ScarToonz: The ressurection

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Mar 122008
 
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After a hiatus of several months in which I spend a lot of time planning and thinking about what I wanted to achieve with the comic, I am happy to announce that ScarToonz is back. I have some very interesting plans now, and some new ideas. A lot of the old traditions will be changing but the things that made ScarToonz work in the first place will remain.

Doing a webcomic is hard work at the best of times, but it is also a lot of fun. The trouble was, it stopped being fun at one point because of the sheer pressure to keep coming up with good jokes and finding time for it all. I think my new ideas will reduce a lot of the pressure and let me focus on why I did the comic in the first place: I like to make people laugh.

So here’s hoping that you will enjoy the all new, all groovy ScarToonz comics.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 5:42 am  Tagged with: , ,

Thank goodness Stephenson wrote Snowcrash

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Mar 082008
 
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Before we actually HAD a cyberspace… otherwise it may have gone like this:

It takes a lot of practice to make your avatar move through the Metaverse like a real person. When your avatar has just lost its legs, all that skill goes out the window.
“ROFLMAO – you sux0r !” Hiro says. “Die bitch!” He whips his blade sideways, cutting off both of the businessman’s forearms, causing the sword to clatter onto the floor.
“I will Pwnz0r you !” Hiro continues, whipping the sword around sideways, cutting the businessman’s body in half just above the navel. Then he leans down so he’s looking right into the businessman’s face. “OMFG,” he says, losing the dialect, “N00B!”

And that would have been …tragic.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 6:29 am  Tagged with: ,

Click – drag – eject – oh no !

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Mar 072008
 
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Seigo posted a blog entry today about a patch for KDE4 that makes it work a bit like MacOS in that you can eject a CD/DVD by dragging it’s icon to the trashcan.

He talks about how his Mac nostalgia was pleased about this. Well I like Aaron’s style, I love what he did with KDE4 – but this is in my view a very painful idea (I really hope it is optional – or at least not the ONLY way to do it).
Many years ago, while still a student my girlfriend at the time showed me an iMac the first time – they had a bunch in her department at the university. She really didn’t like working on it much (and as a digital artist that was odd as that is exactly Mac’s biggest market sector).
When I asked her why she disliked it (my dislikes were always about how closed apple was, I have never really evaluated them on a UI front) she put a CD in and said “get it out”.
After ten minutes of failing to find a way – you can’t right click for a context menu, there is no eject button on the iMac’s drive I gave up. She dragged it to the trash can and said “that is the only way to eject a disk”.

I immediately saw just how horribly unintuitive this was – after all I am a programmer with more than 20 years computing experience on several operating systems and I couldn’t figure it out. Dragging something to trash means getting rid of it, erasing it – it is completely untuitive for merely EJECTING a disc you want (presumably) to be able to use again later.
Quite frankly, if dragging a disk to the trash did anything at all, I would have guessed it would do something like format a CD-RW or something – DELETE stuff – like every OTHER drag-to-trash function does.

So while having this ability may be nice for people who come from a mac background – nobody else will like it, so I really, really hope it won’t be the default. Extra options that are well known to some can be good, defaulting to probably the single worst design decision apple ever made would be… disastrous.
Of course the nice thing about free software is, I can voice this opinion, Aaron will likely notice it – and so will other KDE devs (I know a few read this blog) – and it will actually be heard and cared about.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 4:09 am  Tagged with:

I am buying the new NiN album, and so should you.

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Mar 052008
 
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Marking my first actual album purchase in over 5 years, I am going to buy the 5USD official download version of the new Nine Inch Nails album. I am not a huge fan of NiN though I like some songs – but frankly  - I aint buying it because of the music. I am buying it because I love music in general – and every single payment Trent Reznor gets right now is a nail in the coffin of the record labels.

