The stripped version of the feed has been replaced with one containing images and line breaks. Don’t go off duplicating the site, please. Delete the feed in your reader to re-sync. Some RSS apps may pick up on the change, but Vienna doesn’t. Hope this fixes your problem, Jo.

Random House, I don’t know why you are visiting, but I want to shout this at you guys.

These books changed my life. First, I read House of Leaves when it came out (and I was a lot younger) and it shaked my world. It was the Dutch translation - which was disappointing to me, so I bought the American version for it’s incredible cover (shown above, right). Only Revolutions was the second instant buy. I got two versions of House of Leaves at home in the bookshelf and two copies of Only Revolutions. I was severely disdained when there was an artwork contest and it was limited to US citizens. Really, no, really, you guys hurt me with that.

Now, if you think about buying either one of these books, I’d go with House of Leaves first. If you aren’t interested after reading three chapters, drop the book, return it to the store. But I guarantee you, if this is your thing (I’d consider it a 60-40 chance in favor for the readers of my blog), you’ll be enveloped by it after a few pages. It’s a journey of a book, that I’ve researched and read with equal pleasure. It’s scared me out of my wits many times and sometimes made me become paranoid of the shadows in my house at night. Once you enjoy the book (I enjoyed it to a significant level after one read, but I have read it about six times now) I suggest buying Only Revolutions. It’s the first book I ever bought that made me cry.

No, I’m absolutely serious. I don’t consider myself emotional or anything like that - I don’t cry for movies, never did, and generally don’t feel a lot for books either. And no, I didn’t cry because the letters get so small near the middle and you have to flip it over every 8 pages (if you follow the editor’s notes, that is… hint, hint), but because I truly got emotionally dragged along a fantastic tale, caught in the most incredibly beautiful words and phrases I have ever read. I used this line for a font specimen a lot (and damn, I just found out that all samples and source files of this font got corrupt and I got no backup!);

Corduroy was my first real font. It’s a sort of ‘poetry serif’; an aesthetic font for large text. I have a PDF sample still, you can download it here (4.3 megabytes). Unfortunately, as I said, I seem to have lost it for good. I never finished the capitals and some letterforms aren’t perfected either. If anyone is witty about it, you could notice the name is a reference to a mysterious object in the novel House of Leaves; Johnny Truant’s corduroy coat, of which buttons go missing at a certain moment (don’t want to spoil too much here). I’ve done a lot of work that has a theme of these books or one of them. I also had a series of posters made inspired by Only Revolutions, but alas, they too, are corrupt. Here’s one of them, the resource fork being the only thing a proof it ever existed (oh, and a print, yay)

Now, that’s it for Random House love. I really appreciate you guys publishing Mark’s work.

You know, I actually made my first real own lolcat. It’s at the end of this post.

I study at an Art Academy, here in the Netherlands. I am sure that gives you a very glamorous idea of how things would look, stylish and thoughtful design and all - but I have to disappoint you. Take a look at this.

First of all, it’s not just Arial Black we are using here. This facade actually cut plates of metal with a laser, for a lot of money, and out of a major list of typefaces, went to great lengths to pick… Arial Black? And what’s up with the CAPITALS? It’s absolutely horrid and disgraceful for any Art Academy. Because I hate it so much, I made a list of reasons why I hate it;

And, the most important reason of all…

Also, notice the beautiful dislocated inner negative space of the ‘R’. I have found many to agree with my opinion that this should be torn off the building overnight. I happily quote the most influential figure amongst them;

Portmap, a UNIX daemon made to supposedly make it easier for everyone to find out what ports services are listening on, seems to be dead essential in ad-hoc Ethernet-to-Ethernet networking with a static IP. I always give my home boxes IP’s in the strictly forbidden IP range 10.x.x.x (I’d be better off taking 192.168.x.x) and connect them with a CAT5E cable (for gigabit speeds or at least half of it) whenever I feel like it. I was dumbfounded to find that two Macbooks, one my own and one out of the box, will simply completely drown in an ocean of confusion when the daemon isn’t running on the serving system.

The context-sensitive autoconfigurator for network settings in OS X didn’t like it at all. I also have strict rules against named (the DNS server), bonjour (zeroconf) and I let in AFP with a temporary rule. No catch. The connecting party couldn’t find services, and the link refused to establish in most cases (i.e. jumping from self-assigned 144. addresses to my own 10.x range). I could disable the firewall. OK, still nothing. Obviously, this isn’t related to my nazi ipfw configuration. Could it be that I have stopped some services from running in the first place? Yup. I had portmap disabled. Bonjour was fired up and restricted with ipfw because Aperture throws a fit without it running (Read: it gives an error message with the rather descriptive text: “Error. 2.“.), which is a bit insane as I haven’t found it to be a nice enough app to go share my photo collection over the network with bonjour, which iPhoto does for free.

