Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

A little update of the elk_mediaplayer plugin, which was also the occasion to update to the latest version of JW mediaplayer.

Please note that as the pages I was using it on have moved from Textpattern to MODx and from JW Media Player to Flow­player, I won’t be able to update it any longer. Anyone inter­ested in main­taining it is very welcome to do so.

0.3 update

Thanks to Steve, the version works with JW FLV Media Player 5.

New vari­ables:

• playlist (over, bottom, right)
• playlistsize (number; replacement for plwidth)

Made XHTML 1.1 com­pliant by replacing commas in id="v_1,2,3" with under­scores: id="v_1_2_3".

To-do: Playlist images implementation.

elk_mediaplayer_v0.3

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

It’s been a while since I have posted a little ani­mation from the steps of my sketches (that I some­times save reg­u­larly enough to give an idea of how it works), so here is an update. Other pre­vious time-lapse videos can be found at my website tagged “process”.

Con­tinue reading »

written by Yuki \\ tags: cg, digital painting, process, sketch, video

ScreenGrab! A very handy Firefox add-on to make quick screen­shots of the pages you are browsing. It can grab a selection or even a whole page scrolling down to a few pages and save it to the clip­board or a nifty PNG.

And while I’m having fun with Wordle, I might as well try it… it works well with Java applets, flash and the likes

written by Yuki \\ tags: cloud, screenshot, web, words

As I was pub­lishing a new version of my website, I noticed that some of the little ani­ma­tions I had pre­vi­ously inserted with the bas_flvplayer plugin had ceased to function. Well, appar­ently… because on other com­puters they seemed to still look fine.

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

Thanks to the per­va­siveness and per­for­mances of the Internet, it’s now pos­sible to have very complex pro­grams run from your web browser, pro­grams that were only des­tined to your desktop before.

It’s usually called “the Cloud” (or cloud com­puting), and allows the access via the Internet to complex pro­grams. You probably already knew about Google docs and your favourite word processor, or spread­sheet program, but coming from up the cloud, we are talking about dif­ferent kinds of birds. Graphic pro­grams more like Adobe’s Pho­toshop, except that here, it’s for free (at least for the basic version), and you don’t have to install any­thing on your computer.

Check out Aviary; even if you’re not inter­ested in com­puter graphics, the website concept alone is worth checking out, with each project being rep­re­sented by a colourful bird, the symbols’ con­ti­nuity being pushed to having eggs for their coming projects (which look very inter­esting as well), or a broken egg for “404 not found” errors.

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written by Yuki \\ tags: adobe, aviary, bird, cloud, computer graphics

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

Wisp — volume 2 / front cover

After having pub­lished with much sat­is­faction a few books¹ with Lulu (one of the main actors in the print-on-demand ser­vices) this post is listing some of the things that may be useful to know (or to remember after a bit of trial and errors) to design a source file that will produce the perfect PDF file.

Con­tinue reading »

written by Yuki \\ tags: adobe, book, circle of eights, eps, ezine, indesign, lulu, pdf, print-on-demand, process, wisp

Grease­monkey is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that runs user scripts on pages to modify their content, rearrange them, add func­tion­al­ities etc.

It comes pretty useful in web­sites like Flickr. For instance, two scripts that I found really interesting:

• Flickr No Awards — To hide the nasty defacing awards in the com­ments of popular photos. The nice treat is that it’s pos­sible to reveal them if you want to.
• Flickr Hide Comment Images — Zaps the images off the com­ments and photo pages. Actually, I use that only on the recent activity pages, and not on the photo pages, were the first one does what I want.

written by Yuki \\ tags: firefox, flickr, greasemonkey, script

After a long wait, Firefox 3 has been released offi­cially, fol­lowing release can­di­dates that were available for a few days already.

The Mozilla team has been trying to setup a first world record of number of down­loads in a single day (June 17^th), and seem to have exceeded expec­ta­tions with more than 5 mil­lions down­loads so far…

Flock is on its way to incor­porate the new version of the Firefox engine at its core, and has released its version 2 beta. (this post is written using this beta version)
There seem to be some real nice memory han­dling and per­for­mance improve­ments, and that’s really all that I’ve been antic­i­pating from this new version.

So far so good

written by Yuki \\ tags: firefox, flock, record, web