I feel sick even downloading IE7, but what the heck. Requires a 14.8MB download! Compare that to Firefox 2.0 RC3‘s mere 5.6MB. Watching IE7 install (verifying the genuineness of my copy of Windows, installing things all over the place, cranking away at the hard drive for minutes) feels something akin to getting raped by Microsoft. Thanks Redmond! (So glad I use Ubuntu at work.)

So I’ve taken a screenshot of Justinsomnia in Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 RC3, Internet Explorer 6 before installing IE7, and IE7. Click the links to see the results.

[FF1.5] [FF2.0RC3] [IE6] [IE7]

Amazingly there’s no difference between FF1.5 and FF2.0, which probably makes sense because Gecko’s CSS support has been excellent for a long time, and not much on my site really puts it through the paces.

Notice IE6 doesn’t obey the CSS selectors I use to remove margins and padding on paragraphs within posts. The good news is, IE7 does, and surprisingly without messing up my layout.

The only meaningful difference I notice between IE7 and the Firefoxen is the weird technicolor ClearType font-smoothing on the edges of text. I thought this was an OS-level feature, so there must be a way to activate it in Firefox (see update below), but either way, here’s how text looks blown up 1600% in Firefox 2.0:

And here’s how psychedelic it looks in IE7:

Update: I discovered that IE7 renders text with ClearType regardless of the OS setting, which you can turn on for Firefox (and all your other apps) if you like by right clicking on the desktop, selecting Properties > Appearance > Effects… and changing “Use the following method to smooth the edges of screen fonts” to ClearType. It definitely makes the text easier to read, in part because it’s bolder, but it looks kind of blurry to me (at first), and I sense the colors around the edges of letters as I type. As you can see in the Firefox screenshot above, I always have Standard font smoothing selected, which anti-aliases larger fonts in a monochromatic way.

So congrats, if you use IE, which I don’t recommend, and you upgrade to IE7, which I do, your experience reading Justinsomnia should be much improved. Internet Explorer users, welcome to the modern age.

Ha! This just occured to me:

Moving into a new (and somewhat smaller) apartment in the city and sharing that space with another person (for the first time) has got me thinking about some important things.

Like our home network.

The first few nights I started having fantasies about replacing the two inkjet printers we brought to this new space with a spiffy new networked color laser. Later I realized I almost never print. So we settled on keeping one of the inkjets around and plugged it into Stephanie’s desktop.

I was also thinking about augmenting my cable modem wireless access point combo with another wireless access point, the Linksys WRT54GL. You know, the one that you can install your own firmware on. To do what with you ask? I don’t know, whatever I want. I was considering this because the wireless on the combo device was dropping connections and disappearing for minutes at a time (much like the wireless access point it replaced). But since moving to the new apartment there hasn’t been a problem. Maybe the signal was being disturbed an errant cordless phone in my previous building?

Lastly I was thinking about getting a network attached storage drive so Stephanie and I would have a place to store, backup, and share files. But the reviews for those devices weren’t winning me over. And they’re not cheap.

Tonight I finally put 2 and 2 together and realized, I’ve got a Mini-ITX box laying around unused, and I’ve got an external 160GB USB hard drive doing the same. Put together that’s a fileserver if I ever saw one. I figure, why not just install the server edition of Ubuntu on the Mini-ITX, plug in the external hard drive, and shove it all under a bookcase.

If only things were that simple. I downloaded and burned a CD with the server edition, installed it (not a blazing fast process on the 600 MHz ME6000), rebooted, and it rebooted again, and again, and again, ad infinitum. Turns out I’m not alone. Apparently Ubuntu Server 6.06.1 does not boot on VIA EPIA ME6000. Ah well that’s nice. My luck with getting an OS on this system has not been that successful. Luckily someone somewhere out there on the intarweb suggested using the alternate install CD because of the problems with the server edition on the Via EPIA. Okie dokey, let’s give that a whirl.

Woo. We have a server set up. The best part is, it’s a full blown, general purpose computer, unlimited by flash memory size or firmware specialization. I can do anything I want.

apt-get install openssh-server
apt-get install samba

Followed the Ubuntu Guide’s How to share group folders with read/write permissions (Authentication=Yes) and Bam!, we’ve got a fileserver.

It doesn’t take many tools to program. At least it doesn’t feel like it takes that many. Obviously a computer. A lot of people are using Macs nowadays. What better reason to start using Ubuntu on a PC.

At Federated Media I’m finally using source code control, in our case Subversion. I had been doing isolated CVS commits on my own code at O’Reilly, but now that I’m working on a codebase with three other people, I have to say it actually makes working together exciting.

So my work is all svn st, svn diff, svn up, and svn commit. I’m editing text in gedit. No IDE, plain old vanilla gedit seems good enough. I’ve tried Emacs, Bluefish, gPHPEdit, EditPlus under Wine. But always back to gedit after few days.

I find myself doing a fair amount of refactoring, across lots of files I’m not familar with (though getting moreso), and when I make a change I want to be fairly confident that I won’t break a dependency I didn’t know existed. Enter grep. Other than forgetting whether the search pattern or the file argument comes first, I’m pretty handy with grep. grep -r sometext * was my new best friend…

…until I discovered something really really annoying. Since I was using it across many directories resursively, not only would grep return the files I wanted it to, it also returned Subversion’s cached copies of the files in the hidden .svn directories. Yuck! What a mess, grep would return useful results, but I’d still have to pick through them skipping over the .svn/… results.

I googled every possible phrase I could think of that meant how do I prevent grep from returning subversion files, figuring this would be FAQ #1 for anyone writing code under Subversion. No dice. Finally after some extreme phrasal gymnastics, I found a session description for a presentation at an upcoming KDE conference in Ireland that closed with this tantalizing nugget:

And other tricks like grepping without hitting subversion’s own copy of the files

Time to gather information the old-fashioned way: by asking a person. So last month I sent an email to the session presenter, David Faure, and he told me he uses wcgrep, a bash script from the Subversion sources (not installed by default) that’s worth its filesize in gold.

I dropped it into /usr/bin, and now I wcgrep sometext with wild abandon (as an added benefit, the -r recursive option and trailing asterisk are optional). And occasionally when I just want a list of files that contain some method name, I whip out wcgrep -l sometext. And that’s pretty much what I do all day.

Many thanks to David Faure for pointing me in the right direction and Ben Reser for writing wcgrep.

Indeed, indeed it is.

Am I so audacious as to write this post in IE6 on Ubuntu? Indeed I am. Why would anyone want to even contemplate doing this? To test webpages in the browser still used by 65-85% of websurfers.

Thank you IEs 4 Linux (and Wine) for making this possible. I tried all the other “installing internet explorer with wine” howtos and tutorials (WineTools, Sidenet, manual installation, direct download) to no avail. Then I downloaded IEs 4 Linux, ran ./ies4linux, and got a working copy of IE with an icon on my desktop. Big freaking kudos to Sérgio Lopes.