You don’t pay much attention to your blog when…

Posted by Jorge Bernal April 30, 2009

…after 8 months since the last comment you realize your new template is not showing comments (or the comment form).

Stupid me. I’ll try to fix that soon.

What’s wrong with colors in Firefox?

Posted by Jorge Bernal March 08, 2008

I’m not the first one to realize this, but there’s something wrong with color management in Firefox. Look at the following screenshots.

This is the original picture in Aperture, with colors exactly like I wanted:

Now the same picture in Safari

And now for something completely different: Firefox

In this particular picture, I used saturation to give strength to the moment, only to find out Firefox decided to wash out my colors.

The technical story here is that our monitors can’t display every color, so we have color spaces, and Firefox ignores them. Good news is that color profiles are supported in the Firefox 3 beta, though not enabled by default. You’ll have to open about:config and switch the gfx.color_management.enabled variable to true.

Bad news is, that will only work for you. If you’re trying to show your pictures to the rest of the world, they won’t see the same colors.

To learn more about this:

• Color space
• sRGB
• Web Browser Color Management Tutorial
• Digital-Image Color Spaces
• Introduction to Colour Science

Feedburner down?

Posted by Jorge Bernal October 05, 2007

Quick question: am I the only one having problems to connect to feeds.feedburner.com? Tell me if my feed works for you.

Update: it seems it’s my laptop. weird!

Update: Gotcha! I don’t have any idea of how this happened, but it’s fixed right now
$ route get 66.150.96.119
route to: feeds.feedburner.com
destination: feeds.feedburner.com
gateway: 192.168.101.3
interface: en1
flags:
recvpipe sendpipe ssthresh rtt,msec rttvar hopcount mtu expire
0 0 2840 212 316 0 1500 0
warhol:~ koke$ route get google.com
route to: py-in-f99.google.com
destination: default
mask: default
gateway: 192.168.1.1
interface: en1
flags:
recvpipe sendpipe ssthresh rtt,msec rttvar hopcount mtu expire

The dangers of openID

Posted by Jorge Bernal August 13, 2007

Since I first knew about openID it sounded like a tremendously great idea for me. I’ve wanted a distributed login system like this for years, but nothing is perfect. We all now the advantages: you aren’t tied to a single company to handle your data, are you?

Well, if you don’t want (or can’t or don’t know how) to setup your own openID server you will have to use a hosted system. Having one common authentication system for all the web services you use is a great thing, but we have to be aware this represents a single point of failure. I don’t rely on this system to get my work done, but this error shown above could have been a real problem for me if I had.

Spain is back to the middle ages

Posted by Jorge Bernal July 20, 2007

The last edition of the famous Spanish magazine “El Jueves” has been removed from the streets. All because of this cover (NSFW)

Copy says: If you get pregnant, this will be the nearest thing to work I’ve ever done (these are caricatures of the prince and princess of Spain). The cartoon refers to the amount now offered by the Government for every birth in Spain.

This is one of the times I feel ashamed to be Spanish. No surprises here, we are a monarchy in the 21th century. In fact this might be the only magazine who has the guts to laugh at the Royal Family.

Wanted: Google Groups

Posted by Jorge Bernal July 18, 2007

Bizarre. At this moment, google is missing its groups

The home page is returning random 500 errors and individual groups are accessible but empty

Discussions aren’t available right now. We’re sorry. Try again shortly.

EULAs from hell: typography

Posted by Jorge Bernal July 11, 2007

Do you think proprietary licenses suck? Try reading a typeface’s EULA. From typotheque:

4. You are permitted to make a single back-up copy. The Typotheque Font Software or documentation may not be sublicensed, sold, leased, rented, lent, or given away to another person or entity.

So it seems if you buy a typeface the author wants to have a saying in your backup policy. I’m also wondering why a typeface should be licensed by CPU

Wet google maps

Posted by Jorge Bernal April 17, 2007

Coincidence? No, serendipity. Last week I was on the bus going back home. This usually takes half an hour so I don’t have much to do except listen to music and think in absurd things like this.

I wondered what would happen if you ask google maps for directions from one place to another if there’s no road between those two. Hector got the answer today. Say you want to go from the new Warp HQ to the MySQL HQ (BTW, I’ve been there today and the sakila dolphin plush is awesome). No problem at all, google knows the way

So, swim across the Atlantic Ocean, cool! But there’s more, if you look at the Drive details it’ll give you estimates of how much will take you to get there.

After some experiments shortening the path, let’s say the distance is about 5500 km and Google says it’ll take you 29 days to get there. If you do the math you’ll find that you’ll need to swim at an average of almost 8 km/h (that’s 5mph) for almost a month (without any stops, and presumably no food). So, unless you are David Meca on tons of steroids you won’t make it. Just for reference, when this world record swimmer crossed the strait of Gibraltar, he did an average of 0.5 km/h for 2.5 hours.

Update: while reading another post on boingboing about the same topic, I got the insight for the old USENET acronym YMMV: your mileage may vary.

Planet apologies

Posted by Jorge Bernal April 10, 2007

Note: This is a dedicated post to Planet Warp readers

You might have noticed the sudden appearance of some posts in the planet feed. Quique told me this morning that his posts weren’t appearing on the planet, so I checked it and found that planet was crashing with something like DBNOTFOUND error (sorry I can’t remember the exact string). The issue was fixed by removing the cache directory and running planet.py again.

After that I discovered some really funny posts…

NeoOffice gone nuts

Posted by Jorge Bernal March 27, 2007

Yesterday, I read about the release of NeoOffice 2.1. NeoOffice is a port of our beloved OpenOffice.org for MacOSX.

The new version is quite nice. It has a look’n'feel way more consistent with the rest of the OS (it uses native libraries) and it’s like twice faster. But there is somethin quite strange:

I think I may not have the Bitstream Vera Sans typeface. The really bizarre thing is that switching off bold gets me a sans font, but turning it on gets me that gothic font.