Posted by matijs
24/07/2005 at 18h26
As of yesterday, my blog runs on Typo. All in all, I have been quite
satisfied with Bryar, but it was
time for a change.
I like Bryar because it is simple (no frills, entries are stored as
files), and yet easy to customize (to change the layout there's basically
one template to update). In addition, it is written in Perl, a language
that I like, and that I'm fluent in, so getting it to
work the way I wanted was easy. So, I'm happy that I chose it a year ago.
A combination of events lead me to change over to Typo.
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Posted by matijs
10/07/2005 at 12h47
I take a great interest in type design. I'm not sure when it started,
but no doubt it has something to do with the following: A long time ago, I
invented a writing system for the language of my imaginary
country. Since then, I've created several fonts for this writing
system. Since I'm only an amateur, I can't afford to buy any of the
professional tools for font making, so I have had to resort to free tools
(for varying definitions of free).
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Posted by matijs
10/07/2005 at 11h05
Some time ago, I ended up with my friend at Schiphol Airport. It was
three in the morning, and we had to wait for a train to Amsterdam Centraal
Station.
Now, I work for Large Catering Company, which owns a coffee bar there.
So we decided to get some coffee there to pass the time. While we were
enjoying our coffees, we got to talking about the following problem:
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Posted by matijs
11/06/2005 at 15h45
It's
been
available on CTAN for a while now, so it's about time I made a formal
announcement:
I have updated my LaTeX package for typesetting syntactic trees.
In this new version, the allowed number of branches has been increased
from three to unlimited (Yay!).
To make this update, I had to refactor the code that was dedicated
to zero, one, two and three branches into a more generic version. I must
say, I've always enjoyed modifying code to make it more manageable, but
refactoring becomes very satisfying once you have a good test suite to test
that it keeps doing the same thing, and a version control system to keep
your known good versions. (This is no new insight, of course; it's right
there in the
book). This is a highly recommended technique!
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Posted by matijs
29/04/2005 at 09h36
This should be fun:
The Dutch Stichting
Thuiskopie seems to want to tax iPods for a ridiculous
amount of money. The article ends with:
Or the Dutch could just become a nation without iPods. I
wonder how happy that would make them?
Well, it wouldn't make me very happy. On the other hand, it seems I
could just buy one in Belgium or something.
(The Stichting itself on its website denies that any amount
has been set yet. Let's make sure the amount they set will be more sane
than The Register reports.)
Oh yeah, this is all via
Slashdot.
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Posted by matijs
27/04/2005 at 23h04
Language
log talks about Blendie. I like
Blendie a lot. The following conversation results:
N: Hiingnyiiiiiing.
M: What are you doing?
N: I'm trying to be a blender.
M: I still love you even if you're not a blender.
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Posted by matijs
16/04/2005 at 21h32
Ooh nice, a meme! Via the
language
log (where someone actually bothered to write something resembling an
essay — no such luck here). Here follows my meme copy:
My Unitarian Jihad Name is:
Brother Hand Grenade of Sweet Reason.
Get yours.
Hm. Sweet Reason. I like that.
Update: Boris Skoric mentions that the other Unitarian Jihad name generator gives me the name Joyous
blunderbuss of patience. There is now also a Wikipedia article
about the Unitarian Jihad, as well as a LiveJournal
community.
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Posted by matijs
09/03/2005 at 12h57
I'm slightly out of touch with happenings in the digital world, so I only read yesterday evening that the EU Council adopted the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive. This is a sad thing.
Slashdot points to an article on
ZDNet about this. The ffii also has press release.
Interestingly, proponents of this directive are mostly not saying that
pure software patents are good. Rather, they argue that the directive as it
stands will not allow them (e.g., Frits Bolkestein, Robert Evans, MEP). I wonder if we can hold them to this when
the lawsuits start.
Oh, and last evening I read it in a paper
newspaper (in dutch), in a bar. Go figure.
Updates: Links to proponents added above, a good overview with arguments
against software patents and the wording of the current CIID, the European
Parliament is not pleased.
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Posted by matijs
11/02/2005 at 09h36
I’m ill, so I’m ranting. Bear with me.
I’ve now run across the second site that does something like this in its CSS:
p {
font: 11px “Lucida Sans Unicode”,
“Trebuchet MS”, Verdana, monospace;
}
And, with me running Linux and as a consequence not having any of the three named fonts installed, I get to see the whole body text in monospace. Sure, monospace is a great replacement for Verdana. Very readable, too. What are people thinking? Fucking monospace!
(The style contains more wonderful font insanity, such as giving the input element the choice of fonts Courier New, Arial [why yes, Arial is very similar to Courier New], or, again, monospace. Oh, and for some reason, this rule is !important. Sure.)
(The first site is less bad, but still annoying: Only part of the text is accidentally monospaced.)
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