Gregs Blog

I plan to explore the art of composing music, through the Apple program GarageBand. I plan to collaborate with two other people in producing a song. To learn more about the program, i will be using information from several website tutorials.

These will include:

http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#garageband

http://homerecording.about.com/od/garagebandtutorials/ss/getting_started.htm

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Garageband_Quick_Tutorial

http://www.macjams.com/article.php?story=20040329063101758

Through these, we will be able to master the program, and hopefully produce a great song.

One observed social impact that came from my database is the ease of use for people trying to find one of the recipes. Instead of searching through boxes and binders of recipes they can go to the database and just search. It is much faster and easier then before. A projected social impact is that if recipes of wholesome foods are posted in an easy to use database hopefully people will start cooking better foods and stop eating things that are fast but extremely unhealthy.

My recipe database was tested by two beta testers and my end user. One of my testers was a fellow student who tried to use the embedded search feature on my database. The tester said it was very cumbersome to use and did not bring back the expected results. They were a qualified tester because they have a lot of experience with search engines and finding things on webpages. My other tester was my dad and he was checking consistency in the recipes. He saw something that i over looked. The database entries that had no numeric values in certain recipes still showed up but with no amount. He is a qualified tester because he has lots of experience with spreadsheets and databases in his work experience. One end user, my mom, tested the database and said she would like it to be more graphic. She is a qualified tester because she will be one of the people using this product so it should be tailored to her needs. I found three changes that i could make to the database that would make it easier to use. One was i put a new search feature in that was more consistent and worked better. Another was changing the code so entries that were zero did not show up. And the last was applying backgrounds and skins to make it more graphic which helps make it easier to read.

1) The article is about companys that make printers and copiers that have secret watermarking so that the government can track what printer printed a certain document. The IT component is printers and the database used to track all the printers. Some potential solutions would be for the companys to remove the watermark, or, for the government to be completely transparent about their use of the the data, as in, what they are looking for and what they want to track.

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/02/eu-commissioner-printer-tracking-may-be-human-rights-violation.ars

FOCAL LENGTH: How close the camera appears to be in respect to the subject
EXPOSURE: Balance between light and time
APERTURE: Controls light
SHUTTER: Controls time
STOP: Measurement of movement when you adjust the shutter or aperture
DEPTH OF FIELD: The area in front and behind thats in focus
WIDE: <35mm; wide F.O.V.
NORMAL: 35mm to 65mm; normal F.O.V.
TELEPHOTO: >65mm; narrow F.O.V.

Today I looked at how i might organize my database i.e. how i might split up the different ingredients to make a well formatted recipe. Overall it went well.

I am going to change my project. My change will be from a linux database to a database of all my family recipes.

My plan is to learn how to build websites that have mutiple components from the ground up. After that i would implement the new skills i learned to build my own website about linux software.

My two possible solutions for the problem of not having access to a stable operation system are a pamphlet which will be distributed throught the school; my other will be a website that is a database will a plethora of information in different forms. The pamphlet will be good because it can be easily distributed without the use of technology which some end-users may not have access to. One disadvantage is that no links or direct downloads will be available from a pamphlet and they would need some other way to get access to the thing they would actually use. Also a pamphlet will be very hard to update when new information comes along. On the other hand a website will be able to have much more data available and be easy to update but could not be accessed by everyone. For my project I have chosen to make a website. This decision is based on given advantages and surveying of end-users. A website is a much better solution because of the updatability and the larger amount of data that can be given to the end-user. Also a website is the preference of the end-users i surveyed.