If you use Adobe Illustrator a lot this might be handy for you. You can do multiplication, division, addtion and subtraction within the app:
As the screenshot shows above, I have a 10mm box and I want to increase its width by 2. So in the ‘Width’ field I simply type in ‘10mm * 2’ and voila. Granted this is not that usefull for a simple operation like this however, if you find yourself often using decimals (e.g. the golden ratio) this is a time saver.
This post is the first in a series called “Mitsakes” where I’ll be exploring the various mistakes that I've made and how you can avoid them.
Recently I designed a poster for a client that was used in the subway system here in Toronto. I used Adobe Illustrator for the majority of the job and fired up Photoshop once or twice to edit the background image. The guidelines were pretty strict, but easy enough to follow and I did the usual quality control before sending the poster off:
The final PDF looked good and the client approved it.
This week I saw the product of my labours while riding the subway downtown. Unfortunately, the printed poster did not look like final PDF that was up on my screen. The mistake was slight, but still noticeable: a lightly tinted box enclosing the title. A box that I knew shouldn’t be there! So what did I miss?
There are a couple of possible answers, but I think the correct one is that I didn’t rasterize the effects that I had on the title. The title had a very slight drop-shadow applied to it, but because I was working in Illustrator this means that it was a raster effect applied to a vector object. Unfortunately, that combination can sometimes lead to unexpected results when printing, even if the final PDF looks fine on screen.
When working in Illustrator make sure to rasterize any vector objects that have raster effects applied to them. To do this:
That’s it. I would recommend doing this for all of your final deliverables.
What do you think? Am I right in the diagnosis of the problem? Could it have been something else? Let me know in the comments below.
I’ve been listening to/reading about Ayn Rand recently. She’s a pretty big deal in the world of ‘neo-liberals’ and ‘free-market evangelists’ (I'm not using those terms derogatorily).
As I understand it, the central thesis of Ayn Rand's philosophy is that selfishness is good; selfishness is a virtue; we should be selfish in pursuing our goals. The question that I have is: In the selfish pursuit of our own goals should we use any methods available to us to achieve what we want? Should we use force, coercion, bribery and corruption?
Then my next question is: Why not? I suspect that Ayn Rand would say that using the above mentioned methods would be immoral. But, why is it immoral? On whose authority are these methods immoral? Ayn’s? Why should we listen to her about what is moral and what is not. This becomes especially poignant considering that Ayn was an ardent atheist and considered faith in god to be an abdication of man’s ability to reason.
On the other hand, if we are allowed to use any method available to us—including force, coercion, bribery and corruption—then in such a society monopolies and government favouritism would be inevitable. Yet anyone whose familiar with her philosophy knows that Ayn vigorously opposed and condemned such phenomena.
Let’s imagine a simple scenario. Any business that accumulates enough power would naturally want to hold on and even expand that power—that would be its selfish prerogative. If the above methods are considered legitimate then there would nothing stoping that business from bribing, corrupting, coercing and forcing the government to bend the rules in its favour and against the favour of its competitors. This business, through these methods, would then secure a monopoly in its sphere of industry and ... bye, bye free market.
Any thoughts?
Quick tip for people who use Coda for development and like their code to look clean and organized. Have you ever pasted in a snippet of code with tab spacing that’s out of sync with its surroundings?
Those <ul> and <li> tags are way to far to the right. Previously, I would have wasted so much time aligning them one-by-one. Then, by accident, I discovered that you can adjust the tab spacing of multiple lines at the same time.
Simply select the line that you wish to align and hold down Command + ] to tab them over to the right and Command + [ to tab them over to the left.
You’ll end up with nicely formatted code:
Biking on my way to work this morning I almost got into an accident. I was coasting up to the intersection and as the light turned green I began peddling again. Just as I did that the crankset on the bike, basically the front gear that's attached to the pedals and pulls the chain, literally came apart. My chain flew off, and being that my bike has a coaster break - i.e. I need my chain to break, for a moment there it looked like I was going to crash into the curb. Luckily I have a back up front break that saved the day.
After the adrenaline died down I was left to deal with the inconvenience of some how figuring out how to get my bike fixed and still get to work on time. I knew it wasn't an easy repair that I could do myself. However, there was no bike shop around that I knew off, and besides it was before 9AM and with exception of the exellent Urbane Cyclists all the other ones don't open until 10.
This got me thinking of a business idea: CAA for bikes. It would've been great if there was a bike shop that I could've called which would've then came and picked my bike up. Better yet, I could've locked my bike up, went to work, they could've then picked up my keys from my work, gotten my bike and repaired it.
