iPhone browser share
Ha! There are already half as many iPhone users as there are Linux users. Let me be the first and last to suggest that 2009 is the year of Linux!
Smooth scrolling in Safari on Windows
Don’t know how they do it, but smooth scrolling in the Windows version of Safari is ridiculously smooth. Is it this way on OS X as well? Did I just never see it because I only ever ran it on a shitty CPU or GPU?
Package development based on VCS
I’ve always been annoyed that distros don’t do their package management using VCS systems. I mean, how hard is it, really? You import tarballs. Maintain local patches. Build packages from your source tree. Yes, sometimes you might have to translate between upstream VCS’s and your VCS of choice, but still, the benefits seem to far […]
"Dynamic" FIR filter patch
This patch modifies freetype to look for a “FT_FITLER_PARAMS” environment variable, and then dynamically generate a FIR filter matrix from those parameters. Patch file here. It applies against freetype 2.3.7 from the ubuntu repository (though it should apply just fine to upstream 2.3.7. FT_FITLER_PARAMS should have two floating point numbers separated by a space. Each number […]
More font progress?
More hacking. I wrote a patch so that freetype will optionally generate the FIR filter it used during subpixel rendering on-the-fly based on an environment variable. I’ll put the patch and packages up shortly. Here’s another shot of the “hello” google search. Look better than the last one? I dunno. It’s certainly less fringy to […]
Linux font progress?
So I finally got around to hacking freetype yesterday. All I did was modify the FIR filter weights that are used for the “lcddefault”-style filtering. Where as they use to be a [1, 4, 7, 4, 1] weighting (relative), I tried a [1, 3, 4, 3, 1]. To my eyes, it results in a lot […]
Restoring nice hinted fonts on Ubuntu 8.10
The Ubuntu folks seem to change around their default font settings every release. Whatever that’s fine. But it is worth nothing that the default “subpixel” setting in the gnome appearance dialog now means “subpixel + slight hinting” whereas previously it meant “subpixel + full hinting” Since 8.04, though, they’ve committed a crime, IMHO. There’s some […]
VMware Tools install in Fedora 10
Nothing special really, but there are a few fedora-isms. Install the rpm package from the tools dvd that gets automounted. Install the kernel-devel package that matches your processor type, which you can find out by looking at the kernel name obtained from uname -a. It appears that fedora doesn’t create the /usr/src/linux symlink for you, […]
Blog systems
I was reading through some of my very old posts and noticed that I used to spend a lot of time playing with different blog systems. At one point, I switched between wordpress and textpattern several times, constantly looking for the right set of features. I seemed to have been very preoccupied with the relative […]