Nigel Thornberry: Keep Calm and Blarghargh

You’re welcome, Internet.

If, like me, you had font problems after applying Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update, there’s a simple solution: delete the font cache. You can easily delete the font cache by using the free tool OnyX—which also does much else besides.

For me, the issue became clear when I went to look at a job in Adobe Illustrator. Opening the file should have triggered Extensis Suitcase Fusion to load a particular font, but it didn’t. In fact, none of my fonts could be previewed in Fusion: instead was a note stating “Font Unavailable”. Once I deleted the font cache & restarted, everything was fine.

With the release of Portal 2, Valve have published this shirt, filled with Internet Meme Win:

Aroooo TAKATAKATAKATAKATAKA

This is totally inspired. Oh, and Portal 2? GOODBYE, PRODUCTIVITY.

Before I started off on my own, I worked for what seemed like an eternity for a graphic design firm. The art director would give incredibly vague orders & was outraged when we didn’t read his mind. I think a four-year-old would have been a better boss.

Step forward, Tiny Art Director! Your commands are far clearer, and your criticism are more reasoned! Example:

The Brief: I want you to draw me a dinosaur! Not a scary one! He's taking a bath.

The Critique: I don’t like him.

Job Status: Rejected.

Wow! It’s been quiet here. That’s for a lot of reasons, but partly because a) I’ve been getting over a long-term illness that had really had an effect on my work (which is now gone, thankfully) and b) my Mac suffered a nasty failure. It experienced weird symptoms, which were fixed when the graphics card & RAM riser boards were replaced. Good thing I got AppleCare for the machine.

In any event, while the machine was in the process of breaking, I realised that my local development databases weren’t backed up. Why? Because Apple’s Time Machine would want to back up hulking single-file monstrosities every time you modified it slightly. In my haste (and panic), I made an imperfect backup. When the databases were restored onto the machine, they wouldn’t work. I could see that they were there, the databases were listed, but attempts to access them inevitably resulted in failure.

It turns out to have been a permissions issue (Errno 13 in MySQLspeak: I now know that gzipped tarballs won’t preserve permissions). It took some hunting to get to the root of the problem, but if anyone else experiences this problem, the answer is that the MySQL data directory is likely to be owned by root, when it needs to be owned by MySQL. In my example, I’m assuming that the data directory is the one specified in a MacPorts installation:

  
    sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /opt/local/var/db/mysql5
  

Restart your MySQL server, and everything should work!

Uhh, no thanks, I’ve lost my appetite.

So, who thinks that the designers were pranking the client?

Apple iOS Veep Scott Forstall; and,

Professional creep Steve Buscemi?

By “Professional Creep”, of course, I mean he frequently plays creeps. Whatever, this has been digging at me for a long time.

So I’m catching up on True Blood—which has generally been good—when it decided to not only jump the shark, but perform a particularly frenetic fandango mid-vault.

I wish I knew, Jean-Luc. I wish I knew.

The artist nina Maria Kleivan dressed up babies as famous dictators. Kleivan says she’s exploring the meaning of evil:

Anyone who doesn’t think that kids can be dictators doesn’t have a child.

As Kleivan says, “We all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil.”

Graydon Carter, founder of Spy Magazine; and,

Bozo the Clown?

Oh, Graydon—how your children cannibalise you…

First of all, happy new year! Let’s hope that 2011 will be better than 2010.

Longtime visitors to the blog may possibly remember that Ian released a freeware time-tracker called MateWatch—software that helped track your time when using the text editor TextMate. As you might have guessed, it’s now pretty much abandonware, although with Nick’s advice you may well be able to get it up and running again. But you should question whether the effort is worth it: it really is dead, unless someone is interested in picking it up & maintaining it.

I’m mentioning this because I noted in the web stats a few days ago a visitor from a website that’s selling a new time-tracking app for the Mac. Lapsus takes a very novel approach, and from a user’s perspective, it’s a model of orderliness: it polls the currently-opened window every 3 seconds & logs it. You can “train” it to recognise open windows in a given directory as associated with a given project. This is a really nice take on the idea, since set-up/maintenance is usually one of the most frustrating aspects of time-tracking packages. And Lapsus’ programmer, John Gallagher, claims that people have a tendency to a) forget to turn on the time-tracking software; and b) forget to turn it off. I’m certainly guilty of this & I’m certainly not alone.

Being shiny new software, it’s got its share of bugs. At first I couldn’t create a project for love or money, as Lapsus kept crashing. However, today it has magically allowed me to create some projects, so I’m off on my evaluation. Also, it appears that an open document in Photoshop CS5 wasn’t being recognised as being, well, open. And it could do with the ability to sort one’s projects in alphabetical order, rather than in the order by which one arbitrarily created them.

But, as I said, it’s new. What’s important here is that Lapsus is a very refreshing take on a perpetual problem & may well help you be more careful with your time-tracking. I’ll be curious to see how it polls when I’m just playing about on the computer—perhaps I should have a project called “Faffing”. Well done, John!

Update (24 January 2011): I’ve just received a message from John that version 1.0 of Lapsus is out & it addresses all the bugs I mentioned here. It’s now time to evaluate it in earnest :)

The good people at Mule Design have presented a very good run-down of how clients can make great design feedback. It’s really worthwhile because, in part, it explains that the client is not supposed to decide whether she likes any given design but, rather, is supposed to decide whether it helps her sell her widgets. The full thing is worth a careful read.

It also begs us to stop thinking of designers as “creatives”—something I must admit I’ve (inchoately) thought for some time. “Creatives” don’t want, and don’t like, feedback: they’re prima donnas. Design is a business, and it must meet business needs: otherwise it’s a pointless exercise in spending money.

In any event, we tend to be a bit more informal about presentations & feedback at Argument from Design: we help our clients develop a visual vocabulary, but haven’t yet needed much formal “training”. If we do, we know where to send them for it!

Babies are like aliens. And some of them are terrifying aliens, as was mine. From Fail Blog:

Well, it felt that way to me

So I’m getting bored with the way I look. It’s time for a change. Here’s the beginning of an occasional series I’d like to call:

Take Me Seriously—I Am A Professional

First, the suit:

The “Accordion Suit”, from Poorly Dressed

Then, the glasses:

The informant from Bullitt

Stylin’!

A brilliant idea: take the wonderful photographs found on The Big Picture & add teh funneh. As The Big Caption’s mission statement says, it’s

A complement to The Big Picture wherein Jokes and Statements are made using Typography.

They’ve not been publishing much recently: I hope the Copyright Police haven’t shut them down. Here are two of my favourites:

Fuck you, flowers—how does it feel to get kicked right in the face?

And, equally strong:

Hipsters, Start Your Photocopiers

Heh—it’s funny 'cause it’s true!