Listening to: Where Do You Think You’re Going? - Dire Straits

Listening to: The Number of the Beast - Iron Maiden

Well I spent the arvo bingeing on SVG renders. I have been pottering around with ImageMagick for a few months - but it doesn’t play nice (out of the box) with SVG text - and text is a BIG DEAL for what I am doing.

While trying to find if I could use the SVG renderer in Webkit I happened upon librsvg and ksvg2. I used darwinports to install rsvg on my mac and then clue’d up and simply flashed up my ubuntu VirtualBox (hattip to Nahum for pointing me at the sweet little Parallels replacement). Note for future reference - if you’ve got a virtual Linux machine apt-get will save you hours and, given how hot my poor little Mac got, a few watts.

An informal shoot out points in the direction of librsvg (rsvg being the command line app) rather than ksvg (with it’s associated ksvgtopng command line app). It seems that I can recompile ImageMagick to use librsvg (and thus get access to it via RMagick)… but I might just run with calls to the commandline to get something out the door. This result surprised me a little as Safari renders SVG beautifully and that uses ksvg2.

PS. If this post seems like a bit of SEO baiting exercise… I hope it works and that I am able to save others the hours of research :-).

PPS. In my wanderings I found this research project at Sun - I’m not too sure what it is, but someone is going nuts with SVG over there.

PPPS. I know that if you’re an Ubuntu user you’ve probably got a good case of “rolls eyes” going on right about now… I can live with that

Listening to: King Of Pain - The Police

The very first language I ever used for web apps was Perl (I use the word “used” in the same way a 3 year old uses the phrase “i do fine art”). I haven’t touched it for 10 years and I am now back up to my eye balls with it. My brain hurts. I have really rapidly reached that “f**kit I’m going to do this in [current language of high proficiency]” stage … where you know the effort will pay off and the ACTUAL value of going back is not as high as you want it to be.

I am hoping to cure my hatred of RegEx at the end of this exercise…

Listening to: Belfast Child - Simple Minds

Listening to: A Wonderful Life - Carl Craig

For my own notes: Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse

Listening to: Broadcast - Strawpeople

It’s great to see that the VortexDNA guys are finally getting some coverage:

At a home nestled in the heart of Christchurch surburbia five men have mapped the structure of the human consciousness.

It allows predictions to be made about people and who they are, which could have huge ramifications for the insurance and advertising industries, says VortexDNA director Branton Kenton-Dau.

Listening to: EXPOSÉ on the Journal: Chemicals in Food and Jeffrey Toobin - Bill Moyers Journal

Here you go… It’s a gnat’s fart away from Spook Country - you’ve just gotta replace the ubiquitous Google Maps with you’re own massive data overlay system.

Listening to: All You Deliver - José González

One of my personal favorite features of the new Ponoko showroom is that we’re enabled RSS feeds all over the show. Handy when tracking the progress of a competition (RSS) for instance. Implementing this was one of those ‘damn i enjoy programming in Rails’ moments - super powerful and super easy.

Listening to: Dil Cheez - Bally Sagoo

I had a rare taste of the future today.

I’m out to San Francisco for a week and as usual I forgot something in my packing. This time it was my iPod Touch - in my case this is a big deal because it is a sanity saver. Thankfully I had my phone with me (it’s an iPhone (*) but I never listen to music on it)… and here is the taste of the future - software gadgets rock! I just loaded it up with music and sanity was saved. The whole experience had a delightful maliability to it. A device that I used for one task instantly took on the role of another device. ‘Today you’re going to play music! Make it so.’ I know it’s a bit of a false test but it was a delightful little taste of the near future.

(*) As bad as it looks… I am not a gadget freak - I swear. UPDATE: The missus has notified me that I only just get a way with that claim.

Listening to: Gypsy Biker - Bruce Springsteen

I turned off Spaces this morning and life is a bunch better. While I initially felt that it made my computer a bunch bigger I eventually found that it just pissed me off. If you spend a lot of time using many apps to do your job - IDE, command line, browser(s), virutalisation space - Spaces is just plain broken. The core reason is that you naturally start to accrete your windows around where you’re working - you don’t leave them where they were instantiated. The problem is that “Apple-Tab” assumes exactly the opposite - so you end up staring at blank screens.