Missing Punctuation in Cufon
April 22nd, 2012 by ClaireA website that used Cufon to replace the font headers threw up a strange problem: the punctuation was missing. Apostrophes, in particular, in post and page titles were gone. Here’s how I fixed it.
My Interview on CBC News
March 23rd, 2012 by ClaireThere’s a growing trend for employers to ask for their prospective employees’ social media logins, i.e. usernames and passwords, for stuff like Facebook and Twitter if those accounts are not already visible. Presumably they want to see if the person in question is of good moral character, whatever that means, and considering the current job climate, many people will choose to give up that information rather than lock themselves out of a potential job.
Free Snowflake Design
February 14th, 2012 by ClaireAnother Inkscape design I tried out for my personal blog. This snowflake was created with the Pen tool, using the Spiro Spline path, and then by rotating and duplicating the segments.
Advertising on Twitter
February 2nd, 2012 by ClaireIt’s quite clear to me that many Twitter business users are more than a little tone deaf when it comes to advertising. I think it stems from the traditional mindset of advertising being a one-way street, where a business promotes its products and largely doesn’t respond to the audience.
Inkscape Swirls
December 30th, 2011 by ClaireInkscape does not use brushes, as far as I can tell, so I was a little wary of trying out a few spiral designs. Thankfully, I found this excellent tutorial on the subject, and I was up and running quite quickly. Inkscape uses a few different things to do swirls, namely the Bezier Curve tool, Spiro Splines, and Patterns Along Paths.
Happy Holidays
December 25th, 2011 by ClaireMerry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Io Saturnalia – whatever your festival of choice is, I hope you enjoy it and have a good holiday.
Setting up XAMPP and WordPress
December 22nd, 2011 by ClaireNormally, I just jump to the command line and use apt-get to install whatever I need from the Linux repositories. Not so with XAMPP; I had to download the archive instead. So, what’s usually a five-minute operation turned into… no, actually, it was still five minutes.
Illustrator vs. Inkscape
December 17th, 2011 by ClaireThe first thing I noticed is that Inkscape running through Linux is fast. Incredibly fast, in fact. Where I’d sit around and have to wait for Illustrator to load, Inkscape is up and running inside five seconds of me hitting the shortcut. The look and feel of it is a lot rougher – more technical, less user friendly – but it’s snappy and responsive in a way I quite enjoy.
The First Major Linux Problem
December 13th, 2011 by ClaireMy graphics tablet refused to work properly. This seemed really odd to me at first, because the Wacom tablets are usually very well supported and I didn’t have any problems before with it. But it started at one hour lost, then went up to two, and before I knew it, I lost a whole evening just chasing down one issue.
Open Source Design: First Steps
December 10th, 2011 by ClaireThe one thing I was absolutely dreading was getting my stored email (more than 6000 mails, last time I checked, plus settings and calendar) transferred into the Linux partition. Thankfully, Thunderbird runs natively on both Windows and Linux, so a quick search brought up which folder to copy over and it worked as normal.