Tag Archive for Google

Changing to web fonts

February 12, 2012 No comments

While you can add Windows fonts to Linux installations, I have found that their display can be flaky to say the least. Linux Mint and Ubuntu display them as sharp as I’d like but I have struggled to get the same sort of results from Arch Linux while I am not so sure about Fedora or openSUSE either.

That has caused me to look at web fonts for my websites with Google Web Fonts doing what I need with both Open Sans and Arimo doing what I need so far. There have been others with which I have dallied, such as Droid Sans, but these are the ones on which I have settled for now. Both are in use on this website now and I added calls for them to the web page headers using the following code (lines are wrapping due to space constraints):

<link href=”http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300italic,400italic,600italic,700italic,400,300,600,700” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css“>
<link href=’http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Arimo:400,400italic,700,700italic‘ rel=’stylesheet‘ type=’text/css‘>

With those lines in place, it then is a matter of updating font-family and font declarations in CSS style sheets with “Open Sans” or “Arimo” as needed while keeping alternatives defined in case the Google font service goes down for whatever reason. A look at a development release of the WordPress Twenty Twelve theme caused me to come across Open Sans and I like it for its clean lines and Arimo, which was found by looking through the growing Google Web Fonts catalogue, is not far behind. Looking through that catalogue now causes for me a round of indecision since there is so much choice. For that reason, I think it better to be open to the recommendations of others.

Linux, Web, Web Development, Web Technologies, Web Tools, Windows

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A new phone

February 4, 2012 No comments

After a few years with a straightforward Nokia 1661 and a PAYG Blackberry 8520, I decided to go and upgrade from the former to an HTC Wildfire S. So far, the new phone has been good to me with only a few drawbacks. Other than working out how to insert a SIM card, the phone has been easy to use with just a few nuances to learn, such as finger pinch zooming and dealing with an onscreen keyboard as opposed to a real one.

The touchscreen interface and the 3G capability are the big changes from my Blackberry and both make web browsing so much faster too, especially with the larger screen. For instance, checking RSS feeds with Google Reader and emails is so much faster on the move with the screen being very responsive most of the time that I am using it; it does get dirty like others so either a screen cover or frequent cleaning with a camera lens cloth would be no bad thing. The onscreen keyboard remains something to which I need to grow accustomed and probably is the one area where the Blackberry continues to hold sway though turning the phone sideways and tapping it on the side to change orientation helps a lot. That makes the keys larger and, while my finger are not the thickest, there are fewer cases of hitting the wrong key. Even then, you need to get used to switching between alphabet and numeric keyboards and that applies also when you need punctuation marks like commas and so on.

Otherwise, the user interface is bright and pleasing to the eye with the typical presentation of both a clock and current weather on there. Handily, the screen is locked easily too with a press of the button at the top right of the phone. That will put a stop to inadvertent phone calls, emailing, web browsing and other things so it is to be commended. To unlock the screen, all that’s needed is to swipe the lock bar to the bottom. Any alerts are viewed in a similar way with holding down your finger on the top bar presenting an extension that can be pulled all of the way down to see what’s there.

With an icon for the Android Marketplace on the main screen, I got to adding a few apps and you can set these to update automatically too but you need to watch your phone contract’s data allowance. The one for WordPress works better than it does on my Blackberry but it seems that retweeting with UberSocial is much less good on the Android platform. For one thing, feeds for all accounts are presented on the one screen and swiping left to right is needed for replying, retweeting and other operations and that’s not working out so smoothly for me yet. Maybe I’ll try an alternative. There are others that I have downloaded too and these include one from CrossCountry Trains and that seems to be a nice offering even if it failed to find trains between Macclesfield and Edale of a Sunday morning. For those omissions, I have an alternative in place and I also have the LinkedIn app too. That seems to work well too. Usefully, it is possible to move these to the phones microSD card to avoid filling up the limited space that’s on offer. However, that isn’t to say that I will be going mad on these things.

