Mathrick no PATANKO PRESS!

Things I did this easter: go to church, drink, THROW SNOWBALLS.

Life is good.

Admit it, your Web 2.0 experience hasn’t been full up till now, has it? But now, with Chattr here, you can fix that and talk like a real Web 2.0 weenie with no effort. Its full glory can be had here.

Executive summary: yes, it’s an XChat plugin, no, it has no use.

(with-christmas-gifts
  (visit family))
(setf *money* 0)
(print ";_;")

Inkscape is nice. The above is a quick trace of a photo, because flexible image resolution adjustment was needed (and doesn't have anything to do with the Linux distro).

On the other hand, the original SVG (linked to if you click on the image) shows how little parity is there between freely available SVG implementations. Inkscape displays it correctly (obviously), librsvg does a rather nice job, but can't display masked objects at all (there is a slight gradient on the brim which is masked), and FF simply butchers the image, unable to display something as simple as a gradient correctly. 

As Ankh says, it's not good when the only widely-available, decent SVG viewer is Adobe plugin inside IE. 

And there are sure signs:

This is a Japanese paragraph, laid oud according to Japanese traditional typography rules, ie. running vertically, from top to bottom and with lines stacked from right to left. Notice the highlighted text. Red is Latin script, which normally doesn’t run vertical, therefore it’s rotated to retain shape in a foreign environment. The blue part is digits, which are considered script-neutral, therefore they get laid out according to the direction currently in effect.

And here’s how it’s done:

What doesn’t work perfectly yet is alternate embedding modes (as there’s more than one way imaginable to try and fit horizontal text in a vertical paragraph). Need to debug it.

Update:
So, I fixed the bug mentioned previously, as I expected, it was because of errors in my copypasted option parsing code in the test viewer. Now I can try out all modes, and for those of you who expected the post-apocalyptic world to be dwelled by strange and bizzare creatures, you were right. Check out this curiosity:

This is a result of laying out a random snippets of text (taken from Wikipedia and Qatar’s MoFA site, respectively), to test multiscript layout, rendered in EMBED_LINE mode. This mode will layout paragraphs, trying to agree all foreign scripts with the primary direction glyphs run in. And as you can no doubt see, they have been agreed indeed. Except that to get LTR English and RTL Arabic running in the same direction, you need to have their “up”’s pointing in the opposite direction. Which is kind of odd and strange and confusing. But well, you can’t have a horizontal script laid out in vertical paragraph without breaking at least some of its properties.

I’ve been here in PL for a couple of days already, so here are two general observations about Spain:

• My God, it’s HOT over there
• Salads you can get over there are surprisingly crappy and/or totally incompatible with my expectations of what a good salad is. It’s not impossible that you’re supposed to add olive and vinegar yourself, but then, how is it different from a DIY kit? And how am I supposed to do that with a full plate, anyway?

Other than that, GUADEC was a total rockage, and organisers did an awesome job. As you can read in this report (I hope you can, because I can’t ;), which’s got a paragraph about me and a pic (fame, yay!), for me the best thing was finally seeing the faces of people I have known for something like 3 years online.

Other things:

The screenshot below is a testament of my complete pwnage over Gnome Robots. The next thing, I pressed Enter and they all rushed over to crash and burn under my feet. Hah!

My CRT is broken and makes my eyes bleed if I stare at it for extended periods of time. Coding is hard this way and I need to get a new one, but noone has displays I could try out, so I’m left to choose based on whatever they write in glossy specs and hope for the best when I actually order them.

I just increased Bonfire’s bugcount 5.5-fold. It’s not often you do that (and surely the fact there were 2 bugs total filed for this youngest product in bugzilla doesn’t matter at all), and in recognition of my virtues, I gained a bugzilla point! Woo-hoo!

So, yesterday my foot’s got swollen, and today it’s really blown up and hurts a lot when I try to walk on it. As I don’t remember breaking it (and frankly, I don’t believe in myself enough to claim I’d be able to even attempt walking on a broken foot), it’s probably a bite. Nasty stuff, doesn’t want to go away, but fortunately someone’s had it the same thing before, so I’ll be getting some bandages and medicine in the evening. I surely do hope it goes off tomorrow, otherwise I’ll have to see a doctor, not to mention I’ve got the plane tomorrow, with sleep-over at the airport, which doesn’t exactly sound like a fun thing to do in my current condition.

