Wow it's been a month since last comic. I apologize... my list of comic ideas is overflowing so the only problem here is my laziness (ok and finishing a product that took forever). You could actually like the facebook page to get updates.
Anyhow, there you have it. Every now and then I see this: good programmers, good coders, designers, testers, they are all too busy to sit down and define 'guidelines'. They do manage to transmit them to each other so the structure kind of works.
But that leaves out the most useless people in each of those teams. They need to justify their jobs so what better way than to 'help' the others by defining some guidelines and common styles? Nothing wrong with that, is it?
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Multilanguage, or SE HABLA ESPAÑOL 05 Aug 2012
Well, well, well... I finally used the multilanguage support I added long ago. In essence it detects the language you are using and displays images or text based on that. Today I translated the latest Paul the innovator comic to test this feature.
The trick is doing this all in one site without changing URLs so that the facebooks and googles of the world can see just one site. Hope it didn't break anything, let me know if it did.
Bueno, bueno, bueno... Por fin he empezado a usar el soporte multilenguage que añadí al sitio hace un tiempo. Básicamente detecta el lenguage que utilizas y cambio el texto y las imágenes. Hoy he traducido el último Paul the innovator para probarlo (por cierto, no tengo pensado traducir el título del cómic, creo que queda más cool en inglés, pero se aceptan quejas).
La gracia es hacerlo todo de manera que feisbuk, google y compañía vean sólo una página para no tener que liarla demasiado. Espero no haber roto nada, si no, decidmelo.
Comic: Paul the innovator 38
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Look closer to your co-workers, they are probably at it. Right now. Some may be even staring at you. Mira a tus compañeros de trabajo, seguro que le están dando. Ahora mismo. Alguno de ellos lo estará haciendo mientras te mira fijamente. Mira als teus companys de feina, segur que n'hi ha algun. Ara mateix. Algun d'ells ho estarà fent mentre et mira fixament.
(more...)Paul the innovator (37): The bonus pot 14 Jul 2012
I'm scared to find out just how much of this is actually true.
(more...)Facebook thumbnails 24 Jun 2012
A short post for the benefit of those struggling with this as I was: the little parser that Facebook uses when you share a link is insane, don't trust it.
That parser is what creates thumbnails for links shared in Facebook. It reads the contents of a page and allows you to choose an image. The problem is that more often than not, it can't find the images. It's got a lot of limitations: image size, image position in the document and it also has a tendency to just randomly stop working.
It's particularly bad when you start adding images as CSS backgrounds since those are completely ignored, even if you have fallbacks for crawlers like google etc. So today I once again found myself with this problem, Facebook refusing to use my images anymore. So any link to a comic would not show the actual thumbnail of the comic, which I find extremely annoying.
That meant I finally needed to cave in and use their extensions: I created a thumbnail for each post and added a few tags at the top of the page so that Facebook can find the right image.
To fix it, Create a thumbnail for your images and add the following to your HTML document (head section):
<meta property="og:image" content="http://address.of/your.image_thumb.png">
<meta property="og:title" content="Optional text">
That's it. Want to check if it works? Use the Facebook URL debug page. It will tell you whether the tags were interpreted or not.
Note: for creating a thumbnail you can use Imagemagick, for instance using "convert -crop 300x300+0+0 image.png image_thumb.png".
(more...)Paul the innovator (36): Art and design 24 Jun 2012
I think that 'Eagles don't flock' is an example of hypocatastasis and not a metaphor. I thought I should mention it, because you were most probably thinking the same.
Also, all I know about art school life comes from Daniel Clowes comics.
(more...)Some changes to the site: links to the archives (yes up there near that little monkey) and horrid Facebook and Twitter Like buttons. Upgraded the comment system and now every post shows as '0 comments' even if there are comments, but too tired to worry about that now... Fixed now.
But the most interesting bit is that I added hi-res comics in the Paul series and the header logos. This means that if you have a retina display (iPad or iPhone 4), you will see much crisper and detailed comics. All of that thanks to me using Inkscape from the start, which uses vector graphics.
Being a bit geeky as I am I created a small script to do this for all comics at once, using Inkscape and Gimp. If you are interested the code is in this github gist.
So you are asking, what's the difference, well here's an example. I captured screenshots before and after enabling this, on an iPhone 4. The pixelation that the iPhone had done on the first one is obvious.
So what's next... well I have a huge pending thing in the form of translation. To Spanish, mostly. I've promised to translate these comics a few times, and have some actually translated already so I guess at some point I'll have to put them online. Another biggie is making the website react to the device you are using, so to make it easier to navigate from a mobile.
Oh, and you know, maybe write some comics :).
Yes, I could do that.
Final note: I discovered there's a limitation in the actual size an image can have on an iPad's browser. That doesn't bode well for the super long images I used in LIFE/interior. For the time being I sliced the large pages into smaller ones but haven't yet added hi-res versions as they are still too big. More info in the official documentation, found here.
(more...)Paul the innovator (35): Business trip (cont) 16 Jun 2012
The funniest thing is that all those are words I hear almost every day. It all started with a cool idea that developers (that is, people that do programming), came up with a decade or so ago. At its root, it was a way to have managers understand that computer science had become anything but a science or even engineering. It had become clear by then that the current development practices, largely based on proper engineering, with detailed specifications and plans, were getting more and more cumbersome. So a new, leaner method was defined. Someone called it Extreme Programming, and all was good.
Then someone added some stuff and called the thing Agile. It was still good, but you could see something was changing.
Then people started specializing in 'Agile'. And people that never actually programmed anything started giving talks. And then managers wanted something similar because programmers had started to be able to work without them, and they called it Scrum. And Scrum was not bad in itself, but people with too much time on their hands started theorizing about what development was. Developers ignored it for a while (big mistake) and then someday they found out that what they had been doing before was now Scrum and Agile and some other names. And suddenly they had the less useful member of the team be branded Scrum Master and get a pay raise. Then people started signing emails as "Scrum Project Manager", and defining written methodologies for the monkeys to follow.
Anyway... I digress.
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