Bigger than the Sherminator

While a fellow Atlassian recently lamented losing his number one position on Google after five years on top, for the first time ever, I now appear as the number one hit for “Christopher Owen“.

While I have been the number one hit on google.com.au for some time, on google.com I had been battling the awesome power of the actor Chris Owen (the Sherminator of American Pie fame) and, even more embarrassing, the previous number one hit: a page on mugshots.org listed under the “Sex Offender” category. Hurrah!

I do actually encourage readers to check out the mugshot and verify that indeed the photograph looks nothing like me… thankfully. I won’t link to the pages in question for fear of losing this hallowed status.

Joy from a stick

A recent MSN article on the downfall of the joystick (via Slashdot Games) stirred up memories of my most favourite incarnations of this venerable gaming peripheral: Multicoin Amusement’s Starcursor series.

Advertisement with a Koala holding a Starcursor

I actually had the second and less bulkier version of this Australian designed and made gem, the Starblazer, which served me well for years until a not-so-close friend from high school broke it with some harsh play. I was actually heart-broken when that stick bit the dust and I’m even more saddened that I can’t seem to find any pictures of it to show you.

Luckily one of my other mates (hi Niki!) wanted to sell his original Starcursor (as pictured above) and I leaped at the opportunity. That stick still goes strong today, around twelve years later, whenever I get the nostalgic urge to drag my still functioning Amiga 1200 out of the cupboard for a few rounds of The Chaos Engine. As you might guess from the picture, and the fact that it appears to survive a ferocious Koala mauling, that stick can actually take quite a pounding. But for all its harsh angles and generous proportions it was still a joy to use; great micro-switch responsiveness and well-placed two function fire buttons.

Those were the days huh?

Not any Helvetica I know

Just after I swore I would use my Linux box at home for real work rather than constantly battling with configuration and upkeep I’ve spent about two hours tonight trying to get any web page using the Helvetica font not to look like total arse (read: aliased) in Firefox. It turns out that, at least in a standard Gentoo distribution, applications that ask Fontconfig for Helvetica will get a lame arse low resolution bitmap font that lives in the /usr/share/font/75dpi directory. The Fontconfig utility fc-match is useful in situations like these.

> fc-match Helvetica
helvR12.pcf.gz: “Helvetica” “Regular”

After trialling numerous successful ways of getting the system to select a different font instead, it turns out the easiest way to avoid this situation is to sym link the no bitmap font configuration file into the Fontconfig configuration directory.

  1. cd /etc/fonts/conf.d/
  2. ln -s ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf 70-no-bitmaps.conf
  3. fc-cache

After this is completed, fc-match tells me a much happier story.

> fc-match Helvetica
n019003l.pfb: “Nimbus Sans L” “Regular”

Where “Nimbus Sans L” is a very nice, Helvetica like, truetype font. Hope this knowledge may save someone the same two hour torment and distraction from other, more interesting tasks such as learning Scala (oh you know, just purely for example, maybe).

Confessions

I have a confession to make. Ever since I was young I’ve loved watching election night TV coverage. Tonight is no exception. All the graphs and talk of swings and distributions. Channel 9’s coverage even includes a “ding, ding” every time the Labor party picks up a needed seat. Is there therapy for this type of thing?