Linden LAN » Software

Adobe Should Grow A Pair

Brian — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 02:24:39 +0000

So according to Daring Fireball Apple’s new iPhone Developer Program License Agreement effectively bans Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler.

CS5 is thisclose to release and the iPhone compiler is the flagship feature in this version of Flash. They’re pretty much royally fucked.

Plus Apple has already made its position clear on Flash. Personally, since I’ve never been a slave to brands, I don’t have much of a stake in either company unless one of my mutual funds happens to invest in one. Yet, the way I see it, Adobe can really give Apple the big “Fuck You” if it wanted to, simply by no longer producing any of its Adobe software for OS X. Now seeing how designers and design houses invest heavily in Macs simply to run Adobe software, should that platform no longer become available, what do you think is going to happen? Is the entire graphic design, web, print, and publishing industries going to abandon all its invested know-how and simply pick a new defacto industry standard, or are they going to switch to Windows?

On “Modern CSS Typography and Font Styling Examples”

Brian — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:28:36 +0000

I read an article titled, “Modern CSS Typography and Font Styling Examples”, and though mistakes and omissions weren’t major, I felt compelled to comment on them. My comment got so long, I figured a quick blog post would be better than a long-winded comment.

Smallcaps is not the same as uppercase. Even if you can simulate smallcaps using uppercase letters (similar to simulating italics or bold), fonts that employ smallcaps are specifically created to maintain proper balance and weight.

Furthermore, it’s important to use glyphs as intended with proper formatting. This is a small detail, but in the CNN example, a double-hyphen is incorrect. An emdash should be used instead and without the spaces. Many CMSes and blogging software, WordPress included, are able to convert typographic shorthand like double– and triple-hyphens and convert them to their proper glyphs. An old but timeless article: Typography Matters covers this topic. Also it wouldn’t hurt to look at print style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style.

Also not mentioned but useful to know is to make sure that when using justified text (most everything is on the web is flush-left), that it should be used in combination with hyphenation. See wp-Typography for example.

As for the top-10 list (I disagree that Dreamweaver should be on the list), it’s important that the imagery is consistent. The Photoshop icon sticks out like a sore thumb. Also if the list is ordered, it would make sense to provide some way to indicate that it is ordered like numbers. That sets it apart from an itemized list.

I like Georgia since it is one of the better looking serif fonts among the web core fonts. However, since this is supposed to be a post about modern typography, the author should have mentioned upcoming font-embedding technology that would allow the use of much better looking fonts than Georgia.

Hyphenation!

Admin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:04:43 +0000

Do you like typography? Are you tired of ragged right text? Do you have a WordPress blog? Go here now! wp-Typography is the merger of wp-Typogrify and, more importantly, wp-Hyphenate. I do LaTeX typesetting, and as a result, I’ve acquired an appreciation for properly formatted text. If you ever tried using the CSS property text-align, you inevitably are disappointed with the results because it resembles nothing like what LaTeX can produce. You often have to make your text eye-jarringly wide to make it useable, and that doesn’t always work. This is because the browser lacks built-in support for hyphenation. This plugin makes up for this browser deficiency by inserting hyphenation hints, known as soft-hyphens, which the browser does understand. The algorithm is based on the one used in TeX to boot! Brilliant!

Use .htaccess To Password Protect All But The Index File

Brian — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:14:14 +0000

I helped deploy a Magento store today, but the client did not have all the products entered in the database, and won’t be ready to launch that part of the site for another month. So they wanted a “Coming Soon!” splash page to be at the subdirectory where the store is and password protect everything else. To do that I had to reconfigure the .htaccess file.

First I needed to chage the default index file. That’s simple. Change…

DirectoryIndex index.php

to…

DirectoryIndex index.html

Next I needed to password protect the site. That accomplished by using htpassword to setup the users and groups, followed by adding the following directives to the end of the .htaccess file.

AuthType Basic
AuthName "protected area"
AuthUserFile /home/68571/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /home/68571/.htgroup
Require group group
Require user username

That will password protect everything. Finally, I need to allow the index.html file for the splash page.


  Allow from all
  Satisfy any

The first regex will match against “subdir/”, the second regex matches “subdir”, and the third matches “subdir/index.html”. That’s it.

How To Add A Meetup Calendar To Google Calendar

Brian — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 05:13:29 +0000

I stumbled upon Meetup.com while looking for some local groups that matched my interests. I noticed that each group has its own calendar. Since I hack Google Calendar, I was wondering how to get a Meetup calendar on Google Calendar, rather than manually adding events by hand. Here’s how…

Login into Google Calendar
On the left hand side, under My Calendars, click Add and a drop down menu should appear
Click Add by URL
In a new tab/window, go to a Meetup group
Click on Calendar
Scroll to the bottom of the page, until you see Subscribe
Right click the iCal link and select Copy Link Location if you use Firefox (a similar option should be available for other browsers)
Go back to the Google Calendar tab/window
Paste the link in the Public Calendar Address field and click the Add button
Click OK to return to your Google Calendar

If all goes well, the events from the Meetup group should appear on your calendar after a short while. It takes time for Google Calendar to load the remote calendar. This will work for any iCal address you find on the web.

Pidgin Went Cuckoo

Brian — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:41:38 +0000

I was a big fan of Trillian because during my 15 year history of using the internet—it’s even longer if you count my bulletin-board days—I’ve acquired multiple IM accounts from different providers. I’m in the process of transitioning my multiple computers away from proprietary OSes that aren’t necessarily worth the money spent. (That’s not to say there aren’t OSes worth paying for.) However, since Trillian is platform dependent, it was out. I needed a multi-network IM client that would work on multiple platforms. Enter Pidgin. It fit all my needs, except…

Despite being a relatively robust release, Pidgin 2.0 certainly wasn’t bug free. I managed to encounter a major bug. In my particular situation, I reorganized some MSN contacts into different groups on my laptop (Xubuntu) after organizing them on my desktop (Windows). This caused a synchronization problem:

Buddy list synchronization issue in xxxxxx[at]hotmail[dot]com (MSN)
blah_blah[at]hotmail[dot]com on the local list is inside the group “Individuals” but not on the server list. Do you want this buddy to be added?

Unfortunately, no matter how you answer the dialog Pidgin crashes. Sometimes Pidgin just pukes at startup. Other times just trying to disable/enable the account causes a crash. Pidgin is just hosed. If you can manage to delete the account (because even attempting that can crash the client), then the problem goes away. However, recreating the account in hopes of starting from scratch doesn’t work. That’s because deleting the account doesn’t purge the data files of the old data.

The good news, the Pidgin developers have already fixed this bug. The bad news, there are two dozen or so more bugs to squash before 2.0.1 is released. Fortunately, I managed to find a workaround. Since the problem is a corrupt buddy list, you just simply have to delete the blist.xml file. Pidgin is smart enough to rebuild the file. This won’t prevent future corruption but at least the workaround is mostly painless.