The Darkness Descendeth/Hollywood Here I Come!!

 

The Darkness Descendeth/Hollywood Here I Come!!

The week's required reflections: What did I do, and, what am I going to do next week?

The first thing I did was started off with starting to make the video script. As I worked on it, I kept getting stuck on how I needed to fix the layout of the website. It was bugging me, and it was bugging my first client, so I switched gears that day, and re-attacked the layout, worried it would spiral into another project of it's own. But I was wrong, and it only took a little bit. The program is super controllable, and everything is super organized. I did a spectacular job on extrapolating the features it's built with, so all I had to do was rearrange the components, written in JSON, inside the JavaScript, and I took a couple out that weren't going to work out anyway, and I still had every type of component demonstrated in the interface, and everything fit perfectly on all the screen resolutions we use. It's even been reported to work on an iPhone screen. So with just a little effort, the layout was all fixed up, I showed Client A, and I took it to client E and called and made phone appointments with clients F-H. Meanwhile someone from a web development company in India saw that I bought the domain name ValuBlast.Us and called me to ask if they could develop it. I said 'no, sorry, but while you're on the phone...' and got them to check out the site! They said they thought it was pretty neat looking and well designed! That's from someone on the other side of the world, working at a professional web development company. I thought that was kind of cool. The first thing he said was, oh, so it's for school then, since I stuck the CSUMB logo all over it. Then the phone interviews with the appraisers happened today, and it was great to get some really wise insights from some of my ex-co-workers in the real estate valuation field.

So after I got the layout fixed, I was able to return to writing the video script. With some good feedback from the instructor, I think I was able to get something like what was expected articulated. That wasn't what I was worried about though, what I was worried about was taking on the monstrosity that video editing can become.

And I wasn't wrong at first, but I was wrong in the end. Making the video started off just as bad or worse than I thought it would. Crashing, corrupting, deleting progress, all non-good things happening. I even had the whole thing deleted once or twice right at first somehow. OpenShot was so much worse than I remembered it being. This was like last Wednesday or Thursday or something. But it was so bad, I started remembering that when I put the OS on, that I was using that day, I had installed it maybe a couple months ago, and the first thing I had done, then, was try out some guitar software - that added sound components to the system. That got me thinking, because OpenShot really just did not want to go. I was playing back clips to cut them, and it was so scratchy, even after optimizing the settings, I thought I was going to go bald before the weekend. It was so bad, it made me realize, something must be wrong - it can't be that bad. I've used OpenShot before, and when I did, it actually started to grow on me a little bit, it's almost fun, if the computer doesn't explode from overload.

The computer I have has 64Gb of RAM - no video card - but still - with that much RAM, anything should work, I would think. In this day and age, that is currently a lot of RAM, like an excessive amount. I have that much because it's good for having virtual boxes. So I thought, I might just try a different OS. I learned about OpenShot from using Knoppix, which always worked pretty well, but it's over a year old now. I got used to using Mint, for being actively developed and for working like I'd expect it to, and for being based on Debian. Mint works super good, and always does everything I need it to do. But not OpenShot, after installing GuitarX & Pipewire I guess. So, trying not to get too sidetracked, I looked up 'video editing distributions' and selected two interesting looking prospects: IO Linux and Ubuntu Media. I thought it was actually a shot in the dark, trying a different OS, but I lucked out, and it was the way to go it turned out. So I torrented them both, and gave both of them a shot. IO was super awesome, but it was too awesome, and I couldn't flow in it. Double and triple deep menus made the zillions of options it has so nested I couldn't see what all the options were without digging every mouse click. Everything was sort of a - how-do-you... but then I tried Ubuntu Media - and I'm not kidding - all bad luck was out the window immediately. The OS both worked super great - as far as how I knew how to use it - how stuff worked - where it is - mostly just like Mint - but - it comes with ultra-light video editing software built-in. I hadn't used that software yet, but apparently it is currently one of the heavy hitters: it's called Kdenlive. I could do tracks, transitions, fade-ins, everything and more I could do with OpenShot - but it was super-light-weight feeling - and when I was using OpenShot before, the more stuff I added, the more it got harder and harder to use. Kdenlive is still open on my computer right now, I never closed it, it's that lightweight. It doesn't even seem to take up any memory at all, a night-and-day difference from what I was experiencing with OpenShot.

And I've found using the software sufficiently easy and searchable if it's not. Adding video in to the video is super easy. I even tried to magnify my face, and I got it with just a little effort. But it was a little blurry, from zooming in, so I threw that trick out.

I finished the MIPS homework I mentioned last week, did a lab, did an architecture book-homework, and hit every deadline. I have a little work left in the video, talking about what platforms and technologies I used, and what I learned from the project, and prospective future features. One thing I definitely learned was how to use and understand session variables. I've always avoided them, but in this project I finally made great use of them to save the data sheets in between requests. Without session variables, the requests would have been much, much larger, unnecessarily. With session variables, it's done correctly, saving the data sheet and sending back and forth only what is necessary.

More things I will get done this week are, for starters, a final test in my Architecture class tomorrow evening, and a 'required' sheet for that test. I got to the point in MIPS I could nearly flow it seems like, and I almost like programming in it. Too bad it's - I don't think - the right choice for any particular programming project. Maybe if I need some very optimized routine, it will be good to have - and it's definitely added understanding as far as how these computers work. Taking these classes online, studying how computers work, I think it's funny - we're using computers to study computers.

So the exact to-do list this week, as I know it right now is, short video additions on technologies used, learned and future features, ILP formatting fixes, completing part 3 of the project paper report, one more lab in architecture class, one more homework on cache trace exercises (pretty easy) in Architecture class (written out in LaTeX, which is even getting easier for me now) attend and present at the capstone festival on Saturday, add the completed project report to the ILP site, complete a capstone portfolio assignment, request my transcript for the recent four classes to be sent from Cabrillo, order graduation stuff on the eighth, and keep checking my email to make sure I don't miss anything, and also complete one or two more journal entries.