The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
.:1:47:39 AM:.
Finally!
I finally figured out how to find out the total space used inside a directory. Before you could type ls -l to find out the details of each file in the directory (including their size) but not the grand total. If you type in du -b this will give you the total size used by the files in the directory in bytes du -k in kilobytes, du -m in megabytes. Probably the people who needed to know already knew and now I'm one of them!
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
.:9:39:51 PM:.
The importance of masks...
In Photoshop and Fireworks you have the ability to create masks. Masks are just that-you can screen out sections of pictures that you don't want. Say you had a portrait of someone and you wanted to take out the background. In the old days I used to take the eraser and slowly etch out each part. Nowadays I create a path to outline the shape I want and then use the handles to modify the curve properly. If you get used to it, it's much better than the old erasing method because if you make a mistake you just readjust your path!
Despite the busy schedule of studying and prepping, I managed to squeeze out another small website. This time for a play named 'Fallen' written by my friend Roland. Of note is the use of FIR image menu system (I believe this is the first official time, most of the sites before used a combination text and transparent gifs to achieve the same effect), the main logo and Roland's picture were cropped using masks. Also on that site... if you use Internet Explorer you will see that the scrollbars have changed colours-again a first. Some of you may ask why include it at all? In the end the goal is to make the owner happy with all the possible means at your disposal. If that means having to use Internet Explorer... fine. :P