Of course, any phone should be good at making and taking phones and the Wildfire seems to be doing well on this score too. Firstly, contacts were read from the SIM but they can be transferred from an old phone using Bluetooth connections too. Sound is good and loud though you need to be on a call to adjust the speaker volume with the rocker button on the side of the phone. Otherwise, that just changes the volume of the ring tone. Without any adjustments, the phone seems to vibrate and ring at the same time though that may be something that I get to changing in time. The pings emitted when new text messages, emails or tweets fall into the same category.

If there’s any downside to this phone, it has to be battery life. Unlike others that I have had, this is a phone that needs charging every night at the very least. Maybe that’s the price of having a nice bright responsive screen but it would be no harm if it lasted longer. Others have found the same thing and reported as much on the web though some have having worse experiences than others. There are some hints regarding how to conserve battery life but they include such things as switching off 3G or data capabilities and neither appeal to me; after all, I might as well use my old Nokia if this is all that can be offered. Instead, I am wondering if acquiring a spare battery might be no bad idea because that’s what I do for my Pentax DSLR (note in passing: I haven’t got to using the phone’s own camera but recent wintry weather had me tempted by the idea, especially with the likes of Twitpic and YFrog out there.). Taking things further, others have mentioned getting a larger capacity replacement but that sounds more risky.

All in all, first impressions of the HTC Wildfire are good ones. Over time, I should find out more about the ins and outs of the gadget. After all, it is a mini-computer with its own operating system and other software. Since I continue to learn more and more about PC’s everyday, the same should be the case here too.

Android, Mobile, Software, Telephony, Web

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Sorting out MySQL on Arch Linux

November 5, 2011 No comments

Seeing Arch Linux running so solidly in a VirtualBox virtual box has me contemplating whether I should have it installed on a real PC. Saying that, recent announcements regarding the implementation of GNOME 3 in Linux Mint have caught my interest even if the idea of using a rolling distribution as my main home operating system still has a lot of appeal for me. Having an upheaval come my way every six months when a new version of Linux Mint is released is the main cause of that.

While remaining undecided, I continue to evaluate the idea of Arch Linux acting as my main OS for day-to-day home computing. Towards that end, I have set up a working web server instance on there using the usual combination of Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL. Of these, it was MySQL that went the least smoothly of all because the daemon wouldn’t start for me.

It was then that I started to turn to Google for inspiration and a range of actions resulted that combined to give the result that I wanted. One problem was a lack of disk space caused by months of software upgrades. Since tools like it in other Linux distros allow you to clear some disk space of obsolete installation files, I decided to see if it was possible to do the same with pacman, the Arch Linux command line package manager. The following command, executed as root, cleared about 2 GB of cruft for me:

pacman -Sc

The S in the switch tells pacman to perform package database synchronization while the c instructs it to clear its cache of obsolete packages. In fact, using the following command as root every time an update is performed both updates software and removes redundant or outmoded packages:

pacman -Syuc

So I don’t forget the needful housekeeping, this will be what I use in future with the y being the switch for a refresh and the u triggering a system upgrade. It’s nice to have everything happen together without too much effort.

To do the required debugging that led me to the above along with other things, I issued the following command:

mysqld_safe –datadir=/var/lib/mysql/ &

This starts up the MySQL daemon in safe mode if all is working properly and it wasn’t in my case. Nevertheless, it creates a useful log file called myhost.err in /var/lib/mysql/. This gave me the messages that allowed the debugging of what was happening. It led me to installing net-tools and inettools using pacman; it was the latter of these that put hostname on my system and got the MySQL server startup a little further along. Other actions included unlocking the ibdata1 data file and removing the ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 files so as to gain something of a clean sheet. The kill command was used to shut down any lingering mysqld sessions too. To ensure that the ibdata1 file was unlocked, I executed the following commands:

mv ibdata1 ibdata1.bad
cp -a ibdata1.bad ibdata1

These renamed the original and then crated a new duplicate of it with the -a switch on the cp command forcing copying with greater integrity than normal. Along with the various file operations, I also created a link to my.cnf, the MySQL configuration file on Linux systems, in /etc using the following command executed by root:

ln -s /etc/mysql/ my.cnf /etc/my.cnf

While I am unsure if this made a real difference, uncommenting the lines in the same file that pertained to InnoDB tables. What directed me to these were complaints from mysqld_safe in the myhost.err log file. All I did was to uncomment the lines beginning with “innodb” and these were 116-118, 121-122 and 124-127 in my configuration file but it may be different in yours.

