Dammit Jim!

A couple weeks ago I made a WordPress plugin to generate unique monsters for each commenter. Don Park came up with the original idea for representing users with geometric shapes. Since I already had the framework in place I thought I’d make a WordPress plugin for the original geometric Identicons. If you want to visually represent users (but maybe you don’t like monsters so much?) then this plugin is for you.

After making the WP_MonsterID WordPress plugin to create a random monster avatar from an assortment of parts for each commenter (based on other people’s code), fruityoaty asked This looks nifty, but how many monster images are available for assigning?

I was skimming Simon Willison’s blog (I know his uncle) when I came across this cool idea for automatic avatar generation. Well to tell the truth, I took one look at the title “Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification” and deleted the link from my RSS reader but the next day a link based on that idea came up for generating a unique monster avatar for each user that did catch my interest. After all if it’s got monsters, it has got to be interesting.

I’ve been using LaTeX a lot recently and I thought I would write a quick post since I wish I would have found out about it earlier. LaTeX is a really powerful document (pdf and others) creation program. It’s sort of like HTML and CSS for paper publishing. As a first warning, LaTeX, like HTML, is not WYSIWYG. You have to code in things like \textbf{This will be bold}. This takes some getting used to after programs like MS Word but after using LaTeX, I really can’t stand working in Word for anything longer than a page or two.

I just found out about ClearType fonts thanks to Download Squad. I’m still debating whether I like them or not. They took me a few hours to get used to. Every time I looked away from my computer, I would come back and feel like my eyes were unfocused. But that blurry effect seems to have gone away and the fonts do look pretty and somehow thicker so I’m thinking I’ll stay with them. I guess they’re not all that hidden but funny how you can go years on a operating system and not know something so basic. Anyway, if you want to try on your computer go to the Display Control Panel. Click on the Appearance tab and click the Effects… button. Then select ClearType from the drop down under “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:”. You can also find out more about it and see examples at Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner.