I upgraded the site to WordPress 2.1 this evening—sorry for the little bit of downtime; I set it to upload then cooked dinner.
The new code managed to coax the EventCalendar plugin into each post repeating itself several times, so I’ve disabled it for now. Other than that, everything should be back to normal. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
Congrats to the WordPress team on another landmark release.
One of my longest-running annoyances with font rendering under Linux has been that of the Georgia font; it is a modern favourite for rendering serif text as its bolder weight and well-designed hinting. Unfortunately, Georgia has never rendered as well for me under Linux as it did in Windows; I finally put 2 and 2 together and realised why this is the case, and came up with a simple solution to fix my complaint.
Or, How a recent Windows user became depressed/frustrated within weeks of switching to Linux.
Would-be Linux converts, beware: Despite all the Digg articles you’ve read about how strong gaming on Linux has become, you’d be wise to do your own investigation. I’ve been doing mine for days now, after having had a craving to escape into another world for a few minutes to unwind—and so far, my search has come up nearly bone-dry. Let me explain.
I’ve purchased four 19″ TFT monitors from Samsung over the past three-or-so years (two for parents, and two for in-house use), and have recommended them to others without reservation. The honeymoon with their LCD display product line just ended after returning a recently purchased SyncMaster 931c to Best Buy because it had two dead pixels—only to return with another monitor (also factory-sealed like the others) which displayed … Another dead pixel. Fuck.
I know LCDs were plagued with problems in their early days, but come on. You’ve had over a decade to get your act together.
My conclusion: After having had three of these in my house so far, and only one that didn’t ship with any factory defects, unless you want to take a 66% chance of having one or more dead pixels on your new monitor, don’t buy the Samsung SyncMaster 931c. If you have had spectacularly good luck with a line of monitors in the past, please post a comment and let me know. I don’t think I’ll be buying Samsung again.
P.S.: Yes, I have tried the two common “folk wisdom” tricks for fixing the defect, but to no avail. I suspect these hacks may help fix some users’ aging monitors, but they can’t help rectify production defects.
So I haven’t written anything since New Years.
That isn’t entirely accurate—I’ve tried to write the same story twice, but given up both times after a couple paragraphs. It suffices to say that despite having spent a very painful week trying a variety of combinations, I still can’t get fonts to render the same on two different Linux distos. They look pretty good on Gentoo now, though, after a lot of hassle—Long story short, patch Freetype 2.2.1 and Cairo 1.2.4 with the ‘FIR Filter’ patchfiles, then recompile with the -bindist USE flag for Freetype, then use the essence of my previous post for configuring your ~/.fonts.conf to disable autohinting between pixelsizes 10-12 for everything, then make font-specific changes for Arial, Verdana, and the like to render crisply at common resolutions.
Allow me to add to the millions who have already echoed the sentiment. Not much to say, really. 2006 was a good year whose highlight was the birth of my son. We had a few scares about our family’s health, but on the whole we couldn’t ask for much more (at least, not without sounding greedy or ungrateful).
I’m not much of one for making New Year’s resolutions, but here are a few points I’d like to try to accomplish in 2007:
Hope you all have a happy, healthy, and successful 2007. Cheers!