I wrote a small VB application to sit in my system tray and keep me up to date with sales progress within the company and I had used the Calibri TrueType font as the screen font. I wanted to install it on the PCs of the other Directors and I knew that the Calibri font was only available on my system because I had Office 2007 installed, so I set the VB Package Deployment utility to install the font on the client system.
I was surprised when I ran the program on the first installation and none of the text would appear. I opened the c:\windows\fonts folder and when I double-clicked on Calibri the standard test response was blank yet other fonts were working fine.
The solution turned out to be simple. The PC in question was not using ClearType to render and tidy the fonts and the Calibri font will not work without ClearType enabled!
To switch ClearType on, either right-click on the desktop and select properties then the appearance tab or go to Control Panel>Display>Appearance and where it says “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts”, select “ClearType”. After a restart, this cured the problem.
The UK had it’s largest earthquake for almost 25 years in the early hours of this morning. The quake was “only” a 5.3 magnitude which I know compared to big quakes in other parts of the world is insignificant, but we just don’t get ‘quakes in the UK so it’s news worthy!
The epicentre was near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire but we felt it quite a lot here in the Midlands. At 12:58AM it started with the bedroom door rattling then for a few seconds it rattled the whole house. It was quite a spooky experience.
There have been reports of minor damage to buildings and some injuries from falling masonry and there is the possibility of smaller tremors to follow. There’s more detail over at the BBC.
Only the other day in the Mozilla Messaging post, I was commenting on how I find it uncomfortable how much personal information companies like Google are keen to get stored on their servers. Today I read that Google is to test a new health care records system whereby Google store all of your health records and you get password access to them.
Personally, I find this scary. I don’t trust Google with this information because there is a reason they are keen to store it and that is because they can ultimately make money out of it. Will the company be searching the information internally for their own uses? Will Google employees have access to it? Will it be sold to insurance companies wanting to weed out the undesirables?
This is only a test of the system but you can bet that as soon as they believe it works, it will be rolled out in full. I wouldn’t sign up for it, would you?
The Mozilla Foundation has launched a new subsidiary, Mozilla Messaging, to take over the development and promotion of it’s messaging applications. Initially this will take over the development of the Thunderbird email client towards version 3.0 which will have much improved calendaring and a more robust, streamlined back-end.
This development shows a willingness by Mozilla to direct more resources into Thunderbird and other possible messaging applications. Hopefully by dividing it off into it’s own subsidiary, the extra resources will not come at the expense of Firefox which is a vitally important application in the fight to keep the internet open and free. The CEO of the new division, David Ascher, has a blog entry which attempts to explain his vision for the future, although it is a little heavy on evangelism and a little light on substance.
According to ZDNet’s coverage, there is an interest within the new organisation to develop an instant messaging application, although with so many commercial and open source alternatives I’m not sure where Ascher sees such an application finding a home.
Some commentators have rushed to point out that in a world of multi-gigabyte webmail allowances from the likes of GMail, Yahoo and Microsoft, the desktop email client is a dinosaur and as such extinct. I for one would argue strongly against such analysis. Webmail has its place of course and with AJAX and ‘Web 2.0′ have become much more attractive and use-friendly, although still without the desktop applications quick and fluid operation. However, for large volumes of email archiving with multiple attachments they cannot compete with a desktop client connected via IMAP to a company mail server. Add in Exchange-like calendaring and integration with third-party apps and you have a messaging hub which webmail cannot replicate.
I also doubt the integrity of some of the webmail providers. Their entire business model is based around access to data. By keeping all of your emails on their servers you have no idea what access anyone has to that information. I’m never one to don a tin-foil hat but with the likes of Facebook digging their heels in about users deleting their profiles and Google’s constant desire to have a finger in every byte of data that passes through the net, there are some aspects of these companies that I do not entirely trust. With online social networking, photo albums, webmail and so on, it is not impossible to see a future where all of your private data is sitting on the servers of internet corporates and that sits uncomfortably with me.
