Pascal's TechBlog

Migration Notice

2006-06-21T21:54:00.000+02:00

I will no longer update this blog.

My new blog can be found at blog.pcode.nl.

Globally Compatible Paper Size

2006-06-19T16:22:00.000+02:00

One of the reasons I dislike country's like the US of A is because they keep on clamping to their own medieval (and illogical) standards, for example, they haven't accepted the metric system there yet, the Inch and Mile are still the standard measure of distance.

The same thing goes for paper standards, almost the whole world has embraced ISO 216 and standardized on A4. But not the US, no, no... They still keep on using their Letter format.

When exporting documents to PDF for distribution, this raises issues. As both formats are incompatible with each other. A4 has more height, and Letter has more width. So when printing either of the formats to the other on paper implies the document gets scaled (best case) or the margins get cropped (worst case).

So I'm proposing a solution to this debacle which is quite simple: create your documents using the lowest common denominator of the paper metrics. This means using the width of A4 and the height of Letter: 210mm x 279mm.

Extracting Fonts from PDFs

2006-06-19T15:33:00.000+02:00

Have you ever come across a PDF, which uses some really cool fonts, but you can't seem to get a hold of them... Here's a solution, you can extract font from PDFs! It's possible!

There are some drawbacks though, in many (and probably most) cases it won't be either legal or moral to extract a font from a PDF and then use it without paying a licensing fee. Next most PDF creators only embed a subset of characters into the PDF, which means you won't get a complete character set. This basically means this method is only useful for sampling...

Now first you'll need to convert the PDF to an old school PostScript file like so:
# pdftops 1Rules.pdf

Next open the 1Rules.ps file with your favorite text editor and search for the following:
%%BeginResource: font CIKHFG+Schoensperger-Modified
%!FontType1-1.0: CIKHFG+Schoensperger-Modified
12 dict begin
/FontInfo 10 dict dup begin
/Notice (©1991 FontFontRevival; FontShop International ¥ Modified by Marc G @ the Black Library 7/99 so we can write the word 'Skaven' properly.) readonly def

...

cleartomark
%%EndResource

Copy that excluding the %%BeginResource and %%EndResource lines to a new textfile, which you can then save using a .pfa extension.
Open the newly created .pfa file with FontForge, and reencode the font as Latin1 (Encoding - Reencode - Latin1), and compact the font (Encoding - Compact). Because of the embedding the font's name will be garbled, so you'll want to adjust that (Element - Font Info - Names). Finally you can generate a TrueType or PostScript Type1 font to your liking (File - Generate Fonts).

Desktop Publishing Rules of Thumb

2006-06-16T16:27:00.000+02:00

Along the years I've seen many reports being written in the horrid default Microsoft Word style. OpenOffice.org's default style is just as horrid because of compatability reasons. The following are rules of thumb explaining how to properly layout a report:

Fonts
Always try to use the least number of fonts you can. For most documents this means you end up using either two or three fonts, depending whether you want to give your document (respectively) a traditional or contemporary look. For a traditional look, use a single serif font for both headers and body text. If you rather like a contemporary look, use a sans-serif font for the headers and a serif font for the body text. In both cases you might need to use a monospaced font to display screen dumps and the likes. The font size for your body text should always be either 10, 11 or 12pts.
While there there is not much fundamentally wrong with Times New Roman, Arial and Courier, they just reek of laksness, and basically say to the reading 'I didn't care!'.
Instead of using Times New Roman, try Palatino or a Garamond. Arial being a bad Helvetica ripoff, should be replaced even more so, for example try Frutiger, Gill Sans, Andale Sans, Univers, Akzidenz-Grotesk. And last but not least, Courier could be replaced by Prestige, Andale Mono or Vera Sans Mono.

Margins
Don't be afraid of white space, white space is your friend. All documents should at least have margins of 2.5cm, preferably even larger, 3.0cm or 3.5cm is not too much. LaTeX even uses 4.0cm for it's innner and outer margins, and that's just fine.
Large margins are a good place to grip the document, making sure your fingers aren't obscuring any text. For teachers, mentors and reviewers it's also an ideal place to scribble notes and corrections.

Line Width
There are several available rules of thumb concerning line width, they're all different, yet very similar. Some folks say each line should hold about 10-12 words, other say 12-14 words. Yet another crowd tells you to put the letters A-Z, a-z, 0-9 on a line as a guide. If you compare these methods (and some others) it basically boils down to the following, always keep on average between 10-15 words per line of text.
Reading lines shorter than 10 words will disturb the sentence flow too often, while lines larger than 15 words will be tiring, because of excessive eye movement.
Ofcourse you can't configure a line width anywhere so you must experiment the font size and margins accordingly.

