It seems that GTD, that favourite of serial procrastinators, is being supplanted in people’s affections.

That should be reversed, so he could see it in a mirror.

From the ever-fantastic Photoshop Disasters blog, someone from the Globe forgot to replace that trust standby placeholder text with the real content.

Apple’s latest release of OS X is version 10.6, or “Snow Leopard”. For most users, upgrading isn’t a worry: you upgrade, and everything just works. Developers, however, will find that upgrading is more haphazard, as the environment has switched from 32-bit to 64-bit. Plus, you have to find enough downtime in which to upgrade & deal with any issues that arise. For me, that downtime finally occurred over the Christmas/New Year’s holiday period. In a hazy, and admittedly alcohol-induced moment, I rashly decided to install 10.6 around midnight a couple of days ago, forgetting that I hadn’t fully thought out what to do with all the Rails apps I had on my machine.

So here are some notes for when/if you want to take the plunge to 10.6 (which I recommend that you do). Matt Aimonetti’s August 2009 article on the Riding Rails blog contains very good general information. What I took away from it is that Snow Leopard requires 64-bit versions of your Unixy software: remaining 32-bit isn’t an option, as I’d hoped (from a position of laziness, that is, prone). So you’ll need to recompile not just all your MacPorts goodies, but of equal importance, all your gems.

Matt suggests that upgrading ain’t that bad. In my experience: lies, all lies. Virtually nothing he or the commenters suggested worked for me, so like some crazed frontiersman, I had to forge my own path. I blew everything away & started afresh. Here’s what I did:

• Before anything: export your databases (or at least have their contents close to hand in some fashion);
• Start your MacPorts dance, installing/upgrading to the latest MacPorts & then installing all the software you need;
• I had a lot of trouble updating MySQL. The tips in this article did me a real treat when nothing else worked;
• A little titbit of info: apparently you can have problems with the MySQL gem, as apparently it wants to compile as 32-bit. You’ll have to force it to compile as 64-bit:
  sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5 --with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5 --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysql_config
• Re-create your databases & use your db exports to populate them;
• For Rails apps that have gems in vendor/gems (thanks to Ian for this), you’ll need to recompile them for 64-bit: rm -rf vendor/gems/* ; sudo rake gems:install ; rake gems:unpack ; rake gems:build
• For Rails apps that don’t have gems in vendor/gems (boo! hiss!), the situation is more hit & miss. The easiest option is to just install new versions of all your old gems. However, I wanted to take this as an opportunity to prune through the thicket, hence my slight pain. If you follow my lead here, just try to run your app & see what gem is missing: then install it.

The end result: when the sites popped up, I was stunned by how quickly they appeared. In addition, the whole compiling MacPorts apps was shockingly quick.

Don’t issue invoices when jet-lagged.

So says ICANN. How long will it be before we start seeing phishing scams for visiting Microsoƒt.com?

And, more importantly, how many people will fall for it?

All joking aside, this could open up a huge jug of hurt for end-users. End-users have become completely used to a basic basic Latin character set & are wholly unaware of the variations that can occur. Whilst my example above is blindingly obvious, less obvious examples—such as using the dot-less ‘i’ in Turkish— could cause no end of problems. Don’t get me wrong, this is a necessary step; it’s merely a question of how we cope with the change.

That the makeup department did something horrible to that dog.

Well, it may be holiday time for many people, but it hasn’t been for us. We’ve been up to (and past) our eyeballs in work, particularly graphic design work, for the past several months. One of the items we’ve been working on is this.

The “Culture & the Mind” Project assembles individuals from a wide range of academic fields to investigate different subjects. This year the focus is “Folk Psychology”: what we, in our everyday lives, do when we attribute beliefs or desires onto other people. One of the questions the conference (and the Project in general) will attempt to do is to examine what aspects of folk psychology are innate, and what change depending upon one’s cultural upbringing.

The client had a great desire to have fun with the poster, in particular to hark back to 60s & early 70s design. I took the opportunity to quote that, but also to pay homage to one of my all-time favourite graphic designers, Steven R. Gilmore. You can only go so far quoting Jefferson Airplane & Skinny Puppy posters, though: psychedelic typography & brain imagery act as visual hooks to make the viewer take a closer look at the content of the conference.

I spent last week shivering away with the Swine Flu. It wasn’t fun; but I knew something was coming & accordingly shut down jobs until I felt better, notifying the clients of the issue. This is planning: you do it because you know what’s coming.

Whilst convalescing, I read a fascinating discussion over on Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog. In this article, Zeldman publicised the fact that David Berlow of the Fount Bureau was proposing a new permissions table to OpenType. The idea is to be able to embed fonts into websites via @font-face whilst protecting the foundries from piracy. A permissions table would stop the font from, say, being downloaded & used elsewhere. Currently, only Microsoft’s EOT format allows for any protection from misusing the technology; it’s been around since 1997 (and it feels like it). Safari (for some time), Firefox (as of 3.5) & Opera (as of 10) support standard, naked type formats: Firefox 3.5 has just been released & Opera 10 will be released any day now. One may assume this is why there’s a sudden flurry of activity from foundries about the subject.

