06.27.03

More for Dean

Posted in Politics at 9:19 pm by Craig

So Howard Dean has done about as well as one can possibly due in a 9-candidate race, and won just under 44% of the vote in the MoveOn.org primary. Following this success, I’ve gone ahead and given him more money to help his fight in the real thing. If you are democratically inclined, and haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to check him out, particularly his reponses to the questions posed by MoveOn members. I was particularly impressed with his answer to question 4, on Truth. He seems to be the only candidate who noticed that the question was not about WMD in Iraq, but was more broadly about truth in general. I think it’s a little bit unfortunate that he’s being presented in the media as a bit of a looney-tunes; he seems to me to be very well grounded in reality, and to have very sensible views on pretty much every issue. He’s certainly no Kucinich!

06.26.03

Reduce font-smoothing threshold

Posted in Apple at 7:36 pm by Craig

An alternate way to solve the Safari font-sizing thing is offered here. It shows how to reduce the font-smoothing option to a point size lower than the lowest option the General control panel allows. I’ve temporarily reduced the minimum font-size setting in Safari and turned on font smoothing for small fonts instead. Looks pretty decent at first glance; I’ll leave it configured this way for a while and see how I like it across a variety of sites.

06.25.03

Switch-over completed

Posted in Sysadmin at 10:02 pm by Craig

Ok, the switchover to WordPress from B2 is now completed. The main site is now running off the new software. Please let me know about any problems you hit.

Safari font rendering jacked in final release

Posted in Apple at 7:51 pm by Craig

I’ve updated to the final release of Safari, and it turns out that Apple has decided to change the way it renders fonts now. I used to have the default browser font set to 11-point (comes with 13 as factory default), because I like to get more text on my screen, and with my flat panel, font smoothing, and good eyesight, 11pt is extremely readable. With the setting at 11pt, even sub-normal sized text on webpages was completely readable, and looked good. Now though, with the final release, any default font setting sized lower than 13pt causes sub-normal sized fonts (eg [font size=1]) to be rendered too small, so that font smoothing is turned off for them (I guess that probably means 8pt or below, which is what I’ve got configured in the General control panel), and they become unreadable. If I set the font size to 13pt, then sub-sized text is readable again, but normal-sized text is now huge, leading to insanely more scrolling. Surely this is not the sort of thing one should be changing between a final beta and a full release? Also, since this whole Safari thing is built on Konq, how about exposing the Konq “Don’t draw any fonts smaller than x points” option? Doesn’t even seem to be there hidden in the properties file. sigh. I used to like Safari, now I’m going to have to go look at Mozilla options again. UPDATE: It looks like this says there *is* some hidden way of turning back on the minimum-render size. But carefully omits instructions on how actually to do it, or what the preference is! Re-UPDATE: Ok, I found it by hunting a lot. Looks like the name of the pref is WebKitMinimumFontSize in com.apple.Safari, so 

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitMinimumFontSize 9
does the trick.

New blog server software now going up…

Posted in General at 4:28 am by Craig

I’m upgrading my old, sad blog server software to newer, flashier blog software. The database is shared between the old frontend and the new one (which is not yet fully up). Feel free to try out the new view of things. Probably not much worth seeing right now, but should allow me to do plugins to the sidebar, etc more easily, plus allow me to stay more easily current with the latest updates to the software. Once I’ve ironed out the kinks on the new stuff, I’ll reconfigure apache so all requests end up going there instead of here.

06.24.03

Looking forward to a spam free summer…

Posted in General at 11:32 pm by Craig


At Microsoft, we’re strongly committed to the goal of ending today’s spam epidemic.

– Bill Gates


Looks like the competition is going to start heating up…

06.21.03

Endorsement time

Posted in General at 2:26 am by Craig

I just gave money to Howard Dean, despite the fact that his website doesn’t work with Safari. Even with IE, there were some substantial issues with his Javascript… Anyway, I don’t need him to be a technical genius, I just need him to kick Bush’s ass. While I was in a giving mood, I also donated to MoveOn.org as well — as well as a good candidate, we need as many people as possible working on getting out the vote.

06.04.03

Real or not? You decide…

Posted in General at 11:57 pm by Craig

I will present two links. One refers to a real event, the other is satire. See if you can tell which is which:

  1. The 3rd Annual Nigerian Email Conference

  2. DM Days New York Conference and Expo, “One of New York’s top 100 events!”


Particularly worth reading is the list of sessions at the DMA conference. Such topics as:

  • HELP…THESE ISP FILTERS ARE KILLING MY E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS!

  • WHY YOUR E-MAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS AREN’T WORKING

  • E-MAIL…THE HIDDEN GEM IN BRANDING!


…and other classics.