blog • Jacob Reiff / jaacob.com

Archive for the ‘blog’ Category

over two years ago

Chartwell: typeface for making charts

Chartwell gives you super-clean charts via ligatures in a typeface, plus the license supports @font-face (but ligature support is iffy in most browsers). $15/ea for Pies, Bars and Lines; $40 for the complete set.

Chartwell: “Chartwell is a family that explores the use of OpenType to interpret and visualize data. The font format is highly portable and can be used in most applications that support ligatures. The data also remains editable allowing for easy updates.”

via kottke.

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over two years ago

Numbers Two and Three

Book No. 3 from A Book Apart is now available—The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane.

This means I can finally order Book No. 2, CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm. (Because I’m (occasionally) a cheap bastard, I’ve been waiting until today to save a few bucks on shipping.)

Must-haves for any web-person’s library. (Alongside HTML5 for Web Designers, of course.)

How’s about a book subscription plan, Zeldman? My credit card is all warmed-up and ready.

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over two years ago

Suddenly I’m inspired to build

QuaDror from Dror on Vimeo.

The form is constructed of four identical L-shaped pieces, in which the angles are all the same, that operates with a kind of yin/yang action through a unique corner hinge. That allows it to open up for its full expression, or fold flat. It’s always parallel to the ground and identical from all four sides.

pop-up building

sound diffusing, structural walls for highways

building a wall

i’d live here

or just replace the old sawhorses holding up your makeshift desk

via Dror’s Folding Concrete Block Could Change How We Build

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over two years ago

New Launch: Wantist

Brittany and I (re)launched Wantist a few days ago, and I’m finally getting around to writing something here about it. The last week or so has been a whirlwind; coding, designing, hustlin’.

Our about page says it best:

Wantist is a hand-picked collection of goods, sorted and organized to help you give a great gift.

We made Wantist for everyone who draws a blank when it comes time to give a gift. You want to give something unexpected, something personal, when all of a sudden it’s like you barely know the person and your brain has perfect recall of the Snuggie and nothing else. Your usual next steps: browse the same old stores or get your google on and hope to find the needle in the haystack.

Instead, we wanted an application that was as insightful as a great salesperson. You say “I’m looking for something quirky for someone artistic,” and there you go—hand-picked quirky gifts for your artistic friend.

I hope you’ll check Wantist out, see if it helps you be a better gift-giver. I’d love to know what you think.

(We set up a GetSatisfaction page for feedback, ideas, and customer support.)

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over two years ago

Berlin, day one

Fair warning: I’m traveling in Europe for a couple of weeks and am posting some thoughts at the end of the day. Disjointed and random will be my MO—it’s not a high enough priority to form into stories fit for public consumption, I apologize. I hope to post once a day. You may want to unsubscribe.

Surprised by how much not being able to understand what is being said around me is disorienting. It keeps firing some competitive impulse to try and learn the language, completely, tonight. (Makes me much more concerned for France since I can conjure at least some German comprehension, whereas I don’t grasp any French.)

The difference between common, colloquial German and what is in the phrase books can be miles apart. Sorry, kilometers.

Lots of döner joints to try. Yummy.

Forget the Portland/Austin comparison, I’d take Portland/Berlin. So many people in coffeeshops on the sidewalk, enjoying 3pm on a Wednesday. Every block has new hole-in-the-wall or three to explore. (I need to work up a spot of courage on that one.)

Repeat after me:
Es tut mir leid. (I’m sorry.)
Ich spreche wenig Deutsch. (I speak little German.)
Sprechen Sie English?

5th floor walk-up flats are good times. My elevator has made me soft.

Graffiti is everywhere, lots of it visually arresting. (Shown is the firehouse.)

graffiti at the firehouse

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quite a long while ago…

Cadence & Slang, a small book about interaction design

Cadence & Slang achieved its funding goal 2 days ago, and is now available for preorder, with a release date of late 2010.

Based on the initial outline (pdf), I pledged to the project. (It might’ve had something to do with me itching to fund something for the first time on Kickstarter, but only a teeny tiny bit.)

Help support independent makers; if interaction design is your thing, consider preordering a copy for yourself. Or if you know somebody who would be interested, please send them to the C&S site.

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quite a long while ago…

Looking to hire a Rails teacher

An intensive round of 1-on-1 instruction

I’m looking for somebody to help me take my development skills up a notch. Portland, OR-based preferred, but finding the right situation for a successful outcome is most important to me.

I’ve got a number of holes in my knowledge (I have ideas of what I don’t know) and it’s too time-intensive to fill them on my own. While DIY-for-life is what my heart says, my brain is overruling with a demand that I speed things up and fill in the gaps with just the best knowledge, pronto.

Ideally, you

are an excellent communicator
are patient
develop on a Mac using TextMate
practice BDD using Shoulda (I’m somewhat open to change but Shoulda syntax clicks for me much better than Cucumber/RSpec)
won’t stick to a predefined “course”; I might not get something you’ll assume is obvious, I might be past whatever you assumed you’d be teaching that moment. I’d love somebody that can read cues and is flexible enough to fit what they’re teaching to me.
(I’m repeating the last one in a different way ’cause it’s so important); initiative is awesome. See the gaps before I can define them and fill them in. Don’t plan on running me through Depot from AWDwR and calling it a day.