And since in most cases simple repairs on a bike don't require many tools or a ton of space I could even forsee a travelling bike repair van of some sorts.
Let me know what you think.
So 9 days after my initial letter to the 4 major candidates running in the St.Paul's by-election only 2 have responded, Liberal candidate Dr. Eric Hoskins and the NDP candidate Julian Heller. So what I'll do is examine the Dr. Hoskins' response in this post and then save Mr. Heller's response for another day.
To be honest I'm actually quite surprised that only two have responded. The questions pretty soft ball and relatively "trendy" in terms of what going on in Ontario and North America. But, oh well.
I should also point out that neither of the candidates so far actually responded in person, it was just some person from their campaign, which is I think to be expected. So this is the first response that I got from Dr. Hoskins' camp:
Dan;
Thanks for contacting the campaign.
On the first question, about the Green Economy, I would refer you to the recent activities surrounding the Green Energy and Green Economy Act: http://www.greenenergyact.ca/. The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) has also re-launced our Feed-in Tariff program by which we are procuring green electricity and thereby working to build the industry: http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/FIT/. As a local producer of solar panels, ARISE will benefit from these efforts as will other future local producers.
On your second question, I will have to make some inquiries and get back to you.
Hope that helps (for now),
rob.
This was kind of disappointing. I expected a more in-depth point by point response instead of a couple of links to some websites. To make matters worse the Green Energy and Green Economy Act website was pretty hard to navigate. I couldn't actually find what the Act was going to do, there were vague promises of "improving the environment and the economy of investing in green jobs ... blah ... blah." However, I didn't see anything concrete in terms of a plan or a list of projects that were going to be accomplished.
So I wrote them back saying this and asking them to outline some of the specific projects/incentives/investments that the OGEA will be making.
They responded back with:
Dan;
We are still in the regulatory stage of the Green Energy Act. The goal is for the the Green Energy Act to accomplish three things:
- Smart grid - A network that can accomodate the multiple, distributed sources of energy.
- Right-to-grid - Ensuring that if you produce the energy we will buy the energy.
- Feed-in-tariff - Paying prices for renewable energy that encourage more people in to produce it.
The regulations being written will be to support these initiatives.
Hope that helps,
rob.
A bit better, but again no specifics AND they completely ignored my second question on the topic of The Internet & The Government. Overall, I wasn't that impressed by Dr. Hoskins' response, he gets marks for speed of response and follow up, but that's about it.
Final score — 2/5.
Check back soon for a look at how Julian Heller form the NDP handled the questions.
Just wanted to give you an update. So far, after 4 days, only the Liberal candidate Dr. Eric Hoskins has replied. I'll wait a while longer to see if I get anymore replies and then I'll post them here with my thoughts/analysis. Check back soon.
I live in the center of the universe and my particular corner of the universe is having a by-election.
Our last MPP quit 'cuz he got a better paying job, but then he hit and killed a bicyclist, so things are looking a bit iffy for him. However, since he quit the people of my 'hood need to elect a new person who will represent us in the Provincial Parliament of Ontario. So the election is scheduled for September 17th and the candidates, as far as I'm aware of and in no particular order, are:
I wanted to pick their brains a little bit so I sent all of them an email.
RE: Questions about the Sept 17th elections
Hello {name},
My name is Dan, I live in the riding of St. Paul's where you are running in the September 17th election. I just wanted to get you opinion on 2 areas of interest to me:
"New Green Economy"
There's recently been a lot of hype surrounding the "green" economy. Multiple levels of government have touted the importance of creating a sustainable future by balancing both job creation and the protection of our environment.
This emphasis has also been present in the speeches of the U.S. gov't. In fact, this week U.S. Vice President Biden announced funding to a solar panel maker Sylandra as part of their "Investing in Renewable Energy" program.
What will you do to attract, retain and foster companies like Canada's own ARISE Technologies and others involved in the "green" economy?
"The Internet & the Government"
This area is personal to me since I work in the Internet industry. Looking at our neighbours down south I can't help but feel inadequate.
From whitehouse.gov to recovery.gov to their gov'ts wholehearted embracement of popular social networking sites like Flickr, Facebook, Vimeo, MySpace and YouTube the current U.S. administration has done an amazing job using the Internet to increase citizen participation and gov't transparency.
By contrast the current Ontario gov't site is boring, hard to navigate and uses the old top-down approach -- "we talk, you listen".
What will you do to finally get the Ontario gov't in the 21st century and get citizens involved by leveraging social media, user-generated content and the plethora of available Internet tools to allow people to monitor, contribute and discuss gov't policy?
Cheers,
Dan
Stay tuned to the replies.
