But I noticed something amiss between our message boxes and the built-in message boxes. Even with the same font at the same size, our message boxes looked like crap. The text looked like it had been run through some fun house mirror filter. Without getting too technical, it's apparently a difference between Windows' different graphics interfaces, GDI and GDI+, and resolution-independence. This was something Microsoft noticed with .NET 2.0 and thus came out with a TextRenderer object with methods MeasureText and DrawText which accomplish roughly the same effect.

All this examination of fonts lead me to start looking at ClearType, Microsoft's name for sub-pixel rendering technology that attempts to make text more legible at small sizes on a discreet display medium like the computer monitor. It's not a new idea, but it's only become become prevalent in recent history because of the advent of LCD monitors. Any major desktop operating system will have some form of it built-in or at the very least have the ability to turn it on. Having said that though, there's no one right way to accomplish it, because different people perceive things differently. It's actually quite a polarizing topic. There are several different ways to do it, but basically they fall into one of two camps, and it's all about the pixel grid.

Microsoft's theory is essentially a kind of "snap to grid" approach; adjust the font so that it mainly fits along discreet points of the pixel grid. The idea being that this increases the "crispness" of the text, thus making it more legible. In theory, this is good, but in practice there's really one big caveat: unless a font is designed with this in mind, you can end up with some quite jarring results (the fun house mirror effect I alluded to earlier). This is now why you see a whole new rash of fonts coming out of Microsoft, especially designed for ClearType, and quietly replacing their old tried and true fonts with every new Office or Windows product. They themselves know how poorly fonts look with ClearType turned on if they weren't designed for it (and vice versa, I should point out).

Apple's approach is more benign. Rather than cram the font into a box, they elect to display it as best they can keeping the font in tact, potentially at the cost of crispness of display. The net effect is fonts rendered in OS X tend to look "smoother" and more appealing to the eye, but also "blurry" to some people. The upside is you don't need fonts designed especially to work with OS X's rendering technology. It "just works".

So it all boils down to personal preference. Frankly, I find fonts rendered with ClearType to look broken, faint, and/or fuzzy (with multihued outlines) and really distracting as I read (though it's better than turning it off completely). I don't find fonts rendered in OS X to be blurry at all. They look more natural and "intact" to me. Now perhaps it's my monitor at home, which is the new 27" iMac, because when I tried XP with ClearType through VirtualBox it looked way better than it did at work with the same settings (though I could still detect the fuzziness I see, but not as bad). This is even after using the ClearType Tuner, which helped greatly, but I was still never able to find the perfect setting. Though, if you’re going to stick with ClearType on XP, I highly recommend it .

Regardless, I'm stuck using XP at work with aliased fonts, or broken/multi-hued fonts in ClearType. This became even more noticeable when I installed Safari 4 and turned on its built-in "Medium" font-smoothing. It really made me want to find a way to turn that on system-wide. Luckily, some Japanese programmers also came to the conclusion that ClearType sucks for displaying their ligatures and decide to do something about it. GDI++ is a tool that uses the FreeType open source font engine for rendering fonts in Windows, and you can customize it (albeit in a very non-user-friendly way) to your own preference.

Now I'd only advocate using GDI++ if you're like me, and stuck in an XP world. If you're on Vista or Windows 7, their latest advances in DirectWrite and Direct2D appear to me to be a vast improvement over anything you can accomplish in XP, either built-in or through a third-party (mind you, I'm basing that strictly on screenshots I've seen, having never used Vista nor Windows 7). Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided no to support XP at this time with either of those technologies. But if you're up for a little tinkering, GDI++ is the way to go. I'll attach my settings, which attempt to mimc my Mac, once I get back in to work.

Apparently, a long running joke. I first heard it in 2004, I think, from a coworker who read it on a programmer’s blog he was following. Unfortunately, I can’t find it anymore. I think it was a Python developer, as that’s the technology this particular coworker was fond of.

Is this it?

