Nobody can argue he led a full life at 90 years of age and so many books under his belt—but I’m sorry to see him go none the less. I especially enjoyed one of his recent collaborations with Stephen Baxter, Firestorm—I’d give it a re-read if I hadn’t just read it less than a year ago now.
Cheers, Arthur, and thanks for all the stories and ideas.
By now you’ll all have heard: The OLPC is available for sale on a “buy one, donate one” basis, for $400 USD, which worked out to about $430 CAD for me including the shipping.
A week ago, a reader named Erik contacted me regarding font rendering on Linux with a question (for which I sadly did not have the answer), and some highly interesting news for Linux Firefox users. In short, by supplying a little environment variable when you start up Firefox (also works with Thunderbird), you can instruct Firefox to render fonts using Fontconfig instead of Pango.
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Although I haven’t been lucky enough lately to get to do any Python programming at work or in my spare time, I still end up tweaking the occasional file or fixing a bug here and there—And hope springs eternal for what the future may hold. A friend pointed out that he wanted to find a better Python editor, and brought Stani’s Python Editor (or SPE) to my attention, which wasn’t even on my radar a year ago but seems very promising now that I’ve had a chance to look.
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First, let me state that I am a relative noob at working with JavaScript—and to be blunt about it, event-driven programming gives me a headache (on top of having to work with JavaScript at all, that is).
My most recent challenge was how to fit event handling into an object-oriented design approach; I wanted to load an image from a new URL (e.g. it isn’t already embedded within the HTML page), then get the loaded image’s dimensions for use elsewhere in a larger application.
My blog’s feeling pretty neglected. I’ve gone past guilt now and just don’t even bother to look anymore; I was brought back to Earth by a nice fellow who goes by ‘Divide’ who commented on one of my earlier posts about Linux font rendering (and is apparently a font pedant—like me).
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Things have been quiet here for a while; there hasn’t been much to report (or at least, not much energy to report it).
We’ve now switched from Magma to Primus as our primary ISP. I can’t say the change has been either good or painless; there’s been more downtime with Primus in two weeks than there was with Magma across two years, and the Magma folks (what’s left, anyway) seem to know it, based on a couple calls with technical support. I’m hoping things even out now that the transition phase is over.
One of my original requests to Andrew was to extend Boodler’s scheduling time limitation (of just over one hour), which seemed too restrictive for those of us who “think big” and wanted something to happen further in the future than that limitation would allow — a perfectly reasonable request, especially when you listen for extended periods of time, and/or want to introduce a high level of randomness in your environments (including events’ overall duration).
… But not because I’m spring cleaning. It’s been over a month since I’ve so much as touched the keyboard here—not that anyone’s noticed except me, feeling guiltier for every passing day. That isn’t to say that nothing’s happened; whether it’s worth sharing (or reading) is a different question altogether. I wonder lately whether I should bother to keep a blog at all.
I don’t usually comment on music as it’s a highly personal experience subject to individual tastes. But I couldn’t let this one pass by unmentioned.
The duo famous for turning the electronic music scene on its head in the 90’s is back—sort of. While the FSOL have released several new albums since their disappearance from the scene in 1995 after Dead Cities, most notably Translations, The Isness, its re-work album, The Otherness, Alice in Ultraland, and a few other releases of remix material/singles, although worthy of note here.
From the Archives comes in volumes 1–3; three separate ‘discs’ of around 70 minutes worth of FSOL tunes. “So fucking what,” you say, “when it’s all just the same shit we’ve been hearing for years played back in a different order?”