To make a very long story a whole lot shorter; assigning pixelsize turns off font hinting for Qt apps. I wasn’t able to figure out why, but I did find a solution for my particular setup, resulting in the following ~/.fonts.conf:

  
    Arial
    12
    13
  

You really have to look carefully to notice the difference with the original: it’s the qual="all" attribute in both test nodes. That did the trick for me.

Would you like a pocket-size device that reminded you of each appointment and daily event? I would. I am waiting for the day when portable computers become small enough that I can keep one with me at all times. I will definitely put all my reminding burdens upon it. It has to be small. It has to be convenient to use. And it has to be relatively powerful, at least by today’s standards. It has to have a full, standard typewriter keyboard and a reasonably large display. It needs good graphics, because that makes a tremendous difference in usability, and a lot of memory — a huge amount, actually. And it should be easy to hook up to the telephone; I need to connect it to my home and laboratory computers. Of course, it should be relatively inexpensive.

What I ask for is not unreasonable. The technology I need is available today. It’s just that the full package has never been put together, partly because the cost in today’s world would be prohibitive. But it will exist in imperfect form in five e years, possibly in perfect form in ten.

Do you think what I think? I reckon that Donald A. Norman must be the owner of an iPhone. At least the quote above is a perfect description of today’s smartphones. In particular the iPhone, which, in my opinion, is a one of a kind both in design and usability. Now this book is first published in 1988, so Norman was ~10 years off, though not bad. Funny to bump into, in the already quite interesting book.

It’s a pretty straightforward setup. You’ve got this C++ library which you want to export to Python. You’ve already setup an interface to Lua, using SWIG. Now the cool thing about SWIG¹ is, that it’s really easy to export the same interface to different scripting languages, so you want to use SWIG’s power to use your existing setup and extend that from Lua to Python as well. You take your existing .i file, divide it up into two separate files, a general one and a Lua specific one. Say common.i and lua.i where you include common.i in lua.i. Then you can create your new python.i with the Python specific instructions for SWIG, again including common.i. Problem solved.

Well, not if you’re using SCons as your build tool and you put the %module statement in common.i. That does work for Lua, but for Python strange things will happen with SCons’ build dependencies on the .py wrapper file generated by SWIG. I had to go all the way into SCons’ Tool/swig.py to find out what the problem was. While SCons scans for %module statements, which, if found SCons uses to define the .py file build dependencies for Python extensions, %include statements aren’t honored as such. That’s when I undestood that the problem was my Python specific python.i which didn’t have a %module statement! I put that into common.i, reusing it for Lua and Python, thinking that would be ok. However, that setup will mislead SCons to thinking that there are no %module statements at all. So build dependencies will be incorrect, leading to build errors.

Lesson learned: when using SCons, always put the %module statements for SWIG in the .i file that is used to directly generate the scripting language extension from.

1. Yes I am a fan.

I’ve got several purposes planned for my media box, namely: to host my music library using Squeezebox Server, connect it to my amplifier and play music with it, connect it to my TV to be able to play videos with it — most likely using XBMC, and to use it as a little webserver and source control server. With that in my mind, I pointed Safari to a couple of hardware web shops, and ordered the following hardware to start with:

• Mini-Box M350 — Currently one of the smallest (if not smallest) mini-ITX enclosures, very suitable for fanless operation because of its design for natural air convection. I’m not planning on installing a internal DVD or Blu-ray drive, which would require a different case.
• Zotac ION ITX A-E — A low power dual-core Intel Atom N330 @ 1.6Ghz operated mainboard, with nVidia ION graphics processor capable of 1080p video playback. Perfectly fits my needs. Should even be possible to operate fanless, but we’ll see how hot it will get when I finally put the pieces together. One of the nice things about this mainboard is that it comes with an integrated PSU, which saves you some money and installation hassle. Goes well with the M350 too.
• Zalman Fan Mate 2 – Just to be sure, when things get too hot, I can still install the optional fan that comes with the mainboard. With this handy tool it’s possible to reduce the fan’s speed to reduce the produced noise, because usually the fan doesn’t need to be running full speed.
• WD5000BUDT — A 2.5″ 500Gb Western Digital hard drive design for systems that are running 24/7. Low power, cooler operation and 32Mb cache.
• Kingston 2Gb DDR2 — Running at 800Mhz, the highest speed supported by the Zotac board, I’ve only ordered one piece of 2Gb. I might consider upgrading to 2x2Gb to take advantage of the Dual Channel feature. But for now, I’m sticking with only one piece of 2Gb DDR2 memory.

