anti-aliasing nightmare on debian

Debian mysteriously turned on font-anti-aliasing when I upgraded my laptop a few days ago. I guess that's fine, but suddenly my terminal got completely unreadable.
before


after


I thought about turning it antialiasing off -- and I still may -- but it occurred to me that I could probably do better.
I asked around, and I found a few shootouts, including Jeff Atwood's, but none for my exact setup.
The problem is, Linux/X11's font renderer isn't really ClearType. Also, different applications seem to render the same font different ways: VIM and Gnome Terminal sometimes show the same character in the same font in a dramatically different way.

Now I've got a handful of beautiful monospace fonts, but I can't seem to decide which to use. I'll post some examples here, as I get time to make screenshots.

So far, I've got:

• Andale Mono
• Consolas
• Consolas
• DejaVu Sans
• Inconsolata
• TheSans Mono
• Bitstream Vera

I don't have Monoco or Pragmata, but maybe I'll find them later.

Rails 2.2.2 is a lemon

There's one bug that makes my life miserable in all sorts of ways. It's the Catch-22 that you often can't run rake tasks if any of your models fail to compile.
It seems to be a bit of a heisenbug:
http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/1548-gem-tasks-fail-when-cache_classestrue
http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/802-eager-load-application-classes-can-block-migration
http://www.redmine.org/issues/show/2441

I've seen it bite me:

• trying to migrate up fields in the database, while a model was trying to call "alias" on the field


• trying to automatically install a gem dependency, including while a model was trying to mixin a module from that gem


• trying to run specs in a plugin when the app it was plugged into had syntax errors in a model

Gaaah.

programming languages that I still can't read:

1. LISP (and scheme)
2. C++ Templates

which suggests I need to take some time to really grok macros.

debian linux: bigmem gives you highmem and you need it or you'll be missing memory

if you're running a debian system, make sure you have a bigmem kernel installed, like this one, or memory above (somewhat less than) 1GB will be ignored.

before
sudo grep -i memory /var/log/dmesg
[ 0.004000] Memory: 899224k/917504k available (1693k kernel code, 17724k reserved, 746k data, 320k init, 0k highmem)


after
sudo grep -i memory /var/log/dmesg
[ 0.004000] Memory: 2059204k/2087744k available (1834k kernel code, 27260k reserved, 788k data, 256k init, 1170240k highmem)


Now I can stop blaming firefox.

Update:
I've become convinced that this is a bug in Debian's 2.6.26 image. The previous version (2.6.24) had "highmem" (memory above 1GB) turned on even if "bigmem" (memory above 4GB) was turned off.
(I think. Someone should confirm this.)

mixed types

In scala, it's possible to mix parameterized types (e.g. TypeOne[T]) with inheritance (e.g. TypeOneTwo extends TypeOne[TypeTwo] )
but it's complicated.
Lesson learned: if it's possible to just pick one or the other (pure inheritance or pure parametrization), do so.

more on that later.

gij is a bad citizen

I think I've found what was going on with my scala interpreter. The debian scala package depends on gij, the GNU Interpreter for Java. THIS IS BAD. I didn't notice it get installed, but suddenly everything that called java on my system was filling up system memory, going into swap, filling up the entire swap, and crashing. I suspect that if I install a version of scala that uses the real java interpreter, it won't use 1GB of RAM to call 'hello world'.
Come on debian. Java is GPL now. Let's get out of the ghetto.

TO: larry drebes <ltd@janrain.com>

Larry, I think it is despicable that the same company that was responsible for shepherding the OpenID 2.0 spec is now selling a proprietary product that capitalizes on the failures of that spec. I think it is obscene that the open source libraries that your company maintains^[1] are now being pitched as excessively complicated^[2] so that you can sell a proprietary wrapper for them. This is a fundamental conflict of interest.

~Jesse Wolfe