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.
… 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.
Lifted from Dreaming in Reality, it’s all you ever didn’t want to know about who/what I listen to.
A: Amon Tobin, Aphex Twin, Arovane, Autechre
B: Biosphere, Boards of Canada, Brain Pilot, Bob Marley, Blade Runner (OST)
C: Chrono Cross (OST), Chrono Trigger (OST), Charlatans UK, Children of Dune (OST)
D: Deathprod, Dune: Spice Opera, Dune (Space OST), Dead Can Dance
E: Enya, Electronic
F: Future Sound of London, Final Fantasy (OSTs)
G: Global Communication, Ghost in the Shell, The (OSTs), Grim Fandango (OST)
H: Hardfloor, Hitman (OSTs), Homeworld (OST), Hobbit, The (VG OST)
I: ILL Mitch
J: Jackson and his Computer Band, Jimi Hendrix
K: Kirité, Kiki’s Delivery Service (OST), Koudelka (OST), Katamari Damacy (OSTs)
L: Labradford, Lull
M: Meat Beat Manifesto, Mick Harris, Myst (OSTs), My Bloody Valentine, Maps & Diagrams
N: Nirvana, New Order, Neil D. Voss
O: O.Rang, Oöphoi, Origa, Orb, Orbital
P: Paul Schütze, Pete Namlook, Proem, Popeye (OST)
Q: … Nope.
R: Rapoon, Rez (OST)
S: Steve Roach, Spacer, Speedy J, SubtractiveLAD, Saint Etienne, Samurai Champloo (OSTs), Supergrass
T: Thomas Köner, Techno Animal, Tron 2.0 (OST)
U: Ulrich Schnauss, UmJammer Lammy (OST)
V: Vapourspace
W: Wings of Honneamise (OST), Wipeout, WOXL (OSTs)
X: Xenogears (OST)
Y: Young Gods, Yoshida Brothers,
Z: Zoviet*France, Zone of the Enders (OSTs)
I’ve been laying low these past few weeks with good reason: more layoffs at work, and greater pressure from head office to deliver the finished product (including a drop-dead date I’m pretty sure we’ll miss). I’ve still got plenty to do, but all the critical-path items are up to the developers.
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!
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.