Nearing the end of this rant, it’s obvious what I am telling. Hardening always gives you trouble to get into your own computer. You know, that really the way I like it. But I don’t consider acquiring a link a real security issue, so I’ll have to fix this. Strangely, whatever security measure I took in the how-to’s I served, did not affect these problems. Rather, it was the portmap daemon that ships with OS X that seems to be much more essential to it’s networking than I thought. I’ll look into this, because portmap has it’s history, especially with RHEL. I don’t know what those guys in Cupertino were thinking when they were soldering in portmap with liquid steel, but I’d rather just run without a whole lot of services.

Yeah, I am getting truckloads of visitors. And the funny thing is, with nice webserver log analytics, you can see what kind of people. First of all, I want to say hi to that loyal NetNewsWire subscriber that downloads my feeds from the US Courts. It had me freaking out when I first found it, but when I looked into it and saw you are using NetNewsWire to read my blog, I thought that was pretty innocent. My blog’s innocent too, right?

And hello to people from the Navy, the Air Force, the Army! Always nice to see you around. And Apple, Pixar, Sony, NEC, Cisco, you guys honour me with your visits. Oh yes, if the Washington Post feels like publishing anything about me, don’t hesitate to contact me. I saw you dropping by. There are also some visitors from a certain adult site that whose name I won’t mention here (Google Hell and all).

I must say, I haven’t named the big part yet. This month, I’ve had visits of companies that honoured me a lot. I think I’ve seen a significant amount of visitors from Redmond, too. How strange! It keeps stacking up. I hope you enjoy the iPod tools. Or are you all here for the ‘Mac Hacker’ badges, perhaps? Feeling like a discount on icon design since, well, I guess, Microsoft or Apple do count as ‘developers’? Really into hardening your OS X? Whatever the reason, please read on. It’s going to be an exciting month full of rounding up school projects and releasing more of my own creations.

The European Union. Benefactor, malevolent. In my country, like the French, we have voted off a European Constitution. Even before that even came into the public discussion, I was very active in another part of the EU legislation; software patents. It was a close call, but the proposals were all swept clean of the table. Eventually, we haven’t made idiotic legislation for software patenting and it turned out all the better.

The European Constitution allows more power to the EU congress; an entity that has shown itself to be sensitive to lobbying, prone to mass expenditure (like moving to Straßburg every now and then, slurping up millions just because, well, people love to just move the entire congress over the continent every now and then) and well-versed in overseeing the most important matters in national cases.

Lately, with the PR campaign that is meant to facilitate a general feeling of helplessness and fear for the most minute minority of our populace, it’s become a much more scary regulatory organ pushing for continent-wide regulation of data retention (you email, your browsing behaviour, and more), radio-frequency chip enabled biometric passports, mandatory ID-checks, centralized databases of genetic, biometric, and private information and more scary things. It’s in a race to becoming the US Congress for Europe. Only worse.

And today, Sarkozy takes presidency in France. He is an absolute fan of the European Union, and he won’t poll the French population for such matters again. Germany, now under conservationist Merckel, will also bend in any way the EU wants. And us? The progressive Dutch? Ah, our government has been conservative since ages. We’re in Afghanistan, we’ve been in Iraq - hell, we are the only participating country in the war in Iraq that did not launch an investigation into the absence of WMD’s. Progressive? Think again.

it’s astonishing to see the Western world of politics heave in wave after wave of conservative political reform that regresses us in our rights and privileges. I see the gap between immigrants and native citizens of countries widen, poverty increasing, education falling into a state of profit-driven farms that put out students with no real skills. The world we are making is an alienating place, where there is an unspoken and unseen fear between all human beings. The collective feeling of only being able to march in one line, and keep strict tabs on your left and right neighbors. We’ll continue aggravating ourself until the bubble collapses; the incredible overload of wealth draining away.

As it stands now, countries like India and China grow so rapid that in the time you have read this, there were about 40 new human beings born. We won’t be able to sustain our growth. Have you ever imagined how the collapse of humanity would look like? I am starting to ponder about it. When will the breaking point come, where oil and food becomes too expensive and all countries, worldwide, will run into struggles. If you analyze our history, you will see war is one of the most likely scenario’s.

Perhaps one day a more progressive race will land on our globe and look over the scattered remains of our society and sketch out the outline of a race that outgrew itself.

