This is going to sound silly, but it wouldn’t be the first time. I needed to create a digital mosaic from a piece of Illustrator art. Not one of those high tech picture mosaic, where a person’s portrait is rendered with a thousand little pictures. I am talking about the old school little chips of tile, cut and clipped and assembled piece by piece to create an image or design. Of course I have neither the time nor inclination to do one by hand and the nature of the job I am working dictated a digital solution.

PhotoShop has a mosaic filter which is more of a name than a tool. It will apply a mosaic-like texture over a photograph and I am sure (like most of the filters) it is a great place to start to develop random fields of texture from which to build or apply masks. But as a stand alone solution it sucks. Not very mosaic like. Alien Skin Software makes a plug-in for PhotoShop that has a mosaic effect, but it falls short as well. While definitely more mosaic like, it nver the less looks “canned” and delivers a buggy, gap filled, inconsistent mosaic patten.

AutoFX also has a plug-in and a stand alone product which really doesn’t do much more than PhotoShop’s basic mosaic filter (plus or minus a few bells and whistles.)

After studying a few mosaics I stumbled across a solution that is perfect. I am not sure why I didn’t go here before but I never really thought of it. It is a tool I use a lot — but over the course of years have never uncovered this gem hidden in a menu that I obviously glaze over in search of other things.

Corel Painter has a Mosaic tool, that is not strictly a filter but uses your pen to fill in or “paint” tiles. This can be done freehand, (like the real deal only faster and digital), or you can use a cloned color source and paint over top. What really makes this outstanding is the natural way you control the pattern of tiles. Because it works like a pen, you can control the direction, the overlap, the natural gapping, the color, everything! You can override a portion or a single tile. You control the grout color and width and it works as fast as you can draw a line.

After drawing my test mosaic, I dumpped it into photshop, attached a layer effect to give the tiles some dimention, and exported it out to my program 3D texture program. Very cool.

My client does some video production for SUNY schools in New York. He uses a web app from time time to time to create DVD case sleeves and disc art. (The application is actually a service offered by the company that “prints” the low run disc duplication and packaging products.) The web app is mostly a hobbled together, upload picture, stick it “here” and type over the top using our built-in web based text editor. While the system works, it is short on creativity and heavy on jumping through hoops.

He asked me to create something special for his lasted production and I dumped this together in Photoshop. The background is a combination of stock vector art that I modified a little in Illustrator and moved it over to PS for final text and image layout.

Last week I took a well deserved Road Trip with a buddy of mine. The impetus for the trip was a math conference I was planning on attending in Salt Lake City. (Math Conferences attract school districts and teachers, who in turn attract publishers, who in turn attract freelancers. See? The world does make sense!) My friend who is a salesman makes a pass by that direction on his route and we decided to combine expenses and drive down together. At the last minute the people I wanted to meet and greet at the conference pulled out and I was left with a road trip to nowhere. Instead of scratching it off my plate, we decided that a buddy trip was long overdue and reason enough to hit the pavement.

One of our stops was Twin Falls Idaho. Ironically The actual waterway “Twin falls” is damned down to a trickle for agricultural reasons. However, Shoshone falls is just up river and part of the same canyon system that is carved by the Snake River. When the spring thaw starts to hit, the falls are an explosion of water. Last week however it was biter cold and the wind was blowing down through the canyon at a clip to make eyes water. No thaw in sight. But the falls was still pretty awesome … so I took a picture

(No you can’t see the rest of the pictures. It was a guy trip. Hotel rooms, Cheeto’s in the bed, urinating in milk jugs, room service, and unabashed testosterone driven mayhem.)

As most of you know, those who have been following my various blogs, or classroom antics, for years; I am not a big fan of doing web work. Part of this is due to my non-linear thinking. I am not great at writing code. I can read it 99% of the time, but writing it from scratch is beyond me. Part of this is also due to to the nature of working inside of a box. I hate working inside of a box — espcially a box where I spend a lot of time designing something that will look different on any given browser on any given day on any given machine.

However, I am pressed from time to time to throw my hat into the web building ring. And I answer the call with a fair amount of teeth gnashing. The result of all this angst is that I am fairly competent in Dreamweaver and CSSedit. I use Transmit to direct traffic and modify small bits of code as I go, and Illustrator and Phtoshop (and sometimes Fireworks) to tie the visuals together.

Over the past two years, as more and more of my clients make the move to eCommerce type solutions in various forms, I have seen quite a few shopping cart back ends cobbled to website front ends. As most of these ventures have been budget driven (my clients want to test not invest) I have been forced to dive into another Web building tool; Zen Cart.

Zen Cart is a community driven, public licence (open source) eCommerce solution. It is by far the most convoluted piece of software that I have ever used. But, I am getting past the steep learning curve and I have recently built a basic eCommerce site in three days. The trick in this software is knowing where NOT to look for making changes to something that should be straight forward. The good news is, I may actually make some money on this project, well, I will as long as I can keep project creep at bay. (Another web eccentricity that I hate.)

This has been an awful test of my patience, but I have stumbled across a third party direction on how to fix my WP 2.5 problem. The generic and almost useless direction from WP forums was to reinstall all the files and make sure that they were copied correctly. I did this three times (there are hundreds of files) and found nothing. A blogger then wrote to check on the “wp-includes/media.php and wp-settings.php” and make sure they are intact (re-upload them). I did check on them and sure enough there were partial files there in the directory when compared to the original files. (You can deduce this by comparing file sizes, in this case 10k vs 16k). I immediately re-uploaded these files and cleared the cache and restarted the browser and all seems to be well.

So the bottom line is; Yes the forum support was right. Make sure the files were uploaded correctly and all is well. However, why did I have to dig off some third party site to focus on these particular files? Or is this just me protecting my ego? Anyway. it seems to work.

Here is the link to the FAQ that answered the question.

This is a portfolio site. I rather need the ability to upload and swap out pictures of work at will to suit my clients and particular whims. Although I have not had a problem updating my site with textual posts (there are two of them below.) I needed to upload a picture this morning and found this little message hanging in the wings to greet me:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wp_constrain_dimensions() in /home/content/v/a/n/vanettda/html/wordpress/wp-admin/includes/image.php on line 173

Fatal errors are never a welcome sight, but undaunted I tried, and tried again. I cleared cache and retried and double checked my pictures and retried. I tried to see if the files where in the site directory , (they are) but still nothing. From all points of attack anything that has to do with the new “Add media” section of WP 2.5 is borked.

I went to the forums and found a couple of threads that start to talk about the problem. But of course as soon as the thread starts … the moderator shuts it down (topic closed).

They do have this 2.5 Image/Media uploader problems check list.

I spent three hours of my workday methodically following the list. Out of all eight, none of them work.

I find it hard to believe that something as basic as adding pictures (via their NEW interface) was not beta tested unless … WE ARE the beta testers. It just goes to show, early adopters pay a price.

I am now in a VERY pissy mood.