The Word “Hacker”
Good to clear up any misconceptions, especially since in some respects I consider myself somewhat in the category. Before you call the feds on me, go read it.

And in a not-altogether-unrelated vein, thoughts on why the land of America is rich but ugly:
Made in USA

And just in case you’re still around, thoughts on some of the mental aspects of programming:
Holding a Program in One’s Head
I especially like the image of walking around in a memory.

Snipshot
Snipshot is a website that will let you upload a picture and do a few basic photo-editing tasks (like resize, crop, etc.) right in your browser, with quick multi-step undo, and save the results back to your computer. They provide a sample image you can play with first, if you like. Oh, and it’s free.

So the next time you take pictures with your 5 megapixel camera (which, by the way, means REALLY BIG in terms of file size as well as picture size — all those bits have to go somewhere) and you want to email them all to your extended family and friends, and you don’t have something handy like F-Spot or Picasa installed, take a few minutes at Snipshot and size them down a bit.

Simple Machines Forum (SMF)
This is a little more on the geek-specific side, but I’ve recently started running a private online forum for some adoptive families and have been quite pleased with the Simple Machines Forum software. I was trying to get something set up quickly, and it was available as a quick-install package with my hosting provider, so I figured I’d check it out. It has become, in my mind, another example of solid, quality software put out by the open source community. To be sure, their license is open source more in spirit than in technicality — they pull back from the open re-distribution aspects of typical OSS licenses but you’re more than welcome to tinker with their code. But as a team they function just the same as other OSS projects, and I’m quite impressed with the result.

Well, several months ago I had a project for work that involved storing quite a bit of somewhat sensitive data on my laptop, or at least on an external drive I kept with me. Not wanting to see myself or my company as another lost-personal-data headline, I dug a bit into how to pull off hard drive encryption in Linux. Once I got it figured out, I offered to do a presentation at my local LUG (Linux User Group), which was accepted. Meetings are only monthly and schedules didn’t work out for me to do it until the October presentation. So I knew I had some time.
Then, in the course of the project I was working on and its follow-up, which was based around some Microsoft back-office tech, I figured out a technique to make a few different pieces play well together. I was going to write up a blog post about it, but then decided to see if anyone would be interested in publishing a proper article on the topic. I asked this one site that publishes content focused on most of the related pieces if they’d be interested, and they were. Cool! So then I…uh…had to write it. I had about three weeks to get it written, so naturally I got started right away so I’d have plenty of time to develop my ideas, revise, etc.

Riiiiiiiiight. So two days before it was due found me secluded on the second floor of our townhouse typing madly (two whole days! that would have been quite progressive in college…), and even then I didn’t manage to get it in on time. But I got it in, and am now waiting to hear back from the editor. I’ll let you know when/if it’s online.

But I wasn’t out of the woods, because the LUG presentation was the very next weekend. Naturally I had started getting ideas down and organized for the presentation as soon as it was scheduled so I wouldn’t forget anything in the passing months, and wouldn’t have to re-wrap my head around the information.

…You probably see where this is going. Took a night or two off to actually get some sleep, then it was back to the grindstone. The presentation was this past Saturday morning, though, and overall I think it went pretty well. In hindsight I wish I had actually stepped through setting up loop-AES on a small external drive rather than just talking about it (I even had an available one in my bag!), but as it was I took over an hour between my material and questions.

And now? Now Andi’s glad to have her husband back.

Came across this writeup by Bob Cringely on Apple’s recently announced plan to move to Intel hardware in a year or so. Bob smells a merger in the air, with obviously huge industry repercussions. Interesting read.

Of course I have to do things the hard way, so I downloaded the source code and recompiled it this morning . This is one of the great things about Open Source Software — you don’t like something about a program you use? Change it! Granted, you need various amounts of knowledge and the right tools, but the same applies to working on your car.

In this case, all I wanted to do was get rid of anti-aliased fonts. The default builds of firefox for linux are configured to use the Xft font subsystem, which by default uses anti-aliased fonts. When they first included this it was a big Feature that the browser Finally Had. Well, I don’t want it. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s just my laptop screen, but to me anti-aliased fonts just look fuzzy, and make my eyes go buggy after awhile. Plenty of graphic designers and such will no doubt tell me I’m wrong, and that anti-aliasing is the greatest thing since the typewriter. But hey, they can have it all they want. Just don’t force me to use it if I don’t have to.

So back on version 0.9.1, I compiled my own version of firefox with Xft disabled to see what it looked like, and it was wonderful! Text was clear and crisp. Just to see if I could avoid the trouble of re-compiling every time, I figured out how to disable anti-aliasing in Xft itself and went back to the default firefox build. Once. It looked horrible. So it’s re-compilation for me, but that’s okay. It only takes half an hour to build . And I’ve been running on 0.9.1 ever since, regardless of subsequent point releases and such, mostly out of laziness. But now that 1.0 is out I figured I might as well make the move. Now that I’ve done so I’ve gotten more familiar with the process than the first time around, so it’ll be easier for future releases.

Once we get moved to our new host I’ll post links to download my rebuilt version, along with build instructions if you want to do it yourself, in case anyone’s interested. I’m guessing most people using firefox on linux are happy with their fonts as-is, but there may be a few fellow renegades out there…