Isolationism

I just discovered that ol’ George Lucas apparently believes that the moniker Digg, a meta-news site, is uncomfortably close to his twelve year-old science fiction adventure game (which, may I say, completely failed to captivate audiences all over the world—Probably one of the worst-performing LucasArts games ever, I imagine) The Dig. I think it’s safe to assume that the pending suit on the USPTO website is perfectly legitimate, although when headlines like this strike out from left field, you know right away they smack of truth because the notion itself is so ridiculous—so contrived—that it must be genuine.

I mean this in all seriousness, George: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot are you and/or your lawyers smoking? I feel pretty confident when I stand beside the rest of the planet and explain that the chances of even a complete cretin confusing your laughably failure of a point-and-click video game franchise with a meta-news website is about as high as you must be to have green-lit the suit in the first place.

In fact, If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect LucasArts is launching the suit for no other reason than to try to recover some cash back out of that monetary tar-pit that is The Dig—but George has never given me any reason to think he’s anything but an artist, so my cynicism is surely unwarranted.

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.

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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.

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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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Nothing definite, but now The One Ring is reporting that the rights to the film fall back to Saul Zaentz, the owner of Tolkien Enterprises, some time next year—and according to Saul, “[The Hobbit] will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson.”

This is the last article I’m writing on the matter until shooting starts, if ever—it is clear to me that the politics involved mean the story is going to change a couple times a week until production begins, which—according to Saul—could still be years away from now if Jackson wants to shoot another movie, first. My heart can’t take it.

My amigo MCM over at Push the Third Button Twice posted a reaction to an article on The Mu Life titled, Did You Read The Article? MCM raises an interesting point about how we shouldn’t judge books by their covers, or blogs by their fame (or lack thereof).

I think I’ve already stated my position on Digg users making worthless contributions to story discussion threads, so no argument there. I also agree with MCM’s conclusion: Blogs shouldn’t just be discounted because they’re “petite frites” compared to commercial news sites.

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I confess I was surprised when I read that Microsoft had a change of heart on the subject of allowing Windows Vista to be reinstalled. Apparently someone at Microsoft got the message from the online community that their previous position—which was to allow the software to be reinstalled once only, ever—was pretty stupid, and that its discovery and wide publication was doing them more harm than good for a product that is already receiving a hefty share of criticism from the community on other issues.

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…or:

Why I Won’t Be Buying Vista Or Any Software From Microsoft Ever Again

I’ve had a frustrating couple of days trying to get my old copy of Windows XP up and running inside the free VMWare Player package using Ubuntu as the host operating system; getting the player up and running was easy; I just marked the package for installation in Synaptic and a couple minutes later it was ready to run.

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It seems like it’s early days yet to be complaining, but I have a gripe: WordPress stinks at posting source code.

The problem is a bit long to explain but the issue is stifflingly simple: The visual TinyMCE text editor (and how it is implemented in WordPress, it seems) contrives to strip leading tabs and spaces from all lines of content—including content between <code> and <pre> tags.

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