The first problem I ran into was my lack of software. Never fear, I thought — GIMP to the rescue. I quickly learned that GIMP was not designed for print design, however. The fonts looked awful. I forged ahead nonetheless, though. After consulting with Jason, he managed to salvage my 72 dpi (mistake number two) GIMP produced images into something worthwhile using In Design CS3.

When I looked at what Jason had wonderfully created for me, though, I just wasn’t satisfied. The 8 pt font that he placed in the document using In Design looked so much better than the 42 pt font I placed using GIMP. This is when I learned that GIMP must never ever be used for anything other than photo manipulation.

So I decided that I must start from scratch using software that was designed for desktop publishing. A Google search for an open source In Design alternative led me to Scribus. After installing Scribus and the GhostScript library (to assist with PDF creation), I set to work. It took a little bit to learn the software, but once I got rolling, I managed to produce the final design in just a few hours.

So, without further ado:

The album cover

The track listing page

The cover uses a wordle which was generated using the entire text of 1st Corinthians. I used Good News Publisher’s RSS feed to get all 16 chapters of the Apostle Paul’s letter from the English Standard Version and shoved it into wordle. After randomly generating a dozen or so arrangements, I figured I would have enough to work with. I like the final arrangement of the cover — it looks a bit like a factory with a smoke stack, but the factory is 1st Corinthians, and the smoke is comprised of the words found most commonly therein.

A Corinthian column that I found on Flickr seemed an appropriate backdrop for the track title page. It was provided by these kind folks via a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Employer: Self

Skills used/gained: GIMP, Scribus, general desktop publishing knowledge

Time invested: 15 hours

First, Unfuddle.

Unfuddle is a project management tool developed specifically for managing programming projects. I have yet to explore it completely, but it looks to be very promising. It has milestones, tasks, timesheets, svn/git hosting, and some wiki style pages. It’s basically a perfect integration of trac/svn/mediawiki that is already setup and hosted for you. Plus, it’s API exposes nearly every aspect of the system so you can build widgets and mashups until your heart is content.

I hope to be using Unfuddle a lot in the future (hopefully I can convince my employer to make the switch), but for right now I’m just taking advantage of their free 200MB of SVN storage.

Now onto everyone’s favorite buzzword, Ruby on Rails

I’ve had a number of false starts into the RoR world over the past few years (I even developed a plugin a few years ago), but I have never completed a project using RoR. Hopefully now I will have the motivation to do so. I’ll jot down a few of the things I learned yesterday (even the horribly embarrassing ones)

1. Don’t forget the = after <% if you want to output. I spent about 1 hour trying to figure out why my layout wouldn’t yield.
2. There is no built in email model validation, but there’s a pretty sweet plugin named validates_email_format_of. RFC 2822, RFC 3696, yada yada yada.
3. If you want to use the flash scope, but don’t want your variable hanging around for the next request, use flash.now().

The technique is pretty simple: pass an options object to the function you’re calling (or don’t), create a default arguments object at the top of your function in question, and use jQuery’s extend function to merge the two.

Here’s some code to help explain:

/*
 * call the function with some options
 *
 * will alert:
 * option1: whatup
 * option2: false
 * option3: 2
 * option1: "andhow"
 */
mySweetFunction({
   option1: "whatup",
   option2: false,
   option3: 2
});
 
/*
 * call the function without any options
 *
 * will alert:
 * option1: sillystring
 * option2: true
 * option3: 100
 * option1: "andhow"
 */
mySweetFunction();
 
// the function in question
function mySweetFunction(options) {
   // establish the default values
   var args = {
      option1: "sillystring",
      option2: true,
      option3: 100,
      option4: "andhow"
   };
 
   // use jQuery's extend function to merge
   // args and options, modifying args.
   $.extend(args, options);
 
   alert("option1: " + args.option1);
   alert("option2: " + args.option2);
   alert("option3: " + args.option3);
   alert("option4: " + args.option4);
}

SGCC Statement of Faith Wordle

I have been a member of Sovereign Grace Community Church in Roanoke, VA for about 2.5 years now. This is a wordle created using the text of my church’s Statement of Faith.

Employer: SiteVision, Inc.

Skills: jQuery, SQL Server, ColdFusion, Fusebox, ORM

URL: https://www.vhha-mci.org (password protected)

Time invested: 6 months

Clean, commented Fusebox XML code

The status board refreshes every two minutes

I hope to use CFCDoc Revamped once version 0.48 comes out and I can generate some static html. My host doesn’t support CFML (as of yet), so I can’t run CFCDoc dynamically on my server. If you are interested in running CFCDoc Revamped on your server, all you have to do is change the file extension to .cfc on all of the .cfm files which are included by base.cfc, controller.cfc, dispatch.cfc, and model.cfc.

Employer: self

Skills: php, flickr api

URL: http://moustachebash.com

Time invested: 10 hours

A celebration of the mustache