I recently real­ised that I haven’t gone into any detail about my work envir­on­ment. For today, I thought I’d start with my desktop. First things first, the wall­pa­per is from a pic­ture pos­ted up on Twit­ter recently by Bryan Lee O’Malley — the author of the won­der­ful Scott Pil­grim series, soon to be a movie by the tal­en­ted Edgar Wright (dir­ector of Spaced / Shaun Of The Dead).

But recently I’ve been get­ting com­ments about the “crazy text in the top left corner” of any screen-shots I show people, so I thought I’d post up a bit of a tutorial for the applic­a­tion that makes this all pos­sible — Geek­Tool. What it does is run scripts and com­mands that you would use in Ter­minal and dis­play the out­put on your desktop.

Geek­Tool is quite simple to use. For now we will just be mess­ing with ‘Image’ Geeklets, just drag one into pos­i­tion on your desktop and you will see the ‘Prop­er­ties’ win­dow. There are three import­ant things here: Com­mand, Refresh, and Style. Com­mand is where you will enter the scripts below, Refresh is how often you want the out­put to refresh (I find 10s works well for most cases), and the but­ton below Style — ‘Click here to set font & color.’ — opens up the default Font style win­dow of OS X (which you should already be accus­tomed to).

The vari­ous scripts I’ve gathered together below have been col­lec­ted from tutori­als all over the web, I hope you find them as use­ful as I did.

Con­tinue read­ing: My Desktop

Movies. I’ve watched a lot of them lately. Here are some words about some of them.

Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea

Trailer

This is Hayao Miazaki so it’s obvi­ously Stu­dio Ghibli so you can’t escape how good it’s going to be. Beau­ti­ful, fully real­ised yet simple and easy to watch this re-weaving of Hans Anderson’s Little Mer­maid is one of the best things I’ve ever looked at.
Luck­ily for the UK it’s hit­ting cinemas soon, although per­son­ally I’d ditch the Cate Blanchett headed dub and hold out for a sub­titled screen­ing if you don’t want to catch the Dis­ney­fic­a­tion effect of Noah Cyrus and try­ing to hard to talk to kids. Either how­ever, is bet­ter than not see­ing it though. Espe­cially if you have some kids to take with you. They’ll love it just as much, if not more than you.

Con­tinue read­ing: 3 Months Of Movies

It’s pos­sible that you haven’t seen Adven­ture Time before. Pos­sible, but with over 2 mil­lion views in 3 years, not very likely. It aired once — at mid­night — on Nick­elodeon, before going on to win awards and become the inter­net sen­sa­tion that it is. Picked up by the Car­toon Net­work at the end of 2008, it’s finally draw­ing near to the date the first epis­ode airs — March 10th 2010.

Adven­ture Time is the cre­ation of Pen­delton Ward. His per­sonal web­site seems to be down cur­rently, but he also hap­pens to have a twit­ter on which he posts many delight­ful draw­ings. Other than that, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find out that much about him.

How­ever, the voice act­ors are much easier to track down. Star­ring Hynden Walch, Jeremy Shada, and John DiMag­gio (best known as Bender from Futurama) — with guest appear­ances from tal­ents such as Mark Hamill — it’s def­in­itely off to a good start.

Fred­ator Stu­dios are the pro­du­cers of the series (as well as of the anim­ated short) and they have a ter­rific blog on which they post up art­work, story­boards, back­grounds, char­ac­ter designs, and much more. Well worth keep­ing an eye on over the com­ing months as things start com­ing together.

But per­haps my favour­ite thing about the new Adven­ture Time is the gor­geous sets (261 in total) as seen above. Designed by Ghost­shrimp and Santino Las­cano, the high res­ol­u­tion ver­sions are already in heavy rota­tion as my desktop wallpaper.

In short: keep an eye out for it, it’s going to be popular.

In 2009 I took a fair few pho­tos, some­thing like 3,000 of them accord­ing to my Light­room lib­rary (and that doesn’t include the 4 or 5 roles of film I have sit­ting on my turntable yet to be developed). Most of those pho­tos (around 2,500 I’d say) were shit, and they will never see the light of day. A few of them — des­pite vari­ous prob­lems — were still rather inter­est­ing. It turns out that when the major­ity of your shots are taken with a manual focus lens from the late ’70’s you’re going to get a lot of out of focus, over/under-exposed, or just com­pletely missed shots

So I present to you my dud pho­tos of 2009, a little white-balance here and some levels there, but they’re pretty much as they came straight out of the camera:

Con­tinue read­ing: Dud Pho­tos of 2009

There has been a def­in­ite fall off in the updates at SPK lately. Not much has been going on on the front page and vir­tu­ally noth­ing has happened on any of the oth­ers. Things have ground to a halt.

