| Bad hosting day... |
[Apr. 16th, 2006|10:18 pm] |
My main blog got very busy recently and I exceeded the bandwidth limit for the month. Now I am stuck; I would like to move somewhere else, however, I cannot access my files in any way because the bandwidth got exceeded. I want to move somewhere else anyway, so I do not want to pay for extra bandwidth with my current provider.
To add to this, my current provider does not specify when the "next month" starts for the bandwidth to reset. Moreover, there is no useful notification that the bandwidth is about to be exceeded; there is a notification at the administration page that you would not visit unless something is really wrong (too late) with your site.
My options are open as to where I'll host my site next.
I will avoid GoDaddy at all costs because GoDaddy sucks to a big extent. It does not help when they make such decisions on domain parking. (Update: It appears they reverted their domain parking decision.) |
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| StixFonts, the license is now available |
[Aug. 30th, 2005|03:10 am] |
You may have heard of StixFonts, an effort that started 10 years ago to create a set of fonts for use in academic publishing and specifically those related to mathematics.
The StixFonts Project has just published a draft user license of the fonts and it looks that it is similar to that of Bitstream Vera. This is the moment to speak up and give feedback if the license is suitable to have the fonts included in Linux distributions. |
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| GMail rocks! |
[Jun. 9th, 2005|02:40 pm] |
GMail has fixed this bug.
In a nutshell, if you typed a subject line in an encoding other than plain latin1, GMail would add spaces every dozen or so characters. The same was with
"First LastName" <mail@gmail.com>. Now you can type your name in your language.
Some background on the issue:
A. RFC 2812 describes the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
In section 2.3.1, it mentions
``Although SMTP extensions (such as "8BITMIME" [20]) may relax this
restriction for the content body, the content headers are always
encoded using the US-ASCII repertoire. A MIME extension [23] defines
an algorithm for representing header values outside the US-ASCII
repertoire, while still encoding them using the US-ASCII repertoire.''
Source: http://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2821.txt
B. Reference [23] (from above) points to
``[23] Moore, K., "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part
Three: Message Header Extensions for Non-ASCII Text", RFC 2047,
December 1996.''
C. RFC 2047 (from above) says in section 8 (Examples)
``(=?ISO-8859-1?Q?a?= (ab)
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?b?=)
Any amount of linear-space-white between 'encoded-word's,
even if it includes a CRLF followed by one or more SPACEs,
is ignored for the purposes of display.''
Therefore, there should be no spaces when two encoded chunks are
reassembled, even if there is whitespace (included CRLF) between them.
This bug was serious as threading was not carried out properly.
Thanks GMail for responding to the bug report. |
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| Quiz, how to block this ad with Mozilla Firefox |
[Jun. 2nd, 2005|07:17 pm] |
You may have noticed that LinuxToday carries again the MS-sponsored misleading ad about the Linux Reference Center. Instead of being a Linux Reference Center, it is a blatant Linux-bashing initiative. Last year the same ad was running on LinuxToday and there was a tip to add filtering in userContent.css. This year, the ad is implemented a bit differently. Hint 1.
How can you block this specific misleading ad (Jun'05)?
Click the comment button for your answer and add your name. I'll post winners in a new blog entry. |
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| STIX fonts, to be available this summer |
[May. 18th, 2005|02:03 pm] |
The STIX fonts project is an exciting project to make high-quality open-source fonts to be used by the scientific publishing industry. It started from a long time back and it looks that this summer the project will come to fruition. A beta version will be made in July while the final version will appear in September 2005.
Languages based on the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts will be covered in STIX fonts. For scientific publishing, Math and other symbols will be included. For more on the coverage of these fonts, see the white paper listed in the news section.
The STIX fonts project is double-exciting because they have been in contact with the Unicode Consortium to add new glyphs in the upcoming standards. Part of this effort is special Maths symbols located in Plane 1. GNU/Linux and specifically GNOME/KDE are able to show Plane 1 glyphs out of the box! |
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| A bug in GMail |
[Apr. 2nd, 2005|07:47 pm] |
When the e-mail standards were laid out a few decades back, there was limited use of internationalisation and of course there was no Unicode. Therefore, for e-mails written in a language other than english, the content has to be encoded so they appear in standard english characters (ok, am being oversimplified...).
Once the recipient receives an e-mail in a fancy language, the software has to decode and reassemble it, so that it appears in the original intended form. To be a bit more technical, specific parts of an e-mail (From: line, Subject: line, message body) define their own way of encoding, so it's not something global setting which encoding type is used.
GMail has a problem with this process, and in particular with the header fields (not the message body).
Let's see our original test e-mail.
Here, we use the "α" character as a long string, in order to show that the reassembly adds unwanted spaces when received. At the end we add the euro character in order to make sure that the Unicode encoding is used, not iso-8859-7 which would suffice. For the used characters, Unicode and UTF-8 is the least common denominator.
When reassembling, GMail adds unwanted spaces in the From: CC:, and Subject: lines. Why it adds spaces to those positions is made obvious in the following screenshot.
This is the e-mail source, shown when you click on Show Original in your GMail account. When encoding, the header fields are split into smaller blocks so that no field is overlength. Each block carries information on the encoding. You can notice that there is a space before the second and subsequent blocks, which might explain why there is a space in the reassembled text.
Yahoo! Mail has a similar problem, found in the subject line only.
Oh, Hotmail is still struggling with making their service UTF-8 capable... :)
This GMail issue has been reported in early December 2004 and carries the id #17701124.
I hope this problem with GMail and internationalisation gets resolved soon. Other than that, GMail has blown apart the Webmail competition! |
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| GMail, accessible from the Linux Console |
[Mar. 8th, 2005|06:22 pm] |
Linux Console is the text mode interface that one can use in a Linux distribution. As most users prefer the graphical interface, it is in general in disuse. Typically, system administrators would use the Linux Console for administrative tasks. Although one would think that in developing countries people would use the Linux console as a way to enable old computers to access the Internet, I have not heard of any such success stories.
Just recently, GMail announced the availability of their service for browsers which only support basic HTML.
I tried out w3m, lynx and links. From the three, only the last, links, worked out-of-the-box with GMail.
This screenshot was taken from the Linux Console.
Oh, if you want a "GMail invitation" (enables you to create an account for free), feel free to email me. |
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| Make your screenshots beautiful! |
[Mar. 7th, 2005|04:39 pm] |
I am not referring to the excellent blog by Jeff Ooi, rather to the screenshots/images people take of their desktop.
To make my case clear, you normally see screenshots as
while they can look like
or even like (to save space, as in real estate, on Web page/Book)
Thanks to my involvement to the GNOME Translation Project (bright new version 2.10 coming this week!) for the Greek language, I had the chance to learn the hard way how to do these screenshots. Thanks GNOME People!
So, to beautify yourself your screenshots, use the open-source (FLOSS) GIMP Image Editing Program, available for Linux/Windows/OSX and have a look at the tutorials at
1. How to drop shadow
2. How to blend
You need to have Flash support for your browser. |
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