This is the archive for May 2007. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

Stripey socks

Tuesday, May 22, 2007 ★ 20:57 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url

Bastien, our well-known stripey lover and perhaps others will surely like my socks:

Stripey socks

Stripey socks

Not so many colors, thankfully…

Dark Gummy

Saturday, May 19, 2007 ★ 17:27 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

Wow, I played a bit with the color scheme for the new Gummy style that is included in the latest (unstable) gtk-engines release. Gummy has light colors by default, but the color pickers in the Gnome Theme Manager dialog allowed me to easily select some of the grey scales in from the Tango desktop project. The result looks like this:

Dark Gummy style, click to enlarge

See the gtk-engines 2.11 release notes for more information. Note that you need gnome-themes 2.19.2 as well to actually use the Gummy style!

Update: I don’t like dark themes that much, actually.

Marie Antoinette

Saturday, May 19, 2007 ★ 12:23 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url

I’m a big fan of the films by Sofia Coppola. Both The Virgin Suicides (with a wonderful soundtrack by Air by the way) and Lost in Translation are amongst my all time favourite films, together with e.g. Fucking Åmål and Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain.

Marie Antoinette

Image shamelessly ripped (and cropped) from IMDB.

The latest film by Sofia Coppola is about the Queen consort of Louis XVI of France, Marie Antoinette (Wikipedia), and is titled after her: Marie Antoinette (IMDB).

A well-done blend of a Costume drama and contemporary music, which is at some points hilarious and at some points really melancholic. See it!

Interview

Saturday, May 19, 2007 ★ 12:07 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url

I went to see Interview, a remake by Steve Buscemi of the original (Dutch) Interview by Theo van Gogh (who has been murdered some time ago by a muslim extremist) in Kriterion (which is only a couple of minutes from the location of the murder).

Interview still

Image courtesy of Sony Classics

Quick plot outline: a not-so-interested political journalist Pierre (Steve Buscemi) is sent out to interview a famous trash movie and soap actress Katya (Sienna Miller). He is completely unprepared, but after a while he manages to get the conversation going. After a while you start thinking who is actually the interviewer and who is the actor, since the game played by interviewer and the interviewee is not entirely honest, from both persons’ perspectives…

The film has lots of references to the original film, e.g. a truck with ‘Van Gogh movers’ written all over it, a quick appearance of the ‘real’ Katja Schuurman and Pierre Bokma and some photos on a desk.

Anyway, nothing really special about this film, but nice nonetheless to see a local Dutch production getting picked up by others. I didn’t see the original, but it is told the remake is a lot better.

Free your fonts

Friday, May 11, 2007 ★ 00:02 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

RedHat has released an initial version of a set of serif, sans-serif and monospaced fonts with exactly the same metrics as the (non-free) Microsoft Times, Arial and Courier fonts, which implies those fonts can serve as a drop-in replacement. The font family is named Liberation.

Click for full-size image

More information can be found in this RedHat press release about Liberation fonts. Alternatively, go to the download page to get the font files. Extract them somewhere into your ~/.fonts/ directory.

If you want to fool applications into showing Liberation whenever they ask for one of the non-free Microsoft fonts, you may add some configuration snippets to you ~/.fonts.conf file. For your convenience, I’ve put an example Liberation fontconfig snippet online.

Oh, that reminds me… I should really contact some translators to ask for updates and release Gnome Specimen 0.2.

Update: It seems Pascal de Bruijn made a Ubuntu Liberation font package (might also work on Debian).

What's up with those numbers?

Wednesday, May 2, 2007 ★ 13:35 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url

It seems like knowing the number that lies exactly between the two numbers below (in hexadecimal notation) will get you sued in some countries, (but not in the Netherlands as far as I understand it):

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 BF

and

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1

The whole fuss about magic numbers reminds me of the film Pi in which this number:

884509627386359275033751967 943067599621731590401694134 434007629683591574337516791 197615733475195375920401694 343151239621353184932676605 800621596380716399501371459 954387507655892533875618750 354029981152863950711207613

... is considered a numerologist holy grail in which the trueness of god is expressed. Note that the number has 6×6x6=216 digits. Another ‘special’ number that reveils a bit of the magic irregularities in the world is of course the well-known π:

3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510

... but we all agree Pi is wrong ayway, don’t we?

Church sign

So, what’s up with all those numbers? Nothing special I’d say, we’ve got plenty of numbers all around us! Criminalizing people for knowing numbers is just plain stupid.

Update: if you don’t like numbers but you do like coloured clothes, be sure to check out this t-shirt. Heh.