Commander Chris Hatfield performs David Bowie’s Space Oddity…

 performs it from the International Space Station.

This has a haunting beauty, especially if you have a fondness for space exploration.  Watch now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

Let’s say you’re bored to tears with the fonts that are available to your web browser, and you don’t want to, or can’t use a service like WebInk.  What are your options?

Here’s a good article that covers the issue.

So, you’ve decided to add your font in via CSS and @font-face.  Excellent choice!  The next problem is how to convert your font file into all the different font files that are required to cover all the browsers you may encounter?  There’s some free web services out there, but if you’re font file is too big, they will reject you.

User Agent Man has written a command-line script that will convert your fonts for you.  Click here to go to his site and read about it.

This script should work in Windows, Mac and Linux.  The catch?  It’s not simple to install.  It requires quite a few other things in order to run.  Here’s some additional hints on how to install this software in OSX.

1. Installing fontforge.  To do this you’ll need to first have Apple’s Xcode developer tools and MacPorts.
   1. Xcode: This is available for OSX going way back.  These instructions are for 10.8, which is what I have.  It may be different for older versions.
      1. If you have a install DVD, Xcode may be on that.  Otherwise you can download it from the Apple App Store. Just search for “Xcode”.  It’s free.
      2. Launch Xcode, accept the license.
      3. Go Xcode -> preferences -> downloads -> components
      4. Click the button and install the Command Line Tools
      5. Yay!  Now you can compile programs from the command line.  You’ll be doing that later.
   2. MacPorts.  This allows simple installation of unix programs on your mac.  It’s easy to install, go here and follow the instructions: http://www.macports.org/
   3. Ok, now you can install fontforge with this command:
      1. sudo port install fontforge
      2. enter your password when prompted, then wait until it’s done.
2. If you don’t already have it, install Java.  Instructions here.
3. Install a piece of Java software called Batik.
   1. Instructions start here
   2. The available places to download the software are here
   3. The file you want will be called “batik-1.7.zip” (at least until there’s a new version)
   4. You’re supposed to verify the integrity of the batik install files, but if you’re walking through these instructions you probably won’t bother.  However, do note that skipping the verify is a potential security issue for your computer.
   5. Copy batik-1.7.zip to where you’d like it to live that’s convenient to your command line.
   6. Open a terminal window, move to that directory and give this command:
      1. jar xvf batik-1.7.zip
      2. NOTE: you must use “jar” to unzip this.  Other utilities won’t set the preferences correctly.
   7. Ok, that’s done and ready
4. Use macports to add ttf2eot.  In your terminal give this command:
   1. sudo port install ttf2eot
5. Install sfnt2woff
   1. Download the software from here: http://people.mozilla.com/~jkew/woff/
   2. Make sure you’ve saved it as a file.
   3. We need to copy it somewhere where it will run properly.  There’s all kinds of places it could go, I just decided to put it here with this command:
      1. sudo cp sfnt2woff /usr/sbin/sfnt2woff
   4. Now make it executable:
      1. sudo chmod +x sfnt2woff
   5. Yay!  Almost done!
6. Download the CSS3 Font Converter from here.
   1. Unzip the files, place them in a directory you like
   2. Make the script executable:
      1. sudo chmod +x convertFonts.sh
   3. Edit the script and set this:
      1. BATIK_DIR=’c:\Program Files\Batik\batik-1.7′
   4. To wherever you’ve put the batik software
7. If you’ve done all that correctly then you’re ready to convert fonts!

Now what you do is move your truetype fonts into the directory with the font converter script and run this command:

./convertFonts.sh *.ttf

The script converts the .ttf files to the additional formats you need and also creates a CSS stylesheet!

Thanks to User Agent Man for this handy tool.  Remember, you can read more here!

 How to make the font show up in your web site

You’ll notice that in addition to the font files the script has produced a file called “stylesheet.css”.  That file will contain text that looks something like this:

@font-face {
 font-family: 'NanumPen';
 src: url('NanumPenScript.eot') format('eot'), 
 url('NanumPenScript.woff') format('woff'), 
 url('NanumPenScript.ttf') format('truetype'),
 url('NanumPenScript.svg#NanumPenScript') format('svg');
}

You need to place this in your site’s CSS somewhere.  The URL is the location of the font files relative to where the css file is.  That is, if:

• The css file you added that @font-face to is at /user/foobar/site/css
• AND the font files are in /user/foobar/site/css/fonts
• THEN you want to edit those URL lines to read like so:

  • url('fonts/NanumPenScript.woff')

Ok, now you need to tell which elements of your web site to use the font.  There’s a million ways to do this.  In my case, I wanted to use the font in the menu.  My menu has a CSS ID of  ”#menu-main-menu”, so I entered this into my CSS:

#menu-main-menu { font-family: 'NanumPen',Helvetica,sans-serif; }

This tells the menu to use my custom font “NanumPen”, and if that’s not available use Helvetica, or whatever sans-serif the browser has.

Hopefully this post helps you take control of your web site.  Let us know how it goes!

Whatever happened to Chanel #4?  Was it murder????

Productivity is less about time management than it is about mind management. We all have the same number of hours during the day. How effectively we spend those hours really depends upon how well we can manage and harness our fragile mental energy.