After all the above, the MySQL daemon ran happily and, more importantly, started when I rebooted the virtual machine. Thinking about it now, I believe that was a lack of disk space, the locking of a data file and the lack of InnoDB support that was stopping the MySQL service from running.Running commands like mysqld start weren’t yielding useful messages so a lot of digging was needed to get the result that I needed. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I am sharing my experiences here.

In the end, creating databases and loading them with data was all that was needed for me to start see functioning websites on my (virtual) Arch Linux system. It turned out to be another step on the way to making it workable as a potential replacement for the Linux distributions that I use most often (Linux Mint, Fedora and Ubuntu).

Databases, Linux, Software, Virtualisation, Web Technologies, Web Tools

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Making a custom button to hide or display the Google Toolbar in Firefox

February 27, 2011 3 comments

Adding more toolbars to Firefox is all very fine but they can take up space on the screen. Even with the big screens that many of us have these days, it’s still nice to be able to see more of what we use web browsers to visit: web pages. For the Web Developer extension’s toolbar, there is the Toggle Web Developer Toolbar plugin for showing and hiding the thing when so desired. As it happens, I keep it hidden until I need it and I fancied doing exactly the same thing with the Google Toolbar but found none. Instead, I happened on a tutorial that used the Custom Buttons plugin to define a custom button. That gives you an entry named Add new button… to the context menu that appears when you right-click on the main menu bar near the top of the Firefox window. When you select the that extra entry in the menu, you get the dialogue box that you see below.

In there, that are some form fields that need filling. Button URL is an option without which you can do but I entered “Toggle Google Toolbar” into the Name field while also sourcing an image to be used on the button instead of the default (a Google logo, naturally…). The last step is to add the code below underneath the /*CODE*/ comment line, leaving the latter in place.

const toolbar = document.getElementById(“gtbToolbar”);
toolbar.collapsed = !toolbar.collapsed;

With all that completed, clicking on the OK button is all that’s needed to finish off the button definition. With that done, the next step is to add the button where you want it by right clicking on the top menu bar again and selecting the Customise… entry. From the list of buttons that appears, just pick the new one and drag it to where you want it to go. Then, you’re done with what might sound a roundabout away of putting in place a space saver but I can live with that.

Scripting, Software, Web, Web Tools

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A look at Emacs

August 10, 2010 No comments

It’s amazing what work can bring your way in terms of technology. For me, (GNU) Emacs Has proved to be such a thing recently. It may have been around since 1975, long before my adventures in computing ever started in fact, but I am asking myself why I never really have used it much. There are vague recollections of my being aware of its existence in the early days of my using UNIX over a decade ago. Was it a shortcut card with loads of seemingly esoteric keyboard shortcuts and commands that put me off it back then? The truth may have been that I got bedazzled with the world of Microsoft Windows instead and so began a distraction that lingered until very recently. As unlikely as it looks now, Word and Office would have been part of the allure of what some consider as the dark side these days. O how OpenOffice.org and their ilk have changed that state of affairs…

The unfortunate part of the Emacs story might be that its innovations were never taken up as conventions by mainstream computing. If its counterparts elsewhere used the same keyboard shortcuts, it would feel like learning such an unfamiliar tool. Still, it’s not as if there isn’t logic behind it because it will work both in a terminal session (where I may have met it for the first time) and a desktop application GUI. The latter is the easier to learn and the menus list equivalent keyboard shortcuts for many of their entries too. For a fuller experience though, I can recommend the online manual and you can buy it in paper form too if you prefer.

One thing that I discovered recently is that external factors can sour the impressions of a piece of software.For instance, I was using a UNIX session where the keyboard mapping weren’t optimal. There’s nothing like unfamiliar behaviour for throwing you off track because you felt your usual habits were being obstructed. For instance, finding that a Backspace key is behaving like a Delete one is such an obstruction. It wasn’t the fault of Emacs and I have found that using Ctrl+K (C-k in the documentation) to delete whole lines is invaluable.

