WineLocale now being synced to SVN

I’ve set up SVN on my system again so updates are once again being synchronized on the Google Code repository. I’ve put in at least 6 hours today and the new WineLocale is up to almost 30KB of working code.

The layout was kept the same as the old version, but I scrapped the lines which allowed for using Microsoft’s TrueType core fonts. Why? Because I’m a bastard and don’t want to let you do that.

Actually, it’s because those fonts are, if everything continues as planned, entirely unnecessary. I have programmed WineLocale to use the same fallbacks as Ubuntu’s fontconfig. Ubuntu pulls Kochi Gothic for its Japanese, glyphs, so WineLocale does the same. Expand that to include Chinese, Korean and Russian.

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Wallpaper Wednesday!

For months I’ve been promising myself I would post more regularly. Usually the posts come in a burst, and then the site falls back into silence. That’s why I decided to add a new weekly feature: Wallpaper Wednesday.

Every Wednesday, I will post two vector wallpapers rasterized into select widescreen sizes. It’s a chance for me to learn more about vector art and do something new with my best photos.

Each wallpaper package will be released in a ZIP on my deviantArt page—assuming it stays unblocked in China.

If you enjoy these wallpapers, consider supporting some of the sponsors (read: ads) on this site: they don’t pay much and a lot of them suck—especially the mail-order brides which Google seems to think you all want. But hey, I’m giving you with good shit for free.

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Back at work on WineLocale

OK, first off, talk about a blown release date! I said I would have a beta out what … a year ago? Ubuntu is on its second release since that announcement and my old guide fails on Ubuntu Ibex.

While I personally have little use for Wine let alone WineLocale, I do realize how important it is to other people. You can give special thanks to Dan Kegel, who has written to me many times over the last few months and without whose mails I likely would never have looked at this again.

I’m not complaining. I am actually very glad someone cares enough to write me!

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Black, white and dead all over

Forty years ago, a newspaper was one of the most lucrative businesses to own. What has happened the last year, and will happen next year, is something that should stun any reader.

When I started college, my initial major was computer engineering. It wasn’t because I liked systems or had any desire to design them—it was because I liked video games and had a wild idea that I would make them. Of course, school teaches more about the study of computer programming than how to actually do it … but that’s another topic.

Even in 2000 it was obvious the IT jobs were doomed to shift to India. Sure, there are still people working in the IT field in the US, but they are a shrinking population.

I changed to journalism because it was a job that could not be outsourced.

Or so I thought.

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You are all poor, stupid teenage parents

Earlier today I learned about Quantcast, a Web site which claims to profile not simply how much traffic a domain attracts, but the faces behind those hits.

The verdict is in: you, dear reader, are most likely a 12-17-year-old Asian male with a 6-year-old child and no college experience who works at a McJob for $0-$30,000 per year before taxes.

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Help me find CC-licensed art

Greetings! Regular readers may remember that some months ago I announced my plan to typeset some free books published by Project Gutenberg. I intended to have the first volume of Arabian Nights out by now, but things fell behind schedule and there were too many layout changes.

More importantly, I have learned much about book design—especially how much I did not know! It is such a specialized and often-neglected area of design, and consequentially most books do not cover it.

The Internet has been a tremendous help in providing classical diagrams and the theory abandoned by mass market paperbacks, and I have made tremendous progress on this project.

While Arabian Nights is still planned, first I would like to focus on the fairytale collections by Andrew Lang. The first two books I will work on will be his Blue Fairy and Red Fairy books, both fantastic collections that are usually passed over in favor of the more popular Grimm Brothers’ tales.

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The long walk home

It’s evening in Beijing. Ten fifty. Foggy. The night air has a bit of a chill to it—what more tolerant people would describe as “brisk.” It’s fall, but you wouldn’t know it walking on this side of town. The only trees in sight are buried in the small yards that dot the side streets of Third Ring Road.

Tonight is a full moon. The first since the Mid-Autumn Festival last month. It seems like forever ago.

Maybe it’s my mood. Maybe it’s the pollution. Tonight, the streets don’t seem as friendly as they usually do. On the west end of the overpass, a gang of seven or eight guys are surrounding one girl on her knees. She’s not crying, but they still give me dirty looks as I round the corner.

I step off the other side, walking past a Holland Bakery where two ladies are engaged in the world’s oldest business.

“Hello honey~, ma~sa~ji?” they coo.

The left one is wearing a dark brown jacket and matching boots. Fur trim. Chinese clothes are always deceptive that way: even the thinnest windbreaker is topped off in a furry ring—fur is status, not warmth.

Her coworker is sporting that bad perm job with the fucked-up brown highlights that’s been so popular the last few years. Face caked in chalky white makeup, looking like a ghost. The only color is the red lipstick she laid on clownishly thick.

Fashion is beyond me.

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Lessons from 2 years without Windows

I dropped Windows in December 2006. At the time, Ubuntu Feisty was in beta and I upgraded to it from my initial Edgy Eft install. While I had used Linux for 4-month intervals from 1997 onward, this was my experience in jumping ship entirely.

I have learned a lot—both about Linux and about my own desktop usage—in the past two years. This post is my opportunity to share these with you, the reader.

Lesson 1: Do not customize

Linux is hailed as the customizer’s friend. Most applications store their data in user-editable INI-like files. Root has the power to overwrite any ugly image that offends your optic nerves. If something is shittily organized, you can always reprogram and recompile it to make a sensivle UI as I did with MadEdit.

However, as on Windows, these customizations are temporary.

What I mean is that there is no effective way to preserve your changes during upgrades, and there is no way to collect or save these changes when you need to reinstall your system—especially once you begin tap dancing outside /home/.

Once outside your own user directory, all bets are off. A new update can and will overwrite your configuration changes. While some data in /etc/ might not overwritten—assuming the package scripts were written by a courteous maintainer—changes in /usr/ will be toast.

Did you fix your OpenOffice.org icons to match the same Tango used in your OS rather than the poorly-matched Tango in synaptic? Tough cookies. Those are now gone. Hope you made a backup.

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Ubuntu ate a frisbee

Apparently I did something that Ubuntu really, really did not like. currently any GTK application that displays text will segfault. I think that includes just about … everything.

Thunar can run, but right clicking anything to view its properties causes a segfault.

I’m currently in the process of doing backups from the command line. I’d kind of like to install a dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu environment this time so that I can have a faster machine for Quark. An EeePC can run it, but it is painfully slow at times and the resolution leaves much to be desired. I used to run it in VirtualBox but got sick of the crashing.

Who knows, maybe I’ll throw on Windows for a change until the next Ubuntu release comes out. I need to figure out how to install Windows without a bootable CD-ROM or floppy device anyway.

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Obama’s choice of lipstick

I’m so glad I don’t live in the United States.

Not because of the crippling, unequal tax system. Not because I may be sued into oblivion by a clown who gets butthurt over my free speech. Mostly because at times like these, its corporate media system is even more broken than that in which I work.

I woke up today to a full iGoogle ticker with nothing but reports about Obama saying, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” Not the choicest of words I’m sure, but only a stone’s throw away from “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and shits duck shit, it’s probably a fucking duck.”

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