The name “David Berlow” may be familiar to you: he was interviewed in A List Apart back in April, where he started making this permissions idea & I wrote about that interview, and some of the reaction to it. Mark Pilgrim smacked it down pretty thoroughly, and with good cause: Mr Berlow’s suggestion would require that every computer on earth be altered. Not to mention virtually every font as well.

This isn’t the only problem, however. In the comments to Zeldman’s article I pointed out that it’s far too late for foundries to make such proposals: all modern browsers now support @font-face. To expand upon what I wrote there, the time for making these proposals should have been made back at least in 1998, when the @font-face was definitely part of the W3C’s CSS2 specification. And remember, if 1998 is the date of the recommendation, you can be goddamn sure that they were talking about it for years beforehand.

I apparently irked Berlow. He became quite defensive that until recently, foundries didn’t know how browser vendors would deal with fonts; and moreover, like other industries, he just wants to protect his IP. At first I thought that, in my feverish state, I had been a dick, but looking back, he simply didn’t get what I was saying. No matter the mechanism by which a browser deals with a font, @font-face has been with us for over a fucking decade. Foundries have had plenty of time to do something about it.

The best scenario for some sort of “webfont”, protected format would be to strongarm all the browser vendors into supporting it; suppress all the browsers out there that now support naked fonts; update every browser with webfont-“enabled” (one might say DRM-crippled) versions; and then hope for the best. Good luck with that. Let me reiterate what I’ve said before: this horse has long since bolted. If the foundries have pursued actions, they’ve been very slow and, worse, ineffective.

And as for Berlow’s concern about protecting his IP: well, they’ve had at least a decade to think about how to do this. A less charitable man than myself might think they were hoping this whole “fonts on the web” thing would just go away. Instead, they should have planned for this: full @font-face support was coming, and they knew it.

So bring on TypeKit. Where of course you’ll rent & not simply pay for the fonts you use. I have sympathy when people want to protect their IP, but Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket, they’ll do anything to stop use from being straightforward.

That the recent brouhaha over the death of XHTML2 is totally overdone. After all, the spec was so fucking obtuse & abstract that no browser vendor was going to implement it.

I mean, the authors wanted to get rid of the IMG tag, fer chrissakes!

So Obama makes a speech at the University of Cairo (an excellent speech, in fact). You can always control what you say, but you can’t control who attends to your saying it:

Palestinian militants from the Popular Resistance Committee watch the televised speech of US President Barack Obama in Gaza City, Thursday, June 4, 2009.

Click on that link. You’ll not be sorry.

Well, I may like to dabble in the occasional Separated at Birth series, but Totally Looks Like has some particularly incredible juxtapositions:

Totally Looks Like nails the uncanny resemblance between Quentin Tarantino & Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley

Alas, poor Quentin. It’s been hard to take him seriously for a long time now, but this may be the final nail in the coffin.

Could humans at any point in history, given the right information, construct an electronic communication network? To test this hypothesis, Substitute Materials will attempt to build a functional electric battery and telegraph switch from materials found in the wilderness, using no modern tools except information from the internet. The telegraph will be a first step towards an ahistorical internet.

What the author doesn’t say is that he’s doing this in the wilderness while wearing a business suit.

And that he couldn’t find any flint to make a good ax—he had to order it from the Internet.

I foresee much time spent reading this site.

Apparently I’m merely one of many, many people who form the target market for the new Star Trek movie. The movie returns to the original TV characters: Kirk, Spock & many others; and it winningly creates a late 60s retro feel. It’s got a lot of little things in it that would appeal to someone who watched the original series—one of the first to die is even a red shirt. What I didn’t expect was an emotional response & the need to explore the meaning of that response.

Establishing My Nerd Credentials

It’s difficult to convey the magnitude of the effect the show had on me as a child. Like many people my age, I happened across Star Trek in my 70s childhood, when it was syndicated & run on TV daily after school. I was immediately hooked. Growing up in rural Connecticut, I ran around in a yellow velour shirt with a genuine! Star Trek patch sewn onto it. My mother was even kind enough to sew gold stripes on the sleeves to complete my fantasy of captaining a starship. The “aliens” I’d encounter would inevitably be my dog or whatever bug or snake was unfortunate enough to cross my path.

When I was in second grade (around age 6), there were two “gangs” in my school: the “Star Trek” gang, led by me as my hero, Captain Kirk; and the “Planet of the Apes” gang, led by an appropriately monobrowed kid I only remember as Joseph. Our Enterprise was a (to me) huge tree behind the school, from which we’d explore the universe; the Apes gang sat on a bunch of rocks farther away from the school and screamed at passers-by, perpetually threatening them. I look back upon that and marvel how we expressed contrasting visions of the future: one utopian, where the world united to explore the universe; the other dystopian, where humanity had been nearly destroyed & ruled by creatures representing the very worst within us.

Coming Full Circle

The cynical reader might think I’m exaggerating the difference between these two “gangs”: I’m not. Media consumption, particularly of favoured items, has a tremendous impact on a child’s outlook, on what he or she hopes and dreams and imagines. I don’t know if this outlook is lasting, but at the time it’s pronounced.

But when you get older, you learn—quickly—that science fiction isn’t cool: evincing any enthusiasm will not likely get you the ladies, green or otherwise. It further paled by the pooping out of some fairly lame movies & the existence of hardcore fans who argue about “canonical” stories & made-up languages (I mean, c’mon, people). For me, the whole idea of what ST was about—of hope for the future—was submerged into this compendium of disillusionment, of people trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the original series. Eventually I completely forgot about something I so loved as a child; to paraphrase Paul, I put away childish things.

And so we come to the just-released movie. When I heard about it, I decided to watch a trailer and was surprised to find tears in my eyes; the same thing happened at the movie’s end, when Spock’s voice intones “Space…the final frontier…”. That notion of putting away childish things was in part to remove myself from the lame, ancillary hangers-on—the lousy movies & the superfans. (And indeed, aren’t any superfans, whether for a TV show or a sports team, just fucking embarrassing?)

What hit me was more than nostalgia. It was almost a kind of mourning, for a time in one’s (my?) life when it wasn’t absurd to think the future offered hope & not ultimately disaster. It was also a deep sadness emanating from having buried something of immense importance to me as a child, of belonging to something greater than yourself, greater even than the earth: a humanistic desire to explore & understand, not just the world, but the universe around you & your place in it.

From the stars, knowledge, indeed.

We’ve recently completed (and had printed) a couple of new A4-sized posters for the University of Sheffield, one advertising a series of lectures by the renowned philosopher Stephen Stich & the other promoting an MPhil degree in Political Theory.

Before we continue, you may wonder: why A4? Isn’t that small for a poster? It is, but not in the context of a university department bulletin board with lots of competing notices. If your poster is too large, it may not even be placed on the board; and even if it is, a larger poster will soon be covered up by other notices. So an A4-sized poster is about as large as you can safely make it.

Judging from this use-case, you might also conclude that creating a striking effect for your poster would be crucial: one that makes your notice stand out from the dozens of other notices. And you’d be right.

Stich Lecture Series

This was a rush job: I had 24 hours to go through the process of commission, design approval & printing. What’s worse, I was suffering through the worst flu I’ve ever experienced. What’s worst is that I was handed a huge wodge of text & only two source images. Luckily one image was large enough that it was feasible to expand it further to print quality.

With such a timeframe & under those conditions, you are subject to severe constraints. Constraints are sometimes wonderful & this was one of those times: it helps guide you quickly down the path towards a decent design.

Some of the constraints were posed by the photo. It was black & white and couldn’t be expanded further without risking pixellation. Also, the picture wasn’t fully optimal because a critical element—the top of Steve’s head— was cut off. So immediately we know that the poster should be black & white (to match the picture), it shouldn’t rely too much upon the picture to give it visual interest (because it was small) & that we were going to have to distract the eye from the missing top of Steve’s head.

When you’ve got a lot of text and your photo is small & suboptimal and you’re limited to black & white, then you’ve got to rely upon typography & stark contrast to attract the viewer’s attention. Black text on white is too common: reversing this will catch the eye. Using chunky typography, I covered the top of Steve’s head with his surname & used the look on his face to draw the viewer’s eye towards the explanation for lecture series.

The result is pretty good, I think, and certainly eye-catching, but it’s a little conventional. Had I more time, I would have made that chunky typography a lot chunkier: it would have taken up about half of the poster. But time was a real constraint here.

MPhil Poster

The second poster here is for the promotion of a degree offered jointly by the departments of philosophy & politics. We were to employ a really striking image that’s somehow relevant to the subject. My initial to represent the result of a broken political process: images ranging from protests, revolution, police in riot gear, bombed-out cities, etc. I also immediately thought of Orwell’s memorable line from 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever”.

Any of these images would certainly contribute to a striking poster, but the approach was ultimately rejected as inherently faulty. I might have put out an unintentionally negative message: “Join us & together we’ll destroy the world”. So a re-think was definitely in order!

I came across an intriguing image of anti-Communist graffito on iStockphoto, one that still cleaved to my original idea of portraying a broken political process, but the action portrayed here was more positive. Here, the notion is of casting aside what didn’t work as the initial part of the transition to something that did. And of course, what do you need to make that transition successful? Why, lots of people with MPhils in political theory, obviously!

To keep to the conceit that the poster was itself political graffito, I opted to place the title in a hand-drawn stencil typeface. And finally, the actual content of the poster was placed on a semi-transparent bed.

By the way, if you’re a graphic designer in the Sheffield area & need digital printing done quickly, consider ASAP Digital, who printed both posters. Their quality is excellent & their turnaround time is fantastic.

There are moments when I’m really happy not to live in the US any longer. This is one of them, because I simply know that if I lived & worked there, I’d have to make an eagle-based logo for a consulting company. Because, as I’m sure you’ve twigged, they’re keen-eyed consultants who know what’s what.

And not because they’re nearly extinct.