Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
Once again into the breach, once again risking the severe depression that follows every previous attempt to do something about my pain. So it goes. The pain has gotten so severe that I really have no other choice. Just hope I can survive the let down when it doesn’t work.
So I have a new prescription for a new NSAID, and orders for x-rays of my knees and elbows, and a bunch of blood tests. And a promise that if nothing turns out, I’ll get a referral to a pain clinic.
Well, thanks to my second favourite debugging tool (after System.out.println), strace, I figured out what was going wrong in Rants and Revelations » Today’s Java puzzlement.
(Short aside: CentOS is actually RedHat Enterprise Linux with the proprietary stuff filed off. So any changes between versions are RedHat’s fault, not CentOS’s.)
I had a short program I wrote some time ago to print out the names of all the fonts that Java knew about. Today I straced it on my CentOS 4.4 and my CentOS 5.0 machines to see what was the difference. Both machines opened up /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_11/jre/lib/fontconfig.RedHat.bfc just fine. And both started opening up various TrueType font files. But what’s that? On the CentOS 5.0 machine, I’m getting ENOENT (file not found) for /usr/share/fonts/ko/TrueType/gulim.ttf. Oh, that’s not good, since I know the installer installs the “fonts-korean” rpm, which is the CentOS 5.0 equivalent of “ttfonts-ko”, which is what I’ve got installed on CentOS 4.4. Oh, but when the geniuses at RedHat renamed the rpm, they also renamed the directory the directory that the TrueType font files go, from /usr/share/fonts/ko/TrueType to /usr/share/fonts/korean/TrueType. And when they did similar renaming with Japanese and Chinese fonts, at least they had the decency to put symlinks at the old locations.
After that, it was a simple matter to copy the /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_11/jre/lib/fontconfig.RedHat.properties.src to /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_11/jre/lib/fontconfig.RedHat.properties, fix the directory names, and voila, I have Korean fonts.
Now I just have to figure out how to get this into the delivery RPMs.
The pain in my knees is really getting out of hand. It’s been getting worse for decades, but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting a stabbing pain on top of the usual diffuse pain – I used to get that every few months and it would only last for a day or two. My tolerance for any sort of activity has gone way down, and Alieve isn’t doing as much as it used to.
I was planning to clean out the basement and my office this weekend, and hopefully get out kayaking for the first time of the season. Instead, all I managed to do was replace the locks on the garage and clear out the cardboard boxes that have been waiting to be flattened to go out to recycling for months. Oh, and walk around the block once looking at the garage sale. And for that, I’m paying in agony.
I guess if I recover enough, I’ll have to do the cleaning out in short chunks of time every evening instead of one big weekend project. And hopefully fit in the kayaking one of these days.
(And yes, I am going to talk to my doctor. Not that I have an iota of hope that he can do anything.)
Three years ago, when I was asked to implement a DocumentCache class in the cinlib, I made a mistake so that first build that had it was actually horribly slower than before it was implemented. Yes, I admit it. But I fixed that problem in the very next build, and it actually did end up being a net gain.
So is it really fucking necessary that every time since then when there the slightest question about cinlib performance, the first words out of your mouth are “can we try disabliing the DocumentCache to see if that fixes it”? I mean, it’s been three years. Give it up, already.
In amongst my podcasts, iTunes downloaded three “PDFcasts”, two from Make Magazine and one from PilotCast. Of all the ways that people on the Internet have found to re-implement the same basic idea as Usenet, this has got to be the worst. If I wanted content that I had to read on my computer, what’s wrong with a web page? Or better yet, an RSS feed for a web page. Or an email list. Or Usenet.