End the War on Freedom

I recently had a problem with a web site when viewed in Safari 4.0.3 in Mac OS X 10.6.2. All the body text appeared as a sequence of capital "A" characters, surrounded by square boxes, as pictured below.

I discovered that it was due to "Bitstream Vera Sans" being mentioned as a font-family in the CSS file. I fixed it by downloading the font via the "Download" button at www.dafont.com/bitstream_vera_sans.font, decompressing the downloaded zip file, selecting the four ".ttf" files in the Finder, right-clicking and choosing "Open With.../Font Book.app", clicking "Install Font" on the resulting window. Then, in order to clear the font cache, I did the following in a Terminal window:

sudo atsutil databases -remove
sudo atsutil databases -removeUser
sudo atsutil server -shutdown
sudo atsutil server -ping

Bookase.com is a book price comparison service, based in Delhi, India. Enter a book title, select the one you want from the results, and it shows prices, including shipping, for a large number of online book sellers. Worked well for the couple of samples I tried, though there was a layout problem in the results page, causing the result table to be offset to the right. Includes coupon codes to use for discounts, when applicable. No ads, except a couple of popular books listed on the home page. Appears that they make money with affiliate fees.

Just watched the video about Google Wave. Trés cool! Me want'm. For some ideas about expediting your own invitation, see How to get a Google Wave Invitation at the waverz.com blog.

Jeff Moser has drawn a cartoon guide to the Rijndael block cipher. He has also provided a sample implementation, in C#. [gsc]

My new Mac OS X Snow Leopard disk was delivered today by FedEx. After my work day, and the completion of a backup, I rushed to install it. The icon for my boot disk had an exclamation mark on it, and when I clicked on it, it said "Mac OS X cannot be installed on ..., because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer."

I almost went to the store to buy another disk, but some time with Google found the solution in this post from William Maxwell:

He clarifies with:

Some people also had success with uninstalling PGP Desktop. That didn't work for me, but the fix above did.

(I was able to successfully reinstall PGP Desktop after my Snow Leopard install, but I'll refrain from using PGP Disk until they ship a certified-Snow-Leopard-compatible update).

Paul Graham - I can vouch for the veracity of this. Wish more managers understood it. A phone call that a programmer's manager thinks takes 5 minutes can easily cost him most of the rest of the morning. Getting your brain around a hard problem is hard. Once you've done it, you need uninterrupted time to convert it into code.

Factor is a Concatenative language, a descendent of Forth, but higher level. The Factor wiki, and web server, including SSL, were written in Factor. Looks cool. [twitter]

Sundar Pichai at Google - Google is getting into the operating systems business, building a lean, mean, browsing machine. I'll definitely give it a try in a VM ASAP. Might even buy a netbook with it. [everybody]

David Kravets at Wired - Jon Lech Johansen, the guy who broke DVD encryption, at the tender age of 16, has a new company, doubleTwist, which is distributing an application of the same name that allows you to copy your music, photos, and videos to a wide range of portable devices, and share them with your friends. The App appears to work on my Mac, though I haven't played with it much, and is available for Windows, too. It's pretty. I see no business plan, though there's a hint of it in the app. The "My Profile" page says, "Account level: free", as if there will be non-free account levels available in the future.

doubleTwist bought an ad, displayed on the windows of the BART station underneath the San Francisco Apple Store. It was up on the Friday before WWDC, but somebody tore it down because it "did not allow enough light through the subway station window." So they missed the Keynote. It was up again Wednesday, though, with a transparent background.

Vala is a high-level language for making Gnome applications. It compiles to C, and uses the standard Gnome libraries. It appears to make GUI apps incredibly simple to create, and, since that C gets compiled to machine code, probably has very few performance problems. Haven't tried it, and won't until I ship Trubanc, but looks highly cool. [Barry]

I've been using Firefox for a long time, since I stopped using Opera 2, or something like that. I've tried other browsers over the last couple of years, but I've always come back to Firefox. Well, it's just been too slow of late. And Safari is snappy. The other differences are minor, I think, so I'm switching, at least for a while. And Safari 4 is in beta. Think I'll give it a try.

Steve Lohr at The New York Times - Oracle has agreed to buy Sun, for $7.4 billion, $9.50 a share, a net cost of $5.6 billion. I hope they do a good job with Java, and Solaris.

Tom Knapp uses Puppy Linux. Cool. I haven't booted my Puppy VM in a long time, but I remember it fondly. Knapp had no problem updating to version 4.2.

Id Software's John Carmack has created an iPhone version of one of the earliest first person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D. I remember playing it on my Mac with my four-year-old son on my lap back in 1995. He loved it. My wife did not. It works quite well. I downloaded it direct to my iPhone during my daughter's piano lesson yesterday evening. $4.99. Carmack wrote a screed on its development, at the end of which he promises Classic Doom for the iPhone soon.

A little over thirteen months ago, I bought my first Belkin Washable Mouse. I've been very happy with it, but a hole wore through the rubber cover, so I bought another one. The touch-sensitive no-moving-parts scroll "wheel" is its best feature, but it tracks well, and doesn't get gummed up, since it's water proof.

New mouse in its box


Old and new mice


Old mouse damage

1234567890day.com says "It's time to party like it's 1234567890 – 'cause it is!" Today at 6:31:30pm Eastern Standard Time, Unix time (seconds since midnight Coordinated Universal Time on January 1, 1970) will be 1234567890. This page lists a bunch of bars and restaurants where those who care about this sort of trivia will be meeting, likely to talk trivia.

At the time of this post, there are 120 users in the ##1234567890 channel at irc.freenode.net.

Yesterday, the iMac that I got around Thanksgiving of 2006 started locking up and having a hard time booting. I booted from an installation disk, ran disk diagnostics, and discovered that it was disk access on my internal drive that was hanging. Drove to the local Best Buy, that being the closest place I could think of that would have disk drives, and got a new, one terrabyte, Firewire/USB/eSATA external drive, a Western Digital "My Book, Home Edition" to be precise. Spent an hour installing the OS on it, and another 4 hours restoring my Time Machine backup. Lost a week of changes, but got back most of my bits.

'twas a bummer to lose most of a day to getting my computer working again. Would have been a disaster had I not had a backup.

Remember, boys and girls, the question is not whether your disk drive will fail, only when your disk drive will fail.

Pictured below, from top to bottom, DSL modem, 500 GB backup drive, new 1 TB system drive, wifi router.

Eric S. Raymond has written a number of Unix koans over the years. Master Foo enlightens the neophytes. Entertaining!

I got a new iPhone game last night. In Mobigame Edge, you slide your finger to roll a little cube around 26 levels of puzzle courses. Timing and strategy are both necessary to win. But you get as many tries as you want to improve your score on each level. They've posted two YouTube videos. One embedded below. Edge also works on the iPod Touch. Good addictive fun! [tuaw]

There is now a Beta Mac version of my favorite BitTorrent client, µTorrent. It's a tiny download, 1.3 megs. It starts up quickly. And it worked for the one torrent I tried. Yay! I don't download torrents often, but when I do, I want a good client.