Browsing the blog archives for June, 2003
Jun 27, 2003 Now it’s time to get to work on that redesign I’ve had in the back of my mind for a month or so. Major restructure. Minimalism is the goal. I’ll start by cutting away everything that’s not a blog entry and then add stuff one by one and see if I really need it there.
Off I go.
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Jun 26, 2003 Tomas Jogin wrote a bit about anti-aliasing and ClearType in Windows. I thought I’d chip in with my €.02.
The first thing I noted when I first laid eyes on OS X was the nice fonts. If you have a graphic card capable of OpenGL, OS X uses its Quartz Extreme engine to render the fonts and windows, which automatically provides a very nice anti-aliasing of fonts.
Windows 2000 and later also has anti-aliasing, but it’s not as good as the one in OS X. The main problem is that Windows doesn’t anti-alias fonts below a certain size, whereas OS X anti-aliases pretty much everything. (I have a vague memory of a registry setting where you can fiddle with this size threshold. I’ll look into it and report if I find anything.)
Windows 2000 and later Windows XP has a function called ClearType, which provides a sort of anti-aliasing. It is, however, not enabled out of the box, and for a good reason.
ClearType isn’t really supposed to be used on CRT monitors — it uses a technology called sub-pixel font rendering, which only provides an advantage if you have an LCD or TFT monitor.
On a CRT, a pixel is a point of light where three beams converge. These beams are red, green and blue and vary in strength to give the pixel a certain color.
An LCD monitor, however, has no cathode ray tube that shoots beams. Instead, each pixel on the screen is made of three individual diodes: red, green and blue. This means that an LCD screen with a resolution of 1024×768 really has a resolution of 3072×768.
Sub-pixel font rendering works by lighting individual pixel elements on an LCD screen, making the font smoother by effectively tripling the horisontal resolution.
On an LCD screen this looks nice and smooth. On a CRT screen, the results vary wildly — I find it less than good-looking, for reasons displayed in these pictures.
The top text uses “Standard” Windows anti-aliasing — meaning “none,” since the font size is too small to anti-alias, according to Windows. The bottom one uses ClearType. Now, let’s have a look up close and personal.
Here you see what sub-pixel font rendering looks like on a CRT screen: even though the text is black, you get various red, green and blue-tinted pixels. A CRT has no sub-pixel elements, so it gives the entire pixel an average color. The pixels on the left side of the letters are slightly red, whereas the ones to the right are slighly blue — this is the order in which LCD screens have their sub-pixel elements arranged: red-green-blue.
Below is the same image, but in gray-scale, approximating how it would look like if Windows used proper anti-aliasing:
If you take a few steps back and compare the images, you will probably find that the bottom one looks best on a CRT.
Update: I should also note that on an LCD screen, you can’t see these color artifacts at all. But on a CRT, I find that ClearType makes the text look blurred and hazy and a bit hard to focus on, due to the color artifacts.
Jun 23, 2003 “2-in-1 is a bullshit term, because 1 is not big enough to hold 2. That’s why 2 was created.”
— Mitch Hedberg
Jun 20, 2003 It’s midsummer eve. I’m drunk. I have major problems typing correctly. Not that it stops me from blogging. (Magnus is here, btw)
In Fidonet, we had a nice tradition: if you’re drunk, it’s forbidden to use backspace.
Well, back to the game of Trivial Pursuit. I’m sure I’ll manage. Somehow.
Swedes traduitionally get drynk about thid time of year. Nice spelling, eh?
Jun 20, 2003 Rumored specs for the rumored Apple G5 PPC 970.
Dual 2GHz PPC 970. Holiest of shits. How many souls do I have to sell to afford something like that?
Jun 20, 2003 You know that whacky senator who wants to give copyright holders the right to destroy the computers of pirates?
He’s a pirate himself. Oh, the wonderful irony.
I’m fully expecting him to come out and say “I had no idea, it was my webmaster who did it!” This perfectly illustrates the danger of his proposal. No matter what his webmaster did, he is responsible for the site. And the same server probably hosts a whole bunch of other senators — they’d crash and burn too, when the copyright holder nukes the server.
Jun 19, 2003 Just a post to let the Popdex crawler verify my blog.
Jun 19, 2003 Looks like I’m not the only one who has been getting referrer spam from phiberweb.com. Two lines in my .htaccess and he now gets a 403.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} phiberweb\.com
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Mark Pilgrim is also very keen on killing rude bots.
While I’m at it I gave kooqoo.com the finger, since their RSS crawler incorrectly says their site is referring to me. It doesn’t. Bye bye.
Jun 15, 2003 In late 1997, I suddenly and unexpectedly suffered from a severe depression.
And I still can’t write about it.
(I am pinioned
her eyes move)
Jun 8, 2003 Rands elaborates a bit on a comment Brent Simmons (of NetNewsWire fame) said in an interview.
After sitting staring at the ceiling thinking about this comment, I realize it crystallized, for me, a very basic question about how to think about weblogs. The painfully simple question is, “What is a weblog?” The painfully simple answer is, “A weblog is the representation of a person on the Internet.”
[...]
This explains why I get the heebie-jeebies when I read the AlwaysOn site or even the Corante blog pieces. I stare at the masthead wondering, “Hey, are these people speaking for themselves or for the corporation?” Their association with a faceless corporate entity, in my opinion, decreases their credibility. Even Gillmor bugs me because I don’t know if his weblog is his voice or his voice translated by the mothership.
What usually hooks me on a blog is the writing style. The irreverent eloquence of Dean Allen got me hooked at once, though the actual content itself, quite frankly, is far from unique. Mark Pilgrim certainly has a lot of technical expertise, but nothing I can’t find elsewhere. It’s his personal stories that interest me the most.
Rands is my most recent addition to the list of people who write interesting stuff. I recommend his list of HOLY SHIT! moments. I might write a HOLY SHIT! list of my own some time.