My best-case scenario is one where we start off by examining my current codebase together. I’ve gone through and documented all the things I think I’m doing less-than-ideal but am unsure of how to appropriately refactor. (I’m sure there are other issues as well.) Hopefully from there you’ll be able to craft a customized curriculum that fills in the gap between what I’m doing and where I’m trying to go.

Code review + consulting

On top of a round of instruction, I’m looking for somebody that can provide code review services and consulting, both on an as-needed basis. (We’ll hash out a scenario that works for both of us.)

Moving forward

I’m open both to individuals as well as companies. Email me (jacob@ this domain) and let’s work something out. I’m looking to get started ASAP.

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quite a long while ago…

A great deal or a rip-off: Which is it?

Dear Condé Nast,

Are you trying to rip me off? You’re definitely confusing me.

I just got this in the mail:

but I can’t figure out if I’d be paying $12/year for both subscriptions, or $12/yr for each subscription I order (myself + any gifts).

As a preferred subscriber (it says so in big bold slab serif!), I’d like to think I’d get a better deal than say, what they offer to everybody else on their own site:

Or on Amazon:

instead of paying $2 more. I don’t want Wired to go the way of the dodo, but come on. Let’s not take advantage.

I spoke with a nice lady over at 1-800-SO-WIRED, who had absolutely no clue. She wasn’t exactly making an above-and-beyond effort to help me find the answer either, but I wasn’t expecting her to. (<self-promotion>Low expectations are a problem we’re aiming to tackle with Wantist.</self-promotion>)

Anybody know the answer?

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quite a long while ago…

Playing hooky ain’t gonna get it done, but what fun

Mt. Hood Meadows from the parking lot

We’ve been working a 6 day on / 1 day off workweek (although it mostly turns into 6.5 on / .5 off when we wake up Saturday and keep pushing forward on whatever didn’t get finished Friday night), however yesterday I played a full day of hooky and went snowboarding. Mt. Hood had incredible weather with blue skies, chilly wind and 140 inches of base. Most of the trails were tracked but there was tons of deep powder in the trees. I’m sore today, but it’s a great feeling sore. (Afterwards we went to the Blazers / Mavericks game, but the Blazers lost so we’ll leave that alone.)

With Fremont (the placeholder name for our current project), I’ve been in a constant back and forth in my mind with whether to spend some of our available cash to speed up development or keep fighting through the DIY process we’ve been doing. Development has been coming along relatively smoothly, much to my delight. Without any economic rebound insight, I can’t pull the trigger on hiring a full-time developer, and I don’t think we’ll see enough of an increase in development speed (compared to the tradeoff of burning cash so much faster) going with a freelancer/external team that has to balance other clients.

Of course we want (NEED) to get to launch and a revenue-generating phase, but there’s no sense in arriving at that milestone without the cash to fight the good fight towards the black. Our overhead is so low right now (with The King helping make a decent dent), our desire to raise another round nil (not that it’s exactly easy in this climate) and consumer behavior/belief so shook up right now, that if it takes us a bit longer to get up and running (but costs multiples less), is that really such a bad thing?

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quite a long while ago…

Revised WordPress Plugin “Date in a Nice Tone”

UPDATE: Crap, just found a bug. Will update later today. Fixed. (There’s some overlap between how “around a week” and the tail end of “a few days ago” is calculated, but I don’t think it makes a difference.)

On both this site and Brittany’s site, I’m using Mark Kirby’s excellent Date in a Nice Tone WordPress plugin, which is what enables the date in the upper right corner of this post to be written out in loose English rather than just displaying a date.

Brittany wanted a modification that added “yesterday” to the available options—she felt that “freshly baked” for posts sitting in the 48 hours between right now and time posted was too long to be useful.

The plugin calculates its dates by using time (seconds) in a day and phrases everything in approximate language (i.e. “a couple of days ago”, “a few days ago”)—so the difference between “a couple of days ago” and “a few days ago” is if the post falls between 86400×2 seconds and 86400×3 seconds. (There are 86400 seconds in a day.)

This works fine when using approximate language, but “yesterday” is more precise because it needs to work off of midnight. (Unfortunately, this plugin doesn’t take into account timezones of the user; I’m pretty sure it just uses your web hosting server’s timezone.)

My equation for calculating “yesterday” is if the time between now and when posted is greater than the time elapsed today, and the time between now and when posted is less than the time elapsed today plus another full day, then it is yesterday.

I also changed how “if equal to or more than 2 days ago” is calculated so that it uses the same pattern as yesterday. Otherwise, you get a weird overlap where it’s not yesterday, but it’s less than 48 hours from the post, which would give you a less recent post showing “freshly baked” behind one showing “yesterday”.

I’m hardly a PHP programmer, so if you see any flaws in my code, please share a fix.

@Mark Kirby: If you like my revision, it’d be great if you added it to the version in the WordPress Plugin Directory; if not, no worries, I’ll leave it here regardless. Thanks for writing (and sharing) your plugin.

Download Date in a Nice Tone v1.2.1

WordPress Plugin Directory page for Date in a Nice Tone

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