Obviously they were present in the actual text as viewed in the back end, and in the body text that used a standard websafe font. I usually use Google Webfonts in the event that I need something interesting in the headers – see the font I’m using right now, in fact – so this was a novel problem.

Tracing The Issue

First thing to do was to find out if it was really Cufon that was doing it. I had to rule that out pretty quickly, as this was not a consistent problem with other font replacements. It had to be the font itself, then. The glyphs that represented punctuation were not being loaded – but only in certain places. This implied a problem with WordPress – it was using the usual punctuation glyphs in some headers, but not in others.

Cufon gives a designer the option of choosing which glyph sets are included in a particular font replacement script – and this is a great idea, because it means the glyphs can be limited to just what’s needed. Font files include all kinds of glyphs for Cyrillic and Greek letters, for example, which would typically not be needed on an English site. So the challenge, then, was to figure out which glyphs were being loaded.

Finding the Right Glyph Set

First thing to do is to go to the Cufon generator and load all available glyphs for your font. You need to know if the punctuation glyphs are available at all. Create the [font name].js file with all glyphs, and load it into the site after backing up the original. If no punctuation shows up, then you’re out of luck and you need to choose another font.

Let’s assume that the punctuation shows up. This means that the right glyphs are there, but they’re not being loaded by the original .js file. So, two options – either force WordPress to use the usual punctuation in the Basic Latin set, or add the set that contains the punctuation glyphs it is using. I chose the second.

Loading the Extra Set

I found that some of the headers in my WP install were using a glyph as an apostrophe from the Latin-1 set, not the Basic Latin set. I figured this out simply by looking at the glyph that was loaded with the full set, and then comparing it to the character map in Libre Office (Insert -> Special Characters gives you a complete character list, and tells you which set they’re all in.) Then it was a simple thing to go back to the Cufon generator, and add the Latin-1 Supplement set to the .js file along with the default sets. This resulted in a small increase in the file size, but nothing as bad as if it were using the full set. Then I copied it into the appropriate place, and voila – problem solved.

This method still causes a slight discrepancy with what punctuation is used in different areas, but it’s better than having none at all if you’re absolutely set on using one particular font.

Here’s the background: there’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.

Serious Problems

The main issue, of course, is one of privacy. Employers simply have no right to know about a person’s private life, so long as it does not impact their work. If someone chooses to keep such information as secret as possible, then they have no right to ask. This is similar to the list of questions that employers may not legally ask, in the US at least; things like ‘are you planning to have a child’ or ‘do you have a criminal conviction’. Such private details could and indeed will unduly prejudice the employer’s decision.

It’s obviously against the Facebook TOS to share login details with any third party. It’s very legally murky to ask someone to break a service agreement as a condition of employment; the DOJ in the States seems to be of the opinion that breaking such an agreement, even one for a website, may be a criminal offence.

It’s well known by tech professionals that people tend to reuse their passwords. Giving up their Facebook password could very well allow the employer access to things like their email, their online banking, or other sensitive services, and even open the employer up to liability if it can be shown that an unscrupulous interviewer did access that information without permission.

The Solution

Thankfully, it’s already illegal here in BC to ask for such a thing. If I were asked by a company to hand over my social media logins as a condition of employment, I would immediately think that they were testing me, to see if I would be likely to give up the same kind of company information in the future. I would not, under any circumstances, tell them my details. That information is privileged and far too valuable.

The interesting thing is that many tech professionals already have a contingency plan in case they are asked for something like this: multiple social media accounts. For example, I keep two Twitter accounts – one for my professional life, that I use for connecting with other businesspeople, and one for personal use that I keep for friends. I have a Facebook page for PureCode Design, and a personal Facebook account that is largely low-key and benign because Facebook has a pretty terrible track record of maintaining people’s privacy. I have a personal Google+ account, and again, a page for PureCode Design. And I have a personal website that is not connected to this business site. It is possible, of course, for someone to find all my personal things if they were so inclined and if they had the time to spare, but that’s an inevitability of the Internet, unfortunately. What’s important is that my professional life turns up in Google search results long before my personal life does, and my name is common enough that I don’t fear someone stumbling across anything embarrassing.

In conclusion, it’s something that everyone needs to be aware of when they start using social media to stay in touch and connect online. In many cases, it’s just good practice to keep more than one online identity. It’s not really being deceptive, per se; the idea of someone having a public image and a private life is nothing new. Professionals just need to be aware of how much they put online, and how much their prospective employers really don’t need to know.

The Value of Responsiveness

Twitter is a medium for communication, one where anyone can join a conversation in progress merely by replying to tweets or making use of hashtags. And it is a conversation, believe me, albeit a very noisy one. A company that doesn’t respond to messages is essentially excluding someone who’s open up a conversation with them. A company that does respond is one that becomes inclusive, and that instantly translates into goodwill, assuming that the company does not then say something problematic. There is a lot of value in responding in a public conversation that other people can read. It lets all customers, potential or otherwise, of that company know that it is willing to reach out to them.

