inportb

WebKit support in Konqueror is coming along nicely in the form of a KPart called webkitkde. If you’re running Konqueror on Ubuntu 8.10, it’s really easy to try WebKit without disrupting your usual workflow:

1. install webkitkde
2. when viewing a Web page in Konqueror, select from the menu: View > View Mode > WebKit

It’s beta-quality software, but it works alright. Konqueror defaults to KHTML whenever navigation occurs, so you have to manually select WebKit for each page. Now you can do some basic WebKit-compatibility testing using Konqueror.

I bumped into a former classmate from middle school yesterday. We talked about what we did after graduating… then he started asking some interesting questions.

Dude: You’re telling me you’re studying biochem? Whoa, that’s interesting.
Me: How come?
Dude: Well, I’ve been writing quite a bit lately. Mostly detective stories, you know.
Me: I love detective stories.
Dude: Yeah well, I was wondering if you could help me. Know any good ways of killing someone? Like a poison, maybe.
Me: I don’t exactly study this stuff, but we were talking about arsenic and cyanide poisoning in class the other day.
Dude: Oh, those are classic. How do they work?
Me: Well, arsenic inhibits some important enzymes in the aerobic respiration pathway. It also affects the oxidative parts of some other pathways, which backs them up and keeps them from working. Cyanide works sort of like arsenic in that it affects energy metabolism, but it’s more acute; it binds to cytochrome oxidase in mitochondria and blocks aerobic respiration. Basically, it keeps cells from using oxygen and suffocates them.
[I explain in a lot more detail.]
Dude: Ah, now that’s all very interesting, but how would you actually use these?
Me: Erm… I’ve heard of people getting sick from drinking arsenic-contaminated water. But cyanide can be used as hydrogen cyanide gas or cyanide salts.
Dude: Awesome! I might have to call you up later for details… but I’ve a quick question for you. Do you know where one could obtain arsenic or cyanide in a place like New York City?
Me: … erm… I gotta go to class…
[I retreat into the nearest convenient lecture building.]
Dude: Hey! What’s your phone number?

Traditionally, installing fonts on Linux meant creating directories, copying files, and refreshing the font cache. Today I discovered a neat Windows-y font installer in the form of the fonts URL scheme. Open the file manager to fonts:/ and installing fonts should be as easy as copy and paste; removing fonts is just as easy. Through this mechanism, one can manage both personal fonts and (with sufficient privileges) system fonts.

Excited about the discovery, I decided to have some fun. A while ago, I’d purchased a disc full of fonts. My Kubuntu setup comes with some 400 system fonts, but I wanted to find out just how many my laptop could handle. After I copied in several thousand TrueType and OpenType fonts, I fired up OpenOffice.org and the GIMP for a quick test. While OO.o was not able to use the OpenType fonts, everything was pretty smooth. But the real test was just about to begin. The disc included some 150000 font files, and I proceeded to install all of them.

At the moment I’m taking a break at 56398 fonts (4.0GB). It takes a couple of minutes to load the desktop after logging in, and many operations have slowed drastically. So uh… I guess installing lots of fonts does affect performance. It would be interesting to perform the same experiment on Windows and Mac OS X.

November 13th, 2008: I now have 124479 fonts (8.1GB) in my personal fonts directory; I figured this is as slow as I could tolerate, so I’m going to stop here and revert to the original state of zero fonts. That was fun!

The 2008 College Puzzle Challenge will commence in fewer than eight hours! Every year, Microsoft employees stage a puzzle-solving game at colleges across North America. During the event, teams of four strive to solve the largest number of puzzles within a twelve-hour timeframe. To those who will be participating today: good luck and have fun!

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I’ve been experimenting with Wordpress-Facebook integration, since I use both Wordpress and Facebook substantially. WPBook looks like an interesting plugin to play with — it makes a Facebook application out of your Wordpress setup.