Monday 8 December 2008

Japanese and Korean fonts in Ubuntu

Gnome terminal is known for being a resource hog. When it reached 130 megabytes for a recently-opened terminal I looked into it.

Thanks to Gnome Live memory reduction this was fairly easy.

Using cat /proc/nnn/smaps I could see Korean and Japanese fonts using lots of memory. I don't usually need these...

Try searching for "batang", "kochi" and "uming"- I've removed these from my Ubuntu.

Friday 5 December 2008

12m Lebanese abroad supporting 4m at home

"With some 12 million Lebanese overseas and only 3.5 million in the country, remittances make up a vital third of the economy" according to the BBC. According to Wikipedia, these are people of Lebanese descent, not actually Lebanese citizens!

Tuesday 29 April 2008

Schools Minister quote

In inner London, 53.4% of pupils do not speak English as a first language. Surprised?

Jim Knight

(UK Schools Minister): "The evidence is clear that children with English as a second language make exceptional progress and are rapidly closing the gap with native speakers."

Is "exceptional progress" really correct?  Is he trying to say that the standards of children who speak English as a first language are slipping or are simply not as capable as those who do not?

These quotes can be twisted to suit any purpose...

Wednesday 16 January 2008

London buses

London buses are very good (when they work) but it seems very hard to find a map mashup with bus routes.

Is it so very hard?

All one should need is a list of bus routes, their stops and the co-ordinates...

Tube travel is catered for very well, but I think there's a demand for better bus information!
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Saturday 1 December 2007

Brilliant: Autotest Rails with iNotify

Great post at Alban's blog about how to use inotify with Rails Autotest.  Much faster test responses.
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Outlook online

Another rant about Outlook.  Windows in general doesn't seem to handle networking very well- many applications block because Explorer is doing something with the network.

Outlook should be cleverer.  It may start up in "on-line" mode, but it should not block with "Not Responding" for up to a minute before it realises yes, this is a laptop and no, it's not connected.  To anything.
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Tuesday 23 October 2007

SSH web proxy through a firewall

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Rather a buzz-word heavy title, but if you need to sort out decent web access from behind a firewall/proxy, use:

ssh -ND 9999 [email protected]

The web browser should then be configured to use the proxy "localhost:9999".