Comic Master

Be a master of your own domain, get Comic Master (bater)!

OK, so I’m going to bite the bullet (and maybe lose my teeth in the process) and learn RubyOnRails. But instead of building another ToDolistapp or another one of countless blogs, I thought I’d do something different. Something that I actually could use. A comic website management application. Thusly, Comic Master was conceived.

Planned features for version 1:

• Comic strip management (duh)
• File uploading (for strips and other things… wallpaper, avatar, etc)
• Setting future dates for strips to be published
• Allow for grouping individual episodes into issues (Lil Monstas will use this format)
• Simple content management
• Simple forums
• News posting
• Blog
• Commenting on all of the above

I’m going to use MySQL as the database. All the content is going to support RedCloth. Plus, I’d like to make it support themes.

I don’t like the name Comic Master, though. Sounds a little like “Be a master of your own domain, get Comic Master (bater)!” Which is just plain wrong. But I can change that when — or if — I think of a better name. Feel free to post any suggestions…

Terminal Woes

I couldn’t stand it any more. My terminal prompt looking like:

Matthew-McCrays-Computer:darthapo ~/Desktop $ |

It was driving me crazy! I wasn’t sure how to change it on my Mac though. Our friend Google showed me that I can change it the same way I would on my linux box—since they both use bash as the shell.

So, I’m much happier now that I’ve updated my ~/.profile with this entry:

export PS1=" \w > "

Now my prompt looks like

 ~/Desktop > |

Ahhhh, much better.

The Venture Brothers

The Venture Brothers is the best cartoon on Cartoon Network (Adult Swim). It’s got action, humor, and some of the best villains I’ve seen in a long time. I nearly fell off of my couch when I saw Magic 8 Ball man! He, of course, doesn’t speak. He shakes himself and you read his answer on his chest-plate.

Dean: Dad is super serious all of a sudden. Do you really think he’s in as much danger as he says he is? Brock: Oh yeah, he’s screwed. I give him about an hour before he panics and begs for us to haul him up. Dr. Venture: Okay guys, I can hear all this

It’s definitely quirky—when one of the main characters is voiced by Patrick Warburton (The Tick, Puddy, et al) you know it’s gonna be a little off. It pokes fun at lot of cartoons from yesteryear. You’ll notice the nod to Johnny Quest right off. A tad of Hardy Boys, a dose of Austin Powers, with the camp of Brisco County, Jr. (how’s that for an eclectic reference) what’s not to like?

Brock is chained up, talking to Hank through his communicator watch
Brock: After the twist, you’ll hear a snap. Then the body goes ragdoll on ya.
Hank: And that will knock him out…even more?
Brock: That’ll kill him
Hank: Do I have to?
Brock: Alright fine, crybaby. Just tie him up and, maybe I guess gag him. But at the first sign of trouble I want you to at least break both his knees.

Check it out on Cartoon Network -- it’s usually on Sunday nights -- I think you’ll be glad you did.

FYI: I feel compelled to mention that this show is on Adult Swim, so it’s not really for little kids. I think it’s rated TV-PG, but still some of them can get a little raunchy.

Mass. Pirate: We need that key to stash your boat, Mr. Big Stuff, let’s have it.
Brock: ... it’s up my ass.
Pirate #1: Are you serious?
Brock: Why don’t you check?
Pirate #1: (to other pirate) Well? Check!
Mass. Pirate: But what if he’s lying?
Pirate #1: If he were telling the truth, that would be better?

Time to Find a New Job

OMG -- I almost feel sorry for this guy. Almost.

Never Say Never

Well, all things being cyclic, it eventually had to come to this; Internet Explorer is not the top dog anymore. When I say this, I don’t mean market-share. They still have a good slice of that (see chart below). However, IE is so far behind it’s competition that you can’t - in good conscience - call it a “modern browser”. It’s slow, buggy, non-compliant… Oh, yeah, and full of security holes. In fact, it’s really just an online virus magnet that allows you to see some web-pages too.

