Posted by matijs
11/02/2005 at 09h36
I’m ill, so I’m ranting. Bear with me.
I’ve now run across the second site that does something like this in its CSS:
p {
font: 11px “Lucida Sans Unicode”,
“Trebuchet MS”, Verdana, monospace;
}
And, with me running Linux and as a consequence not having any of the three named fonts installed, I get to see the whole body text in monospace. Sure, monospace is a great replacement for Verdana. Very readable, too. What are people thinking? Fucking monospace!
(The style contains more wonderful font insanity, such as giving the input element the choice of fonts Courier New, Arial [why yes, Arial is very similar to Courier New], or, again, monospace. Oh, and for some reason, this rule is !important. Sure.)
(The first site is less bad, but still annoying: Only part of the text is accidentally monospaced.)
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Posted by matijs
25/01/2005 at 22h12
A friend sent me MapPoint's advice on how to get from Haugesund, Norway, to Trondheim,
Norway. Very entertaining. Don't forget to look at the directions:
there are 116 steps, plus the Start and End.
In fact, though, that was the quickest route. The shortest route is
perhaps even funnier. And only 55 steps.
Just in case they fix things (hey, they probably will), here are screen
shots of the fastest route,
and the shortest route
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Posted by matijs
24/01/2005 at 19h59
People who visit this site more often than once may have noticed that I changed its layout. It took a lot longer than I expected: It's easy to just whip something up that looks nice, but it's much harder to take a thought
sketched on a piece of paper and make that happen in CSS. It's harder still if you want to make it work in
old browsers.
In addition to the change of layout, I did a redesign of the URLs my
site serves.
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meta
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Posted by matijs
10/01/2005 at 23h46
There's a great initiative to thank
Poland for preventing the legalization of software patents in the EU.
(via Mark J.
Wielaard's blog entry)
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Posted by matijs
05/12/2004 at 12h10
The first time I saw Mulholland Drive, I only saw
the first part. It made sense to me. Then there was a fire in the
theater.
The second time I saw Mulholland Drive, I saw all of it. The first part
still made sense. Then something weird happened, and I was confused during
the rest of the movie.
Last week, I saw the end of Mulholland Drive for the second time, and
this time I understood it. What I had thought was real, was not, and
suddenly it all made sense.
(Salon
made sense of it too. See the movie first, then read that.)
Maybe I should also see Lost Highway again.
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Posted by matijs
25/11/2004 at 23h42
All this time, it turns out, people using IE5.5 (36 so far this month),
and perhaps IE5.0 (44 so far this month), have been unable to read my
website: The left and right sides of the text were simply cut off. I knew
IE6 didn't show the vertical borders, but at least it showed the whole
text.
Somehow, it feels similar to suddenly finding out you've been walking
around all day with mismatched socks, or a torn shirt — assuming
those things weren't part of your fashion statement. It's simply a little
embarrassing. Anyway, it should all look fine now. The vertical borders
even show up in IE6.
Oh, and I'm working on a new layout, so here are samples before and after, just in case the site
looks completely different when you read this.
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meta, web
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Posted by matijs
07/11/2004 at 01h57
I just noticed entry number 13 wasn’t showing. Of course, which other
entry could it be?
The file had the wrong permissions. I fixed it, so you
can go read it now. Scoot. It’s about writing Gimp
plug-ins.
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meta
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Posted by matijs
07/11/2004 at 01h40
While studying linguistics, I often had to put pictures of syntactic
trees in my papers about generative grammar. I made several systems to draw
these automatically. One of these was a LaTeX package called synttree.
I actually uploaded the version from 1998 to CTAN. That version was clumsy, and the code
was hard to read, a result of my struggles with TeX. I have always wanted
to clean the package up, so it would be easier to extend it if needed.
In 2001 or so, I read an article
from TUGboat that showed me how
to write a parser that I could actually understand after I had written it.
So, I wrote the new parser, and sort of bolted it onto the existing drawing
macros.
Two days ago I finally came back to it. Now, I have a new working
version, much more extendable and cleaner, ready to be uploaded to CTAN.
[Update Dec 9, 2004: The
new version can also be found at
CTAN.]
[Update Jun 11, 2005:
Information on downloading and using the package has been moved to the synttree page.]
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software
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Posted by matijs
04/11/2004 at 22h06
I feel a great need to shut out the world beyond my home. Curtains must
now be closed in the evening, whereas before I wanted them open, even while
sleeping. Lights and heating must be on.
I've decided to limit the intake of news to once per day. I get a
newspaper. Reading that should be enough. Anxiously waiting for more news
all throughout the day will do me no good: Events will not unfold faster,
reasons and explanations will not be found earlier, and I will end up
feeling more frustrated, angry and sad.
Luckily tuesday night brought Gillmore Girls, Sex and the City, and the
OC, all in a row, so I could begin to forget that I live in a country where
people are murdered for speaking their mind.
I will now make a nice bowl of decaf latte.
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Posted by matijs
11/10/2004 at 12h40
As I mentioned, installing Bryar was not
completely straightforward. Luckily, it is architected well, so making the
necessary modifications was easy.
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meta, software
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