This is the stub of a homepage for me, Jacob Rus (). I’m a 22-year-old government student, bibliophile, photographer, cartographer, interface designer, computer programmer, writer, erstwhile mathematician, amateur color scientist, wannabe typographer, and enthusiastic (sometimes profligate) talker.
I grew up bouncing between Claremont, California, United States—a college town in the middle of Los Angeles County’s vast suburban sprawl, a tree-filled oasis both literally and figuratively—and San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, México—nestled in the state’s verdant central highlands, a few miles from my Tzotzil Maya godparents’ house, where I spent countless summer afternoons marveling at torrential tropical rainstorms.
Technology I recommend, in no particular order: American Democracy, science, non-violent activism, open source, TCP/IP (email, &c.), Munsell color system, Python (NumPy, Twisted, SQLAlchemy, PyObjC), Git, jQuery, “plain” text, Markdown, HTML 5, Mac OS X, TextMate, Adobe Photoshop, Quicksilver, Wikipedia, Google, Google Maps, AbeBooks, Nikon D50, IBM Model M.
Right now, the only thing of much interest here is the article I wrote about the Mac OS X text system, along with a list of default key bindings for OS X, and another list of default selectors usable in key bindings.
I put together a set of scripts for controlling iTunes and triggering Growl notifications about it, which look sharp when used from Quicksilver. You can find the scripts here.
I also made a set of pretty icons for Mac Python, which should be shipping of newer versions of python 2.4, and python 2.5, here. And I’ve made several of the icons for TextMate of which a selection is shown here.
More recently, I have done quite a bit of work on Orbited, a project to bring real-time network applications to the web. Besides writing some code, I made the logo and the design for the Orbited website.
In late 2008, I invented a new way of color-correcting images using Photoshop, which was dubbed “Jacob’s Ladder” by one mailing list user. At this page I share a few example images, and link to the Photoshop action I created which makes the technique accessible to novices and the lazy. Sometime in the future, I will add a more complete description, with a step-by-step tutorial.
So, to summarize:
There’s other stuff worth putting here eventually, like some photographs (a few tens of thousands sit on my computer, very few on the web), and maybe some ramblings (I’ve got lots of strong ideas about the way the world should be). So stay tuned. :)
