kaioa.com

Crispy glyphs

Some of you might have seen FontStruct over at Slashdot. It was at the front page yesterday or the day before. The usual thing happened of course - it got slashdotted to death. Fortunately it's back online. It's time to give it a shot.

In a nutshell: FontStruct is a web-based font creation tool. Apart from a few minor issues the Flash-based interface is perfect. It's surprisingly awesome in fact. Well, it's not intended to be used for professional font creation; it doesn't handle kerning or hinting for example. There aren't even any vector tools (all you get is a set of building bricks). But all those things aren't really necessary for less-serious/pixel fonts.

This should be easy, right? Well, for reasons unknown to me it isn't. Win2k/98/95 got two sliders: one for sensitivity and one for acceleration. This was great. This was easy. WinXP, however, assumes you always want to use some degree of acceleration - unless you're using the lowest sensitivity setting, which is quite frankly unusable. This is really irritating - especially if you consider that people who disable acceleration typically use a rather high sensitivity. There is only one slider which controls both settings and there is a check box, which can be used to "improve" the sensitivity... whatever that means.

Why am I writing about this anyways? There should be zillions of pages about that topic, shouldn't it? Well, while that's true all I saw so far only contain some nonsense. And they all copy&pasted from each other. Gee. That really helps.

Mmm... crispy sectors

It's toast

The weekend started with a premonition. Well, maybe "bad omen" is more accurate. Some rather bad SQL errors showed up, but they were sorted out quickly. The next day the site disappeared. "403 - forbidden", it said. That's just great. Did I already mention that I'm amazingly unlucky these days?

Page 403s, FTP says the password is wrong, but email works. So, I waited for the phone support hours to start. Gee. Fast forward about an hour and I got some techy to talk to. Apparently some HDD failed, it got replaced, some files were wiped (well, all of them - except for some now empty directories), and some access rights were nuked as well.

*plop* :'(

I'm actually not dead

Just a bit unlucky. Twice in a row. Being without net access for about 2 weeks is somewhat akin to a new experience. I can't really remember how I did things before the internet. Almost everything I do requires a working connection. I need it for documentation, looking up synonyms/words, downloading/updating libraries/frameworks/compilers, bouncing ideas around, etc.

Everything seems to depend on it. Heck, I couldn't even make phone calls. Maybe I should get one of those annoying mobile phones. Meh.

Not everything was bad though. Having a few days without any PC running wasn't all that bad. I also got around playing some games. No More Heroes (Wii) and God of War 2 (PS2) were actually pretty entertaining. So, I'll dive into that for now.

Sums It Up, Really

Back Then

A few months ago I noticed odd hits coming from live.com - hits from searches for very common words such as "about", "content", or "example". My initial thoughts were that live.com is just a bad search engine (and no one should ever use it). Searches for this kind of vague terms shouldn't yield a hit among the first 1000 result pages. It really shouldn't. Well, I decided to ignore it for the time being.

Some weeks later the number of hits from live.com increased - again with the same kind of nonsense queries. After a quick log check I knew they were all coming from the same IP range (65.55.165.*), which resolves to "livebot-65-55-165-*.search.live.com".

Decisions, decisions...

Legacy Ball Chains

A few weeks ago when Microsoft announced their "opt-in for the default behavior" strategy I was disgusted. Quite frankly I still am. As I see it it's just another scheme to pave the way for more legacy cruft. Don't get me wrong, I'm not disappointed. After all it's what Microsoft always did, but the way they did that - pretending they are doing everyone a favor - was just a bit too annoying. Why can't they do the right thing? Just once.

"Backward compatibility", they say. But wait a minute - don't we already have a tool for that? Yes, we do. Conditional comments (another Internet Explorer specific thing) are used for this kind of things for a couple of years. In a nutshell: you create a website with a good browser (i.e. not IE), and then you work around IE's issues with override style sheets targeting specific IE versions.

The strategy was always to lean forward; fix the issues of the current and previous IE versions and hope that the next one doesn't need extra workarounds. Back when IE7 was released that didn't really work out, because it still had some of IE6's problems and a few new ones on top of that. I should have seen that coming.

Hell is indeed freezing all over. With Humanized's free tool called Enso (available for Win2K, XP, and Vista) you can do lots of useful things with that dreaded EULA fine print key.

You can for example switch to other windows easily, open websites, spell check, count words, evaluate mathematical expressions, and lots of other useful stuff. The math thing is very handy if you use IM or IRC clients and feel like throwing some facts around. Well, check out the videos if you aren't sure if it's something for you.

By the way the Mozilla foundation recently hired some UI designers from Humanized.

Oh yea, and pressing caps lock feels really weird. ;)

Background

It wasn't even four hours into the new year and I already did something stupid. That's pretty impressive - even by my standards.

Over at some channel in some IRC network we got a very useful bot. It can be used for (wildcarded) API lookups, remembers a few important URLs etc and it can also evaluate code. Executing arbitrary code sounds scary at first - and well, it actually is. However, there are many safety nets to prevent any harm: it's sandboxed, execution time is limited to a few msecs, it runs in headless mode, there is a flood protection, it runs in a separate process, memory usage is capped, and output is queued in a Set and capped which ensures that only up to 3 different lines are printed.

Thanks to the headless mode even creative attack routes such as inlining an image, which exploits a yet to be discovered new image parsing vulnerability (they should be all patched by now) on that rather exotic operating system (BSD) are cut off. Not to mention that it would be very difficult to fit all that into less than 512 bytes.

So, what could possibly go wrong?

If you've got an HDTV this won't be all that interesting, since you got better options there than S-Video (aka Y/C). Usually you can connect those via D-Sub, DVI-I or HDMI.

Well, let's say you want to build a nice cab to run some emulators on and all you got is an old PAL TV. With vsync enabled those games will run about 17% slower as intended (Note: a few games use 50 or even 55hz!). Additionally, you may get sound buffer underruns which sounds truly nasty. The two available options are disabling vsync (yuck!) or using 60hz.

Despite that I'm feeling pretty good actually. Or maybe I should rather say I'm feeling pretty good thanks to that. Alright enough of this dear diary jibba jabba as Mr. T would say.

So, here is the oh-so-happy Dango family cramped into mere 800 bytes:

dango.svgz

Semi pointless fact: The biggest PNG export size, which manages to be smaller than 800 bytes (thanks to post-processing with PNGOUT) is 35x16 pixels (14.65 DPI).

(791 bytes)

At this size the color count also dropped to 155. At 1:1 size (90 DPI) it was at 1333 colors.