grumble

SomeDegree writeExams(Knowledge k, Studying s, Coffee c)
{
k.clear();
s.cramWith(c);
return null;
}

While I'm Here

Recently I've taken the whole engineer-as-artist thing a little seriously, so I've started reading industrial design, typography, modern art and web design blogs. I think it's made me broaden my horizons a little to get a fresh perspective on "design", and what it means to create. I'll post the coolest ones once I've had time to live with them.

This leads to my random reason for coming back to post, which is a font I made. It's a bitmapped, 10-point font that you can "design" yourself and auto-generate to .ttf online here. Mine is called "NewGothic", and was based on a typeface called "from Gothic" in Samuel Welo's 1935 edition Studio Handbook: Letter and Design for Artists and Advertisers. It's actually a really cool book that I picked up before I got on this design trip, since it was this neat 1935-printed book for $5 or something. I loved the pages and binding, and the concept of hand-lettering and drawing posters seemed quite foreign to me! Glad I picked it up in any case.

Been A While

It has indeed been a while. Just a quick post, because I thought I should actually contribute things here more often, and also thought I had something useful that other people might borrow and extend for free.

What I've written is a quick little AppleScript script that takes your currently selected text file, and "un-gutenbergizes" it. What I mean is that it removes all those senseless newlines they put into Project Gutenberg ebooks, and gives you back a text file with paragraphs that actually wrap! It's the only practical way to view ebooks on my new iPod Touch and/or Tofu on my Mac, which is an excellent text viewer and "columnifier". I've read entire books with my macbook sitting on my chest, lying down in bed, with Tofu. I think it's truly the next gen of readable ebooks, and we need an iPod/iPhone port!

For those interested in actually using the script, there are caveats since I don't really USE applescript (more on that next time!). First of all, it has a giant bug that means you must run it "indirectly". It only works if you select your file, then run it from your scripts menu on the menu bar. Double-clicking on the script file app itself and/or just dragging your text file to it does not work. Don't know why. Also, you WILL need TextWrangler installed, as that is how I automagically replace \n's with spaces and keep \n\n's the same.

As for a bullet-proof, drag-and-drop, stand-alone Cocoa app that does the right thing, that is coming soon enough. It really won't be much more coding than I used in the AppleScript, but it's more time than I have in between exam studying-periods. I wish they made a C-syntax language that let you use all the scripting hooks; I HATE AppleScript! Oh wait, they put that in Leopard with the beautiful, beautiful scripting bridge. I officially [heart] Leopard just for that! Oh, and free garbage collection too!

Also I just realized that there's no actual way to upload real FILES to a blogger.com blog, so let's just pretend I never offered a buggy AppleScript app in the first place, kay? A real developer (such as yours truly) wouldn't do that! So until I write the new code (and find a free host for my files), enjoy some nerdy science lolcats.