Disqus - Latest Comments for gemp

Re: «Ça c’est des choses à dire importantes à propos...

gemp — Wed, 18 May 2016 19:53:58 -0000

Faut que je sois plus régulier, mais c'est pas simple. Étienne et les autres, ils planent à 20 000. Pourtant gravement ancrés dans le réel. Mais pas le nôtre. Eux, c'est le vrai réel, le nôtre, c'est celui qui est pollué par nos hommes politiques, nos institutions, notre «vie de tous les jours». Le leur, ce sont des possibles qu'il ne tient qu'à nous d'actualiser. Je vais faire des efforts.

Re: Fixing mixed-encoding MySQL dumpfiles with WordPress

gemp — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 13:54:49 -0000

Thanks for the time you took to document all this. My problem wasn't related at all to WP but the iconv trick nailed it anyway.

Re: collision detection: Gay squid sex

gemp — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:17:21 -0000

A squid post absolutely rocks. But one thing those fine scientists didn't take into account is that those octopuses never invented the kleenex. It may have some sort of influence on any specie's sexual activity.

Re: collision detection: Come for the design, stay for the text

gemp — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 07:36:01 -0000

I relatively agree with Project Gutenberg decision. Separate content from aesthetics is valuable, as each formatting decision becomes part of the actual content. CSS is a good example of external formatting, and HTML5 offers better markup to qualify content. But for "printed" or e-printed material the equivalent is rudimentary. Design decisions you make while working on the aesthetics of a book are hardcoded into it. Furthermore, some of them are lost if you don't control the display. Manually adding an hyphen, or removing it if it's automatically inserted, reducing kerning locally to allow one more word on a line, even sometimes italics and bold, not to mention initial choices like fonts, size, leading, etc.

A nicely done book requires a lot of unnoticeable work. As a designer, I would quantify it a bit more than "1%" :)

Though there's more to it, as you remarked with modern poetry, and it also exists in most other types of writing. As an avid Pratchett reader, some of the fun would be lost without Death not speaking in small caps, for example, not to mention the ever abundant footnotes to mention just a few. Even before the computer age, where the author can now work closer to the end of the line, some design desideratum were passed along with manuscripts, being a rudimentary meta-information, shaping the final form of the book according to the writer's vision.

The more evident of those are chapters, then paragraphs: we are accustomed to them but they're only a formatting choice, one which survives Project Gutenberg acquisition, as well as capitalized letters and punctuation. I didn't check but I certainly hope they also keep subscript, superscript, bold, italic, etc. The latter being sometimes meaningful, to emphasize a word, or conventional, when applied to quotations, which already have their own enclosing symbols.

Therefore, some of the "soul" is lost in the process the Project retained, your poetry example showing it perfectly. To preserve it while keeping the content clean, it would need a defined set of markup with meta-information, not unlike an XML Schema but with relevant formatting constraints, which would be delivered along with the content. It could be then used and adjusted to typographic and design choices.

And with e-print come other difficulties, as there is different screen sizes, various resolutions, poor typographic alternatives and people deem normal to be able to zoom, reorganize text according to their specific tastes and so on. PDFs are frustrating in that regard, but still the best way to offer what I consider good aesthetics.

And sorry, no, I won't undertake any e-book design, sorry ^^

Re: collision detection: The art of public thinking

gemp — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:16:45 -0000

I won't make a witty comment, sorry. I just find it awesome that you're (maybe) back. And I don't use the word "awesome" a lot.

Re: http://on-est-demain.tumblr.com/post/9081610030

gemp — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 06:54:18 -0000

Le 9 mai 2011. Je l'ai ajouté, quoique je vois difficilement ce qui peut te faire penser que ça a dix ans, vu que le Parti de Gauche n'a que deux ans et quelques.

Re: collision detection: "Let's get this party started!" My evening talking to "babygurl01475" ...

gemp — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:13:00 -0000

72 comments? On a dead blog? Pleeeeeease post more often :)

Re: collision detection: How Instagram changes the way I look at things

gemp — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:28:49 -0000

"Now, only a couple months later, we're happy to announce that our community consists of more than a million registered users."

"Little did we know that within a few short weeks we'd see more images from all over the world than we could have ever imagined. It was both rewarding and humbling to see people embrace Instagram as both a new home on their iPhone - and a new way of communicating visually with people around the world."

http://instagr.am/blog/3/in...

Re: collision detection: How Instagram changes the way I look at things

gemp — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:14:31 -0000

And voilà. (Moved to Tumblr.)

Re: collision detection: How Instagram changes the way I look at things

gemp — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:54:02 -0000

Holy Cow! A new post! I couldn't believe my eyes. And with pretty nice pictures inside.

Thanks for sharing. I yet resisted the Instagram flow, having heard a lot about it but now... there's no way I cannot start using it.

Re: collision detection: The "Milky Way Transit Authority" map

gemp — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 06:44:08 -0000

Now for fans, you have the Lost Subway Map. Might interest your wife, Clive.

Re: collision detection: Asking Wolfram Alpha "Does God exist?"

gemp — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:48:25 -0000

It doesn't know (yet) anything about changing a lightbulb, tho.