Line Spacing
I always prefer a proportional line spacing between 110% and 120%. Having lines stuck too close to each other, may cause the eye to unintentionally switch between lines. But having lines be too far apart will disturb the sentence flow, because the eye needs to search where the next line starts.

Dont's
Do not type two spaces after a dot. This is a remnant of the typewriter era, where the double space would cue the brain a new sentence was about to start. But modern proportional fonts obsoleted this custom.
Do not use a non-proportional font for your body text. Non-proportional fonts are harder to read, and cause eye strain.
Do not mix TrueType and Type1 fonts in your document (especially when exporting to PDF). Different operating systems have different font renderers, and may render either TT or T1 fonts more crisp or blurry. Sticking with one type will keep your document looking consistent.
Do not use Comic Sans. Only you can prevent bunny punchings:

RichText Mail?

2006-06-16T13:16:00.000+02:00

During my participation in the Exchange Server 2003 course, it has come to my attention that Outlook and Exchange actually use RichText Format when MAPI is used to send or receive mails. Only when mails are sent using SMTP, POP3 or IMAP4 is the mail converted to plain text or HTML.

Nuff said...

OpenOffice.org templates packaged

2006-06-11T19:55:00.000+02:00

I managed to create a quick and dirty Ubuntu package of my OpenOffice.org humanist templates. The package contains the following five templates:

Humanist Presentation
Humanist Report (A4, Letter)
Humanist Curriculum Vitae (A4, Letter)

You can download the Ubuntu package here, and either double click the package or install it like this:
$ sudo dpkg -i openoffice.org-humanist-templates_0.4-2_all.deb

UPDATE: I updated the package to remove the spaces from the templates.

Lawrence Lessig: What have you done?

2006-06-11T15:55:00.000+02:00

I ran acros this old keynote from Lawrence Lessig the other day. It's a really good keynote where he makes a point out of the fact that most people talk about their ever decreasing freedoms, but never actually do anything substantial about it (like, for example, supporting EFF).

Sun Java 5 Fonts

2006-06-11T13:00:00.000+02:00

If you fiddle a bit with Synaptic you'll notice that the Sun Java 5 JRE/JDK has a package called sun-java5-fonts. What this package basically does is install the fonts (which are normally exclusively accessible by Java itself) and make them available to defoma. The Sun Java 5 Fonts package contains Lucida Bright, Lucida Sans and Lucida Typewriter. After installing these fonts, try visiting Slashdot again, it looks stunning!

UPDATE: You might need to run 'sudo fc-cache -v' to update your font cache.

Double One!

2006-06-11T12:35:00.000+02:00

For those of you, who know what this means: Yes, I do like to gloat!

CorelDRAW! 9 Fonts

2006-06-09T20:44:00.000+02:00

While going through my stuff the other day, I found an old student license of the CorelDRAW! 9 graphics suite. I popped in the CD and found a goldmine of professional fonts. Most fonts included with CorelDRAW! are from the Bitstream foundy (which also did the Vera fonts included with GNOME). Here's a short list of the Bitstream fonts:

Aldine401 BT (Bembo)
Humanst521 BT (Gill Sans)
Humnst777 Bt (Frutiger)
OrigGarmnd BT (Garamond)
Swis721 BT (Helvetica)
ZapfCalligr BT (Palatino)
ZapfHumnst BT (Optima)
Zurich BT (Univers)

All of these Bitstream fonts are properly hinted to produce good onscreen results when rendered with FreeType, the open source font rendering engine which is used by GNOME.

After inspecting the CorelDRAW! EULA I couldn't find anything prohibiting me from separating the Bitstream fonts from the rest of CorelDRAW! as long as I didn't have CorelDRAW! and/or the Bitstream fonts installed elsewhere.

Eben Moglen Keynote

2006-06-09T14:57:00.000+02:00

For all the folks who haven't seen Eben Moglen's Keynote at the Red Hat summit yet: you really really need to see it. It's available in several formats: Quicktime, Real, Ogg. Download it now!

Thom's comments on Ubuntu's GNOME

2006-06-05T15:56:00.000+02:00

After reading reading Thom Holwerda's post about Ubuntu's GNOME, I noticed that most of his complains were either bugs or works in progress, except for this one:

"GNOME needs a better default layout for its panels. The top bar is wasting an insane amount of space; to the left, we have a few menus and icons, and all the way to the far right we have the system tray and clock. In between, it's all gray. A solution would be to place the taskbar in between those two ends, but on most screens, the space there is just a little too limited to comfortably house the taskbar. Other than that, the top bar becomes extremely cluttered if it also houses the taskbar."

