Posted by matijs
16/09/2007 at 13h00
Some time ago, RedHat released the Liberation set of fonts. They are intended as metrically identical replacements for Microsoft’s Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New fonts.
Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Well, apart from the license issues, there’s another problem: Metric equivalence isn’t everything. Arial is already the metrically equivalent substitute for Helvetica, and look at it: Arial is basically Helvetica’s ugly twin sister. So, will Liberation be any better?
Linux already has a set of fonts that are not only metrically equivalent to, but actually look like Helvetica, Times Roman and Courier: The URW
fonts. To see them on the screen, instead of the ugly jagged bitmap versions, you’ll need to make them available to X, and turn off bitmap fonts in fontconfig.
But the URW fonts themselves look ugly too, because their hinting is bad. Liberation would solve that, wouldn’t it? No it wouldn’t, because
Liberation’s hinting isn’t done yet:
The first release is a set of fully usable fonts, but they will lack the fully [sic] hinting capability […] provided by TrueType/FreeType technology.
So why not spend the effort on providing good hinting for the URW fonts, so we can have actual nice looking real Helvetica on our Linux screens?
1 On Debian, and probably Ubuntu, that’s
sudo aptitude install gsfonts-x11
and
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
respectively. Answer no to using bitmapped fonts.
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Posted by matijs
23/08/2007 at 16h36
I was enthousiastic about noobkit for about a week. Finally an alternative to the rough style of Ruby’s standard API documentation.
Until I actually wanted to use it.
Most pages have a full width block of Google ads above the main content. This is just too much. For some methods, the text is one line. The ad block then is five times as big.
I’ll go back to using the old version, thanks.
[Also, the search function is not geared towards API documentation, but instead uses a generic Google-like method. Why not highlight the search results that actually describe the method or methods with the searched name?]
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Posted by matijs
27/06/2007 at 21h12
So, I’m reading Steve Yegge’s latest, and he drops some not so suble hints to the reader that they should apply at Google. I talk about that to my wife, how working at Google would definitely be nice, but that it would mean moving from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Zurich (Switzerland), because that’s where Google is in Europe. And then she says:
Zurich has the best zoo in Europe.
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life
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Posted by matijs
25/06/2007 at 20h27
First, what the hell does Microsoft’s slogan people ready even mean? The campaign’s site seems to think it means you need people to run a business. Well, I don’t see any businesses around run by small rodents, so I guess they’re right. That’s some vision
So, what’s this about? Some bloggers got paid for writing about people ready, and people got upset.
Now, some defend themselves saying they didn’t endorse anything, and some defend themselves saying of course it’s an ad box (whatever an ad box is).
Well, I don’t think this looks like an ad, and it may not be an endorsement of a Microsoft product, but it is an endorsement of a Microsoft campaign. Oh, and look at the right of the page. It says “Click here to submit your own People Ready Business story”. So, that pretty much suggests that the content on the left was also submitted the same way. But of course, it wasn’t.
Luckily, at least one of the entries seems to have been written while drunk.
People readiness is something only people that are ready for people to be ready can be ready for.
All this via Mark’s translation.
Finally, back to the meaning: “people ready” means ready for people, right? Just like HD ready means ready for HD. Well, sort of anyway. But no, it means the people are ready. See?
Campaign lame.
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Posted by matijs
21/06/2007 at 23h38
Today, at seven months and nineteen days of age, Sophia spontaneously performed her first song. It went like this:
Ba ba baa ba baa, ba ba baa ba baa.
(The bas are short, the baas are long). The piece was performed
at a constant pitch. I’m still working on the correct rhythmic
notation; it’s pretty complex.
Years from now, we will say: We were there at her first performance.
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Posted by matijs
21/06/2007 at 12h58
The Problem
You have built a home server slash PVR that you want to hook up to your
twenty-year-old television. You have gone to several shops to buy
a graphics card that actually has open-source drivers for
its TV output functionality (i.e., the ATI Radeon A9250). You have dodged
salesmen trying to sell you something else (“No, but here is its successor
the NVidia so-and-so.” “Uhm, no thanks.”). You finally succeeded by ordering
it over the Interweb (and probably should have done that in the first
place). Now you want to patch the driver shipped by Ubuntu to actually get
TV output working.
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howto, software
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Posted by matijs
18/06/2007 at 14h50
I’ve been using svk for a while now, but I keep bumping into problems with the whole concept of tags being just copies.
The problem is this: In my mind, a tag should be a symbolic name for a particular revision on a particular branch. In subversion (and hence, svk), it’s not. To use a tag in place of a revision, you first have to do svn info to find the corresponding revision number, and then use that in your svn diff or svn merge or whatever.
Subversion should have had a smarter client from the start, one that emulates tags and branches and hides the implementation detail that they are ‘really the same thing’ from the user.
As it stands, subversion has no tagging.
It’s all very annoying.
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Posted by matijs
18/06/2007 at 13h13
Last week, I did some work on my website, upgrading to the latest Typo trunk and Rails 1.2, and changing from mod_fcgid to a Mongrel cluster.
Last Friday or so, I rebooted my server. Unfortunately, I had neglected to make the Mongrel cluster start at boot. So for the past weekend, all you have seen here is a Service Temporarily Unavailable message.
Sorry.
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Posted by matijs
14/04/2007 at 14h42
Setting the stage
Some time ago, I came across SQLDSL, a DSL for building SQL queries. The benefit of using a DSL over plain old string concatenation is that syntax is checked before the database server is hit. Unfortunately, SQLDSL does not deliver. It will happily accept
q = Insert.into[“frot”][“zop”][“blob”].values(“kng”).values[“kgn”]
resulting in
`
q.to_sql
=> “insert into ‘frot’ (zop) (blob) values (‘kng’) values () (kgn)”
`
which is hardly acceptable SQL.
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Posted by matijs
10/04/2007 at 22h22
Say you’re an online book store, and you have an affiliate program. Of course, affiliates come and go. So, what do you do when, say, slashdot stops being your affiliate, and someone clicks on an affiliate link left lying around in an old book review? Do you
- Show the book anyway, but not pay the affiliate? Or…
-
Tell a potential customer to go elsewhere?
Hmm.
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web
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