June
Sub-archives
Jun 08, 2009
it's the little things, or stuff I took away from pse09
In honor of the interrobang, 5 things I picked up at Plone Symposium East 2009 that left me both ? and !.
1. Don't write xml, export it‽
I think I saw four people in breakout sessions tweak their content settings TTW and then pop over to site_setup and export the profile to make pretty, well formed .zcml files. OK, ok, I get the point. It's very fast, accurate, and way less a pain in the ass than writing your own.
2. Everything I make gon be folderish from now on‽
I've sort of half been paying attention to the new content type story (a la occasionally checking the Dexterity changelog) for upcoming Plone releases, but it was a bit of an eye opener to watch limi's Plone 5 demo and see Plone's moving to a single, folderish content type. Out-effin-standing. Everything folderish make incredible sense, and I've been tweaking my dev content types accordingly.
3. Use more ZopeSkel‽
Again, small encouragements. jjmojojjmojo's demo capped a couple days thinking that I ought to get more conversant with what ZopeSkel can do. Somehow I had been missing the
addcontent atschemacommand. I know, I know.... I came home and scaffolded 5 content types in an hour. zang.
4. People want awards‽
I've been working on a Plone Community Awards idea, mostly in a vacuum. I knew a couple people from the Board were interested, but I was suprised so many people not only turned up for the BoF, but had also actually read my very, very long draft. Unfortunately, the BoF didn't get very far before they shooed us all off to dinner. Putting faces and names together was very helpful, and we've now got something to go to the Board hopefully this week. When the dust settles, I'll do a separate post or five about the awards.
5. A couple cheers for the little guy‽
At a conference of about a hundred on campus at Penn State, you expect that a bunch of people would be attached to institutions or medium-ish companies, and that was about right. There was the WebLion/Penn State contingent, which seemed to be a hell of a lot of people, and there was the 6FtUp blackshirt army, too.
But, there were also a whole bunch of 'small shop' people there, independent developers or small biz owners, or single Plone people inside larger companies. It reinforces, actually, what I've been thinking for a while, namely that there's been a bunch of commotion lately about positioning Plone as an enterprise level CMS/platform, but there doesn't seem to be so much attention on the fact that many of us work in the small business sphere, and that Plone can be an excellent small biz solution. And, that small shop Plonistas have particular needs and challenges.
Interestingly, the Evangelism BoF did appear pretty heavily weighted with small shop attendance.
Based on the location and the expertise of the WebLion folks, it seemed right that there were lots of sessions devoted to what seemed to me institutional issues, though based on the attendance, there should have been at least one session about Plone from the freelancer/small shop perspective.
Jun 01, 2009
3-strip Technicolor
I've been reading up on film stock. And, I've been playing around in Photoshop.
Of course, palettes are fake, as are spectrums. They're construed as yardsticks that vaguely present color spaces, and everything we know about optics and perception tells us that color is a contextual phenomenon. A palette or a spectrum just gives keyframes for the color space, abstracting the virtualized space into a flat graph. I think that's precisely why looking at palettes as self-contained matrices is worthwhile.
One of the color spaces I've been thinking about a lot lately is the Technicolor color space. I've been looking around and sort of figured there would be a preset Illustrator or Photoshop swatch palette for it, but no luck so far. So, I thought to try to construct my own keyframe palette, and hopefully also a conversion method for tweaking existing images to map them to the Technicolor space.
When you decide to roll your own palette, you immediately confront the problem stated above. If a palette, as separate from a spectrum, is a collection of swatches, how do you represent a virtualized color continuum and which swatches do you pick? No good methodologies found so far. Commerical swatch books like Pantone, et al are too damn big to deal with at a glance. Default Abode swatches are too limiting and only represent high-chroma hues anyway.
In the interest of having something to play with, I'm working with the Visibone (probably TM) palette. It's no beauty, but it does give some indication of tonal and tint variants.
Based on this math, I've made and now have transportable swatches and actions for palette conversion. Yes, it's all slippery, since there are no absolute points of color reference. Ignore that for now.
Here's the regular Visibone palette.
Compare with the Technicolor construct of the same palette.
You can tell the Technicolor not only ramps up the saturation, but also alters the overall color space of the palette. Blues push out toward either violet or teal. Any subtle greens are wiped out. All yellows are lemony. and so on.
There's so much chroma going on, it's hard to see the implications for a photograph by looking at the palette above, so compare the photos of Whale Point, Eleuthra below.
This one's as shot.
This one's converted to Technicolor.