Thom seems to put space efficiency on par with usability, which in't necessarily true. Well, actually those will often be antithetical to each other.
Also the uselessness with which Thom portraits the empty space in the upper panel is hardly deserved. It can be quite handy for placing launchers (for Epiphany, Evolution, etc), and applets (Tomboy Notes, System Monitor, Weather Report, Network Manager, etc).
Housing the taskbar in the upper panel seems like an extremely bad idea, because most important the available space is much too small, so when a lot of applications are opened the application bars are so small, it'll be impossible to differentiate between them, and the taskbar loses it's primary functionality. That's the brillance of putting the taskbar in the lower panel, where there's plenty of room.

"Ubuntu still does not pass my ZipDisk test; nor does any other distribution for that matter. My desktop x86 has an internal IDE ZipDisk drive (250MB), and no matter what distribution I install, neither of them configures fstab correctly so I can use my ZipDisk instantly. And that's for an internal one-- don't get me started on any of my 6 external (parallel) drives. I never got those to work with any operating system (except Windows, as Iomega has drivers for that, obviously). By the way, BeOS/Zeta also passes the internal part of the ZipDisk test."

While Thom is right from a fundamental point of view, having plug and play ZipDisk support seems hardly relevant anymore. ZipDisks were never really popular, so investing a lot of effort in to this would be a waste of time. And considering a wonderful new technology called 'USB Memory Sticks' it would seem silly at best.

VMware Player

2006-06-03T13:11:00.000+02:00

While reading Planet Ubuntu NL, I noticed Nicolas' post about the fact that VMware Player was now prepackaged in Dapper. Thanks for the tip!

Anyway this is great! Really! The best part about having VMware Player prepackaged is the fact that the user doesn't have to compile the kernel modules manually anymore. Sweet...

BlackAdder II

2006-06-03T13:07:00.000+02:00

While re-watching the BlackAdder series, I noticed in the Potato episode of BlackAdder II, Simon Jones makes an appearance Sir Walter Raleigh, the seafarer. Simon Jones is probably most famous for his role in the original BCC series of The HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy as Arthur Dent.

Elephants Dream

2006-05-26T17:48:00.000+02:00

Lately the Blender folks have released their short movie "Elephants Dream". The movie lasts for about ten minutes, but it really shows off what Blender is capable of. And it's very entertaining to watch.

You can download their HD formatted movie here, after you have downloaded the movie, it can be transcoded into a plain ol' DVD:

ffmpeg -i Elephants_Dream_HD.avi -pass 1 -target pal-dvd -aspect 16:9 Elephants_Dream_DVD.mpg
ffmpeg -i Elephants_Dream_HD.avi -pass 2 -target pal-dvd -aspect 16:9 Elephants_Dream_DVD.mpg
dvdauthor -o ed_dvd/ -t Elephants_Dream_DVD.mpg
dvdauthor -o ed_dvd/ -T
mkisofs -dvd-video -V "Elephants Dream" -v -o ed_dvd.iso ed_dvd

Transcoding the movie this way works fine, except that during the top-down scrolling bits of the movie it's not 100% smooth, this might be caused because the HD formatted movie uses a different framerate than PAL DVD. I'm not sure on how to resolve that yet.

OpenOffice.org: Lacking Professional Templates

2006-05-25T18:45:00.000+02:00

Commercial office suites like Microsoft Office and Corel WordPerfect Office offer the normal user a wealth of document templates for all common document types. Clearly OpenOffice.org lacks these.

Ofcourse there's the OOExtras project, but to be plain honest, most templates offered by OOExtras look very unprofessional downto outright butt ugly.

I decided to give it a shot and fill this gap. The end result being three templates:

All the templates use the Bitstream Vera fonts as these fonts are supplied by OOo itself, and are the only fonts which can be relied upon to be present on all OOo installations. During the design of these templates I've tried to find a balance between making them esthetically pleasing, legible and generally professional looking.

I submitted them to the OpenOffice.org Issue Tracker as issue 65779 for inclusion into the default OOo install.

NGC: Soul Calibur II

2006-05-24T12:17:00.000+02:00

Guess what... It's possible to hang Soul Calibur II on an Nintedo GameCube, and I did last night. I don't seem to be able to reproduce the crash. It happened somewhere in weapon master mode, after rebooting everything seemed fine again.

Anyway I seem to have progressed quite a bit only having played a couple of hours, I completed 7 of the 10 chapters, unlocking most of the characters and arena's.

