Prettier fonts for Git Gui on Ubuntu

The default fonts for git gui (aka gitk) in Ubuntu are down right horrible.  Even Ubuntu 10.04 defaults to tk8.4, which doesn’t support font smoothing.  Fortunately there is a simple way to fix this and make a whole bunch of applications look prettier all at once.

# sudo update-alternatives –config wish
There are 3 choices for the alternative wish (providing /usr/bin/wish).

Selection    Path                   Priority   Status
————————————————————
* 0            /usr/bin/wish-default   10000     auto mode
1            /usr/bin/wish-default   10000     manual mode
2            /usr/bin/wish8.4        841       manual mode
3            /usr/bin/wish8.5        840       manual mode

Then type ’3′ and hit enter.  Now you’ll be using tk8.5 by default, and miracle of miracles your eyes won’t be scarred by jagged ugly fonts in gitk anymore.

Maybe it has more to do with never being exposed to nature

NY Times: Technology Leads More Park Visitors Into Trouble

The national parks’ history is full of examples of misguided visitors feeding bears, putting children on buffalos for photos and dipping into geysers despite signs warning of scalding temperatures.

But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers — July was a record month for visitors at Yellowstone — rangers say that technology often figures into such mishaps.

People with cellphones call rangers from mountaintops to request refreshments or a guide; in Jackson Hole, Wyo., one lost hiker even asked for hot chocolate.

Though the article doesn’t really stress this point, this has always been a problem.  People that are clueless about nature, possibly because they’ve been sheltered from it in the cities or suburbs, are clueless, whether or not they have a cellphone or gps.

HTTPS Everywhere: interesting idea, terrible implementation

Last night I finally figured out why Amazon wouldn’t let me view inside books, it was because I still had HTTPS everywhere enabled for amazon.  It’s a neat idea to force your web session secure for sites that support it, but don’t make it easy.  Good in theory… in practice not so much.

When I finally figured out that it attempted to work with Amazon I noticed that I had disabled all the sites I actually use in the tool.  Twitter is rediculously slow under https, like 1 minute to load a page slow.  Google images aren’t searchable under https, so you don’t see it on the sidebar as an option.  Some of the facebook javascript wasn’t fetchable over https.  Wikipedia inbound search from google doesn’t work if it’s enabled.

It makes me wonder what part of the internet is used by the folks writing this addon, because it doesn’t seem to be the same part that I’m using.

Google App Inventor

Google did something pretty brilliant last month, and created a visual programing environment for Android devices. Google App Inventor is a combination web application for app layout, and java application for building programming logic with java blocks. If you are familiar with etoys at all, it is very similar.

For those that are already developers, this approach to developing is going to be tedious. We are not the target audience. This is really designed to open up the world of mobile development to a much wider set of people, especially as an introductory computer science course.

Set Taxonomy on Confused

Today I found myself in a requirements database where a small group of people had come up with a priority scheme composed of three levels: Very Important, Must Do, and Critical. And I was stumped: what is the relative priority of these terms?  I, as it turns out, wasn’t the only one confused by this.  I did appear to be the first one outside of the core group to raise my hand and ask the question.  (I have the answer, but I’ll leave it as a guessing game in the comments for people).

User Experience (UX) is important on many levels, some times surprising ones.  Reusing words that people think they understand in ways they don’t causes a lot of confusion and adds a lot of confusion (and thus waste) to systems.  I did propose that priority words were annotated with a number, so those outside the core could get a handle on what’s going on, which was a well received comment, and will go into the next version of this tool.

3 rules for running events

Rule 1: Spend as much time on logistics as on content

Most events run by amateurs are “amateur” because they fall down on details. They have a great idea, or a great speaker, but the event turns out mediocre because the sound system doesn’t work or because there’s no parking nearby. It’s more fun to focus on the big stuff, but getting the little stuff wrong will kill you just as dead as getting the big stuff wrong.

Overall a very good refresher on the things to pay attention to when trying to run public events, especially handy if you are involved in local groups doing community outreach.

Would you like fries with that Singularity?

A Java primer for Oracle v Google

Oracle was the opening keynote for Linuxcon this year, where they talked about how much they did for Linux and open source.  The moment everyone had checked out of their hotel in Boston, they filed a massive patent suit against Google’s open source java like implementation in Android.  Oracle, you can suck it.

This has led to a lot of virtual ink in the blogosphere on the subject, and you can see that for the most part, we all sit inside our tech valleys, unable to see the wider world over the hills.  This is especially true for folks that have worked in the same kind of tech for a long time.  Charles Nutter provides a really good background on what the Java space looks like, and gives his own thoughts on the matter.  Much like Linux, Java is really just about everywhere, some times in surprising places.

The Java platform is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. And by big, I mean it’s everywhere.

There are three mainstream JVMs people know about: JRockit (WebLogic’s first and then Oracle’s after it acquired them), Hotspot (Which came to Sun through an acquisition and eventually became OpenJDK), and J9 (IBM’s own JVM, fully-licensed and with all its shots). Upon those three JVMs lives a gigantic world. If you want the details, there’s numerous studies and reports about the use of Java in all manner of business, from the hippest new startups (Twitter recently switched much of their stack to the JVM) to the oldest of the old financial concerns. It’s the favored choice for government server applications, the strongest not-quite-completely-Free managed runtime for open-source libraries and applications, and now with Android it’s rapidly becoming one of the strongest (if not the strongest) mobile OS platform (even though Android isn’t *really* Java, as I’ll get into later). You may love or hate Java, but I guarantee it’s part of your life in some way or another.

It’s a long read, but well worth your time.  The why people hate Java section is particularly useful for people that hate Java.  It may or may not change your mind, but it will at least give you a broader view.

Are you from the past?

Music labels and radio broadcasters can’t agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.

The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. “The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,” thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is “not in our national interest.”

“Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.”

It’s pretty impressive how entirely screwed up the big media industry is.  Really guys?  Mandating FM radios in all mobile devices?  Don’t get me wrong, I bought a quality FM antenna for the house so that we get NPR crystal clear here…. but this is just nuts.

E-ink at 400x

This is the Kindle Screen at 400x magnification, taken by Keith Peters with his USB microscope.  He also has some pictures of the iPad, Newspaper, Magazines, and Books at similar magnification.  Pretty cool.