John's Blog

Rendering fonts, especially on modern LCD screens, is a non-trivial problem. I'm not an expert in computer graphics, biophysics or UI design. However, what I do know is that most out-of-the-box Linux installs result in a visual experience that is unacceptable from my personal point of view. Sure, it's possible to use the system tools (Appearance Preferences in Gnome 2 for example, now it's gnome-tweak-tool in Gnome 3) to set your default fonts and default sizes, and to tweak how they are rendered (hinting, smoothing, sub-pixel smoothing and presumably other sorts of manipulations). What I quickly discovered was that it was akin to a game of whack-a-mole. No sooner would I get one part of my screen free of jaggies, ugly color hinting, or letters that are barely recognizable, than these undesirable effects would show up elsewhere.  There is one more knob that we have available to us and that is the DPI (dots per inch) of the overall display. This often defaults to 96 ...

I recently got back from a trip to Saint Pierre et Miquelon , two French Islands just off the coast of Canada's Newfoundland. These islands actually belong to France, and have for the past 150 years. The people there speak French, hold French citizenship, vote in French elections, are educated in the French educational system and if they get sick, are treated in the French medical system. In short, a little bit of France in North America, as they like to describe themselves. One of the day trips I took while there was to Île Aux Marins  (translation "Sailors' Island" - pictured above) - a small island reachable by a very short ferry trip from the main island of Saint Pierre. Before 1963 this small island was fully inhabited by a small number of local fisherman. From 1963 to about 1985 it was uninhabited and it's buildings fell into ruin. However, starting around the mid-1980s some of the buildings have been restored, and many others have been completely rebuilt ...

Disclaimer:   I am not  a Mac guy. But I think I can still contribute with a possibly useful blog post. The purpose of which is that if you have a 2009 Macbook and you can't understand why your S-video connection won't work - read on! Backstory: A friend had a Macbook - not a Macbook Pro, not a Macbook Air, just a Macbook. The vintage was as best as he could determine, early 2009. When he tried to use the Apple mini-DVI to S-video adaptor nothing happened. Nothing. Zero. Zilch, Nada. Nothing. No amount of fiddling with inputs on the TV or dialog boxes on the Mac would change the outcome either. Additional Datapoints: Repeat with two other TV's and S-Video. Same result. Same Macbook worked fine going to another TV using VGA output. Working Hypothesis: Some Macbooks cannot be persuaded to output S-Video. Confirmation of Working Hypothesis: Can be found here in this Apple support document. It says "However, these MacBooks do not work with S-video output or com...

In Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange (based on the novel by Anthony Burgess ), the protagonist, Alex, undergoes operant conditioning , or aversion therapy , to modify his (ultra)violent tendencies. He's forced to watch film clips with violent scenes while drugged, and thus develops a strong negative response to violence. The movie and the novel raise questions about the morality of such treatments while at the same time illustrating their efficacy. I had an analogous experience where something of this sort happened to me - really quite by accident - and I always thought it was an interesting bit of psychology/physiology and, unlike the scenario depicted in the movie and the novel, there are no troubling moral issues. This is because at the age of 18, I developed a strong association between cigarette smoking and seasickness, with the net result that I haven't touched another cigarette for going on 40 years. Moreover, I retain strong negative associations to ev...

What is Tramp? Tramp is an ange-ftp like utility for Emacs/Xemacs that allows remote file viewing. More modern than ange-ftp, it's normally used to invoke secure protocols like scp, ssh etc., whereas ange-ftp was ftp based as its name implies. Tramp is actually an acronym for 'Transparent Remote (file) Access, Multiple Protocol'. The Xemacs documentation for Tramp may be found here . What goes in Xemacs config file?      (require 'tramp)      (setq tramp-default-method "scp")      (setq tramp-default-user "yourusername")  What syntax do you use to open a file on a remote machine? The online manuals specify this pretty clearly but I somehow didn't take what they said to heart. To avoid invoking "efs" (Which Xemacs needs for package downloading, so it can't be turned off, but is FTP based which we don't want) we need to use Tramp-like syntax which means use square brackets around the machine name.  ...

Addendum: Somewhere along the line during one of the Fedora upgrades this blacklist file got saved off to an rpmsave file and the asus_ast0110 is happily being loaded with no ill effects. So I guess this issue has been fixed somwhere along the line. Ever since installing FC14 on a ASUS P7P55D-E Pro system I was plagued with PS2 lockups. The only fix I was able to come up with was to bypass PS2 altogether and go with USB keyboard and mouse. Which worked fine but OTOH, things should just work, right? Well finally the answer is in. Thanks to Bob P on the Fedora Forums as well as others such as Brad and Josh on the Ubuntu forums the problem seems to be related to a driver conflict between the PS2 driver and the asus_atk0110 driver which apparently has something to do with fans and fan speeds. For Ubuntu this is bug #632048 which is a duplicate of bug #557065 . The fix (or the workaround) is to blacklist the asus_atk0110 driver by simply editing the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist....

First Impressions: When he first comes out one's struck by how short he is. You don't necessarily expect him to be tall, but he's shorter than you expected. A second impression is that if you had to cast a Keith Richards role in a film or on stage, Pacino would clearly be your guy. The impish smile, the wrinkled visage, the swagger - it's all there. New York Origins: Pacino says he's from South ("Sout") Bronx and then moved to Greenwich Village later in while in his 20s. He's obviously a New Yorker through and through - you hear a lot of "Dese" and "Dose" and he's spent a lifetime watching the denizens of New York under his actor's microscope. He's obviously played a lot of New Yorkers over the years. Being a New Yorker informs his world view - he has that particular mix of cynicism, world weariness, optimism and delight at the passing human parade that I think you especially find in New York. Needless to say h...