The Problem with Advertising

Think of Twitter in terms of a real conversation. We all talk about products, and if we like a company, we naturally do talk about theirs. But if the company itself muscles into the conversation like an obnoxious TV commercial, we stop listening no matter how much we like them. It’s very logical, when you think about it – it’s a conversation. Two-way communication. Discussion. Information sharing. There is no place there for a 30-second advert on why you should buy this laptop.

What to Do?

The bottom line with Twitter, and with most social media, is that companies cannot afford to think of advertising in the traditional sense. The paradigm of one-way communication, in magazines, on billboards, or on TV, simply breaks down when applied to a medium where the user has absolute control over their experience. A company Twitter account that is non-responsive will likely be ignored – or at the very least, it will likely squander many opportunities to connect with its customer base and increase sales.

The best course of action is the most obvious one – treat Twitter as a conversation, and spend the money on staff and training to respond to customers when and if it’s needed.

Examples of How to Do it Right

I frequently hold up Epic Games as a company that really gets how to make the most of Twitter. Stacey Conley, the Community Coordinator, talks directly to the fans, retweets interesting game-related stuff, and gives out freebies. Rod Fergusson, the Director of Production, no less, also talks to fans and gets community feedback. You can’t buy the kind of goodwill they build for Epic every day.

The Xbox Support team on Twitter is another good example, this time of pure customer support and response. Where a lot of customer service tends to be of the ‘wait on the phone for an hour’ type, this team make it incredibly simple and convenient for a user to get help, and their response time is usually excellent. Again, the goodwill that comes from having a company representative answer customer questions, right then and there, is phenomenal and worth their salaries several times over.

The Inkscape Version

Inkscape 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.

How It Works

Okay, I’ll be honest – I have no idea what goes into the math behind these graphical tools, but all I can think is that it must be pretty phenomenal. The tutorial goes into more detail, but the basic process consists of creating a curve, turning it into a Spiro spline (to make a smooth, flowing shape) then using the Pattern Along Path effect to produce complex swirls. Both the spline and the pattern are editable using the Node Editor tool.

Much of the grunt work is done by the Spiro spline, as it uses the minimum curvature needed between nodes. This produces very smooth paths regardless of what the designer is doing.

In Comparison

I have to say, on this particular technique, Inkscape makes sense to me in a way that Illustrator never really did. It seems far more logical in how it handles complex curves. The only issue that I can see is where a large illustration may have multiple curves that all use the same pattern; if the designer wants to change the pattern on all of them, they must copy and paste it onto all curves, whereas in Illustrator you’d just edit the brush being applied to the paths.

Between the two, I prefer Inkscape, but if you are very accustomed to the Illustrator method, you’ll likely have some problems with the open source alternative. Anyway, here’s an example of what it can do – a shield type graphic I put together in about fifteen minutes. Click it for the high resolution version.

Here’s to the New Year

Best Wishes from Claire at PureCode Design.

Sudo Apt-Get Install

Normally, 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. The install instructions are so monumentally simple that I had the whole thing up and running in less time than it took to boil the kettle for a cup of tea. No control panel needed here – being Linux, it’s all controlled from the command line.

The WordPress Install

I was worried about whether the WordPress part of it would work as easily. I downloaded the zip file for version 3.3 from their site, extracted it to the /htdocs/ folder of XAMPP, and started the install as normal. And it all worked out of the box immediately. Again, maybe five minutes between getting the archive and looking at a fresh WP admin screen. The only speedbump I found was where I had to make the folders writeable to allow plugins to be installed. I copied over some of my tools and previous work from the Windows partition, and I’m on the way to producing a site for a new client .

Is it Worth it?

I’m not sure if I can immediately declare this to be much better than doing the same on Windows. When I first set up my local server, I had problems simply because I was unfamiliar with XAMPP and with the nuts and bolts of WordPress itself. As well as that, I know Linux well enough to know exactly how to handle issues as they arise, like making the folders writeable. I doubt that a web designer who does not know Linux would have such an easy time working with all this.

That said, Linux is, at its heart, an OS that was built for the technically inclined, and it’s very programmer-friendly. It almost assumes (I think) that a Linux user is not really interested in something like Dreamweaver, for example, when they could have Geany instead. I have used Dreamweaver for theme development, and I found it to be almost comically difficult to work with in many ways, but it has to be noted that there really is no equivalent for Linux, so if a web designer relies on it to get the job done, they will probably find themselves somewhat adrift if they decide to swap over.

Run Speed

The 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 only place where it falls down here is in the filters. I tried out a number of filter effects, and the bevels seem to cripple the program. This isn’t so much of an issue for me, personally, but it’s still an issue. According to some reports I found online, version 0.49 will address this.

Interface

It’s the typical Linux problem – no manual, and if you want to know how to do something, Google is your friend. That said, I got into it quite easily just by trying every option to see what it did or how it worked. Although the interface looks a little intimidating, things are mostly arranged in sensible places and the tooltips are informative. In fact, the only thing I needed to look up was how to pan the canvas using the mouse – click and hold the middle mouse button, if you’re curious.

One thing that completely threw me for a while was the use of the Ctrl and Shift keys. Resizing an object while keeping the aspect ratio is done by holding Shift in Illustrator and dragging with the mouse, whereas Inkscape uses Ctrl and drag instead. I kept making that mistake.

