I work for a tech company, and yet I regularly need to manually sign digital files. What's the obvious way of doing that? Here it is:

1. Print your file
2. Sign your file
3. Scan your file

That doesn't sound right. There must be some other way of doing this without wasting paper and ink, and without the pain of all those steps. Well, turns out there is one! It took me time to find, so I'm sharing it here, hopefully it will help others. The cool thing about this technique is that you probably already have the software that is required. Introducing... LibreOffice Writer! Yep, the Microsoft Word equivalent. You will need an extension though, called libreoffice-pdfimport. Install it simply with sudo apt-get install libreoffice-pdfimport and you should be good. Then the steps become:

1. Make an image of your signature
2. Open your PDF file with Writer, insert the image wherever you want, export as PDF
3. Profit

Here are a few good points about this technique: first, your PDF file doesn't get turned into a flat image. Second, you can do a lot more than just adding an image. And third, it is much easier than using software like pdfedit.

For more details about how to use LibreOffice Writer and for the source of this post, please read Signing a document with an image in Ubuntu 12.10.

Earlier this month, I gave a workshop in Lyon to teach people how to create Web games with the now famous Crafty.js framework. 13 people attended (out of 15 open places), which appeared to be a good number: I could really help everyone and answer all the questions I received. It was a really good experience, but a short one sadly: we only had 2 hours (30 minutes being me talking about Crafty), and it's really short to be able to actually create a playable game. I think with an hour or two more some people could have had something playable.

Anyway, I created a bunch of content for that workshop, and I wanted to share it. So here it is!

Presenting Crafty.js

I spent the first 30 minutes of that workshop talking about Crafty.js, what it is, what it can do, and how it works. As usual, slides without the actual talk are not really good, but at least you will find some code examples and links to various resources in there. And who knows, maybe someone could make good use of these slides someday?

Creating Web Games with Crafty.js

Workshop: Coding a Web Game

My plan for the coding part was to come with 3 game ideas that people could work on, to provide some help (basic algorithms, some graphic resources) and to give them a working version in the end. That's what I did: I created a simple Snake game, a kind of Fruit Ninja and a Side Runner. After my presentation, I showed the 3 games I coded and asked people to pick one and start working on it. Most people picked the simplest one (some assuming it was the snake, when it was actually the Fruit Ninja clone in my opinion), and no one picked the Side Runner which was certainly harder and mostly impossible to do in less than 2 hours.

After an hour and a half of intense coding, documentation reading and some debugging (I had a few mistakes in my slides sadly), we had some snakes moving and some fruits falling!

I made a simple page with all the resources needed for this workshop:

The Crafty Workshop Awesome Page

There you can find:

• links to the base template in github or as a zip file
• short help with algorithms
• graphics
• and my own implementation of each game

I really enjoyed doing this, and I wish I can do it again someday! Thanks to everyone who attended and thanks to the Game Dev Party association for organizing this event.

Make Games, Not War /-)

Sur Terre y a 4 mecs sur 5 qui crèvent de faim,
Y a ceux qui vivent dans les caves à cause des bombes,
Y a ceux qui pourrissent du cancer et du sida dans les hôpitaux,
Y a celles qui se font violer par 25 mecs en même temps pour bien leur faire comprendre c'est qui le patron,
Et y a toi.
Et toi il t'est arrivé une chose TERRIBLE, on a touché à ton RÉ-TRO-VISEUR !

Y a les arbres au dessus de toi, avec les feuilles qui bougent dans le vent,
Tu les as regardés les arbres ?
Y a ta femme qu'est belle et qui perd sa jeunesse à te cuisiner des champignons à la crème pendant que tu la cocufies,
Tu l'as regardée une seule fois ta femme ?
Y a des enfants avec leur belle peau toute lisse,
T'as remercié quelqu'un une fois dans ta vie pour la peau lisse de tes enfants ?
Y a les vaches qui te fabriquent du lait, du beurre, et du fromage tous les jours,
TU LEUR AS DIT MERCI AUX VACHES ?

Mais elle est belle ta vie mon gros !
Elle est belle, belle, belle à crever,
Regarde-la mon gros !
Mais voilà, le problème c'est qu'on a touché à ton rétroviseur mon gros !
C'EST TERRIBLE ! C'EST TERRIBLE !

Vincent Lindon dans La Belle Verte, un conte philosophique de Coline Serreau que je vous invite vivement à regarder.