We found it particularly funny, as the work we were doing at the time (a lot of ASP.NET, Web Services, and XML Serialization) involved a lot of work with XML and XSLT stylesheets, and it seemed every time we finally thought we had figured out all the rules to the game, someone went and changed all the playing pieces. We never seemed to be able to apply what we had already learnt or written to any new problems, and always had to start each time from scratch.

Occasionally, in the middle of a work day, you’d hear one of us blurt out, “Yes!” And, by that, you could invariably always tell that person had just got their XML Stylesheet working.

It was also around that time that I proposed my hypothesis that, “I could solve any problem, given a time machine… and a big enough stick.”

All that reminds me of some posters my dad used to have hanging on the walls of his office when I was a kid. They were of course posters detailing the laws of Murphy. A couple of my favourites being, “Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it,” and, “Eat one live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Classic stuff.

I’ve been tweaking the stylesheet for the site over the last few days, making it a little more efficient and readable hopefully (i.e. making it more about the “C” than the “SS”). There’s a lot about CSS that still throws me for a loop sometimes. I seem to have a hard time with styling technologies in general (but that’s a different story).

I didn’t have too hard a time of it this go around, I think mainly because of the new Web Inspector in Apple’s web browser, Safari. DOM/HTML/CSS inspectors in web browsers is not a new idea, and Apple wasn’t the first to the table with the idea. In fact, their inspector has been around for a couple of years now, in various forms.

It wasn’t just the live-updating of the CSS that helped, but also how it shows the different style rules in play and how they’re being overruled by others, and lastly the ability to see the final computed style. It’s still a little clunky and could use some more features, but it’s definitely usable the way it is now.

If I didn’t find Firefox as a whole rather clunky on my G5 (but only on my G5, for whatever weird reason), I’d probably be using it with Firebug, which looks awesome. Actually, if I was back in the business of coding web pages to make a living, I’d definitely be using that.

Anyway, if you’re still reading this, you shouldn’t really notice too many changes. I’ve pretty much kept all the styles the same, I’ve just reorganized how they cascade in the stylesheet. The biggest change I just implemented, is switching the main font over to a series of various Lucida variants from Verdana (which I’ve used for years now, simply because it was different, and Tahoma looked too cramped). Only problem now is finding the right Lucida variant for the job, as only certain ones came pre-installed with certain OSs or applications at certain times, and some look like utter crap. But I’ve done my research, and I think I’ve chosen the best option that screws all people equally (maybe the Windows people slightly more than others).

I’ve also started using tags, so at least I now appear to be “with it.”

A word to the wise, trust documentation. The help for my add-on said not to leave it on for extended periods of time, and that it’s really only meant for short periods of debugging traffic. Well, I read that and chose to ignore it, thinking of course that I knew better.

Well, it’s turned off now, and things are much snappier than they were.

I still don’t know what it was doing, because I never did get any output from the darn thing. Apparently, it was just spinning its cycles, spewing its data into the /dev/null’s of the world.

I don’t blame the author of the software or the PHP programming language. It was an easy mistake to make. I still intend on using the software (and upgrade to the newest version even). It was my own fault for not keeping a closer eye on the server logs and on the TNG mailing list to notice that this kind of thing was going on.

I haven’t actually been able to pinpoint the exact day or time when the hack occurred. The first attempts began in mid-March. I don’t think the hack actually occurred until just a few days ago, when I noticed the page on my site was posted in a Spanish-language forum as a badge of honour as it were. Thankfully, the kids trying this stuff out aren’t really that bright, as witnessed by a lot of failures to even copy and paste correctly.

One of them actually managed to copy a couple of executables that looked like IRC server software or something, but was undoubtedly stopped cold when it had no chance of running on my server’s architecture.

These are the IPs of the machines from which these kiddies attempted their hacks, followed by the URLs where they hosted their payloads:

Update (18 Jul 2007): I’ve created a quick and dirty live feed of hack attempts and the external links from where the attack scripts are being hosted, seeing as I’m still getting the odd attempt now and then…

Update (15 Sep 2007): List removed since it’s grossly out of date.