Best Feature

If there’s one thing that I have to use a lot, it’s gradients. And if there was one thing that I despised about Illustrator, it was trying to make gradients work – in all the time I was using it, I always had problems or irritations that made me want to just shut the whole program down and forget about it. But in Inkscape, the process just seems to make sense. The gradient parameters are built into the parameters of each object’s fill and stroke, and they can be duplicated, modified or applied to other objects just by using a dropdown menu.

It doesn’t do mesh gradients, however. This is one of the top peeves of designers who might be tempted over to using Inkscape. Part of the reason is because Inkscape uses the SVG open format, which has no specification for mesh gradients – yet. It’s also in the works, and if you’re prepared to take a chance on having Inkscape crash a few times, you can have the feature now. (I’m not, as I can happily live without it.)

Overall, I have no reason to go back to Illustrator and Windows. Inkscape serves my needs quite well. Despite the differences between the two programs, I got into it and did some logo designs for a client with no major slowdowns or problems in my workflow, and no need for external help from Google. For web design, at least, I’m confident in saying that Inkscape is a perfectly acceptable professional alternative to Illustrator.

Very blobby

The Case of the Stylus Sensitivity

The problem was that the stylus wasn’t registering the pressure sensitivity properly. This is a very basic tablet – just a Wacom Bamboo Pen; hardly high technology but not without its issues. The stylus can handle something like 512 levels of pressure, but it clearly wasn’t registering properly because it seemed to be hitting its max pressure far sooner than it should. This resulted in lines that were fine at the lightest pressure, but swiftly turned into blobs when the maximum pressure was registered.

Everything else worked fine, and the sensitivity settings in GIMP and MyPaint seemed to behave properly, so the problem had to be in the driver or the settings.

Checking Everything

The best thing to do in this case is to check everything, of course. I reinstalled the driver, then looked at pressure readings coming from the device through MyPaint, and played around with the settings to see if something could be affecting the stylus. This definitely wasn’t a case of the tablet or the pen being broken, as it works perfectly in Windows. Combing through all this takes time, though, and swapping between drivers or trying to work out if it’s another device that’s interfering takes time.

I was worried that this could spell the end of my experiment, to be honest. I need to have a working tablet, humble though it is. If Linux Mint couldn’t handle it, then I’d be stuck with booting back into Windows to do any kind of graphics – which meant I’d be constantly swapping between them. Not exactly an ideal work flow.

Finally Hitting a Solution

I got a fix on the problem when I found this entry of a bug that had turned up in the input-wacom driver. It seemed to describe exactly what I was experiencing. Someone (who I presume is a developer) explained that the MaxZ parameter for the Wacom Bamboo tablets entry had been set to 255 instead of 1023 – much lower than it should be! This had already been fixed in the latest update to Ubuntu Oneric but, crucially for me, not in Linux Mint 12. I confirmed it by going to the terminal and running the command “cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log” to see what the X server was doing – and it showed an entry for my tablet like so:

Wacom USB Bamboo tablet maxX=14720 maxY=9200 maxZ=255 resX=100000 resY=100000  tilt=disabled

Right then. Off to get a fix for this – and immediately I found this thread on the Ubuntu forums with complete, detailed install procedures for the Bamboo tablets. I followed the first section to install the updated driver, and it all just worked.

All in all, it could have been worse. I could have missed the problem completely, and been stuck with swapping between Linux and Windows. Still, that’s a few hours I won’t get back, and two different jobs delayed because I couldn’t work without my tablet. My clients have been patient and understanding about it, thankfully. I think if this is the worst I have to deal with, then I’ll be doing quite well.

The First Problem

Trillian just wasn’t going to agree with the new OS. The usual method of running it through Wine failed completely for me, which is a major irritation. I do have to be connected at all times. So, moving over to alternatives: I’m currently debating between using Empathy or Pidgin, and I haven’t quite decided yet which one will work the best. I’m leaning towards Empathy, if only because it integrates well with the GNOME 3 desktop.

The 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. The Lightning extension I was using for my calendar didn’t work, so I swapped to another extension to display my Google calendars in the Thunderbird browser.

Cloud Computing

That brings me to another point – cloud computing made all of this so much easier. After a quick Dropbox install, I had all my essential files at my fingertips again. Even if my entire hard drive had been wiped out in the process, I could have had everything up and running again in a few hours. Say what you like about the dangers of it, but not having to rely totally on your own hardware and OS is a powerful thing.

The Second Problem

I hit a wall pretty quickly when I had to edit some Illustrator files. Obviously, CS5 is no longer an option, so I had to begin searching for a Linux alternative. The answer proved to be almost comically simple – Inkscape, the open source counterpart to Illustrator, can open and edit .ai files in much the same way. The text isn’t always rendered correctly, but I was worried that a ten minute job would turn into two hours wasted – and it wasn’t. I saved the files in question as .svg, happy that I can at least access most of the vectors I’ve already created.

Things are going well. I’ll have to take a few days and see how this affects my overall workflow, but I’m confident that I can at least work somewhat normally.