Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I was thinking about how cool tags are. They truly help finding bookmarked or themed information faster. Keeping up with important issues is much easier too.

But are there any good uses for tags in system applications? Sure, there are. One particular area that springs to mind is font management.

After I have installed about 6,000 fonts on my computer I realized that it is extremely difficult for me to efficiently use them. There are no categories or bookmarks of any kind. There are not subfolders. There are no comments or descriptions. I would be willing to sort out and tag all these fonts once to be able to find the most appropriate font later.

KDE people? Anyone?

I mentioned recently that I’ve installed a whole lot of fonts on my office workstation. I was never actually concerned about fonts and was very satisfied with the default few that I had on box. But I surprised myself. The view of the world looked so different and it appeared so nice that I decided to do the same procedure at home. I am way too addicted to the good looks of the Internet to view it in Helvetica 24×7.

If you are like I was, never caring about installing fonts, then I suggest you try it. You’ll be amazed as to how different the real thing is.

P.S.: One of the side effects was also my blogging fever. After I installed all these fonts I started to browse the web more, and Wordpress’ administration interface looked so good, that I couldn’t stay away.

Good fonts is yet another excellent resource for free, True Type fonts. There is about 300 of them currently. They are nicely categorized and demonstrated, with direct links to .ttf files.

I had a couple of issues with Unicode in Perl. Things just W. Work. And Warn. Those of you who haven’t done your reading yet, will probably find this article by Ivan Kurmanov very informative.

Just in case you are still looking for some free fonts, check the 1001 Free Fonts website.

Since few days before the upgrade of the home server to Fedora Linux Core 3 I was seeing high load spikes from SpamAssassin. After the upgrade, my load average stayed at 10-15 almost the whole day. I was trying to fix it, but to no avail. At first, I have switched off the Bayes filtering, thinking that that is the part to be blamed. It didn’t help. Than I forced SpamAssassin to run in non-Unicode environment, thinking that that might improve things. Nope.

After playing some more with configuration and Googling, I decided to visit #spamassassin IRC channel. In a matter of seconds I was pointed to the this bug report. I will be trying the posted patches shortly. For now though, a simple change of number of maximum children helped a lot. I have reduced it to 2 from the default value of 5. (Edit /etc/sysconfig/spamassassin)

SearchFreeFonts.com is a huge collection of free Unicode fonts. Overall there are more than 7000 fonts available for download. Bookmark!

I have finally fixed a bug with encoding of the blog. The content was always served as UTF-8, but the encoding was set to iso-8859-1. Editing the file nucleus/language/english.php helped. Your browsers should not be confused any more and Russian characters should work fine in the BlogRoll. Yabadabadu!

Via this entry in Joe Grossberg’s blog, I came across a couple of pages that link to and compare monospace fonts. Programmers spend a lot of time looking at text monospaced text, thus the choice of good font will probably increase the productivity. Apart from the usual requirements of sharp letters and multiple encodings, good differentiation between “o” (lowercase “o”), “O” (uppercase “o”), and “0″ (zero) as well as “i” (lowercase “i”), “I” (uppercase “i”), “l” (lowercase “l”), and 1 (one) are greatly appreciated.

These pages are here and here.

Today is the very great day in history! :) I’ve managed to convince gramps to correctly export my family tree into GraphViz format. It did preserve all the names in Unicode, so I just had to install a unicode TrueType Arial font and generate a GIF and PNG. Both of them are now available in the “Family tree” section. And I am off to sleep… first time in the last couple of days. :)