No More Hard-to-Read Chinese Text!

NEWS: Currently the font is included in the Ubuntu Hardy Heron repository! Install the "ttf-wqy-zenhei" package

Recently I have been continually fine-tuning my Ubuntu to give me the best (i.e. most comfortable) environment for me to work with. One of the major quirks is the hard to read Chinese fonts, which is due to the fact that it's pretty hard to hint SongTi (宋体) fonts.

Somehow it's pretty surprising that Ubuntu's repositories doesn't come with HeiTi (黑体) or Chinese Gothic fonts, which has thicker strokes. But luckily there's this open source, GPL'ed font foundary, Wen Quan Yi, which does provide their HeiTi variant called "Zen Hei". Basically what I do is grab the package, install the Debian package (execute `dpkg --install wqy-zenhei-0.2.15-1.deb`), adding the configuration to match the font in my /etc/fonts/local.conf file (see my previous article for details) and lastly execute `sudo fc-cache -fv`.

Once I done that and restart my applications, now I had 100% reliable and perfectly readable Chinese pages! :D

From Gentoo to Ubuntu

By some circumstances, I found myself migrated to Ubuntu Linux from Gentoo. It's not a intentional flavour change, to be honest: but rather just happened that I royally screwed my partition table as I shuffle them around. An attempt to raking in dormant partitions (mainly my old Linux installations) and salvaging them for better use ended up having myself wiped out the LVM partition that my Gentoo lives in. Whoops! No doubt that fdisk may as well be your best friend or your best enemy.

Luckily I have my home partition and personal data separated out and I didn't have any production MySQL databases (phew...), so I'm still safe :). (that coming from someone who have screwed up Linux several times, my best advice is better to keep all your important out from your OS partition :p)

So, mainly due to my own laziness of not wanting to spent a whole day just to set a razor-edged Gentoo (i.e. which is very time consuming but you do get to craft every single nook-and-cranny of the system: customized the way you wanted it to), I opt for Ubuntu instead.

But that said, installing Ubuntu using their Desktop Installation CD is only a breeze if you didn't find the need to use LVM. But in the end, it's not as hard as it seemed as Chantra from Debuntu.org did posted up a tutorial on how to do so, which basically needs you to:

• Execute `sudo apt-get install lvm2`
• Setup your LVM partitions; or if you have an existing LVM setup, just activate the volume group by executing `vgchange -ay VolGroup` (where VolGroup is the name of your volume group)
• Once make sure that the logical volumes have entries in /dev/VolGroup/... (again, VolGroup is the name of your volume group), kick up the installation GUI. Remember to use the "Manual" option when you reached the partitioning section
• Once installed, DON'T REBOOT FIRST! Mount all your logical volumes and the /boot partition into /target. Chroot into /target, perform an `apt-get update` there then install LVM2 (Otherwise you won't be able to boot into your computer)

So now I'm running Ubuntu and got it setup in a breeze and I'm pretty impressed on how polished the Ubuntu team have made it to be. Coming from a Gentoo background, I'm really impressed because if you happen to build everything yourself, you'd end up noticing a lot of small quirks which give some rough bumps in interacting with the user interface (especially Compiz, during my days in Gentoo I never seemed to get it "right").

And never needing to leave my PC overnight to let emerge do it's thing (i.e. compiling updates) is a definite plus :).

RedesignMalaysia: Glitch or Gone?

Was browsing around today and noticed that Redesign Malaysia's site was gone!

For the uninitiated, Redesign Malaysia is "an initiative to improve Malaysia’s broadband facilities" (extracted from their site as last cached by Google), which provides information and news of all broadband providers in the country as well as serves as a platform for the rakyat (Malay word for "citizens") to voice their complains and concerns on the services being provided or any development that will hinder the development of wider and faster adoption of broadband.

I'm not sure what had happened behind the scenes, but should we lose the site, it would be a great loss for Malaysia. Just hope that it's just a temporary matter that will be solved swiftly.

Meebo Firefox Extension

Meebo just recently launched its own extension, aptly named as Meebo Firefox Edition. The extension basically adds a Meebo buddy list sidebar (which can be hidden) and a couple of bells and whistles that makes it more useful than a glorified sidebar.

The major convenience that the sidebar provides is the automatic login feature, which is able to log into your IM account automatically when Firefox is started. Once you logged on to Meebo, you'll see your buddy list in the sidebar, which you can select which friend you'd like to message and set your status. The sidebar is resizeable and with the minimum allowable width, the buddylist is still usable without taking up too much screen real estate. The sidebar can be hidden as well, which you can toggle whether it is shown or hidden by clicking on the Meebo icon (see red circle on the first image).

One nifty feature they had included is the alert box feature, which is a small blue box which will pop up on the bottom-right corner of the screen to notify you when your friends were online or when they messaged you. The neat thing is that the alert box is shown even when Firefox is minimized. Not only that, in the Options dialog you can configure what Meebo Firefox Edition should alert you and when it should keep quiet.

