There is no god

“Sir,” Saint-Savin replied, “the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life. We should rather aspire to a heaven where only the planets live in eternal bliss, receiving neither rewards nor condemnations, but enjoying merely their own eternal motion in the arms of the void.”

The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco

and …

Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That's just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” […] Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

There Is No God, Penn Jillette

… all on the same day.

Fedora's New Logo

About a month ago, Matt Munoz introduced the work of the Red Hat design team to create a logo for Fedora. Matt's writeup described the development of that logo's concept and the choice of a visual vocabulary to express that concept.

While I like the direction the design team took for the Fedora logo I have to admit that I find the final result a bit too stiff. The “f”—for “Fedora” and “freedom”—looks tentatively italic but stands straight and feels oddly symmetrical. The infinity sign “behind” it, by virtue of being so geometrical, absorbs too much of the “f”'s shape and makes it harder to read.

So I tried reusing the design team's concept to create a similar but softer logo to show my ideas for an improved version. The logo on the left is Red Hat's; the one on the right is mine.

My logo has its own problems of course: 1) it does not match the Fedora word mark as closely as the design team's; 2) it weakens the smart geometrical interplay between the overall shape of the logo and the negative space of the “f + infinity” sign. It could also use some fine-tuning, especially in some its curves.

Garamond & the Boys

Claude Garamond's legacy is rather complex and one which I had been meaning to figure out for myself for a while. After a bit of reading and researching I think I now have most of it down. It begins with Garamond's death in 1561 when his estate was sold and dispersed throughout Europe, to Antwerp, Holland, with Christophe Plantin, to Frankfurt, Germany, with André Wechel and Jacques Sabon, the latter a student of Garamond's, and to Italy with Guillaume Le Bé. These men, together with Robert Granjon, another one of Garamond's students who worked with Plantin for several years, form the first branch of the “Garamond” heritage.

The second branch appears later, in 1621, when a punchcutter and typefounder named Jean Jannon issued a new type, known as the “caractères de l'Université,” inspired by Garamond's work. Twenty years later Jannon's type found its way into the collection of the Royal Printing Office—now National Printing Office—where it would eventually be attributed to Claude Garamond. It remains unclear to me whether Jannon willingly sold his type to the Royal Printing Office or whether his punches or matrices were taken from him, a Protestant living in a Catholic society. Regardless, Jannon's design served as reference for “Garamond” revivals until 1927 when Beatrice Warde set the record straight in an article in The Fleuron tracing the National Printing Office's “Garamond” back to its original designer.

From these two branches come all of the Garamond-like types drawn in the 20th century. From the second branch, that of the mistaken identity, we get ATF's 1917 “Garamond” by Morris F. Benton and T.M. Cleland; Linotype's 1936 “Garamond No. 3” derived from Benton and Cleland's “Garamond”; and ITC's 1977 “Garamond” by Tony Stan who reworked Benton and Cleland's “Garamond.” Others from the same branch include Lanston Monotype's 1921 “Garamont” by Frederic Goudy; Interetype's 1927 “Garamond”; Bauer's 1961 “Simoncini Garamond” by Francesco Simoncini; and “Garamond Classico” by Franko Luin in 1993.

From the first branch, that of Claude Garamond's students, comes a different set of types considered truer to the master's original design including Monotype's 1913 “Plantin” by F.H. Pierpont—which served as the inspiration for Times New Roman; Stempel's 1925 “Stempel Garamond”; Linotype's 1928 “Granjon” by George Jones; Ludlow Typograph Company's 1930 “Garamond” by R. Hunter Middleton; Stempel's 1964 “Sabon” by Jan Tschichold; Linotype's 1978 “Galliard” by Matthew Carter; and finally Adobe's 1989 “Adobe Garamond” by Robert Slimbach.

Many designers following the first Garamond branch worked from the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen printed by Sabon's foundry twelve years after his death—his wife, Judith Egenolff, had then remarried to another typefounder, Konrad Berner. The specimen includes not only Claude Garamond's original roman but also Granjon's famed italics.

GNOME T-Shirt: GNOME XING

4th GNOME t-shirt; more coming soon. When is the GNOME Store opening again?

GNOME T-Shirt: Stain Fighting Gtk+

Finished another GNOME t-shirt which should in fact more accurately be described as a Gtk+ t-shirt.

Designing it made me wish Inkscape had diagonal guides. They could be set like orthogonal guides, with a click in and drag from the rulers. To differentiate setting one kind of guide vs. the other, diagonal guide creation could be started with a [Shift] + click or a [Ctrl] + click instead of the regular click alone.

GNOME T-Shirt: The Pirate

Forget “Seinfeld”, you want to be a pirate!

On The Meaning of “mus in pice”

I chose “mus in pice” as the title of this blog for reasons I will explain shortly. One thing I did not foresee then was that I would end up with the top hits on Google for this expression. Now I feel responsible for it and I worry that I'm making it difficult for people wishing to know what it means to do just that. This is my attempt at making things right.

