This is a sketch (done on quickly on my iPad) for my comic artists’ minigroup. We’re doing weekly sketch-jams on the same topic, this week’s topic being The Wizard of Oz. Take a look at the other awesome entries here.

As I drew this, I wasn’t thinking about Proposition 8 being before the US Supreme Court today. But since it is,  it seems appropriate in hindsight to say this about Dorothy here: just try telling him he can’t marry whomever he wants.

Here is my sketch from last week’s minigroup sketch. The topic was Batman… Mine is purging Gotham of the donut menace.

Also, I’ve made some new comics over at Horde of Neurons that haven’t been posted to this blog yet.

The Bad

- First, and maybe most importantly, the Ruby documentation sucks. Hard. Compare the level of information and useful search features of PHP.net to Ruby-Doc.org. The former is highly detailed, easily searchable and very helpful. The latter is a little barren, and really shows the immaturity of Ruby as a production language in comparison to PHP.

- Ruby has this weird habit of renaming common conventions for no apparent reason. Where nearly every other programming language uses NULL, Ruby has to be special and use nil instead. This is pointless obfuscation.

- Where most other languages use uppercase and lowercase to refer to the obvious, Ruby uses upcase and downcase. Why? Who the fuck knows.

- The puts() method is poorly named too. It’s equivalent to echo() but isn’t called echo because that would be lame, I guess. I’ve tried to find logical reasons for these weird names and there are none. It really does just come down to Ruby having this strange egotistical need to be different. It’s apparently the hipster of programming languages, and I want to smack its ironic handlebar moustache right off of its douchey face.

- Constantly having to start and stop the Rails server via command line is irritating. I love my bash shell and am extremely comfortable there, but it seems like a waste of time to have to restart the server when making edits to my app.

- The Rails console is too cool for decent formatting. When asking for a dump of an object, instead of returning easily readable blocks of text with line breaks it just barfs out a hairball of unformatted text and expects you to dig through it with a comb to find what you’re after. This is profoundly stupid.

- Installation is a messy, convoluted process for both Ruby and Rails. I’m sure a large part of my feeling on this is a result of being new to Ruby and Rails, but the installation was riddled with dependency and compile errors on my OSX machine. I’m no stranger to command-line installations, GCC, make and so on…. but the fact that there is no simple install bundle is surprising. And no, Homebrew doesn’t count. Compare, once again, to PHP. In contrast to Ruby and Rails, PHP is ridiculously easy to install and configure even without using the excellent MAMP bundle.

The Good

- Ruby is clean. Really clean. I’m rather used to ending lines with a semicolon, not caring very much about whitespace (allowing me to cleanly format my code however I like), and prefixing variables with the easily recognizable $. Skimming Ruby code, at first, is a little more difficult because Ruby is so clean. Everything looks the same and it’s not as easy at a glance to differentiate between variables, classes, functions and so on. The more I use and learn it, the more that clean simplicity is growing on me.

Overall? Meh.

And that’s it. I don’t have any other good points yet. Many of the irritations I’m seeing are the result of Rails rather then Ruby itself so I’m reluctant to lump their faults together. We’ll see if that opinion changes as I learn more. I fully expect that I’m wrong about many of these things (and hope that I am), so please let me know if you feel differently. I want to like Ruby, but it’s not impressing me thus far.

So here we are, a year later, it’s the Chinese New Year and now also the first annual Talk Like Jack Burton Day. Now go do what ol’ Jack Burton would do, and run your mouth off all day long with witty Jack’isms. Tag ‘em with #TLJBD and feel free to share this post and the image below.

This is especially useful for proofreading things I’ve written. Having text read aloud as I read along makes it much easier to spot where things sound weird, or where I’ve made spelling or grammatical errors.

Speak Selected Text

To have any selected text spoken to you, go to Speech in System Preferences. Make sure “Speak selected text…” is checked, and if you’d like you can change the keyboard shortcut as well.

