Posts in the Tech Category

A followup to my previous post: thanks to the nearly impossible to find Character Palette (and thanks to Todd Dominey for instructions on how to enable and use it), I was able to determine the problem and restore my editing pencils.  It turns out that a beta copy of the font “Freight” was what caused the problem.  This beta copy of Freight was for some reason convinced that Unicode 9999 is the reference to a Z-caron instead of a pencil symbol.  It didn’t do this for 9998 or 10000.  Just 9999.

So I removed “beta Freight”, and the pencils returned.  Thanks to everyone who helped me out!

Update: there’s more to the story, namely that the copy of Freight in question was a beta, and not the final release, and the final release doesn’t have the problem that bit me.  I’ve edited this post to reflect that fact.

• Pencilled In was published on Thursday, December 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been three replies.

Pretty much nobody but me ever sees this, but when I’m logged into meyerweb’s copy of WordPress (basically, all the time) I see a little pencil icon next to entries and comments.  It’s the “click here to edit this” link, and I generate it using the following markup:

<a href="[...]">&#9999;</a>

Ah, Unicode.

The problem is that at some point in the recent past, my OS X 10.3.9 laptop started rendering that character as a Z with a set of rabbit ears on top, whereas my OS X 10.3.9 desktop machine still shows the pencil.  I can only assume this is due to a recent software installation on the laptop, possibly one that stuck in a badly structured font or something.  Or else an update messed up the Unicode pointers.

Whatever the cause might be, does anyone out there know if there’s a way for me to figure out what font is being used to generate the funky Z, or how I might otherwise be able to track down and destroy it and get the pencils back?  Because it’s driving me frickin’ crazy.

Update: the problem is now fixed, as described in the followup entry.

• Pencilled Out was published on Thursday, December 15th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Mac category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

The Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal explosion and fire has doubtless dominated news in the UK and Europe, though in all honesty it hasn’t gotten major play here in the US.  Doubtless that’ll change if it’s found to be a terrorist attack and not an accident, but that’s not actually my point.  It occurred to me that this is a relatively high-yield detonation, and I have the means to chart its effects in a basic way.

So, based on the seismic report of a 2.4 magnitude event, I’ve estimated the yield at about four metric tons of TNT (as per the chart found on the Wikipedia‘s Richter scale article, as well as other sources).  As you can see on the chart, that gives figures consistent with initial damage reports: the 0.25psi ring extends out to 1.02 kilometers (0.64 miles), which is about where you’d stop seeing widespread window shattering and door displacement.

Remember that the distances shown don’t define the distance out to which a human would be able to feel a blast, and certainly don’t say anything about the distance at which a blast could be heard.  And also remember that I’m making a rough estimate of yield based on an initial estimate of the explosion’s seismic magnitude, not to mention I just made a guess as to the exact epicenter.

Still, it’s interesting to be able to chart the event like this.  To me, anyway.

• Mapping the News was published on Monday, December 12th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Tools categories.
• There have been four replies.

Well, An Event Apart Philadelphia is in the history books.  (Or, as they might say on the original Iron Chef, “Battle Standards is OVAH!!!”.)  If you want to relive the event, vicariously or otherwise, there’s a Flickr group for the event, as well as all the public photos tagged “aneventapart”.  As I write this, those two sets of pictures don’t form a perfect union, so if you’re really curious, it’s worth checking out both.

I haven’t seen any feedback yet, so I only know what I thought of the event.  At the risk of sounding egotistical, not to mention ungrammatical, I thought it went great.  There were things that could have gone better—my presentation on em-based layouts particularly needs some buffing and polishing—but given that it was the first in the series, and as such largely uncharted waters, I’m not sure I could be happier about how things went.  Even the problems that arose, like the morning crushing of the wifi, were corrected quickly.  The audience seemed really involved and their questions were sharp.  We got a few laughs.  Life was good.

Jeffrey and I would like to sincerely thank each and every attendee for making the event so great, and to thank our sponsors (AIGA, Media Temple, New Riders, and Pixelworthy) for helping make the event possible at all.

• Post-Event was published on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been twelve replies.

Speaking of AEA, the good people at AIGA released another podcast interview with Jeffrey Zeldman.  Rumor has it they’ll have one coming soon starring Our Man Stan, and there might even be another from yours truly.  Grab hold of their podcast feed if you’re interested in any of that, or in hearing from other designers in the future.

(One week to go.  Woo hoo!)

Update: Jason’s interview is now available.

• AIGA Interview Redux was published on Monday, November 28th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Quite suddenly, workshops and seminars seem to be all the rage, don’t they?  The Carson Workshops schedule keeps growing, and the shows selling out.  They recently announced a Web applications summit in London that frankly sounds amazing.  UIE recently announced a six-city roadshow, and seats are already selling.  Clear:left is sponsoring a one-day show on Ajax programming starring the indominitable Jeremy Keith.  And then of course there’s my personal favorite, An Event Apart, which sold out six weeks before the Philadelphia event (which is, yikes, now only a week away!) and is soon to visit other cities.  Keep an eye on the AEA RSS feed to get the latest on those cities, by the way.

Look over all the workshops’ line-ups, and you see a lot of big names and smart people standing on stages (or at least in front of rooms) talking about some truly important and interesting topics.  A determined workshop-goer could run him- or herself quite ragged trying to catch even half the shows, given their geographic dispersion and temporal proximity.  It’s almost a shame, because every one of them sounds really, really interesting.  Have I said the word “interesting” enough times yet?

But really, the most interesting part to me is not that these seminars are being announced, but that they’re generating such strong interest—that they’re selling out.  It’s another indicator, and a very clear one, that the industry is well and truly recovering.

Addendum: just to add a little bit more support to what I said, 37signals announced their overhauled Basecamp seminar, The Getting Real Workshop, and sold all fifty seats in twelve hours.  Whoa.

• So Many Stages was published on Sunday, November 27th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Web category.
• There have been six replies.

After a lovely Sunday morning breakfast at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles, Kat, Carolyn, and I strolled through The Grove to check the sights and pick up a gift card for some friends.  As we neared the center of the main drag, Carolyn suddenly pointed and shrieked delightedly, “Daddy!”

She was pointing directly at the large white logo in the middle of the silver façade of the Apple Store.

I’m thinking that maybe I need to spend a little less time on my PowerBook.

• The Apple of Her Eye was published on Monday, November 21st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn, Humor, and Mac categories.
• There have been fifteen replies.

For those of you who’ve always wanted to hear me talk very quickly over a phone connection: AIGA has put up a podcast of me talking with Liz Danzico about design, code, and An Event Apart.  At the end of last week, they published a similar interview clip of The Zeldman.  There are more interview clips to come from each of us in the next three weeks, so keep an eye on the AIGA site or their feed.

Originally these weren’t quite podcasts because they weren’t part of a feed, and thus had no enclosure to download through your aggregator.  AIGA has fixed that now, and you can grab the AIGA podcast feed via the Podcast directory page.  Or, if you want, go to the previously-linked individual resource pages and download the MP3 files directly.  Either one works for me.

• AIGA Interview was published on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Interviews and Web categories.
• There have been four replies.