7 Jun 2002 raph   » (Master)

Silk

A little Mac OSX hack called Silk made the rounds of the Mac blogs this week. I'm not sure exactly what it does, but it claims to turn on Quartz font rendering in Carbon apps.

However, it's not quite the same. In all the screenshots I saw, the Silk-rendered text did not have subpixel antialiasing. Native Mac OSX apps do. Check out Chimera screenshots 1 2 3, for example.

At low resolutions, I think the choice between hinted aa, and unhinted aa (with subpixel positioning) is a matter of taste. Many people complain that the latter is blurry, but there's also a case that it's more aesthetic. Reports from the field are mixed. Doc Searls is bothered by the blurring, but many OSX proponents love unhinted rendering. See this thread for more opinions, both pro and con.

I also think that by choosing unhinted rendering as the "new, cool" look, Apple has influenced the taste of Mac OSX users greatly. OS9 (or "Classic") apps look old, even dated, although their font rendering is actually sharper. I've been interested in font rendering for a long time, and I did not anticipate the effect that marketing can have.

In any case, as resolutions go up, the win for unhinted aa becomes clearer. The irony is that not only are Apple-brand displays stuck at '90s-era resolutions, but Aqua isn't scalable, so as resolution increases, fonts get tinier too. Why they decided this is utterly beyond me, especially as the underlying Quartz technology is quite scalable, as was the Display PostScript that preceded it.

Linux UI's aren't scalable either, in the sense that there's a knob you can turn to scale everything (good luck getting everybody to agree on the knob!), but they are overly configurable, so you can fiddle with the fonts and sorta get good results.

Few Linux UI's do unhinted rendering, either, but it's not especially difficult. In particular, there's no reason why a Gecko-based browser can't match Chimera almost pixel-for-pixel. All it would take is turning off the hinting, and implementing subpixel positioning.

Future Ghostscripts will do unhinted aa, with subpixel positioning, by default. Hopefully, I'll have time to polish my patch, and maybe get it into HEAD, next week.

See also On antialiasing type by Markko Karppinen.

A little crypto

zooko posed a fun problem on his blog (and in #p2p-hackers irc). It goes like this: Alice chooses a bit. She then sends a message M1 to Bob. However, at this point Bob should not be able to figure out the value of the bit. Bob encrypts a message using a key derived from M1, and sends this message (M2) to Alice. If the bit was 1, then Alice decrypts the message. However, if the bit was 0, then Alice should be unable to decrypt the message. Finally, in the last phase, Alice reveals the bit, along with a proof that this was the same value as chosen when M1 was sent.

Zooko has a colorful motivating example, written in terms of centaurs and ogres. You might enjoy thinking about the puzzle, especially if you know some crypto. The answer will be revealed soon.

(PS to zooko: if you had a permalink, I would have happily linked it)

The trust metric

Well, restricting recentlog to certified entries would have been ineffective, in addition to the various other downsides. So much for that idea, at least for now.

Out of curiosity, I ran PageRank on the Advogato trust graph, treating all links the same (one interesting twist would be to weight blue and purple links more than green ones). The node "bytesplit" comes in at rank 2444 out of 3209. If Advogato were to be based on PageRank, I'm not sure whether it would be better to set a threshold above this or below it. Another way of looking at the graph is that there are two independent certification paths from the seeds. That's not too shabby.

So, a reasonable conclusion is that the trust metric is not the best way to address this conflict. I never really thought it was.

Overzealous spider

Whoever's behind 24.163.74.39, your spider is broken. Requests like these are making up about 80% of all traffic right now, and it's impacting responsiveness.

24.163.74.39 - - [07/Jun/2002:01:51:17 -0700] "GET /person/mbp/../jwz/../Schemer/../rachel/../Telsa/../alan/../NickElm/../alan/../rillian/ HTTP/1.0" 200 14020 "-" "Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)"

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