The grand total of these 5 items was € 335.56. If I’d had to buy a new iPod Classic and docking station (which were both dead), that would’ve cost me € 278. So for an additional € 57.56 I now have a full blown little media pc. Not bad. Not bad at all.

$ cd /usr/local/src/dogtail-0.7.0
$ sudo setup.py install

However, when I tried to run sniff for example, it can’t find it’s image files, because it’s looking explicitly in /usr/share instead of /usr/local/share. Ok, so let’s try again:

$ sudo setup.py install --prefix=/usr

This time, sniff start complaining that there’s no module named dogtail.config. A bit of Googling tells me that Ubuntu doesn’t have /usr/lib/pythonx.y/site-packages in its path by default. Only site-packages inside /usr/local/lib/pythonx.y and dist-packages in /usr/lib/pythonx.y are added to Python’s path by default. This is to clearly separate the place for packages that are included in the Ubuntu distribution (dist-packages) and those you install yourself (site-packages).

Now there’s a special argument for distutils if you want to install a “distribution” package manually, namely --install-layout=deb. Passing this argument will put the package using /usr as prefix and using dist-packages instead of site-packages, as if you were installing a deb package. So:

$ sudo setup.py install --install-layout=deb

That did the trick for me. Now back to what I was originally wanting to figure out: wxPython GUI scripting and testing with dogtail.

A while ago I upgraded to 10.04, and not long after that I had to change my password again (the half-yearly password-will-expire-soon emails started coming in on the account I use on that system). So I did. And as charlesb points out in a comment on my earlier post, I can also confirm that the keyring password problems have been fixed by the Ubuntu team in 10.04.

Thanks Ubuntu!

Anyways, all that reading got me to pen down some random but interesting quotes I encountered:

There are two ways to design a system: “One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other ways is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies” — C.A.R. Hoare.

“When documents are mostly to enable handoffs, they are evil. When they capture a record that is best not forgotten, they are valuable” —  Tom Poppendieck.

“Its easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code” — Joshua Bloch.

“There’s a grand myth about requirements: If you write them down, users will get exactly what they want. That’s not true. At best, users will get exactly what was written down, which may or may not be anything like what they really want.” — Mike Cohn

It’s interesting that only such a small number of words can express such a great deal of experience.

After reading and viewing many technical comparisons (I especially liked TechnoBuffalo’s review video), I was still in doubt. Although the Nexus One is technically a very capable phone and Android is certainly a promising platform, Apple’s iPhone kind of still kept “feeling” better. Then I found Boy Genius’ Personal Thoughts about Android, which pushed me all the way over to the iPhone camp again. I too am missing the soul in Andriod. The little robot logo is cute, but it seems to me that that is almost the only thing that’s consistent.

So I wasn’t surprised by today’s Gizmodo article stating that The Nexus One is a Total Flop. Well, to me, the Nexus One is simply Yet Another Andriod Phone.¹

1. But hey, I might have become a little biased, after using an iPhone for the past 11 days

After consulting the all-knowing Google, I found the cause of this rather interesting behavior. Open System -> Preferences -> Keyboard. Then go to the Mouse Keys tab. Now here’s the million dollar question. Why would somebody _ever_ want to move its mouse pointer with the keypad? Maybe because you broke your mouse slamming it on your desk because you we’re so irritated that you couldn’t use your keypad? I don’t know. I’ve never had the urge to control my mouse pointer using the keyboard. Maybe they’d called it keypad-pointer if it was meant to be controlled by the keypad.

Well, they didn’t, so press Shift+NUMLOCK. This will uncheck the “Pointer can be controlled using the keypad” checkbox. Why was this box checked in the first place? Maybe its the default. Or maybe I once accidentally held down the shift key when I pressed NUMLOCK.

That must be it.