RIT to Unveil Major Commitment to Hockey Arena Campaign Tonight – RIT News.
Bill Destler, president of Rochester Institute of Technology, will take to the ice of Frank Ritter Arena tonight to announce details of the latest and most significant gift to Tiger Power Play—the Campaign for RIT Hockey. His message will include an update on the overall status of fundraising activities for the new facility.
A Close up of “Skyline” by Tony Taj
This is just a superb hypertext art idea.
Tony Taj is an artist and designer from Seattle. He is taking the stories he puts in his urban and skyline landscapes into the digital realm by embedding QR codes into his artwork.
via QR Codes Embedded in Paintings | GeekDad | Wired.com.
(Embedded video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLQeqMaHVYs)
I love From the Earth to the Moon, especially this episode (Spider). This scenario demonstrates something I run into with software development all the time. Frequently, the engineers or developers working on a product come up with novel or unorthodox ideas that project leads are reluctant to go along with. In those situations, sometimes it’s best to just hammer out a prototype and demo the idea.
Just as happens in the video, sometimes work on an “unauthorized” prototype should be done outside of normal paid time, if for no other reason then as protection in case it doesn’t fly. It’s also important to understand that the lead must also sell the idea to his or her superiors, so even if you convince the lead, it may not go anywhere. I would imagine that the manager here had a hard time selling this to NASA.
I’m not saying, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission”, but if done correctly, helping them see it can produce better software and make a developer a hero in the process.
A neat feature of QR Codes is that they have error correction built in, so even if a fairly large portion of the code has been obscured or destroyed, most readers can still read it. Some QR Code creators out there will even let you tweak the error correction level (less error correction means smaller codes).
Since this correction exists, you can add an image to a code and the code will remain completely functional. I just found a page which will do this all in one shot for you; check it out: http://qr.odoa.eu/Web-QR-Code-Logo.aspx Sure, you can just create a code and paste an image yourself, but this is a bit easier.
The site is in German, but it’s still easy to figure out what’s going on. The code to the left is a shortened URL which will redirect to the ShareMyApps market page. (http://goo.gl/nGJKb -> http://market.android.com/details?id=com.mattlary.shareMyApps). The larger code created by the full link works fine, but less data in a QR code is usually better. The shortened URL could also be used to track scan-through rates (I may have made up that term).
As QR Codes are popping up everywhere, this is one of the many ways to increase scan-through rates for codes; it could also be used to hint at the purpose or content of the code.