Apart from keyboard mapping niggles, Emacs has to be respected as a powerful piece of software in its own right. It may not have the syntax highlighting capabilities of some, like gedit or NEdit for instance, but I have a hunch that a spot of Lisp programming would address that need. What you get instead is support for version control systems like RCS or CVS along with integration with GDB for debugging programs written in a number of languages. Then, there are features like file management, email handling, newsgroup browsing, a calendar and calculator that make you wonder if they tried to turn a text editor into something like an operating system. With Google trying to use Chrome as the basis of one, it almost feels as is Emacs was ahead of its time though that may have been more due to its needing work within a UNIX shell in those far-off pre-GUI days. It really is saying something that it has stood the test of time when so much has fallen by the wayside. Like Vi, it looks as if the esteemable piece of software is showing no signs of going away just yet. Maybe it was well designed in the beginning and the thing certainly seems more than a text editor with its extras. Well, it has offer a good reason for making its way into Linux too…

Linux, Programming, Scripting, Software, UNIX

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On web browsers for BlackBerry devices

August 8, 2010 No comments

The browser with which my BlackBerry Curve 8520 came is called Web’n'Walk and, while it does have its limitations, it works well enough for much of what I want to do. Many of the sites that I want to visit while away from a PC have mobile versions that are sufficiently functionality for much of what I needed to do. Names like GMail, Google Reader, Met Office and National Rail come to mind here and the first two are regularly visited while on the move. They work well to provide what I need too. Nevertheless, one of the things that I have found with mobile web browsing is that I am less inclined to follow every link that might arouse my interest. Sluggish response times might have something to do with it but navigating the web on a small screen is more work too. Therefore, I have been taking a more functional approach to web usage on the move rather than the more expansive one that tends to happen on a desktop PC.

For those times when the default browser was not up to the task, I installed Opera Mini. It certainly has come in very useful for keeping an the Cheshire East bus tracker and looking at any websites without mobile versions for when I decide to look at such things. Downloading any of these does take time and there’s the reality of navigating a big page on a small screen. However, I have discovered that the browser has an annoying tendency to crash and it did it once while I was awaiting a bus. The usual solution, rightly or wrongly, has been to delete the thing and reinstall it again with the time and device restarts that entails. While I got away with it once, it seems to mean losing whatever bookmarks or favourites that you have set up too, a real nuisance. Because of this, I am not going to depend on it as much any more. Am I alone in experiencing this type of behaviour?

Because of Opera’s instability, I decided on seeking alternative approaches. One of these was to set up bookmarks for the aforementioned bus tracker on Web ‘n’ Web. What is delivered in the WAP version of the site and it’s not that user friendly at all. When it comes to selecting a bus stop to monitor, it asks for a stance number. Only for my nous, I wouldn’t have been able to find the ID’s that I needed. That’s not brilliant but I worked around it to make things work for me. The observation is one for those who design mobile versions of websites for public use.

Another development is the discovery of Bolt Browser and, so far, it seems a worthy alternative to Opera Mini too. There are times when it lives up to the promise of faster web page loading but that is dependent on the strength of the transmission signal. A trial with the Met Office website showed it to be capable though there were occasions when site navigation wasn’t as smooth as it could have been. Up to now, there have been no crashes like what happened to Opera Mini so it looks promising. If there is any criticism, it is that it took me a while to realise how to save favourites (or bookmarks). While the others that I have used have a button on the screen for doing so, Bolt needs you to use the application menu. Other than that, the software seems worthy of further exploration.

All in all, surfing the mobile remains an area of continued exploration for me. Having found my feet with it, I remain on the lookout for other web browsers for the BlackBerry platform. It is true that OS 6 features a Webkit-powered browser but I’m not buying another device to find out how good that is. What I am after are alternatives that work on the device that I have. Porting of Firefox’s mobile edition would be worthwhile but its availability seems to be limited to Nokia’s handsets for now. Only time will reveal where things are going.

Mobile, Software, Telephony, Web, Web Development, Web Tools

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