Archive for the ‘Rant’ Category.
27th December 2002, 08:53 pm
While being in Aalborg I’ve had the chance to see
what GimpsterDotCom looks like in browsers other than Mozilla. In
particular Internet Explorer… It turns out, that GimpsterDotCom looks
somewhat funny in that browser because it doesn’t support transparent
PNG images. I’m talking about the black edges around the rounded
corners — Internet Explorer blends the images agains a black background
when it should have used the red backgroundimage instead.
I’ve put an image that illustrate this on the right. If the browser
supports PNG images with antialiasing, then you should see a blue square
with a Greek alpha in it. The image is very blurred and this blur is
transparent so that you can see the (white) background through.
This is ridiculous! All major browsers except Internet Explorer can handle
alpha-blended PNG images — my father uses the Opera browser
and it displays the pages without any problems. The PNG format is a
well-established, open standard but Microsoft cannot be bothered to
implement support for it, it seams… The strange thing is, that the
version of Internet Explorer for Machintosh fully supports PNG images. It
handles gamma correction and transparency beautifully. Perhaps the guys
responsible for the Windows version of Internet Explorer should talks some
more with the Machintosh division…
You can read more about the PNG image format at the PNG homepage and
at W3C. -Martin Geisler
17th September 2002, 09:54 pm
I had an appointment at the dentist today — it was just a routine check
to see if everything was OK. I had my last dental checkup just before I
moved to Århus which is a year ago now, so I thought that it would be a
good idea to have a check.
It turned out that I had caries in two of my teeth :-( The dentist said
that it wasn’t that bad because they were small cavities, so I agreed to
have it fixed while I was there. Also, when he said that they were small,
I hoped it wouldn’t cost as much as if they had been big and difficult, but
that didn’t hold true…
So he had to drill… it wasn’t too bad, and I didn’t even get anaesthesia.
I’m generally OK with going to the dentist: it’s a matter of concentrating
on something else while we does his magic on your mouth. He was finished
after 45 minutes.
I then had to pay for the pain: the bill was $100(!) and that’s for less
that one hours work… And then he also gets some money (about $50) from
the Danish health insurance. I’m sure that his equiptment is expensive,
and that he has to pay a lot to rent his place, but it’s still quite
expensive for a student to go get his teeth fixed. When I made a remark
about how expensive it was, he discovered that he had forgotten to charge
me for the two X-ray photos he took of my teeth. But he didn’t change the
bill — that saved me $20.
But now it’s done, and I wont be back for at least a year.
13th September 2002, 07:21 pm
Today I saw the first incident of WikiVandalism here at GimpsterDotCom.
Some guy couldn’t find anything better to do than delete the contents from
the PHP Tutorial and write ”I’m gay” instead.
This is exactly the kind of thing people have been worried about when I’ve
told about how my WikiWikiWeb works. They would ask something along the
lines of: But wont someone just come and delete your pages? And I would
say: ”Probably, but I have backups and they’ll soon discover that it
isn’t that much fun to destroy other peoples work when it’s this
easy…”. I still believe this to be true because of the reasons that can
be seen here: Wiki:WhyWikiWorks.
I just have to figure out how to delete a single revision of a page instead
of deleting everything in one go as I just did with the PHP Tutorial
page…
20th July 2002, 10:25 am
I just saw this huge discussion over at the Debian-devel
mailinglist
about whether or not the LPPL (LaTeX Project Public License) is a
free license. That is free in the Debian sense:
it has be fulfill the
DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) before it can be
included in the main
section of the Debian
archives. There’s currently lots of stuff in the archive that’s licensed
under the LPPL, but the
Debian guys would rather see that it was
distributed under another license, or that the
LPPL is changed to conform with
the DFSG.
The problem seams to be, that the
LPPL forbids you from modifying a
file and then redistributing it using the same filename. This is
important for us LaTeX folks, because one
of the promises of LaTeX (and TeX) is,
that a document processed today will look identical when it’s processed 10
years from now. If everybody is allowed to change important files, then
that promise would be hard to keep. This isn’t just a theoretical concern
— it has happened that someone changed the Computer Modern fonts made by
Donald E. Knuth and
distributed them as the original set. They thought that they were helping
people by improving the fonts, but that wasn’t how others looked at it. I
don’t know exactly what the problem was, but if they had changed the width
of a character just a little, then it could mean that lines would be broken
differently, something that must not happen. If an author has prepared a
document using his own installation of
LaTeX, then he has to be absolutely sure
that the publishers version of LaTeX will
place the letters at the exact same position on the page.
One the other hand, then the Debian guys want to
reserver the right to change the files in their
LaTeX distribution, in case they discover
a security risk or something like that. This is a very hypothetical
situation, but they want the right to do this anyway.
So, is boils down to a question of trust: do the
LaTeX community trust the users not to
cause havoc by distributing modified files from the core of TeX and
LaTeX? Apparently not, and after the
story about the improved CM fonts, I can understand their fear. I don’t
think they fear that the teTeX
maintainers would go crazy,
it’s more about the principle that people has the option of changing
those files.
I hope that they can works things out — it would be a real shame if this
“battle of principles” should end with moving the teTeX packages to
non-free
, as almost everybody recognizes that TeX and
LaTeX are some of the finest examples of
free software.
15th May 2002, 07:40 am

It seems that the Windows community is suffering from yet another virus-attack. I’ve received 53 — no make that 54 — mails from all over the world with an attachment of type audio/x-wav
and various subjects.
I believe that this is the W32/Klez.h@mm virus
that is to blame, so please get yourself some good antivirus software (and
keep it updated) if you’re using Windows or any other operating system
for that matter — you can also get antivirus software for Linux these days. It’s just that the vast majority of viruses target Windows based machines
because there are so many more machines to infect by doing so instead of
going after Linux or Macs.
It’s also much harder for a virus to infect a machine like mine because I don’t use a mailreader that will execute each and every script it sees… It does happen from time to time that I receive a HTML-email. Gnus will then invokes the W3 webbrowser in Emacs to display the mail. This browser doesn’t support any of the scripting languages used by viruses — it just displays the page. It’s this kind of simplicity that keeps systems secure — I’ve never heard that all those scripting capabilities were used for something useful, instead we hear again and again that a virus has been allowed to executed malicious code on the client machine. So if you’ve never used those scripting capabilities, then please turn them off — if you can…