Having seen Helvetica, I can’t wait for Objectified to come out in a few months time. If you’re one of those enjoying (industrial) design, appreciating usability, but demanding æsthetics, this movie is probably for you too. Sadly, I doubt it’s going to be in any cinemas in Hellas, given that there aren’t any arthouse movie theatres around here, really.

The saga continues, with the music industry attempting to subvert the law in Europe and turn ISPs into policy enforcers and courts of law all at once. With ever higher profits in 2008, and a pretty grim record of accusing and prosecuting the elderly, single mothers with no computers etc. in the States, it seems like the music industry would rather hand the dirty job over to ISPs.

This is, besides illegal, pretty prone to error — as history has shown. I’m really looking forward to the next settlement Eircom will reach, this time with wrongly-accused (and disconnected) individuals. Hopefully it’ll be more than enough to compensate for their stupidity.

For the programmers out there. Now that the controversy regarding the licence of the Droid font family included in Android is over — and it’s clear that the fonts are licensed under the Apache licence — I am releasing a dotted version of the Droid Sans Mono, monospaced font that I am using for development (usually its either that or Liberation Mono nowadays). I prefer the dotted zero to a slashed zero in most monospaced fonts. More information can be found in the software page.

I used FontForge to edit the font, so — since some of the hinting instructions are not supported by this application — I’ve scraped them and used the built-in autohinter.

If you wish to use the modified font, they are — of course — also provided under the Apache licence, like the original.

As always, your comments are very welcome.

Today is the birthday of the Mac. And while Steve Jobs may not care about the past, a quarter of a century after its introduction, the paradigms made popular by the original Macintosh (and, arguably, the Lisa before it) are still very much relevant in the present and there’s very little proof that they won’t be in the near future.

The original Mac suffered from the same deficiencies so many Macintosh computers suffered over these 25 years since its introduction: low specification hardware (viz. 128KB of RAM), few upgradeability options, a closed ecosystem. Yet it also kickstarted an era of intense innovation and competition, perhaps the golden era of personal computing and marked the beginnings of the Mac’s role in personal computing. While Apple’s focus has drifted away from the Mac as its sole strategic product in recent years, the platform is today as important as healthy as ever. Happy Birthday Macintosh!

Image used under the GFDL licence. Originally by Wikipedia user Grm_Wnr.

My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town .. a German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.

The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.

How true, this last paragraph. And how brilliant a statement, not because of its content, but because of who said it, Sir Gerald Kaufman, a British-Jew, raised as an Orthodox Jew and Zionist, a British MP from Manchester.

It’s about time to disassociate criticism against the Israeli military action in Gaza as an example of anti-semitism, bigotry, hatred or racism. Sure, those exist, but criticising a totally disproportional, non-discriminating military operation that targets civilians and Hamas militants alike with white phosphorus and bombards hospitals has nothing to do with it.