Picto Synthesis

Several updates after upgrading to Movable Type 4.1.

While I am looking into translating existing sites to the new template system, I took a chance to organize my flickr gallery, simplify my main gallery on Linfa.net, several bibliographic references to my resume, clean up the design of koumako.com and catch up with content updates to the Elder Scrolls Trekker.

I also took this occasion to bring the sites under the umbrella of Google Adsense and Google Analytics.

Cheers to our new Google overlords.

My first batch of MOO cards arrived today.

That was fast. About 5 business days total - far below the announced 10. I guess they are giving themselves a marging of operation when they come up with these time estimates.

Quality of the cards is nice. They do feel more like business cards than just printed pieces of paper.

The finish is matte and lack contrast on some images. I will have to remember to compensate for that in the future.

They are quite smaller than regular business cards - hopefully, they will be noticed for that and not get lost too easily.

Continue reading "MOO cards" »

The refresh of this site is mostly complete. All I need now is the final version of Movable Type 4 to incorporate more dynamic features in a fresh new design. At the rate updates are going on the MT4 website, it will be probably sometimes in the Fall.

In the meantime, I recreated my gallery pages using JAlbum and Simpleviewer. I will look into using more of that great little flash viewer across the site when the updates are complete. 

I took that occasion to update my personal photostream, organise pictures into (flickr) sets and even place some photographs on a photo map. Updating the gallery made me rediscover my flickr account and the capabilities for self publishing I completely ignored since I signed up two years ago.

Since Siggraph 2007 is fast approaching, I tested some of these services : 

MOO | MiniCards - for sleek, colorful contact cards. They look cute but the company is based in the UK and the service not particularly quick (5 to 10 business days to receive an order).

QOOP business cards - to compare the speed and print quality with a company based in the US. They had more choices of templates and customization available but their format is more traditional.

Zazzle - to print out joint flyers with Crealab (follow the link for a web version of the flyers). They will be printed on the inside of notecards and folded to show both sides at the same time. I am curious to see the result of that project .. especially since they pride themselves with their superior speed (only two business days ?!). They also have a marketplace and a selection of products similar to Cafepress.

Blurb - with their nice desktop tool to compose books, their large selection of templates and their marketplace, they look like an interesting alternative to Photoworks for producing books. I stared working on a first book to test the print quality. It will take a few weeks to finish the content, so there is no rush on that one.

The orders are in... I will update my comments when I receive the final products. 

Continue reading "Self publishing" »

After almost a year without any update, I decided to break the routine and start with a clean up of the site. On the menu : new style, new portfolio page and various tweaks across the site.

This is in prevision of the upgrade to Movable Type 4 in a few months ... or whenever  the final version becomes available.

I had to take down the gallery before of high CPU activity on the server it is running on.

Update - I traced the issue to over zealous robots and other spiders, from Google to Majestic 12. It will take a while before they all receive new instructions to stay away from my images via the usual 'robots'txt' file. Until then, the gallery will remain protected by password.

You can still view part of the content of the gallery using the links to offsite images from the gallery main page. 

I created the Games album for shots taken while traveling through some of my favorite games. Not only they can be as intense as movies or books at times, but some of these games are so visually engaging that taking pictures while playing becomes very similar to taking shots during your latest vacation.

I also created an album for some of my favorite pictures of Masks and updated the Statues section with shots of mortuary art.

I finally found some time to migrate the whole gallery to the Gallery 2.0 system.

This has been going smoothly so far. It is a lot easier now to load new images, create albums, and organize images in general.

 I also took this occasion to load photographs, draft 3D images and missing images that have been waiting to go online for a long time.

This website is almost a year old. After a year of playing with the idea of a blog, I have to recognize I do not have the rythm or the mindset to keep up with a day to day account of what I feel, think or dislike. That kind of blog just won't be happening.

What I can do however, is to focus on a subject that does interest (images, photos, graphism) me and keep updating this log as I come across anything interesting.

This is the reason behind the change of colors and the change of name for this log - Pictosynthesis. All of the idea for a name I could think of where already used by a website somewhere, somehow, except this one.

I know it is not really a word, but it does reflect my main interest and the subject of this site - pictures, the way they are created, their effect on who is looking at them.

It took 6 years and a few reminders from people who were looking for these old pages. I am glad to announce that I finally revived my Necronomicon Project pages.

A little history for those who would not know what the Necronomicon Project was.

About 10 years ago (already ?!), I found myself in the lucky position of being the webmaster of my graduate school (EERIE, in Nimes, France). It was the beginning of the web, an ancient time where HTML editors were called VI and EMACS, and where Spyware were just gadgets out of a Bond movie.

