Older blog entries for jooon (starting at number 18)

fontconfig and xft2

I am very pleased with the result. Looks excellent on my laptop with sub pixles and all. Just did apt-get install mozilla-xft the other day, and surfing the web became a new experience again. Everything looked so nice. Except for some sites like advogato that wanted lucida and I didn't have a good lucida font installed. Or so I thought, locate -i lucida showed that Java came with a lucida truetype font. So I linked that dir to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ and ran fc-cache. Didn't work. It still chose the ugly lucida bitmat font. I had to add the following to /etc/fonts/local.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
        <match target="pattern">
                <test qual="any" name="family">
                        <string>Lucida</string>
                </test>
                <edit name="family" mode="assign" binding="strong">
                        <string>Lucida Sans</string>
                </edit>
        </match>
</fontconfig>

After a while I figured the fontconfig syntax and meaning, but I am not really sure why bindings="strong" was needed. It won't work without it.

Some example advogato screenshots: without lucida truetype, with.

journeyer

It feels odd to be blue. Now I really have to live up to the expectations and prove myself. :)

Back in Sweden. I thought I would never leave Germany. I had to take some exams, which I had postponed. The first thing that happened when I got back was that I got a cold, a really nasty one.

chakie: If you still are interested in installing ALSA the Debian Way, take a look at some notes I made when I installed it.

Install ALSA on Debian

I am curious to see what I think about my own diary and also if this will affect people's diary writing habits. Will we be more careful what we write? I probably won't, considering how seldom I write and how careful I already am of what people think. Looking back at my diary entries, it feels like an announcement list: "Look at some of these cool things I've done!" more than a random thoughts blog thing, but that is perhaps just as well. This isn't the place for complete brain core dump and I already have one of those blog like thingies, and my random thoughts are much more in Swedish and about girls than free software.

I like reading the advogato recentlog. It's comfy somehow. Breakfast with tea and advogato. :) I hope it won't get corrupted.

Bookmarklets

mglazer wrote about bookmarklets. The Wayback bookmarklet idea was nice. I modified it slightly to get the Google cache instead. This will solve slashdotted pages much better, because the Google cache is more recent, than what you get from wayback machine, and also faster. I removed the replace(/res:[^#]*#/,'') because I don't know when it's useful and it works fine without, but added an enclosing escape() to quote special characters like &, which otherwise would get eaten by Google. Not sure what void(null) does at the end either, but I let it stay. I really don't like javascript. For me, it's a tool of pure destruction, like a weapon. I know "people kill people, not guns", but people just suck at writing javascript, and it has caused so much agony over the years it has existed. Bookmarklets are good though, but they are only on my computer because I put them there and can modify them as I want.

Google Cache Add this link as a bookmark and use in case of emergency, or just click on it to see the google cache of the current page.

raph: haikus are fun. Made my own after reading about yet another company making their own license instead of taking an existing one:

Macromedia Open Source License: Just like IBM / but this baby has our name / Macromedia, Inc

Regarding doing business with dual-licenses. It seems to work for MySQL at least. When I was at LinuxTag about two weeks ago I noticed a nice diagram at the MySQL booth about their business model. A bit messy with lots of colorful boxes and arrows everywhere, but two things stood out. "Generating revenues" on the left side and "Serving Humanity" on the right side. I talked to David Axmark about the serving humanity bit, how he listened to Stallman's ideas, way back before I even got my first computer, and why GPL is good. I forgot to ask about how much of their income come from the dual license part, but I guess if it wasn't a big part, they wouldn't have chosen the dual license style.

Linuxtag over

The organizers did well. Very much to see and hear. As predicted, I was at the Debian booth most of the time. I met lots of nice new people, but I don't think anyone I met had an Advogato account, not very active at least, not that I am active, except reading.

Wrote a small Linuxtag review in my Karlsruhe diary, which just kept growing bigger and bigger and now I have had time to develop and scan all the pictures as well, so it's really huge for just a diary entry. :)

My camera sux though. First, it's not digital, then of all the really good non-digital out there, it's a shitty APS from some company that also make pencil sharpeners. To make it worse, the scanner is probably pretty bad as well. A funny thing though is that it makes alan's hat matches his eyes.

Oh, yeah, I did meet someone with active Advogato account, rasmus. I am still not sure if he believed me when I said how cool he was to name his baby Carl (Christine And Rasmus Lifeform). I have now certified him as Master. :)

Confusion

Some people didn't at first get that the "loser" in my last diary entry is me.

