Color Error Threshold Calculator (pt. 2)

/

As promised, I’ve got an update about the Color Error ThresholdCalculator. The utility is now in good enough shape to be posted along with the article about it that I recently finished for our TAGA chapter at Clemson.

For those that have no earthly idea what this is about, the calculator helps educators and industry members determine how much color variance is acceptable for a given color. When trying to reproduce a color over hundreds (or thousands) of impressions on a press, there will be some periodic change. The calculator tries to estimate a Delta E value that is acceptable.

See the Color Error Threshold Calculator and read the article.

Whoops! and the importance of Sites

/

For those reading along elsewhere, I apologize for the incorrect domainon the feed up until now. I forgot to set my Site’s domain within the admin interface, meaning everything syndicated pointed to example.com. This has been fixed and won’t be an issue in the future. Sorry for the additional spam.

To see the affected article (really, this time), Django and wxWidgets: A match made in heaven.

Django and wxWidgets: A match made in heaven

/

During the design phase for a color accuracy management system, mycompany decided to go with a client-server model rather than individual workstations that are more or less independent. The central server would be responsible for recording readings from the clients and doing various calculations on the data. We wanted most of the calculation to happen server-side in order to keep the clients very simple, and ease of communication from client to server was a point of emphasis.

Rather than develop a server product from scratch, we chose Django due to familiarity and being cross-platform/database-independent. On the client side, the GUI toolkit of choice was wxWidgets, as it runs well on a number of platforms and has unrestrictive licensing. It also helps that I had developed a few other applications using it.

With the underlying technologies for the client and server chosen, we needed a means for communication between the two. A number of XML and other serialized formats were looked at, but eventually JSON won out. Django includes simplejson, a Python JSON encoder/decoder. On the client side, the excellent wxJSON library fit into the mix very well.

A few weeks later, the decisions made thus far have more than paid off. I’ve developed a standard JSON message class that is implemented on both the client and server, mirroring one another. This “protocol” is used to quickly send data back and forth, and makes the source code on both sides very readable and compact.

Using Django to power the server product means that the whole system is easily managed from just about any browser, and the JSON message protocol I’ve developed may be used by customers to interact with the server from their own applications.

A lot of this is obvious stuff, but I figured I’d throw it out there for those that might be interested in a really great combination of technologies.

Guitar Hero with a Real Guitar?

/

It was only a matter of time before work started on something likeGuitar Hero that uses a real guitar as a “controller.” Guitar Rising by GameTank, Inc. is looking very interesting. Instead of using a little plastic, five-button controller, plug in your guitar of choice and get to it.

The advantage to this over Guitar Hero and Rock Band is that the player is actually learning how to play a real instrument, meanwhile enjoying many of the aspects that made this game’s predecessors so successful.

The only unfortunate thing is that Guitar Rising isn’t due out until late 2008, which more or less means early to mid 2009. This one is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

See the Official Site or the Gizmodo Article for more details.