Microblog: A very long article Wikipedia article on the orientation of toilet paper [Jun 7th, 22:52] [R]

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Printing with LPR in Firefox

Categories: [ IT ]

Firefox didn't allow me to print by default. Printing to a file was the only proposed option. The culprit here is not even Firefox but GTK, which needs to be told that there is life beyond printing to a file. I put to my $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0 file the following line: gtk-print-backends="pdf,cups,lpr,file", and I could finally print to lpr.

[ Posted on July 7th, 2009 at 18:38 | no comment | ]

nohz=off is the Way to Go

Categories: [ IT ]

Debian Lenny's default kernel is tickless, meaning that there is no periodic tick anymore. As a result, it seems that some applications that use periodically short sleeps (as in while(1) { // do possibly something; usleep(250); }) are scheduled far too often and the CPU is running more than in should while the system is seemingly idle. Passing the option nohz=off to the kernel seems to have fixed that problem.

[ Posted on July 7th, 2009 at 18:34 | no comment | ]

Hello, Helvetica!

Translation: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Categories: [ IT ]

I didn't need to say bye bye to Helvetica after all. The least bad compromise seems to be using the bitmap Helvetica font for GUI anyway, and set Firefox to use DejaVu fonts without allowing web sites to decide what font to use (I don't have anything besides DejaVu anyway, so I won't miss anything by doing so).

[ Posted on July 7th, 2009 at 18:29 | no comment | ]

Bye bye, Helvetica

Categories: [ IT ]

I have used Helvetica as the sole font in WindowMaker for the past 12 years (AFAICR). I recently upgraded to Debian Lenny and switched from Mozilla 1.7 to Firefox 3.5 (at last!) I managed to setup my system to use the Helvetica bitmap font, which looks much nicer than Nimbus Sans (the Type 1 equivalent) in WindoMaker, and I was happy. But I discovered that Firefox now (AFAICT) prints Helvetica text using the Helvetica bitmap font, which produces very ugly documents. Mozilla was somehow smart enough to use vector fonts for that, but not Firefox. Helvetica seems to be something of the past :(

So I switched to DejaVu fonts for WindowMaker and Nimbus for GTK applications and Firefox. It's so sad.

[ Posted on July 7th, 2009 at 12:00 | 1 comment | ]