Cave Introduction...
- "Cave?, these are some friends of ours."
- "Friends?, this is the Cave. Sorry! Ms. Cave for you!"
CS137 Help Session #1
1. Access to the Cave Room
You all have card access to the building and Cave
room. You can come in 24-7-365.
VERY IMPORTANT!! Check the Cave Calendar (http://www.ccv.brown.edu/cave-cal/month.html)
for reservations from other classes, demos, experiments, etc. You will
not be able to work at the Cave room during reserved times, so check
the Cave Calendar before heading over!
If you want to work at the Cave, and there's no
other event going on in there, go to the CS137
CAVE Google Calendar. If nobody has signed up for the times you
want to work, go to your personal
Google Calendar and sign up for a 30 minute slot (you can sign up
for a maximum of 3 30 minute slots in a row). By the way, since all of
you in the class have access to this calendar to modify events, BE
CAREFUL and don't move slots that other people has signed up for.
People that have signed up take precedence to walk-ins, so SIGN UP!
2. Rules to Cave-by
Try to keep the room as tidy as possible. I
know right now it's not a great example of tidiness, but with two whole
classes happening this semester it'll get much worse if you don't do
your part to clean up.
There's an official No-Food-No-Drink policy for the
room but, if we are all civilized about it, you can bring a coffee,
soda or the-like to sip while you work. Avoid chips or other crumbly
snacks. That stuff gets everywhere! The trash can is outside of the
room for a reason... don't leave empty cups or bottles around. Don't
bring breakfast/lunch/dinner into the room. It's dark and cold with no
windows anyway so, seat outside or in the beautiful entrance hall and
rest your eyes for a while!
Since, most of the time, you'll be working in
the actual Cave, as opposed to siting down in the computer monitors,
leave your shoes and bags somewhere that don't interfere with people
wanting to use the stations.
ALWAYS WEAR SOCKS when you go into the Cave.
The floor is another display screen, and sweaty feet don't really
improve its already pretty dirty state.
3. Importing you art work into CavePainting
You should bring in ONLY JPG images to use in
the Cave. They should be square and powers of 2 (256x256, 512x512,
...).
Images that you'd like to use as slides should be
named slide*.jpg, where you change the * for any name you want. If you
want a transparency mask for a slide, make a B&W image of the mask
with the same size as the correspondent slide and name it
alphamask*.jpg. For example alphamask-mycoolpic.jpg will be the mask
for slide-mycoolpic.jpg.
There are some special images that need to be of a
specific size (patterns*.jpg, color-swatch-table*.jpg, brushtips*.jpg).
You should have all received an email with an example of each of those.
Copy them into your favourite image editing software and make your own
of each one of them, keeping the first part of the name intact so
CavePainting knows what they are.
You can bring your art work in three formats:
USB memory stick, CD, DVD. It's a little tricky to put your stuff into
CavePainting, so read this instructions carefully. If you have
more than one image file, compress them onto a single zip file.
STEP 1: Go to the Windows
machine at the Cave and open the "CS137 FTP" folder from the Desktop
direct access.
STEP 2: Plug in your USB stick, or load your CD or DVD.
STEP 3: Drag and drop the stuff you want to use onto the FTP folder.
========== NOTE ==========
You can access the FTP folder from anywhere by going to the address
ftp://cs137:goredsox@ftp.cs.brown.edu. If you go there from a Windows
explorer window, you can just drag&drop stuff into it (like we
explained above). Using a regular FTP client, you can connect to
ftp.cs.brown.edu with the login cs137 and password goredsox.
========== END NOTE =========
Now let's put your stuff where CavePainting can
reach it. Unfortunately, CavePainting cannot access that FTP folder,
so we need to move it somewhere.
STEP 1: Go to the one of the Linux
workstations and log in.
STEP 2: Click on the "cs-front" direct access. This will open a text
shell where you can type commands.
STEP 3: Type "firefox &"
STEP 4: A browser will show up. Now go to the following address
ftp://cs137:goredsox@ftp.cs.brown.edu
STEP 5: You should see in there the file that you just put in (let's
say it's called "mycoolart.zip"). Right click on it and do "Save Link
as...". Click Save without changing anything.
STEP 6: IMPORTANT! Close the browser. You are done with it.
STEP 7: On the shell you opened on STEP 2, type the following command
without the double quotes:
"mv
mycoolart.zip $G/data/cavepaintings/mylogin"
where you
substitute "mylogin" with your login name.
STEP 8: Now we need to uncompress the zip file. Type "cd
$G/data/cavepaintings/mylogin; unzip mycoolart.zip"
STEP 9: You are done, but before going into the Cave, clean up the FTP
you used to transfer the files. Go to the Windows machine and, using the
"CS137 FTP", delete the files you just transferred.
========== ANOTHER NOTE ==========
There's a faster way to do this from a CS machine in the CIT. If you
have access to one of those, just do:
scp mycoolart.zip
cs-front.ccv.brown.edu:/ccvdisk2/dollar-g-cs137/tools/linux/data/cavepaintings/mylogin
... then you can
ssh cs-front.ccv.brown.edu
cd $G/data/cavepaintings/mylogin
unzip mycoolart.zip
========== ANOTHER END NOTE =========
Excellent! Now go to the next step to run CavePainting!
4. Getting your snapshots
While in CavePainting you can take snapshots
of the stuff in the front wall so you can bring examples to class or
show them somewhere. All your snapshots are saved on your personal
folder. To get them out of there you have to basically email them to
yourself. Follow these instructions:
STEP 1: Go to the one of the Linux
workstations and log in.
STEP 2: Click on the "cs-front" direct access. This will open a text
shell where you can type commands.
STEP 3: Type "firefox &"
STEP 4: Go to your favourite email account and create a new email. To
attach your files browse to this folder
/ccvdisk2/dollar-g-cs137/tools/linux/data/cavepaintings/mylogin/snapshot/
... and select the image you want to extract. All images are time
stamped.
STEP 5: Send the email!
========== ANOTHER NOTE ==========
Again, there's also a faster way to do this from a CS machine in the
CIT. If you have access to one of those, just do:
scp
cs-front.ccv.brown.edu:/ccvdisk2/dollar-g-cs137/tools/linux/data/cavepaintings/mylogin/snapshot/date_000.jpg
.
... then you can
========== ANOTHER END NOTE =========
5. Using the kiosk to run your
CavePainting session
So, you are all ready to go... you have your
shoes off, your brand new cool art in place, your iPod on, your metal
implants off so they don't fly off
in the magnetic field of the Cave (just kidding!), now, what do you do?
STEP 1: Go to the KIOSK touch screen and "Video Config". Hit the "ON"
button and the "cs-* cluster" button to activate the machines you are
going to run on.
STEP 2: Go to "CS137 Fall-2006 Programs"
STEP 3: Find your CavePainting button "mylogin_kuchora" and HIT IT JUST
ONCE!
STEP 4: Go to the Windows
machine and click on the white full-screen window so it comes up to the
front of the screen.
You are ready to go into the Cave, load your
previous models and be creative!!
After YOU SAVED YOUR WORK, hit Esc on the wireless keyboard, or go
to the Windows machine and hit
Esc to quit the application.
Happy Spelunking!