Hi Jaunty

The latest and greatest Ubuntu release Jaunty Jackalope is here. I prefer mine in the KDE flavor, with the Skulpture theme, the excellent Droid fonts and switching on autohinting. In case of using KDE, also remember to install the “gtk-qt-engine” for better looking Firefox. For first timers, I would suggest the Gnome flavor. It comes [...]

A tale of Freetype and Apple

Some time back I was trying to get Fvwm  on my Ubuntu laptop. One of the prereqs was the open source font-rendering engine Freetype  . But no matter how hard I tried, I couldnt get the fonts to look pretty ( I even got the Open Source Liberation Fonts  ). And then I discovered about the Microsoft and Apple patents. It seems that they own a few patents in font rendering, which meant that unless I turned them on by hand and compiled them in FreeType, these obviously superior engines would not be used for rendering. The way to switch them on is:  in include/freetype/config/ftoption.h , uncomment lines:  /* #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER */  (Apple Patent) /* #define FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING */ (Microsoft Patent) Voila. Ze beautiful fonts are heerre.

Only the paranoid survive?

In which I explore the reasons for paranoia against totalitarianism and restriction of freedom. India has been subjected to online censorship, and there have been muses from both side of the fence. From those that believe the government has a legitimate and well intentioned right to do so to those and those (right here) who do not. But the question is not whether Site A should be blocked and Site B should not.  That is what most people are focussing on, but it is not the question one should [...]