Matt Gibson » Ramblings

Cool, looks like I’m in the PS3 Home Beta. Along with thousands of others no doubt.

Matt G — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:37:46 +0000

WELCOME TO HOME BETA
Dear PlayStation®Network member,

Congratulations, you have been selected to help beta test PlayStation®Home!

We appreciate your help in making the PlayStation®Home experience the best it can be! Please log in to Home this evening from 6 pm – 8 pm PST for a big celebration of Version 1.0 and a load test of our new features.

How to download
After you have signed in with your PlayStation®Network Account:
- Go to the PlayStation®Store on the PLAYSTATION(R)3 system XMB™ (XrossMediaBar)
- Select “Redeem Codes”
- Enter the code (below)
- Click “Continue”
- The download will be available on the next screen

XXX-XXXXXX-XXXXXX

Please note: The unique code is case sensitive and must be entered exactly as displayed.

Thank you for your continued support of the PlayStation®Network, and we look forward to seeing you in PlayStation®Home.

Yours truly,

The PlayStation®Network
Sony Computer Entertainment America

The desk

Matt G — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:14:54 +0000

Here’s my desk in a blurry as hell photo. Enjoy.

Illustrator or Photoshop “Unknown Error” when saving or can’t use type tool. Fixed!

Matt G — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:43:24 +0000

No thanks to Adobe, even after numerous complaints going all the way back to Creative Suite 1, if you have a bad font on your system, you may have issues saving as an .ai in Illustrator. You’ll get the dreaded “an unknown error has occured”.

If you disable PDF compatibility, it will save, but that’s not good enough!

You may also have a problem in Photoshop, where whenever you try and type on the canvas, it says an unknown error has occured in the font rendering engine or something to that effect. Again, similar error, stupid Adobe.

Turns out if you go to your fonts directory, hit CTRL-A to select all items, then go to the file menu, “copy fonts to” and select a folder on your desktop. Copy all the fonts to this folder, wait till it’s done.

Now go ahead and download a free trial of Font Agent for Windows. And let it analyze all your fonts. It will tell you which fonts are bad.

Go back to your windows font directory, delete the bad fonts. Restart Photoshop, or illustrator, and you should be able to save again.

This comes after probably 6 hours of trying different fixes with the transparancy settings, the font cache, font .lst files, adobe presets deleting, app setttings deleting, etc this is the only thing that fixed it.

Maybe it’d be nice if Adobe included a little “verify my fonts” checkbox and alerted us to bad fonts. That’d probably be too easy though.

The Gimp is better than Photoshop when it comes to Arabic or other Right to Left typefaces.

Matt G — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:58:58 +0000

Recently we had to do some work in Arabic for a client of ours. We had never used Arabic in Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator before. So when the client asked “you can do Arabic” the response was “oh yeah of course” without giving it a second thought. Windows supports Arabic, so in turn Adobe will right?

Wrong.

Adobe does not support Right to left languages like Hebrew or Arabic. Instead you must purchase the separate “Middle Eastern” version of Creative Suite, Photoshop or Illustrator. There are also a couple plugins available that we found that claim to enable Right to Left typefaces in Photoshop. When we actually found them, it turns out that most are for Mac, or just dont’ work past Photoshop 7. We use CS3, so we were out of luck.

So, after much searching, trying, etc. What did we end up doing? What we should have done in the first place.

We downloaded The Gimp for Windows, created a new artwork, typed our arabic text in, and used a proper Arabic font. Then we saved the item as a 600 DPI psd file and imported it into photoshop. It’s not editable like real text, but, it’s good enough for us.

Might save someone else some hours of frustration. Good luck.

Even Canucks can get Free Swag from Feedburner/Google! Got ours Today

Matt G — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:36:38 +0000

Check it out, a couple fancy stickers and two fancy buttons with the feedburner logo. Hot!

Leave home even less, consume even more with this handy company.

Matt G — Sat, 31 May 2008 05:11:42 +0000

I was looking at a couple local sites today while trying to find a place to trade my cellular phone for a different model.. and I came across this advertisement. I almost didn’t take a second look until I saw the little interac machine at the bottom. Interesting. Check it out.

Now, I’m not complaining, I’m all about making things easier, but when was the last time you actually WENT out for pizza, instead of ordered in? You probably can’t think of too many times can you. This ad right here, is almost a foreshadowing of what’s to come – even if you don’t have a credit card, you must have a bank account so we’ll deliver our products and let you pay right then and there. Great use of technology, local mesh networks or maybe gsm who knows, COD delivery of your favourite electronics, all without ever having to see anyone or go anywhere.

Anyway, that’s my little ramble for today, I’m not saying it’s bad, but I’m also not saying it’s good – in 20 years will nobody leave their homes in fear of “the axis of evil” or whatever they want us to be afraid of today?

Adding TinyMCE to your ProjectPier or ActiveCollab Installation

Matt G — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:59:14 +0000

Many of you are project managers, and may be using Activecollab or ProjectPier.

We were tired of their lame editor, so we decided to add TinyMCE into our installed version, both for ease of client use, and internal use.

The instructions are very simple.

1. Go to ProjectPier, grab the latest version (or svn)

2. Install ProjectPier as you would normally

3. Install any custom patches or addons to project pier.

4. Download TinyMCE

5. Uncompress TinyMCE, and enter the newly extracted directory. You will see a javascript directory. Rename this to tiny_mce.

6. Copy your newly renamed “tiny_mce” directory to the root of your ProjectPier installation.

# cp -R tiny_mce /var/www/yoursite/htdocs/projectpier/

7. Now, this is the only “complicated” part. Go into your ProjectPier installation directory, and then enter the applications directory. Like this.

# cd /var/www/yoursite/htdocs/projectpier/
# cd application
# cd layouts

8. Now you’re going to want to edit three files

# nano administration.php dashboard.php project_website.php

9. Now in these files, you’re going to want to add the include for tiny_mce. Add the following code after the last “add_javascript_to_page” line at the top of each file and then you are done.

10. That’s It! You are finished adding TinyMCE to your Project Management Installation! It should look something like this.

Enjoy!

Rogers Introduces some Stupid S**t.

Matt G — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:58:36 +0000

Look at what popped up when I was surfing today..

Snow time

mattg — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:27:09 +0000

Look snow

Best cover letter ever!

Matt G — Thu, 10 May 2007 21:01:17 +0000

My buddy works for a certain governmental agency down in St Catherines, Ontario. Since all the students are getting out of school, he has been getting lots of resumes. This one struck him as standing out a little bit. What do you think? Arrogant? or just a creative way of trying to get a job?

I may risk sounding a bit arrogant and far from modest, but I am a widely talented, energetic, courteous, honest and creative individual that would be a fantastic asset to the COMPANY NAME HERE. I have a wide range of skills that would be suitable working in your organization, but most of all I’m a hard working and responsible young guy. You should probably hire me.