Archive for May 2010

Fonts

I’m amazed that Helvetica, a rather beautiful font, costs USD$741. I know fonts take a lot of time to make, and generally cost a lot of money (a conversation I had with Keith Packard sometime in 2004 cemented this into my head). Recently, I read in Monocle about Japanese font-maker Morisawa and figured that fonts are truly, really expensive.

Apple ships Helvetica. But as a “dfont” package. Good thing there’s a utility called DfontSplitter (Windows and MacOSX only). It allows you to extract the font as a TTF. But legally, you might not be able to use it for Web Embedding either.

Today, I discovered Cufón (source). Its a simple web utility – upload the font, and it generates the font in a format, and then there’s a little rendering engine that pops out in JavaScript for your usage. Very handy. Now websites can have embedded fonts, and things start looking the way you designed them to look.

As an aside, I used to generate favicon’s using an image editor. Nowadays, it seems like you might as well just move to the web – one less use for desktop software – use the favicon.ico Generator.

Donating to Firefox add-ons

I went to get Flashblock installed in my browser after a hiatus, and saw something interesting:


Firefox plugin donations

That’s the add-ons page telling me that you can now make a small donation to the developer of the plugin so they can continue development on it. There’s a suggested amount (in this case $5), and when you do click on Contribute, you’re given options: one-time suggested donation, any price you’d like to give, or a recurring monthly contribution. All this is fulfilled quite simply via Paypal. I actually know of one of the developers of Flashblock – a Malaysian developer, Philip Chee.

Money in a capI find Flashblock useful. Donating definitely makes sense. Then I immediately thought of WOT – Web of Trust. I use the service on a daily basis. Would a donation of $10 to WoT make sense? Absolutely. It makes the web safer for me to browse. It adds that added layer of security before I go ahead and click on a link.

Do you donate to the add-ons that you use the most? Did you even know you could donate to add-ons for Firefox? I would totally appreciate some comments on this.

Disclosure: I have a professional interest in Web of Trust.

Wikipedia available in print via PediaPress

Book vendorOver a year ago, I found out about Wikitravel Press from Jani Patokallio, at BarCampKL 2009. I was pretty excited since it was based on the open content Wikitravel, it was printed on demand, and it was updated on a regular basis. Imagine getting accurate travel guides when you were going somewhere (as opposed to a dated Lonely Planet guidebook)?

When I was young, I used to pore through a set of encyclopaedias from Grolier, that my late grandfather had purchased sometime in the ’60’s. These were wrongly disposed off, during a move, and the last time I encountered a traditional encyclopaedia, was a few months ago, albeit a digital version. For me, Wikipedia won.

Naturally, I’m excited to see that you can now get Wikipedia entries, printed in book-form now. PediaPress now offers custom books to all users. Check out the book creator on Wikipedia.

It got me thinking. Would we eventually see textbooks being printed out from Wikipedia? I took a look at some of the pre-prepared books, and found one for College Mathematics: Algebra. Its over 400 pages of dense mathematical content; about the typical size of a math textbook. Coursework preparation will be more open, and quality will be crowd-sourced.

More interesting for me, and other developers using MediaWiki? The tools for creating your own press are available at the PediaPress Open Source Repository. Therein lies a Python library for parsing the MediaWiki articles (mwlib), another library for writing the PDF documents from MediaWiki articles (mwlib.rl), and a bunch of extensions to collect MediaWiki articles and output them to PDF, XML, or even OpenDocument format (ODF).

What does that mean? If you’re using MediaWiki to create documentation, you can quite likely create a printed manual pretty darn easily. No mucking around with writing documentation in DocBook XML… you can use the friendly MediaWiki markup and syntax.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS released, MariaDB 5.1.44/5.2-BETA VM’s available

DocklandsA big congratulations to Ubuntu for the release of 10.04 LTS. While I haven’t had the chance to upgrade, I see everyone on Twitter and in the blogosphere say they are really like the Lucid experience.

A couple of days ago, I made mention that there were VirtualBox images of MariaDB out there. Turns out there were so many downloads, Mark has had to upgrade his Internet connection!

Anyway, to the point: Mark has created Ubuntu 10.04 LTS VM’s with MariaDB 5.1.44 and MariaDB 5.2 BETA. Don’t hesitate to download them, and send feedback.

Have a good weekend playing with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx release, and enjoy using MariaDB on it.


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