But in the real world things have been busy — or at least as busy as we’d ever like them to be. Over the last three months span­ning the end of 2009 and the begin­ning of 2010 a lot of things have con­spired to hap­pen all at once, cat­egor­ic­ally ruin­ing all fun, ever. Things like new jobs with erratic and often unex­pec­ted work hours, the dreaded fest­ive sea­son, appoint­ments with the immig­ra­tion depart­ment and the weeks of paper work con­nec­ted with them, actual pay­ing graphic design work, double flu which may or may not have been swine related but sucked either way, per­sist­ent cough­ing, self doubt, lack of con­fid­ence and the search for some kind of uni­fy­ing the­ory which explains the reason for ‘stuff.

There have been deaths. Sev­eral of them.

It’s just been that kind of three months — the kind where motiv­a­tion is at an all time low and which in an unpro­fes­sional like myself are the sort of time when you with­draw the gang plank and float adrift liked a crotchety pir­ate in a sea of ‘leave me alone’ and ‘is there any Jeremy Kyle on TV?’

But all things must pass — it’s one of those essen­tial gov­ern­ing prin­ciples of life neces­sary to mov­ing forward.

And that’s what the next few posts will be all about — passing on the things we didn’t have the time or motiv­a­tion to tell you about. It’s all about vomit­ing up the past three months onto your lap, wip­ing our mouths and mum­bling sorry before push­ing ourselves up into a stumble across the room like an unknown drunk at a party.

Classy.

We’ve had a few requests for art­icles on the site lately, and more and more of them are ask­ing about the design of the site itself. So for today I thought I would detail how I designed the header for Super­pos­i­tion Kitty. An ini­tial warn­ing: I have no idea how many browsers this works in (as my usual test­ing pro­ced­ure of using Browser Shots is no help for hover states), how­ever it should work for all the major browsers, even IE6. Secondly: This code — or more spe­cific­ally, nest­ing a <div> between <ul> and <li> ele­ments — is not XHMTL valid.

I spent a lot of time wor­ry­ing about the second part until I real­ised the valid­ity of my code had abso­lutely no effect on how the site is dis­played to vis­it­ors. This doesn’t mean you should just throw val­id­a­tion out the win­dow — at the very least it is a great way to dis­cover hid­den errors in your code, or why some­thing isn’t dis­play­ing as you think it should — but I just don’t believe it is as import­ant as I once did.

Head­ers in Word­Press are a rel­at­ively simple affair. If you want to brush up on the basics then I would recom­mend check­ing out the excel­lent Word­Press Codex art­icle on design­ing head­ers. The header for Super­pos­i­tion Kitty is based on Son Of Suck­er­fish Drop­downs, which is in turn based on the ground­break­ing A List Apart art­icle: Suck­er­fish Drop­downs. Read­ing through both of those art­icles (which I heav­ily recom­mend) will give you a good ground­ing in how to style lists as a hori­zontal (or even ver­tical) menu.

Con­tinue read­ing: Word­Press, Head­ers, And Super­pos­i­tion Kitty

Lately I’ve noticed we’ve been get­ting a lot of hits on my art­icle Good­bye Media Temple, Hello Linode, with search terms such as ‘medi­atemple vs linode’. So I thought it would be best to tran­scribe my thoughts in a little more detail below. I would also like to pre­face this art­icle with the state­ment that I was a cus­tomer of Media Temple’s for almost 3 years, and have been with Linode for 2 months now.

For the table below I have com­pared Media Temple’s ‘base’ ded­ic­ated vir­tual server to it’s nearest Linode com­pet­itor the ‘Linode 720′.

 
Linode comes out way in front in everything other than ‘Net­work Trans­fer’, how­ever I have found that for the few small sites that we host we rarely use more than even 50GB a month. Obvi­ously, depend­ing on what you host you may need more than the 400GB per month that this level of Linode offers, but I would be wary of host­ing any­thing push­ing that much traffic on a server with only 512MB of RAM (in Media Temple’s case). It’s also worth not­ing that Linode offers addi­tional trans­fer at the rate of $0.10 per 1GB if need be. Media Temple does not offer such a ser­vice, and will charge you $0.50 for each 1GB you are over your limit.