SANE 2006: Free Software Bazaar

2006-05-19T16:41:00.000+02:00

I finally uploaded the Free Software Bazaar photo's I took at the end of the evening. I also started to actually manage my photo's, and quite frankly F-Spot rocks!!! The Flickr export feature works great.

The bazaar was actually quite fun to attend. I was introduced to OpenOffice.org's new 'Get Legal' campaign, which is a nice effort. Though I'm afraid it won't have that much of an impact, because most people just don't care whether they're using legal software or not. But let's hope for the best...

Another cool project which I first became aware of during the FSB was Simuze. It a great concept: a free distribution point for home made music. You really need to check out The Penis Song!

Leaked cover art for Dapper Drake!!!

2006-05-19T14:33:00.000+02:00

Dots Per Inch

2006-05-12T18:38:00.000+02:00

Calculating your screen's DPI rating is quite easy, first measure your screen's physical width and height (in inches), next divide your screen's native resolution by either your screen's pyshical width or height. For example:

Width: 1680px / 17.1" = ~98 DPI
Height: 1050px / 10.7" = ~98 DPI

After calculating your screen's DPI you can set it through System, Preferences, Font, Details.

I (don't) hate Cisco Systems (anymore)

2006-05-04T19:43:00.000+02:00

Last semester I took Cisco's CCNP7 course at school. During the course we weren't given the chance to take the Cisco CCNP7 final exam. After talking to my teacher about this, I was told that Cisco didn't offer our version (3) any more, and that version 4 wasn't available yet. Usually there is overlap between versions, but in my case there's a big gap. A crevasse of sorts.

Of course this is pure speculation, but version 4 probably covers more recent Cisco technology, which Cisco badly needs to sell. Basically the course is being prematurely ended because it doesn't advertise Cisco equipment enough.

So no certificate for me. I hate Cisco Systems.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Filip van Bel of Cisco Systems has clarified the situation for me, which basically boils down to a miscommunication issue. Please note that I (in my frustration) was quick to judge and I no longer hold the opinion expressed above!

Dia Revisited

2006-04-28T15:33:00.000+02:00

About a week ago a new version of Dia was released, after more than a year Dia 0.95 was finally there. The changes in Dia aren't really major when considering the invested work, but from a usability perspective the changes are quite massive. Dia 0.94 still uses the old GTK 2.4 FileDialog, which is old and just plain crappy, and it finally got replaced in 0.95 with the new and more usable GTK 2.6 FileDialog.

Another change, which personally affects me, is the updated Cisco icon set. The new Cisco icons are now colored, and look exactly like the icons used in Cisco literature. A simple sample:
I hope Dia 0.95 makes it into Dapper. But if it doesn't I've ported the Debian package to Ubuntu, you can download them here.

UPDATE: Please remove your ~/.dia directory after upgrading to Dia 0.95, if you don't you won't get all the new Dia features.

YellowSheepRiver Municator

2006-04-27T19:20:00.000+02:00

The YellowSheepRiver Municator has been in the news lately, this machine has very much potential, a strong MIPS-like CPU (The Godson II) and a Mobile Radeon 7000 onboard, which means it has hardware 3D acceleration using open source drivers.

Beside it's primary target, being a low-cost desktop, this little machine has also great potential as a residential server. It's small size means it can be easily put in an electrics closet.

I certainly hope these machines will become available in the Netherlands, though I highly doubt it.

Corbicula anti virus: Other...

2006-04-27T19:04:00.000+02:00

With the previous releases of Corbicula it wasn't possible to scan anything else but the default supplied scan targets. With the latest corbicula release it's now possible to choose 'Other...', a FileChooserDialog opens where you can select any random directory you would want to scan for virusses.

Coinciding with this new feature release is also the first available Dapper Drake package, apt-gettable in a seperate repository:
deb http://dl.gna.org/corbicula/ubuntu dapper/

Dapper's glibc

2006-04-26T12:35:00.000+02:00

The current Ubuntu stable release (Breezy Badger) was released with gcc 4.0, one of the things that nagged me was the fact that Breezy's kernel wasn't compiled with 4.0 but with an older version of gcc, namely 3.4.

The first thing I did after installing Dapper Drake was to check whether the kernel was compiled with gcc 4.0, it was, so I was happy as a clam. But yesterday I was in for quite a shock, it seems that Dapper's glibc isn't compiled with 4.0, but with gcc 3.4.

I can think of only two reasons why not to compile glibc with gcc 4.0, either glibc just doesn't compile properly with gcc 4.0, or they used the old gcc 3.4 to prevent unknown regressions. In either case gcc 4.0 should not be the default system compiler.