Author Archives: admin

Sunday afternoon typography

The Road To Clarity at The New York Times tells the interesting story of Clearview and Highway Gothic, the past and future faces of American road signs.

I’ve uploaded some more photos to my SF Typography project.

Here is a preview of Shark, a major revision to an old typeface of mine, on Typophile. The original version of Shark was done almost ten years ago as a hybrid between blackletter and roman, before I knew anything about blackletter. The revision has ligatures, alternate characters, upper and lowercase numerals, small caps, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, and the kerning and metrics have been fixed.

sample2.png

(URL) Hacking Facebook

I got a Facebook invite from someone I haven’t seen in years. Awesome! Unfortunately, my long-lost friend used a very old email of mine. This is to be expected; I haven’t seen or corresponded with him in years. Facebook wanted me to sign up using this jurassic email in order to accept the invitation.

I tried logging in to Facebook and looking at the invitation again. No luck. Viewing the invitation while logged in silently failed, sending me to the Facebook home screen, with no error message.

Next, I tried searching for my friend on Facebook. Armed with his first and last name, and his email, I found that there was no way whatsoever to find him. I don’t use any of the popular web-mail programs or email clients that Facebook can import from, because I’m a hella old-school motherfucker.

My options now seem to be limited: spend the time to write a program to create a fake exported address book in one of the formats that Facebook accepts, or download and install a converter, like abook, in order to invite just one person, or just send my friend an email, explaining that Facebook sucks, and by the way, how the hell have you been?

I’m about to send that email, when I notice the invitation URL:

http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=XXXXXXXX&k=ZZZZZZZZZZ&r&v=2

That XXXXXXXXX looks suspiciously like a user id. So, I copy the id onto the facebook user profile URL:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=XXXXXXXXX

Voila! My friend’s profile, complete with a button to add him as a friend on Facebook.

Why is this so hard? What would be wrong with sending me a link to his profile in email, or detecting that I’m already logged in and showing me his profile rather that silently failing when I click on the invitation? Why can’t I just type in his name or his email and add him that way?

Facebook started out focused on the somewhat closed, school-oriented social scene, so the lack of ability to add people outside of preordained networks made some amount of sense, at some point. But they are clearly going for the whole market now, so it’s time to drop the draconian network boundaries entirely. The vast majority of my friends aren’t friends from past universities or previous jobs — they are friends from Real Life. No wonder I only have a paltry three friends on Facebook. Hell, I even have more friends on LinkedIn, and I hate LinkedIn.

What’s that? Facebook hasn’t noticed this problem because their users don’t have real lives? Come on, I’m sure that can’t be true. At least not anymore.

How to not hire a programmer

Here are some more snippets from pseudo-spam job offers. I’ll leave off the names to protect the incompetent.

We have a dedicated practice team which works on Web2.0 domain, open source technologies like AJAX, Perl, Ruby on Rails, Apollo and Silverlight.

Um, guys, AJAX is a marketing buzzword that refers to web-design practices, not any actual software. Neither Apollo nor Silverlight are open source. Perl and Ruby? Nothing about those languages are particularly Web 2.0. Good try, though, you managed to get seven buzzwords in one sentence.

Another email promised the opportunity to work on

a customized user interface using DOS and X-Windows on Linux

DOS on Linux. Sweet. Of course, I’m more of an PDP-11 on Mac OS X kinda guy.

And then there was this one:

Position: C++ Perl Unix Developer
Location: Sunnyvale, CA

Cool! I’ll just drive my Car Bicycle Train to Sunnyvale every day and happily work there in my Office Cubicle, sitting at my Desk Couch, working on my Computer Refrigerator, on their C++ Perl Unix project.

A Codeville user speaks

Fraser Speirs has an informative post about Git which concludes with:

I don’t hear anything about arch, monotone, BitKeeper, codeville, SVK or darcs from anywhere except the nerdiest of SCM nerds.

Git has also been getting attention from Michael Tsai, John Gruber, and Digital Web.

I’m not a SCM nerd. I’ve never used Git, mostly because I’ve never had the time to check it out. But I am a Codeville user, and here are my thoughts about it.

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Tufte & Tiramisu

I went to the Edward Tufte talk on Tuesday with a bunch of people, including Michael Chu. Michael showed his Cooking for Engineers Tiramisu recipe card design to Tufte during office hours, and then he showed it to us at lunch. We talked a bit about how to redesign it. The design must be done with just standard HTML and CSS — no images.

Here’s my version, and my motivations:

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