So, people, if you do make something that puts images on iPods in great, great quantities, then make sure you do it foolproof. Today, we can really virtually checksum files without computing cost to check their integrity. Hell, anyone who can make a shell script can verify if a copy operation succeeded by checking file size and attributes. Apparently, the iTunes team didn’t really deem this necessary (although you have full permission to flame me if you classdumped iTunes and found contrary evidence). The image above shows a, well, slightly recurring problem that can happen with the Photo sync of iTunes. It seems to be quite versed in producing corrupt images or even leaving some data of the old image in place, if the names were alike. I am going to dig deeper into this to see if I can make it reproducible.

I have tested this with GIF’s (which produce non-working images), PNG (native format of Timezones, makes these weird green bands seen above) and JPG’s, who create familiar ‘bolts’ artifacts and some very pretty colors and gradients that you haven’t bargained for. Perhaps, no, really, I might make an app that does this whole Photo syncing instead of iTunes. This is just too bad to be usable.
.

Randleaf is still progressing, albeit slowly. I’ve taken the task of doing some rough semiotics on the produce of this little program, and I am almost done making a few categories with guidelines and ‘creation flags’ that really 99% of all generated images adhere to. Uh, I could say, Randleaf is going á la carte; it’s becoming increasingly simple to define what image you want to see coming out of it.

I had proposed this analysis of Randleaf’s products to my Illustration teacher, and he accepted it as a free project, so that’s good - I can rarely ever make my personal work rhyme with my education; graphic design isn’t new media, after all, and not all media is fun to me (don’t ask me anything about video, I don’t really like it).

In the meantime, the blog’s uneasy silence is caused by the impending release of new blog styles, the Cocoia main site, and several personal projects including but not limited to improving the overall look of Mac OS X open-source utilities and my two (I’d almost say, make that three) apps. At the moment, you could say my day is getting a bit hectic with projects;

1. School work (obligatory illustrations, essays, etc.)
2. Timezones 1.0 (due May 15th)
3. CCC presentation(s) (due for submission before May 15th)
4. Daily build and troubleshoot of Praetorian and iSight Expert; I switch products as I feel like it, but admittedly, Praetorian is seeing a lot of attention as it’s data management and import had to be redone -again- when I discovered FreeRADIUS has raddb inconsistencies across versions.
5. Personal website work.
6. Other commissioned work I am not at liberty to discuss.
7. When my girlfriend’s lucky, personal work-outs for actual physique.

Busy? I feel at times, it kills me, I’ve had an incredible headache for two weeks now, which gets paralyzing at moments. Fortunately, my code is starting to make a lot more sense; I am really getting around the whole unit-testing paradigm and all my projects are seeing a lot of attention to details and cleanup. I strongly suspect the whole headache fuzz is mostly caused by a lack of rest, which I think I can do better with. Sometimes I can’t even grok my reference documents or get my mind around mentally sculpting concepts.

On a side note, the OS X spell-checker wanted to correct “FreeRADIUS” with “ferrari’s”. I suppose it has the same ring to it. I imagined actually writing an app that manages ferrari’s on your Mac, but that’s just too much fun to bear.

Some people have asked me why I don’t want to start a truly open, public beta for my Mac apps (iSight Expert, Praetorian) like I opened up Timezones yesterday. After a few thousand downloads of your fresh beta product, you’ll realize just why.

I can count the messages giving input and bugs on one hand. It’s just sad to know that so many people, downloading and using it, simply cannot take the time or see that there is a definite amount of time (and thus, money), dedication, and love going into a ‘free’ product they can just go download. If there is a ‘download here!’ link, people won’t bother. If they’ll like it, a beta’s just as good as a free app. See the whole Xtorrent story. If they don’t, either because it doesn’t work properly to them or simply a matter of opinion, they will delete the file and forget about it. You’ll need a lot more exposure to get more and more people downloading, and I can only expect a bit more serious input after what? 10.000 downloads? 100.000? It’s hard to determine where the sweet point lies, but most certainly, it lies in selecting your own beta testers instead of just *anyone*.

Free downloads make people lazy. It’s the same with piracy. The notion of something being ‘out there’, on the internet, much rather makes it a product to consume and discard instead of evaluate. It’s become faceless. The products does not reflect the work behind it or the maker.

Please don’t feel guilty about downloading and using my product. But even the smallest bit of input is very welcome. More than you could imagine. A tiny, tiny reinforcement of the notion that I worked on this and put real effort into it is what I do it for. If you can say “I don’t enjoy this product, because…”, I’m more than just happy. If you come along again to tell me that you simply like it, and that’s it, even that is great to me. It’s a very, very little task you can do to show me that you care.