Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

I recently found out, through one of the referrers of my website, the Amazon Mechanical Turk website. Never shy of a new expe­rience, I reg­ister to see by myself what it’s all about.

The premise is simple. Some jobs cannot be auto­mated by machines (doesn’t sound too bad to me) and are rel­a­tively simple to be done by humans —and we’re not talking of playing chess (the origin of the “turk” moniker.)

These simple tasks are given to people to be done for a small fee.

Con­tinue reading »

written by Yuki \\ tags: amazon, consciousness, task, turk

The fol­lowing video is quite inter­esting. Although I am not a big fan overall of the string theory which seems to be (to borrow from JP Petit, a French astro­physicist) “science minus the expe­rience, and math­e­matics without the rig­orous approach” it does a good job to present some of the current chal­lenges on our present sci­en­tific under­standing of the uni­verse. Con­tinue reading »

written by Yuki \\ tags: consciousness, maths, science, strings, video

Here we go again… Another her­metic RIP failing message from Lulu.

180: Error- Text block will not RIP - CID 5722427

I checked again my file, and cor­rected what may be the cause of this. As Lulu’s policy now seems to be to directly refund your order and not bother with detailing what may be the causes of the PDF failing to RIP at the printer’s, I thought it may be good for me to write down the major reasons I’ve found that may be prevent a proper print job at their printers’.

Before I list them, some tips how you can “debug” your PDF (from the latest in the process, to the earliest):

• You can use Pitstop Pro free 30 days demo; it has a selection feature which high­lights nicely the bounding boxes and makes it easier to look for content extending from the crop area.
• You may use the pre­flight options (of Acrobat, or your DTP software); there are useful diag­nostics you can find there, deep down in the options
• You can do an EPS export first of your pages. It’s long and tedious, but if you open the EPS in an appro­priate software, you may notice quirks in the export before (how the page was flat­tened for instance; some­times an inter­me­diary high-resolution export of the little complex trans­parent illus­tra­tions to a PNG/TIF format may improve greatly the com­plexity of a page, and make the RIP job less bogged down at the printers’)

Now, some of the main pitfalls:

• CID encoded fonts — avoid them; perhaps not the reason for that message (since I got it after vec­tor­izing all the faulty char­acters, but not taking any chances, they were dis­played strangely in the EPS exports anyway).
• Images extending outside of the page canvas. Don’t believe the PDF crop, some may still be hidden around. The main reason is still the facing pages (I work in facing pages to have a proper page num­bering and com­po­sition, and it’s not a problem as long as you export in single pages, and check out for those over­lapping contents).
• Fancy effects on the texts: they usually create some “text used as clipping path” which doesn’t go too well in my expe­rience. Better ras­terize if absolutely needed, or find another method.

written by Yuki \\ tags: diagnostic, export, lulu, pdf

Here follows a short list of plugins I use with my instal­la­tions of textpattern (TXP) that I find dif­ficult to work without. (They are essen­tially to make the life of the web­master easier, the fea­tures are not so much user-oriented).

ied_plugin_composer, by Yura Linnyk

Allows you to edit your plugins, export them in the encoded form used by the admin­is­tration interface, etc.
Very useful for most plugins that don’t require external files to work.

rss_admin_db_manager, by Rob Sable

Allows to manage your data­bases inside TXP; a light-weight php­Myadmin. Extremely useful when you are coding a plugin and need some spe­cific field, or when you want to check some­thing inside the DB (size, etc.)

Even more useful is the inte­grated backup man­agement; you don’t even have to dump your database man­ually, it’s done with one click, and very intel­li­gently stored in the file system so that you can restore a pre­vious version with just another click.

mcw_templates, by Mike West

A plugin which allows you to export/import your system’s look and feel (forms, css etc.) in files. Pretty useful when you juggle in the beginning with various themes to test your system.

tru_tags, by Nathan Arthur

A very com­plete and well-thought tagging plugin. Allows you to manage your tags, insert them easily into your posts.

bas_lightbox, by Bastian Sackermann

Allows the inte­gration of the lightbox unob­trusive javascript image display tool.

asy_sitemap, by Sencer Yurdaguel or jmd_sitemap, (updated version) by Jon-Michael Deldin

Gen­erates a gzipped xml googlemap of your site

written by Yuki \\ tags: plugin, simple, textpattern