Archive
Posts
Notes on engineering, applied AI, leadership and the occasional detour into writing fiction.
2010
Comics and closed lips
A pet peeve turned craft note: if a comic character is speaking, draw the mouth open — and how much a pair of lips can say about how someone talks.
How characters look, Comics versus Books
Comics show you a face; novels hand you a description and let your head do the drawing — on the two ways a reader gets to meet a character.
2009
Testing missing translations in Zend Framework
Finding untranslated strings in Zend_Translate by swapping in an adapter that answers everything with the same marker — an instant visual map of what you missed.
GoDaddy SSL Certificate and Apache
Support swore the certificate was installed correctly, yet fresh browsers rejected it — a broken intermediate chain, exposed by a free online tester.
Simple wget written in PHP
No wget, no install rights, but a working PHP — a tiny stand-in script that fetches a file from a URL when that is all you need.
(128)Network is unreachable: connect to listener on [::]:80
A cryptic Apache error filling the logs on Solaris 10, and the one-line Listen directive change that silences it for good.
Ant and Zend Studio
Ant mysteriously disabled in Zend Studio, and the trick with a throwaway project wizard that switches it back on.
Making lists easier and more beautiful
Building 'a, b, c' lists without dangling commas or foreach gymnastics — implode was right there all along, and it composes further than you would think.
The coders approach to writing
What years of wrangling structured data teach about novel writing — and why the tidy expand-from-one-sentence method rarely survives contact with a real idea.
How novels work
At 500 words a day, a 100'000-word novel is 200 working days before editing even starts — sobering arithmetic on what a book actually costs.