Behdad Esfahbod's daily notes on GNOME, Pango, Fedora, Persian Computing, Bob Dylan, and Dan Bern!

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McEs, A Hacker Life
Sunday, July 30, 2006
 Concert/Trips/Life Updates

So, been so busy with work and having fun that I didn't blog about the trips that much.

After the awesome GUADEC in Spain, Sara and I flew to Germany to catch Bob Dylan which happened to be a very good concert in a nice small open-air amphitheater with a river going right behind the stage. After that we headed to Paris, having an awesome two days there and Sara applying for the Canadian visa. I then had to fly the long way back to Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Toronto.

I arrived in Barcelona 2am and decided to go to the train station and spend a few hours there (hoping to get a power plug) and take the first train to the airport to catch my flight at 9. So I got the taxi with the mid-age female driver. All I knew was that I want to go to Sant-Station and she understood that and that was enough. Or I thought so... For the entire length of the ride, 10 minutes or so, she was trying to tell me that the station is closed at night, and I only understood when we got there. At that point I asked her to bring me to the airport and she did. Could have been an episode of Night on Earth.

Two weeks at home, then hit DDC and OLS in Ottawa for another week. I gave up on the Dan Bern performance in Ottawa the week before the conferences but caught the last night of the Blues fest and it was good. Sara arrived in Ottawa too, and so did Chris Ball, the guys from the office, and towards the end of the week my buddies Farhang and Hossein. A totally rocking week all in all. I even bought a gnome from Indigo.

It's September again and lots of concerts and new releases come out just in time for my birthday :-D. The upcoming musical events on my radar:
Apparently ticketmaster has two options of ship the ticket: 1) US only, with no country selection box and only USA states listed, and 2) international, with a province box listing Canadian provinces, but no Canada in the country list and requiring to choose a country! Don't know why that doesn't surprise me...

Thursday, July 27, 2006
 Overflows...

[behdad@home ~]$ cat a.c                                                                                                             
#include

#define OVERFLOWS(x) ((long long)(x) != ((long long) x))

int
main (void)
{
printf ("4*1073741828 overflows? %d\n", OVERFLOWS (4*1073741828));
printf ("1073741828*4 overflows? %d\n", OVERFLOWS (1073741828*4));
printf ("4*107741828 overflows? %d\n", OVERFLOWS (107741828*4 ));

return 0;
}
[behdad@home ~]$ ./a
4*1073741828 overflows? 1
1073741828*4 overflows? 1
4*107741828 overflows? 0

Tuesday, July 18, 2006
 Fontconfig Tip of the Day

Many fontconfig users ask how they can detect whether fontconfig failed to find the requested font.

It's not obvious, as fontconfig has knowledge to substituted avilable similar fonts. For example, if you ask for Helvetica, it will return the Free metric-compatible "Nimbus Sans L". So you cannot just compare the family name of the match.

Here is the trick as I found it today: match font for "YourFamily,sans", and "YourFamily,serif". If they return the same family, it's a match, if they don't, it's junk fallback.

[behdad@home ~]$ fc-match "Helvetica,serif"
n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"

[behdad@home ~]$ fc-match "Helvetica,sans"
n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"


[behdad@home ~]$ fc-match "NonExistant,serif"
VeraSe.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Serif" "Roman"

[behdad@home ~]$ fc-match "NonExistant,sans"
Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman"

Owen's thoughts about the issue.

 PangoOpenGL

Apparently Marc Lehmann has written a Pango OpenGL backend. Screenshot.

Saturday, July 08, 2006
 Turing Test Again

(02:08:21) Burrito: (notice) I last saw tavon (mailto:~jhwang@c-67-185-202-113.hsd1.mi.comcast.net) 94d 8h 2m ago [quit: (Remote closed the connection)]
(02:09:12) sara: excuse me?
(02:09:13) Burrito: sara: MY REPLY IS NO
(02:09:14) sara: !!!
(02:09:33) sara: What are you talking about


Why does Burrito /msg everybody when asked a question on a channel?! +