So, I just realised the stuff I’m fighting with right now is screenshotable, so here you go:

The legend goes like this:

• the text is, well, text; it’s supposed to be stacked this way (and to get an actual vertical layout, you just rotate the cairo drawable).
• Colourful Boxes are bounding boxes, you can see how it gets a wrong idea of where the glyphs lie. This is because the rotation done on glyphs, and their origin point is in a corner, instead of the centre.

I’m currently trying to compensate for this, but that’s actually not easy, as PangoGlyphGeometry holds the width, but not height. So fixing horizontal shift is easy, vertical is not. Especially because there’s this bug where a valid (because it’s used one line below with no problems) pointer to PangoFont can’t be cast to GObject.

Update: So, yeah, taking an address of a pointer doesn’t always yield the desired results. But it still doesn’t really work, and Behdad is out to Barcelona, *grumble*.

Stuff that made me laugh today:

/* The PangoContext and PangoContextClass structs are private; if you
* need to create a subclass of these, mail otaylor@redhat.com
*/


Been to København yester-yesterday, it’s cool, full of interesting places, big and noisy, and I prefer my Smallville to live in :). And it’s cool when you can usefully communicate in Danish, and I’ve been able to do that more and more over the past months.

developerWorks published another piece, this time about i18n in GTK+ context. Never before was so much of tricky knowledge (attempted to be) stuffed into so few words, let’s hope it manges to give people the right idea where to begin.

Also, preparing for the trip to GUADEC, and by implication, me leaving DK for 2 months, not to mention trying to catch up with my SoC that’s been lagging way too much. Fun.

Since yesterday, I’m back in DK. Bleh.

As orph requests:

• Entire Honor Harrington series (that’s 9 or so volumes) by David Weber
• Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben
• Apocalypse Troll, again by David Weber, you can read it for free at great Baen’s site
• Left Hand of Darkness, by U.K. Le Guin (still reading)
• That great book about working in mine, whose title and author I can’t recall at all
• Wśród znajomych, collection of essays and other writings by Leszek Kołakowski

These are the ones I’m sure of, but I have strong feeling I’m forgetting something.

Sure I can!

Update: the site seems to be squatted, therefore this post no longer makes any sense.

Inkscape is double-plus neat, but it’s so incredibly, unbelievably, painstakingly slow it’s not even funny. Seriously. Yes, I know that perhaps using nightlies for Win32 isn’t exactly the recipe for fast, but even using native linux builds of stable version is good way to get some new wrinkles whilst waiting for results. Oh, and I thougtlessly tried new “Effects” menu in the nightly — oops. Now I know the meaning of slow. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to remove the effects, and undo seems strangely ineffective. Double oops.

So, this macmarcel guy is a spammer, too. He has exactly two entries, and by odd coincidence I have read both just yesterday, one is stolen from raelity bytes, second one is from SimpleBits, clearly to give him legitimate appearance. Funny enough, he changed “Rollyo” to “Hollyo”, but didn’t bother erasing explicit references to SimpleBits. In any case, raph, you probably want to delete or disable his account.

ghrrrrrrr.Apple pisses me off.

Why? Well, in anticipation of some substantial cash surge (knock on wood), I decided to check in the local (hell yeah, in Odense there’s one) Apple store, to take a look at 12″ iBooks, because that’s exactly what I’d like to get — it’s damn small, has very long battery life, and is sexy (I’m not the only one to share this view, I think, because people with 12″ iBooks are common sight at the Uni). So, I went in, there was one on the display, small as expected, checked the price, OK, within acceptable range, seems they all ship with Tiger these days, which is also good. So the last question was, can I have SuperDrive with this one?

No. That’s only with 14″ ones.

Fuck. Of course, you can have 12″ PowerBook with SuperDrive, so it’s not a technical limitation, it’s just that Apple wants to suck every bit of cash out of you, because prices for PowerBooks are really crazy. It’s 13.500kr vs 8.200kr. And there’s no way I can afford that. But OTOH, I don’t want to get stuck without DVD burner either.

So, does anyone know a good, linux-compatible, 12″ notebook with DVD burner and long-lasting battery, x86 or whatever? And yes, the 12″ bit here really does matter, when you commute to school every day by bike at least.

This is what (amongst other things) AbbreviationZ dictionary says about the entry “sm”:

I must say that gives new light to certain things…

This is damn crazy. This saturday the ads delivery I had to do was about 160kg of paper, 27 different ads (plus one free newspaper) per mailbox. Pure insanity, no less.

Sez M$ in the “advantages of genuine Microsoft software” (emphasis mine):

“You will also have access to new innovations and offerings available only to genuine Windows customers”

Cool. Now where do I sign up for old innovations?