At the time of writing it's still in its early stage of development, it still require the actual Meebo page to be loaded in a tab, which is required to contain all the conversation windows and provide other functionality that is not implemented in this extension. So at the moment, what it provides is still pretty basic but it's worth the install just for the desktop alert feature. But I'm definitely looking forward it becoming a full fledged IM extension.

Here's a feature (wish) list that I'd hope to see in future releases:

• Theme-able skins
• Able to configure where the sidebar should be located: either left, right or as a floating window. What I would find it nice is probably something like Google Notebook which is capable to slide out from the bottom
• The login screen should allow a narrower width
• Buddylist groups
• I know this is in the works but I can't resist saying this: Make it standalone without requiring the Meebo page to be loaded ;) (that would mean one less tab :p)
• Audio alerts/notification
• Capability to set MSN display name

To install the extension, head to http://www.meebo.com/firefox and try it for yourself :).

UPDATE: I did forget to mention a quite annoying quirk that if you use the auto sign-in feature, it'll always open a new tab loading Meebo's site. This is quite annoying because I personally use the auto-load previous session feature in Firefox: which make it always end up with two tabs loading Meebo and I have to take the trouble to close one of them. Hopefully that get resolved soon (but then again, the "no tabs" feature is on the way :) ).

Follow-up to Spam Blogs

It had been a few weeks after I found out the previous Blogger subdomain of my site was maliciously occupied by a spam blog which not only filled with random content, it also shown deceiving full-screen ad that claims to be anti-spyware but actually attempts to install malicious software in your computer.

So I had filed a spam complaint to Blogger, and the next day the first thing I saw is the deceiving full-screen ad was gone, doesn't automatically attempt to install malicious software, but the page still remained intact with spam. Then I sort of let the issue slide.

Then today, out of curiosity, I revisited my old real-estate and pleasantly surprised that apparently Blogger had closed down the previous site and open it up for others to occupy it. Apparently it seemed that Hayden had picked it up and posted his new blog there, which is also a computer tech blog and the content seemed very promising. Looking forward to read more from him/her. :)

Other than that, I'm glad that Blogger was fast to resolve and had actually taken steps to get rid of spam blogs. Despite the fact that I didn't follow things up on a daily basis, but the fact that they took action is commendable. Good job! :)

Spam Blogs

Once upon a time, The Digital Blue Wave does not resides at the same URL as what it is today: I migrated it to another "virtual real estate" (read: subdomain) in the same "neighbourhood" (Blogger).

Apparently months later after the move, my friend, Eng Lee told me that my old space was occupied. Just out of curiosity, I paid the newcomer a visit. And boy I was surprised!

Nastily surprised, in fact.

Yes, you probably could have guessed it: it has become a spam blog, much worse than one, in fact. It's pretty funny to see how creative those spammers had become, and in the end of the "scan", they even attempted to give me a fishy download file, which that could anything but a nice present for your computer. (well... unless you liked the idea of having your computer spied on)

And they are smart enough for not making it easy to report it as inappropriate (you know, there's a "Flag as inappropriate" button on the Blogger navigation bar on top that you can click on). Even with my attempts of not letting the mock malware scanning screen shown by disabling all graphics, CSS and Javascript, the "Flag as inappropriate" button is no where to be seen! O_O

I have to say that spammers are really a smart shady bunch indeed.

In the end, after rummaging around with Google, I finally found Blogger's spam reporting page (really, they should have make it more.... umm, visible). Just filed my report and let's see how long does it take for Blogger to respond to that one.

In the meantime, I got around to install GreaseMonkey and a script to make sure the damn flag is not made hidden by those hideous spammers. Hope that would greatly help me to weed out those spam blogs as soon as I see one.

Gentoo "emerging" pains of upgrading to Python 2.5

And I thought it's time for me to upgrade to Python 2.5, partly due to a particular masked package and partly due to the fact that I had the itch to upgrade that particular package. So I gone ahead to doing that, happy that it's successful, and sort of left it there for a few days.

A few days later, I do the oh-so-routine of "emerge -uD world" and expect it to run smoothly, only to be proved wrong when emerge start to act up on me. One of the most prominent errors being "ACCESS VIOLATION SUMMARY" in big red text before the emerge fails. Then some of them seemed to have problems with xml2po.

Apparently when python is upgraded, python packages and a couple of programs that relies on it needs to be updated as well. This can be done by executing "python-updater" right after you do the release update of python. And later do the re-emerging of gnome-doc-util, just to be on the safe side.

Currently these steps weren't officially documented in Gentoo and the mention of it is in the GNOME 2.12 upgrading guide. But then again, Python 2.5 is still under the unstable flag, so such inconveniences was expected. Hopefully by the time when the maintainers believe Python 2.5 is ready for prime time (i.e. become "stable") they will issue a notice in the Gentoo newsletter or something.

[P/S: Still haven't got around unmerging Python 2.4 though, but probably I'd do that later]