Con­tinue read­ing: Linode vs. Media Temple

For some reason, some how, the vir­tual private server that this site is hos­ted on was com­prom­ised by Baltic hack­ers last week­end. I am not sure what it is they wanted, maybe Trent Reznor or Stephanie Mayer have some irate tech­no­lo­gical fans out in East­ern Europe.

WARNING: Semi-technical talk ahead.

Either some­body took offense at some­thing we have writ­ten or they were just really, really bored, because at 16:00 on Fri­day of last week our server star­ted send­ing out massive amounts of data over UDP. I received an auto­mated notice from Linode a few hours later telling me that my server had aver­aged 6.16MB/s over the last two hours. That one spike there man­aged to use up 5% of our monthly band­width. The net­work usage con­tin­ued at ran­dom inter­vals for only brief peri­ods of time, mak­ing it quite dif­fi­cult to catch with tcp­dump, and neither ntop or iftop noticed any­thing amiss.

Keep­ing an eye on Linode’s con­veni­ently provided net­work graphs I was finally able to cap­ture the tail end of another massive out­put with tcp­dump only to reveal abso­lutely noth­ing. None of the (very help­ful) Linode staff were able to tell me just what was going on, but after a few hours came to the con­clu­sion that it was likely some­body had com­prom­ised my server and was prob­ably using it to per­form DDoS attacks. Solu­tion: delete and rebuild.

This could’ve been pain­ful if I was still with Media Temple, but Linode offer pro-rata billing (mean­ing that I only have to pay for what I use). I imme­di­ately opened up a new server and got to work trans­fer­ring my backups. Then it was time to secure it, and bet­ter than I had done last time. I am now using ipt­ables to block all ports other than www, https and ssh. I have also set up SSH public/private keys, dis­abled root login, moved ssh ports, removed vsftpd and installed fail2ban.

I could now close up my old account. Total cost to me: $0.63 in server charges and half my week­end. Hope­fully I won’t have to deal with this again, but it taught me to make sure I always have up-to-date backups and to keep on top of secur­ity. And not to piss off East­ern European hackers.

Spec work is killing the design industry.

Spec — short for ‘spec­u­lat­ive’ — work is apply­ing the ‘try before you buy’ prin­ciples of selling cars to the design industry (hope­fully you can see already what a bad idea this is). In short, it is any work in which a fair fee has not been agreed upon up front. This should seem obvi­ous enough to most pro­fes­sional design­ers out there; per­son­ally, I don’t take on any pro­jects these days unless there is a signed con­tract and — if a flat fee rather than on hourly fee is chosen — between 30% to 50% of the fee up front.

Any­body that has been ripped off by a cli­ent that decided not to pay at the end of a pro­ject, or decided that the fee is too large and they will pay the amount they feel is ‘fair’, knows how stu­pid it is to take on spec work. But there is another form of spec work: the design ‘com­pet­i­tion’. Design com­pet­i­tions have been around for dec­ades, but the pop­ular­ity of the web has brought us many web­sites host­ing these com­pet­i­tions — and some of them even prom­ise a reas­on­able fee.

We’ll ignore for now the hun­dreds of web­sites and for­ums that are pop­u­lated with “best design for a logo that con­tains a pic­ture of my cat and the words ‘syn­ergy’, ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘cross-platform’ will be PayPal’d £20″. While these design pleas are uni­ver­sally ter­rible, I have been told that the main entrants for these are 16 year-old’s that have just pir­ated a copy of Adobe Pho­toshop and are look­ing for weed money, not exactly my audi­ence here.

Con­tinue read­ing: On Spec Work & Design Competitions

We stumble over so many bril­liant artists while tra­vers­ing the inter­net that it would be a trav­esty not to fea­ture as many as we can here. So I intro­duce you to a new series of posts: Artists Of Today (And Yes­ter­day).

Stas Orlov

Stas Orlov — also known as Indi and Uno — lives in Moscow, Rus­sia. A mem­ber of Bang Bang Stu­dio, he pro­duces beau­ti­ful detailed pieces that look almost as if they’ve been drawn in MS Paint. His work is largely sur­real, deal­ing with themes from childen’s stor­ies, to pop cul­ture, to reli­gion, and so on.

Unfor­tu­nately this pro­file is tra­gic­ally short as there isn’t much inform­a­tion on him to be found, and cer­tainly not in Eng­lish. But, make sure to check out his afore­men­tioned blogs on Live­Journal, or his Pro­file on Bang Bang Stu­dio, to get an idea of just how pro­lific he is.

Con­tinue read­ing: Artists Of Today (And Yesterday)