At least the format war is. Toshiba have announced that they are dropping out of the High Definition DVD war leaving Sony’s Blu-ray as the victor.
Toshiba has been on the back foot for a while now in their efforts to win over the studios and consumers to their HD-DVD format. With most studios backing Blue-ray, the final blows were inflicted by Warner Bros and Walmart who both pledged their exclusive support to Blu-ray. The day before Toshiba’s announcement, rumour was rife that the move was imminent and Toshiba’s share price was up 5% on the speculation showing that Toshiba’s investors had already accepted the situation and were keen to move on to other battles. The company has a lot of technology and research in the pipelines and to their credit they have bowed out with their commercial dignity intact.
At least the battle was won before the mainstream market took off. It leaves the early adopters with redundant technology but I’ve never had much sympathy for them anyway. They race to be the first to buy a new technology and then bleat when the standards or formats change or the technology drops sharply in price.
The HD DVD market just got a shot in the arm now that consumers don’t have to choose a format to put their hard-earned cash behind. I for one have been holding back for the market to mature even though I’ve had a 42″ HD TV for over a year. The market now is all about cost, finding the hardware and DVD prices that give it critical mass.
I came across this story on the BBC News site yesterday about Sleeveface, a growing web phenomenon where people mimic the pose and style of a classic album cover using the cover itself as part of the photo. Samples are shown here.
It seems a quite strange thing to do but some of the results are quite impressive and there is a high level of attention to detail in some of the photos.
For more details, take a look at the Sleeveface website and at Sleeveface on flickr.
I’m trying a new look to the blog, based on the GridLock-K2 style for the WordPress K2 theme. I was having trouble getting the sidebar to appear at the side instead of the bottom, but found a modified gridlock.css file which fixed it. I want to define the sidebar elements a little more as they look at bit basic at the moment so I’ll hopefully be digging into the CSS in the next few days to smarten everything up a bit.
I found some decent guides to tweaking the K2 theme on the blog of Paul Stamatiou:
I currently have a VAT Assurance Officer from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs sitting in an office down the corridor trawling through our import and export documentation to make sure that we are carrying out our VAT obligations correctly.
This is not a full blown audit but if they find anything amiss, it soon will be. We’re pretty good with our documentation procedures but there’s so much paperwork associated with importing and exporting, there are bound to be documents missing from some files. Unfortunately, you’re not allowed to be human in business and a mistake will be seen as attempted fraud if you get an inspector with a god complex!
Fingers crossed……
Update: Everything went reasonably OK. We were picked up on a documentation shortage in that we do not have a copy of our customs entry for each import/export transaction. This should be provided by the freight agent and will be from now on. If your freight agent isn’t giving you a copy of your customs entry, form C88 or SAD document, you are probably in breach of your documentary requirements. There’s no penalty this time but it will be recorded for next time!
I’ve been sorting out some old hardware at the office and have a number of old Duron/Celeron grade base units which have long since been upgraded by newer desktops. I’m giving them away to any employee that wants them but obviously need to securely delete any data on the hard drives.
I quickly found Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN) which is a self-contained system which you boot from and it securely wipes the drives using random data. You can download either a small exe which will install itself to a floppy or USB flash drive or you can download a bootable ISO CD image. I grabbed the floppy version and booted the first machine off it, selected the hard drive to wipe and it is now sitting on the bench writing random data over and over the hard drive, securely wiping anything on there, safe from any data recovery. Obviously, the speed of this operation depends on the size of the drive to wipe, but it can be left unattended to do its job.
If you are donating, scrapping or selling any hard drives or PCs with hard drives still installed, you should ensure that the drives are wiped and a format just doesn’t cut it. DBAN or a similar utility will ensure that your private or company data cannot be retrieved.
Typical! I just get round to updating WordPress to 2.3.2 and the very next day along comes 2.3.3 with a critical security patch. Thanks to Dick Morrells blog for the heads-up.
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