It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

About two weeks ago I saw a link to the document How to ask questions the smart way? It seems a bit of a long article, but I can really recommend reading it, see it as investment. Plus, it is written in a good style as well.

Immediately after I read it and ran into some problem, I applied the things from that article and it really helps. It will save you time, because most of the time you can find an answer yourself and you won’t have to wait for someone else to point you to Google.

And if you can’t find the solution, it helps to formulate your questions better. Which certainly improves the responsiveness from people in IRC channels. If you sum up all the (simpler) solutions you already tried, it becomes more of a challenge to them to find the right answer, and more interesting. And even if it doesn’t become more interesting that way, it certainly makes you seem more polite.

I’ve switched away from using Blosxom. It seems like a nice tool, it works okay, but it’s not getting updated anymore and there is 0 plugin development activity. And that with the current ‘war’ on syndication standards, that just can’t be.

Another reason to move away from Blosxom is that it feels too hard to post something on the blog. I mostly wrote the XHTML myself (yes, I should have used the Markdown plugin) and had to update quite often. And I couldn’t just update the file itself, because that would change the modification date and therefore the publication date.

Anyway, as you can see I have now moved over to Wordpress and it’s nice to have such an easy point and click interface for the blog. Makes it much easier to post. You’ll be likely to see some more posts in the next few days.

The blog now also comes in your favourite syndication flavour, goto http ://www.je-ju.net/blog/feed/ and pick one of:

• rss (RSS 0.92)
• rdf (RSS 1.0)
• rss2 (RSS 2.0)
• atom (Atom 0.3, I hope to update this to 1.0 soon enough)

and attach it to the end of the url.

The environment variable DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH is used in OS X to track the library path (equal to LD_LIBRARY_PATH on other unices).

If you ever consider setting that variable, then make damn sure not to include the library directory of your fink or darwinports installation. The problem is that if OS X runs into a library that it is looking for in that path, it tries to use it. This is to be expected, but unfortunately, those libraries are not designed to handle those kinds of things. So even simple commands such as "open ." will end up with errors such as this one:

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/lib/libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib

Referenced from: /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/
    Versions/A/Frameworks/ColorSync.framework/Versions/A/ColorSync
Reason: Incompatible library version: ColorSync requires version 0.9.7
    or later, but libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib provides version 0.9.0

Solution is to not set that variable at all, or only for directories that contain libraries that are not related at all to the system libraries.

I have been converted to a new religion. I just couldn’t resist all the perks (flimsy moral standards, every Friday is a religious holiday and a stripper factory and beer volcano in heaven). So as of now I am officially a Flying Spaghetti Monster follower.

You want to know more? Here’s the website that started it all. And the Wikipedia entry is interesting as well.

What is it with Comic Sans MS that it is now appearing everywhere. It may be me, but I just can’t take something that is written in that font seriously. Even the name of the font shows that it is not meant for that. Yet today it appears on signs in shops, billboards, and I even saw an engraved “no bike parking”-sign yesterday *shudder*.

If you look at the font, it may look cute at first glance. But if you look closely you notice that it is a horrible font: ragtag shapes of letters, without serif (the small stroke at the ends of the main strokes, e.g. at the left and right of a ‘T’) and now that everybody uses it, it’s not that cute anymore.

There really ought to be some site promoting the proper use of fonts, educating the general public about what to look for in a font for a message on a billboard. I’m no expert, but I think that Comic Sans is about the antipode of what is optimal for a large sign.

Update: Of course there already is someone out there with a website against comic sans: BanComicSans.com and they have some disturbing projected usage statistics: all text will be in comic sans by 2027.