The website of the school gave me the opportunity to build a few personal sites which had their time of popularity : an encyclopedia about the X-Files (Aux Frontieres d'URL), a guide to cyber culture (Net Tribes), a list of links about horror writer H.P.Lovecraft (De Web Mysteriis), an altar dedicated to his trademark creature Cthulhu (The Cthulhu Gallery) and finally, The Necronomicon Project.

The Necronomicon Project is an attempt at compiling different texts related to the occult book created by H.P.Lovecraft as one of the backbones to his Mythos, and put them together in some re-creation of what the book might have looked like. It is of course a very modest creation, very far from the actual horror described by the author.

One of the interesting aspects of this project was the endless source of amazement caused by the blurred lines between the book and reality. People actually thought this was the real text. Others warned me about the evil of this enterprise. I even received condescending emails telling me that the book does not exist and that I was misleading myself. We will see how things happen almost 10 years later :)

Most of these pages died when I left the school in 1998 ... I mean, they disappeared from the web but they remained in personal archives. The Necronomicon Project is the first one I am attemptin gto revive. Time permiting, I will give the other sites their chance to return to the web.

@-EERIE, the website of alumni from the School for Research and Study in Electronic and Computer Science of Nimes, is finally officially open for business.

I don’t expect a flood of visits however. The goal of the site is to provide a place on the web to meet, reconnect and celebrate what our school used to be for the 10 years of its existence. There is still a site called EERIE in Nimes, but the academic and research program has changed since the takeover from another nearby school called EMA.

The website is currently made of two pieces - a PHP forum based on PHPBB, and a database of alumni based on Cold Fusion. Both sides have their own database for now. Future improvements will be about merging the two databases and turning the two pieces into a single site.

The new home for my brother's website, Koumako, is coming along nicely. It took some planning and patching to integrate more seamlessly Moveable Type, iGallery and Cold Fusion in general but it seems to be working great so far. The structure is similar to the site I created for Linfa.net but he customized the graphics and layout to better reflect his artwork.

A few more days of work and it will be ready for domain redirection....

Must be because of Fall cleaning, or maybe the increasing tension at work. For the past few days, I felt that I needed to put some order in the many loose ends around me at the moment. Updating this website took care of a few of them. Some people eat chocolate to get a clearer head... I work on personal web pages. What does this say ....

I finally got to apply the layout of the Diary section to the rest of the site. It looks more clear and better put together that way. The navigation has been improved as well.

In related news, the Gallery section now is still growing, with new images and new categories (Biography and Statues / Gargoyles). I still have a lot of pictures to add to this list though.

It took me about a week trying (and failing) to set up a diary/blog area on this site. Since the rest of this site is written in cold fusion, my first idea was to look for cold fusion based blogs. The ones I found were either too basic or too cumbersome to maintain.

Then I found CFXML Blog, which seemed to have the features I was looking for. But as it turned out, I ran into odd server configuration errors when I tried to set it up on my hosted site. I had to give up and go back to square one.

That’s when I came across Moveable Type. It took only a couple of evenings to set it up correctly, and a few days after that to find the plugins and code snippets to customize it the way I wanted. I have to say I am impressed by the quality of that application and the amount of resources available for it online. Finally... I can get started updating this site the way I want.

This is the 6th installment of my home page on the web.

The first dates way back in 1994, when I was a student at the School of Engineering and Research in Electronics and Computer Science, in Nimes, France (believe it or not, the french acronym for the school was E.E.R.I.E).

The second followed me during my doctorate in computer vision at the LGI2P institute (another eerie acronym). During that time, I have been also webmaster of the E.E.R.I.E website and had some success with personal pages about H.P.Lovecraft and the X-Files.

The third, fourth and fifth versions served as temporary pages when I left the institute in 1998. Since then, I moved from France to the U.S, I got married and took a couple of years to get started in my new life.

I now live in New Jersey with my wonderful wife, Lori, two adorable children, Steve and Jeff, and four big hairy cats, Cleo, Max, Neko and Merlin. I am now sharing my time between family, my work for the Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute and my hobby for 3D graphics and photographs.

The gallery now contains all images displayed at my Renderosity personal gallery.

After about 8 months of inactivity under a new hosting service, and about 5 years of inactivity at all, it is about time to wake up and do something with this website

So, here it is. A brand new, redesigned Linfa.net website, complete with a working gallery, cleaned up 3D graphics tutorials and small download area. Next will come the unavoidable 'blog' (which I am inaugurating right now) and finaly, the revival of old websites which I took offline after college and that were taking dust since...