It (very slowly) rotates the page, assuming their using a mozilla browser. I may release a future revision with more features, but this is it for now.

Enjoy.

Happy Holiday’s from BecauseRobots.

Tango Color Palette for printing.

Just threw this together and printed one out and stuck it to my cubicle wall. You may notice three extra colors, those are just three I picked from our company logo for when I do corporate work– I’d recommend replacing them with colors that are more useful for you.

RGB is simple– its the brightness or amount of Red, Green, and Blue that make up a color. Sometimes its on a scale of 0 to 100 (Windows for example), sometimes its on a scale of 0 to 255 (or FF in hex.) 0 to 255 is a truer representation typically, as most computers use 32 bits to display colors (check your Display Settings), where 8 bits are used for each color (that’s 2^8 or 256 (0 through 255) different levels) and the last 8 bits are used for transparency.

RGB is an ‘additive’ scale, as in all three at 0 is black, and all three at full is white. This is as opposed to…

CMYK is a ’subtractive’ scale. There are four colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and the Key plate color Black.) For simplicity, we’ll say that each can go from 0 to 100, although 0 to 255 again is a ‘more accurate’ scale.

So why four and not three? Because for printing purposes, you don’t generally want to overlay full cyan, magenta, and yellow ink to try to make black– its much cheaper and more effective to use black ink.

So, for example, after converting a color for RGB to CMY, say you got 20 cyan, 40 magenta, and 60 yellow. Instead of printing that, we ‘take’ out the ‘grey’ and rescale the remaining colors. Cyan is the least used here, so we’ll use 20 black and make cyan 0. Now our scale goes from 20 to 100 instead of 0 to 100, so we need to ’stretch’ the remaining colors to get their adjusted brightnesses. For magenta, (40 – 20)/(100 – 20) is .25, so the new magenta will be .25 * 100 or 25. For yellow, (60 – 20)/(100 – 20) is .5, so the new yellow is 50.

That’s right, 20C 40M 60Y 0K is the same as 0C 25M 50Y 20K in a true sense. In a practical sense, the printing result will be different because the latter will be using less ink overall and black ink instead of cyan. In print, usually less ink is better and black ink shows up sharper than ‘mixing’ the other three, so this is always a good thing.

Most programs will happily do the conversion for you. Note that these formulas do round a bit, so be mindful and if you’re going to do a lot in print make sure you record what CMYK colors you’re going to use for important things like logos so that when you let programs convert you can make sure they always convert to the same color.

[code] $UNDERLINE="\x1B[4m";
$REGULAR="\x1B[0m";
echo "The last word is ${UNDERLINE}underlined${REGULAR}.\n";
?>[/code]

In my own scripts, I just use $U and $R to save some typing. Anyway, enjoy, its a nice way to spruce up help messages so they’re more readable to users.

• back ups
• collaboration
• publishing

Now, none of those are particularly unique, and source control is hardly a waste of resources if it is only being used for two of those above. In some sense, the ’spirit’ of source control is being builtin to other things. Google Docs stores full document revision history and allows for collaboration and publishing. Wikipedia and other wiki store full page revision history, allows for collaboration and is published.

Nevertheless, its worth knowing the widely adopted solutions. Subversion is one of two major, free source control software packages out and about. (The other being git, which is designed, in my opinion, for much larger groups of people and more advanced collaboration.) There’s lots of free subversion sites where you can snag a repository at least up to some size. Whether you need to back up revisions of your book, want to have a shared directory of family photos across computers across the country, or simply want to keep your home directories in sync, subversion can do it for you. See Subversion on subversion.tigris.org.

BecauseRobots now has two (that’s right, two) Personas for Firefox available! BecauseRobots Dark and BecauseRobots Light are available in the Personas gallery.

Personas is a Firefox extension that lets you pick background images for the top and bottom Firefox bars, like a theme. Enjoy the new Personas. BecauseRobots belong under your location bar monitoring your URLs.

khamer@stout:~$ calc() { echo $[$*]; }

This creates a function called calc that does basic calculator stuff for you. For example,

khamer@stout:~$ calc 2+3*(5**2)
77

Note that it doesn’t like spaces, but hey, we’re going for the simplest. ** is the exponential operator. (^ is actually bitwise exclusive OR here.)

This doesn’t ‘add’ the command forever; if you’d like to save it so it is always available, use the following command:

khamer@stout:~$ echo 'calc() { echo $[$*]; }' >> ~/.bashrc

Enjoy. If this doesn’t provide enough power, look up bc, expr, or play around with python (I use the python shell all the time.)

Guild Organization

It’s important that a guild has some type of organization. Traditional forms of guild organization revolve around a hierarchy:

• Guild Master
  • Guild Officers
    • Raid Leaders
    • Class Leaders
      • Guild Members

Additional ranks may be PvP leaders, secretaries, treasurers, and recruiters. There are also nontraditional forms of guild organization (for example, some roleplay based guilds keep their size small and assign each membre a specific, orthogonal role. Others assign master/apprentice relationships within either tradeskills or classes.) All guild organization is trying to provide is a system for advancement and conflict resolution.

It is important that you have well defined responsibilities and privileges of your guild ranks and positions, clear explanations of how advancement is possible, and who is empowered to resolve conflicts when they arise. Typically, we see that this last point is where guilds lack the most– most guilds immediately send all conflicts directly to the guild master or worse, try to use their influence in the guild to bias the resolution. Key raiding members may point out that without them the guild would suffer, for example. These are signs that the guild lacks conflict resolution which we’ve seen eventually leads to guild splits and dissolvement.

To apply to the BecauseRobots Guild Certification Program, please fill out the form here.

Information about what sorts of things we will be looking for will be posted as we’ve got them prepared, however if you’d like to apply before then, fill out the Guild Certification Application and we will contact you and set up a time to review your guild.

Guilds that are reviewed and certified will be able to present the following icon on their website, which will link back to an article highlighting the strong points of their guild.

Copyright 2009.