I’ve been playing with Safari, of late—I really enjoy it. I’ll probably wind up going back to FireFox, though. It’s just so darn nice.

Here’s the market-share chart from ZooDotCom:

Adult Swim, Without A Paddle

As most of you know, I have a webcomic. A second one in the works too. I draw a lot of my inspiration from my many, many years of watching cartoons and reading comics. In fact, I still watch cartoons and read comics. However, I’m a lot more selective in my tastes now.

Over the next few weeks I thought I’d post on some of my favorite cartoons and (web)comics.

It’s funny to watch these new cartoons and know that the writers are my age—you can tell by the jokes they tell.

I watched “Without A Paddle” this weekend. It’s a very funny movie. Matthew Lillard did a good job—although I’ll always see him as Shaggy now. The depressing part is that this movie is about a group of guys my age. I’m now old enough to have the ‘letting go of childhood’ movies targeted at me.

[Sigh]

General Weirdness

Hmmm… WordPress doesn’t like Scooby and Shaggy. I don’t know if you noticed, but the last post is really messed up if you select the permanent link, or try and add a comment.

I’m not sure why, either. It seems to only be that post. I’ve added the last few entries with MarsEdit. But if that was the issue, the other posts should have been messed up too—I’m rather baffled by the whole thing.

Are images an issue? Let’s find out, here’s a picture of my car:

Huh. Weird.

Which Carter is the Carter with all the Pills?

Comments have been re-enabled!

It’s funny, I was perusing the blog of the developer of the AuthImage plugin (that I’m now using the kill some spam) when I saw a comment about him going through more wallets “than Carter has pills”. He mentioned that he thought it referred to ex-President Jimmy Carter—which is amusing, ‘cause I used to think that too. But then I used to wonder, if he had to take so many liver (or little) pills shouldn’t he have died many years ago?

Anyway, it turns out that it’s not about Jimmy Carter. Which really isn’t a surprise. It’s actually referring to a company that made liver pills.

Funny, huh?

Software Stereotypes

I don’t generally believe in stereotypes. But occasionally they do seem to be true, in a general sense.

I’ve been an internet software developer for nearly ten years. In those years I’ve worked in various areas of web-development and have noticed certain attitudes that seem to be common amongst certain technology “camps”. For example:

Java people generally over-complicate things. They come up with the most convoluted “solution” to any given problem and call it scalable. Which, by the way, is strictly speculation. Plus, they really go overboard with configuration files. I’ve seen configuration files for configuration files, how silly is that?

Microsoft people not only drink the M$ kool-aid, they like it. They are usually rather weak at OO stuff. And rarely know anything about Design Patterns (which isn’t entirely bad).

Then there are the XML zealots—which are similar to Java people. But they aren’t limited to Java, they exist everywhere, in every technology camp. Words cannot describe these people. The seem to think XML is the solution for everything. I mean everything. I actually saw one guy post that XSLT was the only language he’d ever use again. He claimed it was a full-fledged language that was comparable to C++.

Delusion simply isn’t a strong enough word.

There are other wacky tech “camps” out there, to be sure. But I’ve not really been exposed to them (thank god). So I can’t really say what they’re typically like.

What “camp” am I a part of? Well, frankly, none of them. I’m really a bit of a technology agnostic. They all do the same thing, more or less. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. That having been said, I’m becoming more and more drawn to dynamic languages like Python. Ruby is on my list of things to play with. Primarily because I want to play with Ruby on Rails.

Anyway, I thought I’d just piss off all of my friends at once. o_O

Of which camp are you?

Ta-da!

Ta-da is an interesting app built with Ruby on Rails, check it out: Ta-da List: Simple sharable to-do lists.

Stardom

You know what’s cooler than having your own comic?

Getting fan mail for your comic! I got my first fan mail last week, others quickly followed. It’s a very cool feeling. Plus, it’s good motivation to update regularly when I have a “fan-base” (too cool) to think of.