Save an Audio File to Dropbox

Recently I thought it would be nice to take that a step further and be able to listen to those articles while doing other things. So I created an Automator action to take any article I paste into TextEdit, convert it to an mp3 (actually, m4a), title it and save it to my Dropbox folder. Then, I can use Dropbox on my phone or iPad to listen to those articles no matter where I am or what I’m doing. It’s great for commuting or even something as quick as doing the dishes.

You’ll need my Automator action: Article to MP3 with title.

First, I’ve created a folder in Dropbox named “Articles to Audio”. You’ll want to open my file in Automator and set your own Dropbox (or other) folder location. If your Dropbox folder is in the default location (~/Dropbox) and you create a folder inside named “Articles to Audio” this should work as-is.

When I want to convert an article, I copy the content into a new TextEdit* window (no need to save it). Then I run the Automator action. It prompts me for a title, which is optional, and then converts the text to speech. It puts a datestamp in the filename and then saves it to my Dropbox/Articles to Audio folder. When it’s finished I get a nice Growl notification.

If you don’t want to be prompted for a title and have the files named as just “article” with a timestamp. download this version instead: Article to MP3

I’m sure there are several ways this could be streamlined, but the current setup works well for me. Unfortunately this requires OSX although I’m sure it’s possible to do the same thing on Windows or Linux. Automator and Actionscript combined with OSX’s built in text-to-speech engine just make it really easy on a Mac.

Feel free to modify this and let me know how it works out for you. I’d be especially interested in any improvements you make.

*The Automator action looks specifically for a TextEdit window, so be sure to paste your article into that application. I’m sure other applications could be used instead, although it would require editing the Automator action.

Humanity has already lived through countless eras where every person armed themselves with lethal weapons as a matter of necessity. The human race has worked very, very hard over millennia to change that. We have progressed to a point where personal weapons are no longer necessary, but seem to have forgotten the fear that came with living in a constant state of hyper self-defense. An enlightened and intelligent civilization, by definition, does not require its populace to be armed to the teeth and ready to kill at a moments notice. Arguing for more deadly weapons in people’s hands is directly arguing against the existence of that society. I’d rather see it all burn down rather than exist in a world where we’ve regressed to living in constant fear of each other.

I’ve also put up a new episode of Meager Panic.

Webcomicbox hotlinks* to these comic images. That means Webcomicbox loads images directly from the creators site to display inside Webcomicbox. Well now, we can get around that with a little fix.

*UPDATE DEC 13, 2012: To his credit, Roman, the creator of Webcomic box listened to what many artists had to say. He very quickly changed how his site works and is no longer hotlinking. Now, he is only including Creative Commons licensed comics and is asking artists if they’d like to be included rather than forcing them to op-out. This is excellent, and if he continues on this path of listening to and respecting artists I wish him all the best.

Most of you webcomic folks are running WordPress. Even if you aren’t, you are most likely using a Linux server, which means you have something called an .htaccess file. It sits in the root directory of your site (root, as in /, not wp-content/) and it looks something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Add these three additional lines to the bottom of your .htaccess file, just before </IfModule> and no one will be able to directly link to your images.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?YOURDOMAIN.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png|js|css)$ - [F]

The final .htaccess file will look something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# prevent hotlinking
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?YOURDOMAIN.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png|js|css)$ - [F]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

If you want to go a step further, you can display an alternate image.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?YOURDOMAIN.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://YOURDOMAIN.com/nope.gif [R,L]

In this example, any attempt to hotlink to images on my site will replace the hotlinked image with this one:

Be sure, of course, to have nope.gif on your server. If you’d like the PSD file I used, you can download it here (nope-animated-gif.zip 779kb) and easily edit the bottom text.

If you need any help getting this set up on your server, let me know. I’ll be happy to help.

Please drop a comment below if you’d like more a more detailed write-up on how this works, and/or if you have any questions about it.

UPDATE: The creator of Webcomicbox has been commenting on my post on Google+.

UPDATE 2: A few things to note: this doesn’t prevent anyone from downloading, taking screenshots or other methods of saving your images. It prevents an external server from linking directly to images on your server, thus leeching your bandwidth, content and traffic.