disicipline I like to apply this logic and understanding how it fits into the blueprint of knowledge.

References

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/2968547143/sizes/sq/

sourcing the crowd

Spontanilsly Unpredictable
Crowd souring is an interesting methodology that breaks a task into little pieces and distributes them among general people over the web. Each person contributes their own independent ideas that often result in spontaneous and unpredictable media. For example Swarmsketch all web user's to contribute a line of 100 pixals to compose an image of a given topic with in a allocated time frame.

The Collaboration Effect
So fare we discussed how crowd sourcing can be used liven up the day of a depressing individual, but what else is it useful? A wiki is a platform for collaborative information where individuals share information of their own area in their own area of discipline. Great things about wiki's is that their online communities are always growing and as individuals contribute their own slice of information the diversity of the content also grows.

References

http://www.flickr.com/photos/menteblu61/2057136966/sizes/t/ flickr

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&ei=PCcySsmSJZe-tAPGjZXqBg&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=crowdsourcing&spell=1

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdsourcing_million_heads.php

Information is Data

Whithout data what is media?
The answers is OBLIVION! If the capitalization didn't catch your attention, then let me explain... Media as the name suggests is the means of expressing information. How we interpret that information depends on how the data composing the representation is structured. Ok, that was a mouth full... so we have established that the structuring of data is in fact information and by extension media. According to the pionere of apple, Steve Jobs, "Data can't be analysed unless it is organised". The rules that govern how observers interpret information is much like a multi-level rule based system. First there is the syntax, unit sentences, expressions and finally the resulting information. One common application that involves knowing how to use this rule based system is advertisemnt. Composers recognise that different structures of data can effect how information percieved.

Data Structures

As stated, composers recognise that different structures of data can effect how information is percieved. This statement is only a conjecture, that is until it is proven...

PROOF:

Suppose you were to ask to look at the folloing symbols and identify one distinguishing feature?

0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0

0 F 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0

The magority of people would undoutably identify 'F' as the distinguishing feature. Reason being is that it stands out, *pun intended* :p. Othere techniques such as scaling, color, shape, position and movement are also effective for visually distinguishing features. Composer's commonly use these teckniques ro present information rather then just sequenial text. If you look to your right, you will see a word clowd that counts the frequency of each word in this post and present them accordingly. I will let you choose wich words you think have the greatest frequency :-)

References

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/01/winning_lotto_numbers.html flickr image

Lecture Notes

Media Royals

I Have To Say

I strongly believe that closed source proprietary media is bottle necking the potential for our economy to grow. Proprietary media prevents the collaboration of thought and ideas between composer's of media. In general, media is derived from intellectual work, however proprietary media prevents this knowledge from being distributed. It is quite possible composer's are reinventing the wheel instead of expanding on already established ideas that could potentially revolutionise different areas of discipline.

The Solution

Royals are one of the driving factors for proprietary media. The welfare of society heavily relies on this system. Although this is only a sugared coated excuse that composer's take pride in hiding behind. The majority of composer's disprove this notion of cause and effect, which contradicts the idea of less effort is equivalent to a greater income. My solution would be to look for alternatives where composer's can benefit off others work and also make an honest income. One suggestion, is that all source code should be freely available and royals should only be made through technical support. Like all different types media the context may change but essentially this approach could be easily adopted to different areas of discipline.

Relevent Links...

I invite you to look at a college's blog that covers a personal view on creative common licencing, this is the post where I originally got my idea... perma link

also, feel free to check out ~ covers some interesting material!!!

http//www.radioopensource.org/

Reference

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcuthrell/2380757581/

http://machinimamadness.blogspot.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU

The Power Of Blogging

Blogging is the only form or media where you can target a global audience from the comfort of your chair. They give power to those who have a voice. On of the reasons why I think blogging is so successful is because it's uniqueness. People are able to express commentary, individual ideas without prejudice. The content is always changing, from an observers point of view the information is always fresh that presents alternative ways of thinking.

Secondly, their is an artistic side to blogging. Bloggers enjoy the challenge of how to present their content in an effective manner. From trail and error, I have learnt that great blog posts make use of white spaces, formatting, graphics, the list is too extensive to cover here. But the basic idea is to get viewers interested in reading your posts, and this is the challenge that the vast majority of bloggers look for. Try it for your self...

References

Lecture Notes

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/14/blogging-for-beginners-2/

http://www.problogger.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Critique Rational

The critique can be downloaded by this link

Before choosing a website to critique there were a number of requirements that needed to be evaluated. I wanted to choose a growing medium with an obvious user base. One of the major specifications was to critique the websites internal information flow with particular attention given to user management. A website with a large user base would need to facilitate its members and by extension how they interact with the website. Amongst the spectrum of popular websites MySpace nicely fits this scaffold. Being already familiar with MySpace, the critique didn't require me to learn how MySpace functioned from ground up and also allowed me to write a more in depth critique within the given time frame.

Prior to writing the critique a little bit of preparation needed to be done. I had to familiarize myself with the art of analyzing content. The challenge here, is MySpace offers such a wide selection of content it would be impractical to cover all of it. I initially devised a diagram to assist with the main points I would cover. This helped throughout the writing cycle as I had a visual to refer to. Originally the critique focused on specialized areas of MySpace; however this approach didn't allow me to compare MySpace with other similar social networking websites. Another change I needed to perform, where my targeted audience. I didn't take into account the general reader, and having a strong software development background it was easy to diverge to information that wasn't relevant. As a consequence my initial draft was scraped and only the essential points were expended.

When writing the critique, I initially developed a blue print of how it would be structured. The blue print had set the basis for expending on the key points; ultimately it ensured I didn’t miss out on any relevant information and kept the information integral. With each main point in mind, I devised a set of manageable sub points. This helped with time management and allowed me to systematically expend on each point with in a set time frame. One pitfall I ran into is that I needed compare MySpace with another social networking website. Having only ever used MySpac the learning curve was steep. The process involved me setting up an account with another social networking website called Tagged. Originally I was going to choose FaceBook as the comparison website. However, with the reader in mind I thought it would be more interesting to expend on an on line social community that is less mainstream.

The cultural context of this critique was unique in the sense that MySpace didn't have a distinct start and finish such as a book or a featured film. Unlike other forms of sequential media that doesn't require user interaction, MySpace proposed interesting implications. The ability to manipulate and govern information flow dramatically changes the context of how a user interacts with a medium. Furthermore it was difficult to find concrete material that offered opinions on these of mediums of this status. With limited resources to work with, a different means of gathering information was needed. As a result, the critique was entirely based on my knowledge of networked media. My work he differed to others in the field, in the sense that there is no sequential structure in which content comprising of MySpace could be ordered as depicted in the diagram.

PRESENTATION

It's interesting how idea's can be expressed in one or more forms. It's a well noted fact that different people may have different interpretation of a given concept. That is, it could have a different message to that person. In the world of presentation, both in the software and web design realm, there are precautions that are taken in respect to different cultural implications. This could vary to content that resemble a religious form to information that wrongly accuses one's welfare. Although, strictly saying every person interprets a given content
different is not entirely true according. Psychologist strongly believe that there are “some color effects that have universal meaning “... ·

• Red was used to stimulate the body and mind and to increase circulation.
  
• Yellow was thought to stimulate the nerves and purify the body.
  
• Orange was used to heal the lungs and to increase energy levels.
  
• Blue was believed to soothe illnesses and treat pain.
• Indigo shades were thought to alleviate skin problems.

reading this kind of poked a hole in my logic, however the site goes onto to describe this idea is not necessarily true either. if you also find this interesting, I encourage you to look into it... until next time :-)

References

http://psychology.about.com/od/sensationandperception/a/colorpsych.htm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldflints/2381496523/sizes/t/

Redundant Media?

Ok, I'm going to divert a little bit from the content I have previously peen posting :-(.... After reading the criteria for this blog for a unit called “Networked Media Production”, I've come to the understanding I've been going around this the wrong way. In light of recent events, these posts will be more related to different branches of networked media such as html, css, content, presentation, layout etc....