And I tried many queries (long and short ones) but it apparently doesn't know why it's called "Wolfram", only that its creators named it that way. Pretty sad.

Re: collision detection: Asking Wolfram Alpha "Does God exist?"

gemp — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:30:38 -0000

Funny, your URL got a bit screwed so the question became: "What is a man%3F". I must admit I don't exactly understand the answer:

3 F less than 1 in 12500 people (0.008%)

Re: collision detection: Asking Wolfram Alpha "Does God exist?"

gemp — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:26:05 -0000

Mentioned among other good ones in 10 Even Better Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs.

Re: collision detection: Study: Shorter search queries produce better search results

gemp — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 07:29:11 -0000

Depends on what you are looking for. Shorter queries will bring you what the search engine, therefore the users (see somehow this previous post) deemed relevant. For little known facts or uncommon aspects, you may have to resort to longer queries, trying to figure out how the information could have been formulated in order to find it.

Re: collision detection: Mind hack: Think of your pay in hourly terms, and money impacts your happiness more

gemp — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 05:43:17 -0000

Being a freelance graphic designer, payed by the hour, I resent the sentence: "Particularly when compared to the insanely huge hourly rates paid to outside consultants, lawyers, and the like."

At least in France, a bit less than half of what I make goes to the government for company taxes, social security, unemployment (to which I have no right to), etc. Plus I have to buy expensive computers and software on a regular basis, pay the office bills, supplies, training and so forth. I don't have paid vacations and when I'm sick, I just don't earn anything. Furthermore, I have to work insane hours -- not because I want to become richer, but because clients impose it with constant bargaining and ridiculous deadlines. And don't get me started on IRS. Taking all this into account my hourly rate doesn't seem so shiny anymore.

Well, but all considered, I might be happier...

Re: collision detection: "Why can't I own a Canadian?" And other delights from Google Suggest ...

gemp — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 10:50:05 -0000

I did spend a day back then doing this in french... pretty funny. I forgot about the meme with Canadians, that's a hot one too.

Re: collision detection: Humboldt squid: Soft, gentle kittens of the briny deep?

gemp — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 09:11:24 -0000

Yeah! New year brings Collision back to life! Auspicious!

Tho I diligently follow giant or not giant squid news only here, headquarters of the resistance.

Re: collision detection: My latest Wired magazine column: Troll taming at Whitehouse.gov

gemp — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:02:11 -0000

You don't have to answer to every comment :)

It was just a pun (a /. one).

Really good article, I looked into those things a while back but didn't have all of it (maybe it didn't existed at the time). I don't know how you know so many things... I'm impressed but don't answer, it's just praise.

Re: collision detection: My latest Wired magazine column: Troll taming at Whitehouse.gov

gemp — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:29:46 -0000

+5 Insightful

Re: collision detection: The meaning of Etsy: My latest Wired magazine column

gemp — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:57:47 -0000

A friend of mine does that with (mostly) kitchen appartuses: http://anne-marie-elorza.fr/

Re: collision detection: The netbook effect: My latest feature for Wired magazine

gemp — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:51:07 -0000

Does the $100 install includes the $129 OS X license? And the fact that the Apple TOS forbid you to install it on any other machine than an Apple one? I'm not aggressive or resentful about anything. I said it was a hack and my friend has about 4 Apple machines actually running (me 6), with valid licenses. So having one more hacked didn't seem to us like something completely evil.

But Apple is very cool about its installations: no serials, no internet verification. There's no hassle like a Windows one. Though if this kind of things gets common, it might change, for the worst.

This looks like a little bit like this free iPhone app, MedCalc, two doctors developed and gave the sources away, And one guy renamed it X MedCalc and is selling it for $1. Screenshots (article is in french, sorry): http://www.macbidouille.com...

If you come with a regular OS X license and ask your guy to install it, why not. But that $300 notepad will become a $529 one, installation and OS included, which is not so cheap anymore.

EDIT: Number of Apple machines not including iPods and peripherals...

Re: collision detection: The netbook effect: My latest feature for Wired magazine

gemp — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 08:41:45 -0000

Neat article.

The friend I rival with in geekness showed me just a few days ago his new notebook, though some "high end" one in the $400-500 price tag. He bought it for a trip in Japan. We're Mac users for a long time, I personally like to show off with the latest MacBook Pro (I know, I should get a life, I have the excuse of being one of those graphic designers who didn't lost his Adobe CS disks). He hacked OS X 10.5 on the tiny machine. If it's not snappy, it's smooth and works perfectly -- and a lot of fun.

I immediately thought I should get one... before asking myself what I would do with it.

Re: collision detection: 41% of museums don't know how dogs actually walk

gemp — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:44:42 -0000

You may have broken your record, but you didn't do your customary posts overflow. And for that, I thank you. I hate it when I don't have time to read carefully what's in there.

Nice to have you back -- even for a short time!

Re: collision detection: Relaunching with a new blog design

gemp — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 04:55:07 -0000

Collision is one of the few blogs I check manually, not with RSS, so I noticed the layout change before the arrival of the many posts... quite a surprise when one was used to close the window on "The Science of Interrogation" for so long. And this morning, a squid on top! I missed you. Welcome back!