I dunno what’s wrong with GNOME Evolution’s native Google Calendar support, but for me it hasn’t been nothing but a disappointment. A while ago during an speleological expedition in Google’s Help site, I found how to use CalDAV instead of the Google connector. In order to access the main calendar one uses the address:

caldav://www.google.com/calendar/dav/LUSER@gmail.com/events

Unfortunately this doesn’t give access to other calendars one may have in the account. If using Apple’s iCal or Mozilla’s Sunbird/Lightning, or whatever name their calendar has these days, you can use the address:

caldav://www.google.com/calendar/dav/LUSER@gmail.com/user

to retrieve a list of calendars, pick and choose.

Note to self: since the Debian Kernel Team in all their infinite wisdom decided to compile statically the IPv6 modules, all the alias-meh and blacklist tricks to disable it are useless. What the pundits out there have missed since the beginning of time (or close to it: the inclusion of the IPv6 code in Linux 2.5/2.6) is the sysctl magic thingy to disable it.

Open /etc/sysctl.conf in your favorite editor and type the dark rune:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1


save and reboot. (I don’t recommend changing this setting on a running system, it can have unexpected side effects).

CAVEAT LUSER: Yes Joe, this works in Ubuntu as well as any GNU/Linux® distro that integrates sysctl in its init system.

I’ve been a fan of Mad Mike Magee for a long time and always followed his site The Inquirer with a knack to keep in touch with technology and have a good laugh at the same time. But in the last months (since the “relaunch” on 1st of January this year) the site has become more and more drooling to the point of being intellectually unsavory. I was wondering why until last night while keeping up with two weeks of unread cruft in my RSS aggregator, a piece of news caught my eye: one of the old-time hacks, Paul Hales, retired. Off I went and discovered several things:

• Mad Mike sold The Inq two years ago and I didn’t notice. Jeez, my brains have been on vacation for too long!
• Mad Mike is a fan of Inspector Morse. (I’m a fan of Inspector Lewis too, FWIW).
• Mad Mike is writing at TG Daily.
• Charlie Demerjian is writing at SemiAccurate.

And last but not least, I agree with Mad Mike: He sold a house and the new owners have turned it into a brothel.

Note to self: All bittorrent clients are horrid. Some have a bearable stench, others haven’t. And for some reason these days I find all POSIXy clients are despicable to me.

Thus enter µTorrent running under wine. And I start getting these weird filesystem errors that could eventually eat the whole filesystem where there are some really rare and valuable files. I started poking at the problem and discovered that uTorrent has its own disk-cache manager that of course enters in conflict with the Linux one. There you have a testament to the design flaws of the Windows NT VM and the NTFS filesystem. Fortunately you can turn it off.

So I’ve settled on this configuration:

• Linux: 2.6.30 (yeah, a release candite for now), makes Ext filesystems work in writeback journaling mode with write safety.
• Filesystem: Ext3 with write barriers enabled to cover your backside against hardware write cache idiocy.
• wine: A very recent vintage
• uTorrent: The latest wit all disk cache settings disabled.

Earlier this week I was contacted by Alan G. Isaac asking me about the whereabouts of the Courier 15 CPU aka Courier Dot 15 fonts I made several years back. The old website at Tripod is gone and I’ve redirected my energies to other interests in the meantime.

I’ve digged up the fonts from old backups and I’ll repost them all in this blog. Let’s see if I’m game to start hacking fonts again.

fcr15cpi.zip

OK, you’ve got your new computer preinstalled with MS Vista and/or MS Office 2007. You didn’t waste time to install your favorite GNU/Linux distribution or BSD flavor and took the time to comb down that Windows partition for goodies the license and Title 17 of the US Copyright law may warrant you to use. That is, unless George of the Bush hasn’t killed it already with the help of his friends in the US Congress, each and every one of whom make Sarah Palin look like a Nobel Prize Winner, ten years in a row.

You find those nice fonts with names starting with “C”, Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel. Diligently you copy them into your $HOME/.fonts directory and run the magic command fc-cache -r -v in a terminal emulator window, go to the font settings application for your preferred desktop environment and change the monospaced font to Consolas (new font from MS, several years in development, it has to be the ultimate coding font, right?). Open a new terminal or a text editor and you discover it is hideous! Blocky, blurry and bold although you made a point of not using bold in the settings, Something you learned the hard way after having written The Great American Novel, a thousand pages worth, printed it in Comic Sans Bold 10 points to save paper and sent it to your prospective editor, who answered back thanking you heartily for all the toilet paper supplies you sent along the other day.

The problem is that the MS “C” fonts are hinted in such way that they don’t work well if you don’t use subpixel rendering and as far as I can see there is no real traditional hinting in them worth a cent. Even after you fiddle with the LCD-type settings there is no improvement, because most GNU/Linux distros default to use the patented bytecode interpreter, which works just fine with traditional truetype hints, instead of the patent unencumbered autohinter (in typical “Bite me!” attitude). Even those distros that give you the choice to use one or the other, such as Debian, have for the most part managed to bastardize the code resulting in Freetype working as it shouldn’t. And all downstream distributions, including Ubuntu, receive the same turd.

But don’t fret! There are ways to work around the ugliness. We can create a $HOME/.fonts.conf like this:


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<!-- Use the Autohinter -->
  <match target="font">
    <test name="family">
        <string>Calibri</string>
        <string>Cambria</string>
        <string>Cambria Math</string>
        <string>Candara</string>
        ;<string>Consolas</string>
        <string>Constantia</string>
        <string>Corbel</string>
     </test>
        <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>


That ought to fix the ugliness, although results will vary depending on how bastardized is the Freetype library in your system. Of course you can add more configurations to the file as long as you respect the XML syntax. Do be careful if using KDE(3/4) because the KDE font configuration tools love to eat users .fonts.conf files raw and spit them out in pieces.

It is a thing of finding the darned URI:

http://blog.tripod.lycos.com/bin/blog/control.rpc

and using the MetaWeblog protocol to login.

Acabo de leer que Zimbra Desktop se conecta con Yahoo! usando IMAP. La autorización usa un procedimiento propietario así que es necesario usar Zimbra Desktop. Pero el programita, el instalador es meros 50 Mbs, también soporta GMail, AOL, y otros proveedores de correo POP e IMAP. Además de integrar los calendarios, y proximaménte los directorios de direcciones por lo que entiendo.

Así que YA hay manera de acceder al correo de Yahoo! con IMAP de manera segura: Zimbra Desktop. ¡A ensayarlo pues!

Una nota rápida. Encontré un artículo bien interesante acerca de como configurar Firefox 3 para que este use GMail como cliente de correo por defecto.

Hay que entrar en la cuenta respectiva y luego se ingresa el siguiente código en la barra de direcciones y se oprime retorno para ejecutarlo:

Si usas GMail…

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://
mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

Si usas Google Apps (sustituyendo por tu dominio, por supupesto).

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://
mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")

Al hacer click en un enlace mailto: Firefox pedirá que uno decida que servicio usar y allí se puede escoger a GMail como servicio por defecto. El sitio original tiene unas imágenes ilustrativas para los que lean lengüeperro.

Buena pregunta. Mirando la historia de Debian y haciendo algunos cálculos de calendario además de tomar en consideración que tuve el primer o segundo mirror público de Debian en mi país, diría que mi primera versión de Debian fué 0.93R5, pues me acuerdo que ya tenía dselect.