“Mus in pice” is a Latin phrase meaning “a mouse in pitch” — the Latin word for “pitch” is pix (picis; f.) by the way. I came across it reading Michel de Montaigne's Essays (complete text in English from Project Gutenberg and in French from the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language). The passage in question is from Book III, Chapter XIII, “Of Experience”:

Men misconceive the natural disease of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and inquire and keeps whirling about, pilling things up, and wrapping itself in its own handiwork, like our silkworms, until it suffocates. “Mus in pice.” It believes it spotted some pretense of clarity and imaginary truth; but as it runs towards it so many obstacles stand in its way, so many difficulties and so many new questions, that they misguide it and confuse it.

The expression itself predates Montaigne and seems to be in fact a classical adage, “getting stuck like a mouse in pitch.” Montaigne uses it in a particular context, that of our endless curiosity, the “natural disease of [the] mind,” but it could just as easily apply to our thirst for material goods.

I have always liked this expression as it describes me pretty well so it seemed appropriate to use it when I was looking for a title for this blog. It's even more appropriate if you think that blogs are by nature one of the worst kinds of information “pitch” there is. I felt then that “mus in pice” applied not just to me individually but also to me as a participant in this giant broacasting mess we call blogs.

Asus WL-330g and Ubuntu Linux PPC

A week ago I bought this gizmo: the Asus WL-330g Wireless Access Point and Ethernet Adapter, to use “my” iBook anywhere there's a wireless connection with the least amount of messing with configuration and drivers. The iBook is running Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and I'm happy to report that everything is working well. Since the WL-330g acts as an Ethernet adapter there's really no messing with anything at all; I just used the “Network Settings” dialog to set the iBook's network interface for DHCP.

One very strange thing happened on which I wasted nearly an entire afternoon. The device comes with a USB power adapter so that it can be used anywhere with a laptop. So far, so good. But it took me hours to figure out that I can't use just any of the iBook's two USB ports to power it. Only the 1st port seems to work. When the device is plugged in to the 2nd one, it connects and reboots 2 or 3 times before giving up entirely. Very strange!

The WL-330g comes with a Windows configuration utility which I couldn't use for obvious reasons. There is also a web configuration interface which is quite poor but usable — not the good kind of “usable” though. The documentation is virtually inexistent since it consists of screenshots of both configuration systems with little explanation about how the device really works.

Good News – Bad News

Tristant Nitot pointed to some of the most recent numbers for Mozilla Firefox's market share: 14.4% in Oceania, 14.1% in Europe, 11.8% in North America (12.3% in the US), 5.8% in Asia, 5.2% in South America and 4.3% in Africa. The good news is that these numbers have been steadily growing for a while and continue to do so to reach significant levels now in certain parts of the world (31% in Finland! Go Finland!). The work done by the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla volunteers is definitely paying off.

This latest study also shows that Firefox is being installed at a higher rate in homes than in offices. In Europe for instance, there's a 2.5 point difference between Firefox usage on week days and on week-ends. Given the way most companies administer their software resources this is not particularly surprising. It does somewhat undermine the idea that software travels from offices to the homes with people installing on their home computer whatever piece of software they're using at work.

The low percentage points in developing regions like Asia, South America and Africa are surprising to me. Free software is usually said to do better in developing countries — since it can be distributed, customized and translated into minority languages freely — but this is not what I'm seeing here. Though I don't really know how to explain this phenomenon, widespread software piracy could be a factor.

In countries where law enforcement resources are limited and where therefore commercial software can be acquired cheap or at no cost, the freedom to redistribute copies guaranteed by free software licenses, arguably the most interesting of all “software freedoms” for non-technical users, is illegally granted to all making the benefits of true free software moot. Moreover, in these conditions, the need for consumers to critically evaluate the price of software vs. its actual worth disappears because the financial cost of using or trying unsatisfactory software is virtually null. And since software prices in developing nations are comparatively higher than they are elsewhere, the gap between price and expectations which could be more significant there than in “developed” nations actually ends up being narrower. This in turns makes for fewer opportunities for free software to spread as an alternative to commercial, and potentially expensive and unsatisfactory, software.

So what's the bad news? Well, nothing really, except that I am impatient by nature and that I can't help but thinking that things are moving too slowly. Firefox is technically better than its alternative, it is one of the best advertised Free/Open Source projects, and yet it is reaching “only” 14.4% of its intended audience at its best (on average, per continent). While this steady progression is good news for Firefox, the relatively low percentage worries me when I think about GNOME, the fantastic Linux desktop. How long before Linux and GNOME have 14% of the computer desktop market share?

Getting Rid of Web Ads

I recently found out about John LoVerso's Proxy Auto Configuration ad-busting trick and tested it. It's quite efficient and integrates very easily with the GNOME desktop. By using John's file and GNOME's Network Proxy Preferences dialog you could be browsing the web free of annoying ad banners.

In the System menu, choose Preferences, then Network Proxy. Select the Proxy Configuration tab, pick Automatic proxy configuration and enter the path to the "no-ads.pac" file you'll have downloaded from the page referenced above.

If you're using Epiphany, that's it; you're done. If you're using Firefox, you'll need to change your connection settings to Auto-detect proxy settings for this network.

On a different and very anectodic note, if you happen to watch "Me and You and Everyone We Know" — and you should — the kids are using Gaim to chat.