That’s right. RIAA, MPAA and ASAMI – I am buying an album I don’t think I’ll ever even listened to – JUST TO FUCK YOU – because you have been fucking US for way too long – and worse, you’ve been fucking the artists we love.

Thank you Trent Reznor (and those who helped pave the way like Hole and Radiohead) for finally proving their bullshit wrong by actually doing it the right way and making a fortune. And the big difference: when I pay this 5 dollars (a HELL of a lot less than a CD costs in a music shop) – the stuff I get is CC licensed, so I can copy it, remix it, share it – it can inspire new art – and the 5 dollars I spent – every single cent of it goes to Trent Reznor – I am actually supporting the artist, not a bunch of fatcats in a system where an album needs to be multiplatinum for several years before they actually make ANYTHING at all.

Even if you are not an NiN fan – support this now – and the music YOU love will get to see why THEY too should do it this way.
As a side-effect, considder this: the grand prize on all the idols shows is a record contract. Imagine when the artists realize how worthless it is. It won’t kill idols (sadly) because merely being there will offer the one thing they all want -a chance to get heard so people will actually by their online published music.

Here’s to a future where art lovers can support artists – and the artists can actually survive. 

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 Posted by silentcoder at 8:31 am  Tagged with:

The supreme annoyance of IE and javaScript.

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Mar 052008
 
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The last while, I have been working on a reporting tool to allow my customer to get useful information out of their system logs. I wrote the reporting tool itself, but not the website design in which it sits. Said website design uses frames. One holding the input forms, the other holding the output (the actual reports matching the criteria you gave it).

One problem with this, is that if you want to print a report – you obviously don’t want all the outside frames and decorations – you just want what is in the output frame.

So I added a piece of code like this:

INPUT TYPE =button name="cmdPrint" VALUE="Print report" OnClick="parent.outputframe.print() ;"

Simple enough right ? Works perfectly on firefox. But on IE – it goes and prints the whole screen anyway. Now why would IE receive a document.print request and not honour such a simple thing as WHAT the document is set to ?
There is absolutely no sensible reason. The only possible reason can be to annoy developers and try to make IE compatible code an annoyance on other platforms. A lot of sites seem to get around this by reopening the print-frame in a new window by itself – which on firefox with popup-blocking is sometimes hard, and in most cases when it does work ends up in a new tab. Either way, it’s extremely annoying.

In short, yet another version of M$ screwing everybody who isn’t paying them money.

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 Posted by silentcoder at 4:10 am

Cooking with SilentCoder: AJ and Silvia’s pepperpine fishbraai

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Mar 032008
 
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First recipe post in a while, and unlike most of those – not exclusively my own – this is one me and Silvia came up with together.

This recipe needs a fish, as fresh as possible (never frozen is ideal). You want an intermediary dryness, not too dry or too oily here. In South Africa, yellowtail works very well but ask your fish merchant for fishes that are good to roast on the coals.
You will also need:

1) One fresh pineapple
2) Two fresh green peppers (one red, one green).
3) Olive oil
4) A fresh lemon
5) Herbs to taste
6) Salt and pepper

Cut the pineapple and peppers into strips about half an inch wide. Once you have cleaned your fish, spread it open so you can stuff it. Drip olive oil over it inside and out, then put a layer of herbs over the inside. Put a thick layer of pineapple and pepper strips over it, add another layer of herbs and drip copious amounts of olive oil and lemon juice over all this. Add salt and pepper.
Fold the fish closed, if needed use some string to tie it shut. Now add salt and pepper to the outside, cover in a layer of herbs and drip more olive oil and lemon juice over it.

Take the whole fish and wrap in tinfoil. Now roast over a low-heat fire for roughly one and a half hour until moist, soft and tender. Done right, your fish will fall right of the bones and both the peppers and pineapple will go excellently with it. Serve the whole dish alongside rice and salads of your choosing (or if this is enough classy for you – make chips).

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 Posted by silentcoder at 1:53 pm  Tagged with: ,
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