So starts this excellent blog post: Mind Management, Not Time Management

The goal of mind management is to align your mental state with work that needs to be done, while also allowing your mind to do the work that it wants to do.

If you’re like me, you’re constantly wrestling with and employing mental hacks to convince the brain and body to do what needs to be done now.  So read on…

Recently I won a Raspberry Pi at a conference.  What is it?  In brief – a $25 dollar computer the size of a credit card intentioned to get school kids excited about what they can do with an ultra-cheap computer.

Of course, the geeky adults have been snapping them up and making them into all kinds of fun devices.  See more here.

For $25 you get a very stripped down computer.  You’ll need to add a few things:

1. power supply
2. SD card (it’s like an itty-bitty hard drive)
3. USB mouse
4. USB keyboard
5. some kind of monitor or an old TV
6. an ethernet cable

The hope is that someone can get this in a nerdy kid’s hands and they can assemble a working computer out of junk lying around at home and they can learn and experiment on a real functioning computer like we did in the 80′s!

Some clues:

• USB keyboard and mouse.  Those are easy.  However, by default the computer thinks it’s in the UK, which isn’t so bad if you’re like me and have muscle memory of your old Comodore-64 keyboard.  For practical reasons you’ll want to run the raspi-config and tell it more about your keyboard, your local time and whatnot.
• Power supply.   The hope is you’ve got an old cell phone charger lying around that will do the trick.  The catch is you need to make sure it’s at least 800ma and has a “micro” not “mini” usb connector.  (see photo – you want a connector like the one on the right.).  I ordered one of these and it works great: Motorola USB Wall Charger with Micro USB Data Cable – Bulk Packaging (Black)  
• Video.  The Raspberry Pi comes ready to connect to and old TV via RCA cable or a new TV via HDMI.  If you want to connect to a VGA monitor, you need a special cable that converts the digital HDMI signal to an analog VGA signal.  Careful about which one you buy – some of the cheap ones are known to not work.  Here’s one that’s worked for me: Cable Matters Gold Plated Premium HDMI to VGA M/F Active Adapter in White  
• SD Card.  The hope is you’ve got one lying around from an old digital camera.  Currently accepted wisdom says that a 4 gig card is plenty big enough, but since I had to buy one and they are plenty cheap I got an 8 gig card.  Two things to know.  SD cards have a “class” which refers to their speed.  Class 1 is the slowest, class 10 is the fastest.  The speed won’t matter too much to your Raspberry Pi (plus you can also put files on a regular USB drive) so let your wallet be your guide.  The second thing to know is some SD cards are known not to work.  You can check here to see about yours: http://elinux.org/RPi_SD_cards
• What if you don’t have a wired ethernet network to plug into? No problem.  Lots of people are using a USB wifi network gizmo like this one.

You can find plenty more info online, but this is the wisdom I have to share.  I’m setting my Raspy up as a web cam to watch what’s happening in my garden.  I’ve got the basic setup working, now some tweaking and an install… Here’s more info on setting up a web cam.

Get out there, make something neat and tell the world!

I’m on-site with a client.  

On their calendar:

1. Stabbing
2. Vehicular Homicide
3. Criminal Sexual Misconduct
4. Shooting
5. Burglary

It’s not what it seems.  Dawson Media Group is doing a CSI-style educational series and this is just their video production schedule.

I’m working on a completely different web site project for them.  No stabbing required.

Welcome to my world.

“Why help other people? What’s in it for you?”

excellent question.

http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/mon-april-8-2013-bill-clinton

If you’re building web applications, you quite possibly are using a web framework.  If you’re hoping a lot of concurrent users will be on your platform, you care about performance and scalability.

I just ran across this set of benchmarks of popular web frameworks:

http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/04/05/frameworks-round-2/

Take any benchmark with a grain of salt, of course, and there’s more to a framework choice than speed.  However I do see two interesting things going on there:

1. The java-based frameworks seem to be performing well
2. Wow, Ruby on Rails is just about the slowest thing you can use

I just ran across the concept of “burn charts”.  Seems a clever way to chart project progress vs. project scope and time.

Check it out!

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2011/07/27/atomic-burn-charts/

Chances are that at some point you have relied on a less-than-perfect WiFi network connection.  This happens all the time at your local coffee shop, but what do you do when it’s your home WiFi?  So many people have been suckered into the low cost of Dlink and Linksys hardware which works, well “OK” most or some of the time.  Maybe that works well enough for Gramma, but what if you work from your home office and you need your network not to suck???

We are finally in luck.  Check out http://www.open-mesh.com

If your eyes haven’t already glazed over from too much techno-speak you are in luck. Open Mesh provides a low cost, plug-and-play wireless “mesh” network that will spread your internet wifi connection across your apartment, home or giant apartment complex.

If your Comcast or DSL or fiber-optic connection to your current wifi hub is working good, then you don’t need this.  However, if you are having network dropouts, dead areas with no reception, or you want to start charging your free-loading neighbors for network access… then this is your baby.

Hard to believe, but configuration is actually “plug and play”.  Should you want to play with the options everything is available via your web browser.  I’ve been building Wifi networks since 2000 and this is by far the most powerful and simple to use.

Don’t delay – check it out today!

http://www.open-mesh.com