Ranting and Raving

morgan1 and I replaced our dead and much maligned Inkjet today. We found a pretty cheap Laer Printer, A Konica/Minolta 3500W. My feelings about it are mixed - I totally shopped price on this one, because this was in many ways a needful purchase, and while I would have preferred the cheapest OKI PagePrinter, this was about 70 bucks cheaper.

It looks to be a good printer, with a small footprint, and setup was trivial, at least for WIN2K. It is, alas, a bit married to Windows, and although someone cared enough to develop a printer driver for it for Linux, it looks to be very raw, and I expect that getting CUPS printing working with it will be like pushing a dead elephant uphill with a teaspoon. Simplest solution might just be to save to PDF on the Linux box and then print on the Windows box from Acrobad Reader.

In the meantime, it's a relief to have a Laser again - the toner is both waterproof and Copic-proof, which is a very good thing for when I want to hand color scanned artwork. It also means that if I should be taken with a desire to do Gocco prints, I have something that will lay enough carbon down for that to work.

I tried printing some Cat-Tharsis strips from it, sized down to what they would be in a Plan9 book. The printer's 1200 X 1200 mode fared quite well with my line-art. Lines were crisp and all details present. I've heard that Grayscale presents challenges to this beastie, but I very rarely use grayscale, so that will mostly be a non-issue.

My strips, on the other hand, scaled down to Plan9 book size are very busy. I really need to learn to get control of my composition - I tend to include far too much non-essential stuff in my panels. Mostly I need to learn to crop more tightly.

Well, I suppose I should return to wresting some creativity from my muse. More Pencil to Paper combat.

Thank God for Plan9 Publishing. While the good folks at the Gutenberg project are industriously converting printed and manuscript texts to electronic media, making them more accessible, and more readily searchable, Plan9 is doing work that is arguably more important: converting electronic media to print. This is important work because of the inherently ephemeral nature of digitally stored data. The entire reason that Gutenberg can do what it does is that it has source media to work with that are not, by their nature ephemeral. Our cultural predecessors left us permanent records of their philosophy, their literature, even their government. As the ideal of "paperlessness" is extolled, I wonder if we will be able to leave an enduring legacy or if large swaths of our culture will be lost to media obsoloscence. I also wonder how trustworthy even the information we do record is, given the mercurial nature of digital media.

A book, a scroll, a chiseled stone are all artifacts. This is the key distinction between these things and a web page. If I alter my web page, what it was before dies as if it never was. It may know a brief half-life in google's caches, may survive a little bit longer in spaces like the Internet Archiving project, and I will confess to being amazed that when I google my name, one of the items that I get back is a joystick port pinout that I posted to a newsgroup over a decade ago. But we are deluding ourselves if we imagine that these electonic records will survive a complete decay of civilization. Print records, however, have. Many have been lost over the millenia, it is true, but so many have survived that we can put together a reasonable picture of the cultures of Greece and Rome, and even get glimpses of legal customs in cultures older than those.

The other concern raised by ephemeral media is the ease of revision. Information may be excised without leaving a trace behind, an embarassing remark excised from the record without so much as a palimpsest to betray the change. This opens up important questions about knowledge and history. If we rely on the internet to record our history, we should not be surprised when something we remember being said or done is suddenly gone from the record. Indeed, the ephemeral nature of electronic media remains the strongest argument against electronic voting.

This is why I sing the praises of Plan9. They are pioneering the conversion of ephemera to artifact. And I know that in a hundred years, when the web is a barely remembered fin de siecle phenomenon, copies of Regime Change and Gone with The Windows will remain as monuments to the artistry of the information age.

After an evening of kitten dreidel with morgan1 and Maeve, followed by bedecking our house with the festoonery of the hap-happiest time of the year, I decided to give Cat-Tharsis' web site a facelift. I've done all the work on the staging server, and am planning to publish the changes to the production server no later than New Year's day (and possibly quite a bit sooner).

The major problems I wanted to address with the existing site had to do with usability. Specifically, visitors could not discover the links, news, feedback form, or other apparatus without scrolling down past the comic. In order to address this I made a fresh set of menu and navigation images that are significantly smaller than and way less clunky than what I had before, and arrayed them in 40 pixel tall bands above and below the comic; a style inspired by kevinjdog's Newshounds layout. Another problem I want to solve is the way my links stay trapped in the cat-tharsis.com frameset my domain name registrar uses to hide my site's internal structure. I think I just discovered how to do this, and I will experiment with it tomorrow.

I'm pretty happy with the new look and feel, most users will encounter the the entire apparatus without need for scrolling. My hope is that if visitors can actually find my feedback form, they might actually drop me a note. I have been wondering about providing a forum, but I don't want to do it if it's going to be moribund. Getting some feedback from users would help me determine whether there is enough interest to warrant it.

And now, the timer having turned off our holiday display, I shall away to bed, where great story ideas will come that I will not have the wherewithal to write down and which I will forget by morning.

And productive too!

Saturday, I built a notebook I had lying around into a new web development/staging server.

The gory details:

IBM Thinkpad 380z, 233Mhz, 64M Ram, 4G HDD.
Redhat 9.0 running Apache, MySQL, PHP, and various and sundry other goodies.
Since I want the processing power for the good stuff, it does not boot to X.

It is Waaay quicker than its predecessor, and getting it going was easier than I'd planned. The only snag I ran into was with the PHP parser. It's a later version than what had been on the RH 7.2 box, and had globals turned off by default, so it wasn't parsing my code. Turned globals on (which is also the way my ISP has their PHP Parser set up) and everything was hunky dory.

Sunday, I pencilled AND inked Tuesday's strip. So much nicer than the past two weeks when I ended up inking hastily Monday night. I was able to use the dip-pen rather than the fountain pen (though I lettered with the fountain pen). It was more relaxed and deliberate than inking with the fountain pen. Inking with a dip pen has some of the characteristics of meditation. And tonight was the first time I inked without music. It was very refreshing.

Well, rather than go out and buy a new PS for the Art-Box, I took a case fan out of a corpse I had lying about, and replaced the PS fan with it. Of course, I had to peel off the label that said "No User Serviceable Parts Inside" in order to service the part. but, it went smoothly and I'm typing this entry from that box. Ah but there are other fans in the system that look like their days are numbered, and I don't have their like on hand. Ah well.

Got Tuesday's strip pencilled and inked. I'm happier with it than I've been with many. Tomorrow I will scan it. The first panel contains some stuff that I'm going to computer letter, because I don't think I can do a decent Courier by hand, and the dialogue is a written exchange between Grendel and his PC. In PHP.

Which reminds me. . . the PHP program that serves up the comic has a little glitch in the calendar control that causes the latest comic to be displayed when one of the Month links is clicked, unless there is a strip for the first day of the next month, or the last day of the previous one. A look at Cat-Tharsis' log database has revealed to me that this glitch has confused at least one visitor, so I need to fix that. It should be easily accomplished with a couple of trivial functions.

morgan1 and I went paddling yesterday. Two lakes and four portages. It was the first time this year that I was out in my solo boat, which is just sad. It beat the snot out of me, which is testimony to just out of tone I've become from lack of paddling. Oh well, it was an extraordinarily depressing year, but things have been starting to look up. It seems that to be willing to do a lot of the fun stuff, like paddling and camping, etc. I really need to feel that I have a stable base, and with the past year being the least stable since . . . well since the last time the President's name was a four letter word, I haven't really had the confidence that that confers.