I would like to talk about my understanding of media.... here's a pictorial view of my logic I draw up in paint..... So here we have tool little chumps communicating and expressing ideas to each other. But what's interesting in this diagram is the poorly drawn line referred to as the medium... The line is symbolic to how mediums can take different forms. Audio, text, and visuals are all forms of media (media, plural for medium)... in fact, I'm expressing my ideas through this post. I think the advancement of IT has had a dramatic effect on how media is interpreted. No point in history has information become so freely available. I strongly believe media challenges the mind to think and act in a certain way according to the producer's intent. However society is growing resistant to this manner of interpretation. Namely, being constantly bombarded with advertisement every day, from your online social networking profile to a massive drive by billboard, it starts to get obvious that people will grow bored of this and eventually take no notice of media. This raises to important question:

To what lengths must a producer go to, to keep their work fresh and persuasive?

References

Picture produced in MS-Paint

Logic

It’s about 10:33 pm, I’m sitting in a comfortable computer chair thinking to myself, “oh god, do I really wan to write this entry”… but being the genuine guy I am, I felt implied to do so.
This week I’ve been thinking about life, and what it is composed of. As a software developer, I like to try and relate reality in terms of a computer. At times this can be difficult, but one concept that fits well is logic. Logic can be defined in two ways:
* formal
* informal
Formal is the definition mathematicians tend to use. They enjoy systematically proving propositions by examining if the concluding directly draws from their hypothesis, although there are many methods for proving propositions, my favorite in particular proof by contradiction

Informally, logic could be described as an intellective process that involves solving a particular problem intuitively. As humans grow, so do their understanding of the world. i.e. logic would tell a person if something is hot then don’t touch it or you will be burnt. Ironically enough this statement could be expressed in symbols using discrete mathematics. Note that in the real world, quantities are generally expressed in a continuous manner. Although in the digital world this is quite the inverse. With that said I invite you to check out this YouTube video I found of a guy replicating logic using dominoes, enjoy…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SudixyugiX4

HTML & CSS

Maintainability

The aim of web development is to separate content and presentation. This extends the life of

the code, allowing it to be reused, ported and easily maintained. Using this method processing

becomes centralized and modifications can be made from a single reference point. When coding in a programming language I try to keep to this

convention. After looking at HTML, I wondered how this same convention could be used, then i discovered CSS.

My Approach

HTML differs from many other languages is the sense it's a markup language that describes what is being presented rather then computing an algorithm. I learnt in class that HTML was never designed for formatting text, although it is included anyway. Saying this it is often misused... CSS on the other hand allow web developers to design templates to control the formatting aspects of the information being presented. Using CSS in conjunction with HTML it is possible to adopt the conventions described previously. To further your knowledge take a look at....

http://www.w3schools.com/htmL/, extensive tutorials for beginners

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML, little bit of back ground knowledge

references

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lastexile/412067070/sizes/t/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/

Who am I, u Ask?

I am not going to reveal my identity for security purposes, I go by the alias Dr X. My intension's in creating this web-log is to connect with people who have similar interests, i.e. programming, game developm t. And hopefully encourage those who have looked into it, but haven't took that plunge. Software development is an exiting world, so many possibilities. An uncharted terrain waiting to be explored. Once stepping into it, no turning back... trust me
This web-log is not intended to demonstrate my intelligence, “hate people who do that”, but to unite developers for the common good. I hope to challenge my audience to think dynamically and be more accepting to look at the larger picture. Ever heard the phrase think outside of the box, I ask you what is outside of that box?

To the question, Who am I? This can be best answered by recapping how this web-log you are reading came into existence. At school, education wasn't exactly my strong point, saying that I struggled with certain literacy based subjects. In year 8, I transferred schools and met a friend called Luke who has had a dramatic effect on who I am today. As school progressed our interests in software grew and our electives concluded that. As of the start of 2009, Luke and I are currently studying software engineering at different universities. I am grateful for other significant people in my life, to many to be mentioned. But in particular my mathematics teacher Mr Watter's.

My inspiration for what I do comes from the satisfaction of idea that everything created is the result of some intellectual process. On the other hand I also enjoy the satisfaction of creating something from scratch and seeing it work correctly. I strongly believe that software development is an art, just like any other that can be expressed in different forms. It challenges the mind to think a certain way, opens new doors and more importantly influence who we become. For those who are interested in contacting me, I am going to create a new hot mail where we can speak on msn. I will update this post as soon as I do...