monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

I love looking at this blog, written in right-to-left persian script. I love that OS X renders it perfectly.

If you’re an OS X developer, go get Hydra NOW.

Hydra is a network-enabled collaborative editor. Open a source code file, click “Share”. Then your fellow LAN (Rendezvous) or internet-based developers can conenct to our machine and you can work on the file in tandem. It’s perfect for small-team/XP development. Wow. Wow.

Support for C, C++, CSS, HTML, Java, Javascript, LaTeX, Objective-C, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, XML included.

Immediate feature-requests:

• a dock-icon marker showing that there are new changes in one or more of your documents
• an “Invite” command

This is seriously cool… stuff.

I think someone was in way too much of a rush to get this story online. The entire text of the story (it’s not long) is included twice!

Oh, and the hoopla is all about how NBC fired Peter Arnett after he gave an interview to Iraqi television stating “the US war effort has failed”. Um, what?!? I guess Peter got tired of reporting news and decided to make some. Sheeesh.

Big surprise, I hacked on mygannt.py some more this weekend, and it’s now called sgannt.py. Ostensibly for Simple Gannt (though it’s not so simple anymore) but more because it sounds cool to pronounce it “scant”. -)

The one thing I really like about sgannt is that it’s personal. I designed the chart format, trying to keep it simple but attractive. I want my clients to feel comfortable looking at it, and get all the information I can give them. It’s not perfect, and hopefully it will get better, but I think I’ve struck a good balance between information design and visual design.

Sgantt now reads an OPML file on stdin as input, and generates very nice PDF. It has it’s own config file format (modelled after analog’s since that’s the format I’ve been using most recently) where I can spec fonts, margins, banner colors, default line widths and column marker colors. This has been a really good experience for me, and I’m going to write up a howto soon on some of the technologies involved, to hopefully save someone else some of the headaches I had.

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Spec Web Site Design: Design for a local lawn care company. The company has no site currently. In my design I tried to develop a look that was professional yet friendly.

The site design features a searchable resource database of lawn care information and tips, based on the tpe of lawn, the task being performed, etc. Customers looking for winter tips on how much to water their desert landscape, for example.

The site also features a lawn-care weblog where the owner can share news, local tips and tricks to lawn care in the desert (the location of the company), and customer alerts.

Jodi has been posting more and more lately to her site. She’s becoming quite the blogger. I knew it was inevitable when I heard her say the other day, with 5 minutes before walking out the door to work: “I need to go post to my website…”

You go girl. -)

She’s a really good communicator, I think, and it’s quite fun to watch her develop her “voice” in this new medium.

(If you’re into that sort of thing, there’s an RSS feed here.)

Of course, no journey would be complete without a few choice temptations along the way.

Ming is a SWF file library with python bindings.