Archive forSeptember, 2004

Editors and Anti-aliased fonts

I was looking around for a version of emacs that supports good anti-aliased fonts that are easy on the eyes. Unfortunately, I didn't have much luck finding one.

In the meanwhile, gvim/X11 seems to be working very nicely and coupled with taglist makes a formidable competition for emacs.

But I wonder why vim had to invent it's own scripting language instead of using something like python.

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Stolen camera from checked in baggage

Just came back from a trip to Europe on United and had the frustrating experience of having my camera stolen from a checked in bag. United tells me that I shouldn't have put any electronic items in my bag in the first place.

They also say that they require passengers to not lock the luggage when checking it in post Sept 11th.

So the moral of the story is that don't put anything precious in your checkin luggage and try to carry it with you into the cabin.

Although my experience with United has been less than satisfactory, I tend to believe their explanation that other airlines have the same policy.

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More prisoner abuse

People are probably sick of hearing about this, so this story didn't show up in any “mainstream” media.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20986-2004Dec22?language=printer

ACLU got some info from FBI that suggests that Bush signed an executive order authorizing the techniques.

I first got wind of this on Scarborough country on MSNBC (looks like these guys are going to beat O'reilly) where the “republican strategists” were openly saying that there was nothing wrong with all of this.

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Standardizing on an encoding for Indian languages

A lot has been said and written on mailing lists about Indian language computing, but it hasn't really touched common people. The main reason is that publishers of kannada (this applies to other languages too) haven't paid attention. Whereas people like BBC/VOA do.

I created a petition signed by about 100 people that has just been forwarded to editors at major publications. Keep an eye out for more publicity for this topic in the media in the coming days. Feel free to write to your editor.

Ladies and Gentlemen - I give you: the petition

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Looking for some scary sci-fi stuff ?

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Arafat bashing on US cable TV

I actually saw some of these reported abuses and they were really ugly.

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More swiftvets on CNN

I've seen the swift boat vets attack on Kerry almost everyday on CNN for the past week. That must be worth some serious money. I haven't seen a single attack ad by the democrats on any channels I watch. But then I live in California. But from where I sit, Bush & Co look a lot more negative.

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Blogs from Sun

Finally, some technical criticism of a Sun engineer about what he thinks is wrong with Linux.

Mentions FreeBSD in passing, but doesn't explore it too much.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eschrock/20040921

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Firefox 1.0PR is here

Among all the releases so far from the mozilla project, this one looks very promising. Go grab it from http://mozilla.org/

And don't forget to grab the voting plugin, which has just been updated for this version:

http://www.sharma-home.net/software/vote/vote.html

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Hiding Iraq to help Bush ?

On a day when 110 people are killed, including a TV reported being killed live on camera, CNN runs the headline “Hurricane Ivan rips through Cayman Islands”.

I seriously doubt all this crap about Fox news being pro-right and CNN being pro-left. In reality, all US media is pro-whitewashing non US casualties and towing the government line.

In the meanwhile, Bush continues to deny connections between 9/11 and Iraq and continues to harp in a tone that a large number of moronic Americans interpret as Saddam ordered 9/11 and since he's in jail, America is safer.

I should stop watching Iraq coverage on US TV. But there's hardly any alternative available at a reasonable cost where I live.

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