Isolationism

Important Note: This article is deprecated; in a more recent article I have briefly explained how to achieve better results than those below. Since this is a blog, I’ve left the original article intact for historical reasons.

As a designer and as someone who spends a lot of their time in front of a screen, I’m especially sensitive to how fonts render in the software I use. One of the greatest challenges I’ve had with Linux is getting text to render simultaneously attractively and readably. The good news is, after a lot of tinkering, I think I’ve got it more or less down pat. What follows are some basic instructions as to what I did, although I suggest reading and altering to suit your needs as opposed to outright copying so as to ensure the results you seek.First, a brief definition of what I sought: Antialiased fonts are relatively easy to achieve on Linux in recent times thanks to considerable effort by its advocates. The trick for me was to strike a balance between the smooth, sleek look of Mac OSX’s “antialias the hell out of everything” approach and Microsoft’s cleartype, which produces (in my opinion) clearer and more legible text at frequently-used font sizes (at my screen’s resolution, anyway) but less appealing font shapes at higher resolutions, and fonts get obliterated at lower resolutions.If you’re interested in improving font rendering in Linux and seeing some examples, read on.

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A big merry christmas to all my friends and family. Hope Santa was good to you this year and that you spent some quality time with your families.

I wanted to mention a quick thanks to all the visitors who were able to stop by for a few minutes to spread some holiday cheer at our little gathering tonight. Thank-you especially to Pat who overstayed his planned time by several-hundred percent. ;) We appreciate you all making time in your busy holiday schedules to visit and exchange banter with us. Cheers.

The past few days have been quiet on here, but only because I haven’t been posting recordings of the cuss-fest that was installing our Christmas gift from my brother Doug: a new dishwasher (in a kitchen that seems to have been specifically designed to thwart any attempt at containing one). As funds are a bit tight I opted for the torturous self-installation route.

The dishwasher itself was actually pretty easy to do; it was disassembling half the kitchen casework to cut pieces down to size and rerouting a ventilation duct that caused the difficulty (and the several hundred small abrasions all over my now-arthritic hands). After one horrible mis-measurement (which was thankfully on the happy side of error, meaning I had to cut again instead of breaking out a bottle of glue) everything came together beautifully considering the challenge of the task, and our inaugural run tonight went very smoothly; it’s barely louder than the fridge compressor (which is pretty damn quiet). Colour me impressed.

I’m grateful to Doug for the gift. Thanks, bro. Merry Christmas.

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Over the past few days I’ve finally found time to familiarise myself with Scribus, the open source desktop publishing tool for Linux, Macintosh and Windows. I decided to learn as I always do—through the practical experience of an actual project.

For my task, I wanted to try to create an attractive, electronic reproduction of Iain Banks’ novel The Crow Road with the original black and white cover art by Peter Brown. This type of publication is typical of desktop publishing packages and would involve no high-resolution bitmaps as everything would be accomplished through the use of vector graphics.

Scribus turned out to be easy to acquire and install on both Windows and Linux; the latter was installed via Gentoo’s portage system and compiled fine with my 64-bit toolchain.

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According to an article in Wired Magazine, the short-lived but well-loved TV series Firefly is making a comeback—as a Massively Online Multiplayer Universe, as it turns out.

While this could prove to be an interesting TV/movie-cum-video game translation (without any of the “B-b-b-b-but I want to be a Jedi nowwwwww!” whines that the Star Wars MMO incited from its fanboy audience) of one of my favourite Sci-Fi stories, I can’t help but think that no matter how closely Mr. Whedon works with the team (which probably won’t be very closely at all), the massively multi-player format isn’t quite right for the franchise—After all, Joss’ genius isn’t about amazingly nerdy tech at all (there’s virtually none in the series; even Serenity herself is an old bucket of bolts to her crew), worlds of wonder (unless you consider Arizona or Nevada exotic), or incredible visuals (well, OK—I concede that briefly seeing Kaylee in the buff was pretty incredible), which are all things that video games can pull off relatively well. I believe Firefly’s success is (or rather, was) based on the development of rich and engaging characters in new and/or unusual circumstances.

Sadly, I don’t think Firefly will be able to pull those qualities off as a MMORPG. The only kind of rich characters I’ve read about anyone finding in MMO games are the gold farmers, which isn’t what I had in mind.

Bram Cohen, creator of the BitTorrent protocol and owner of BitTorrent, Inc., has purchased what is almost unarguably the best Windows-based torrent client, μTorrent.

The move was almost certainly in support of Hollywood’s attempt to stem movie piracy and encourage legitimate uses of the protocol (no doubt through the use of heavy-handed tactics like DRM etc.).

I’m fine with encouraging fair use, but the MPAA and I disagree on what that means (on just about every point on the subject). It probably goes without saying that just about all of μTorrent’s users are understandably more than a little pissed off.

The clowns in Hollywood won this round; they’ve discovered that like themselves, some people out there will do anything if you throw some money their way.

I let this one slip through the cracks even though it happened a few weeks ago: The newly redesigned Critter Jungle website was quietly launched in November. Critter Jungle, if you don’t already know, is a lovely privately-owned pet shop in Hampton Park Plaza in Ottawa (near where Carling meets the Queensway); The proprietors are family friends, so this was a one-off project in my spare time.

The main goals of the redesign were to change the appearance of the site to bring it in line with more current design trends such as elastic page width and easy-to-read content, less garish choice of colour (now that web-safe colour is effective unnecessary since everyone out there is using true-colour display modes), and to emphasize a change in direction for site content. We also wanted to make the site easier for the customer to manage, and increase accessibility and usability.

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This is the worst lull in updates I’ve had since I started my blog. On the other hand, it took about seven years from when I bought the domain to my first post, so things aren’t that bad once you put them into perspective.

I’ve been working pretty hard, lately: Work is gearing up for a product release in early January so there’s a lot to do—especially since situations like these tend to bring a whole bunch of “Oops, we forgot to do x, can you handle it?”’s to the surface. In particular, I’ve been playing with Apache FOP for the past couple weeks to enable us to generate dynamic-content PDF files on the server based on SVG source material (and possibly XHTML as well, now, too). Very interesting technology if you have to work with PDF documents.

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