Linuxtag

It's currently Linuxtag here in Karlsruhe, during the next couple of days. I am going to meet lots of people I've never seen or even heard of before. I am constantly surrounded by people that all know a lot more about computers and specifically Linux than I do. I'll probably hang in the Debian booth a lot and annoy all the people there, although I am not officially enlisted. It all feels very odd. This perhaps began as a day for linux people in Germany and Europe to get together, but this feels very corporate, you have to register, watch people in tie. I haven't seen much mention of Linuxtag in the recentlog list, but if anyone is going there, or perhaps is even there now, reading this, come and meet me. Ask for Jon, the Swedish guy, and everyone will know. :)

cactus: Yeah, right. Check out this guy. He is real loser.

He hasn't done a single piece of anything in about a month. He stays at home, feels sorry for himself, watches Buffy, and never speaks with anyone except through irc and some obscure message boards.

Morpheus to use Rebol

Just noticed the deal that is going to bring rebol to millions of computers out there. Cool, hopes it works.

The net

The wireless network has been working great up until friday evening. All of a sudden I couldn't get an IP address through DHCP. My computer just stood there and waited and waited. I took my laptop with me and roamed the campus trying to find an access point that would give me an IP address. Found one just around the corner, but the DNS server was not functioning properly so I couldn't access the VPN gateway. Luckily I had a log somewhere which revealed the IP address and finally I could read my mail... but not at home, only on a freezing bench at Berliner Platz (here in Karlsruhe). It must have looked waaay geeky, seeing me there with my laptop. Cold is something the screen of my laptop doesn't like. Or at least not when I use X. In console mode everything is ok, but in X, the screen goes completely blank every other minute when I am outside. Weird.

I did find a reasonable solution. I can access Internet if I have the antenna on my balcon, but then I can't close the door completely, and I don't know how well the antenna is doing. It's an indoor antenna but hopefully it won't die on me. If I can't get the net working properly I have to ditch the local network here in the apartment, which my housemates have been looking forward to. I read an article here on Advogato which lead me to the smoothwall project. It may just be what we need.

School

I gave up the lab course Mobile Communications. It was fun, but took too much time. And I already have two other lab courses (Compiler Construction and Speech Recognition).

In Compiler Construction lab course we are making a minijava compiler in Eli. It took a while before I got the hang of Eli, but know all pieces are starting to fit. As it is free, I really should look into it more and get it working on my laptop.

In the Speech Recognition lab course, we are making a Klingon Speech Recognizer (or are going to). Did I tell you I am a Star Trek fan? :) Up until now, it have mostly consisted of learning a tcl-language.

Shakespearelang Wiki hacked

Our nice wiki was hacked. It was inevitable though, so many people visited our page, mostly because of the slashdot effect and we had the most insecure system ever, flat files with a PhpWiki.

ion and galeon

Been hearing a lot about ion and galeon the last few weeks. I have been using galeon at least a year and ion since several months. Good thing that people finally get it. :)

Karlsruhe, Germany

Have been here for three weeks now. My German is slowly coming back to me. I've studied German for seven years (from age 13 to 20), but have also had three years of forgetting. My brain has begun to think in German, which makes it really hard for me to write this diary entry, because I had to reboot into English mode. :) No problem with my Swedish though. I've also met three Swedes down here, two girls that works in a pub nearby, and one male student, but I've heard there are some more.

I have been searching for a place to stay so I haven't followed the news much lately, neither computer news or normal. But I somehow heard of this Anthrax disease in Florida, and wondered what the band's statement was, and today I found it.

Anthrax vs. Anthrax

Before the tragedy of September 11th the only thing scary about Anthrax was our bad hair in the 80's and the "Fistful Of Metal" album cover. Most people associated the name Anthrax with the band, not the germ. Now in the wake of those events, our name symbolizes fear, paranoia and death. Suddenly our name is not so cool.

Money

Now I have to go to the bank and pay a bill. I bought a wireless network card, Dell TrueMobile 1150, and an antenna, Elsa Airlancer Extender. Works great under Linux. It's actually just a Orinoco card in disguise. It was pretty cheap, 279DM (+ 179DM for the antenna), but the rent is high as hell. I shouldn't complain though. I live exactly by the university, in fact, looking out of the window where I am sitting right now, I see the main building with the sign "Technische Hochschule". And as I live so close to the university, I have access to the wireless network.

I wonder how much this year is going to cost. It's going to be scary for sure. But by next year, the currency changes, so everything will cost half as much, but in Euro. :)