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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A few friends and acquaintances are still stuck on pMachine and are considering converting to WordPress. I wish I could tell you the conversion is as simple as installing WordPress itself. What follows are a few suggestions on how to go about it, though, that might ease your transition somewhat.
I decided to spend my Friday working on a small side-project for work; as mentioned in a few earlier posts, I wanted to learn a bit of CherryPy and Cheetah, so it looks like this is my chance.
Since jEdit is my favourite text editor, and I couldn’t find an existing mode definition out there for Cheetah’s template (*.tmpl) format, I made one myself. Not exactly rocket science, but it might save someone a few minutes.
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.
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.
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.
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.