james mckay dot net

After three weeks or so of running Ubuntu on my laptop at home as my primary OS, I reinstalled Windows on it yesterday evening. No doubt this is a move that will meet with howls of derision from everyone who expects me to be an über-geek, and the bearded sandal-wearing idealists who think that Microsoft should be nuked, but the fact is that I just don’t think much of Linux on the desktop. It’s more secure and more stable than Windows, and less prone to spyware and all that, and it has some great geeky features (I just love that 3D Sierpinski screensaver) but it has one big problem: visual aesthetics.

Besides Ubuntu’s depressing brown colour scheme, which makes it look like a plate of mince, the biggest problem is fonts. Ubuntu’s default out of the box fonts are ghastly, dumpy, squat monstrosities, and the rendering engines in both Gnome and KDE are pathetic, giving uneven stroke widths and nasty colour fringing even on the Windows core fonts, no matter what settings I used for the sub-pixel rendering. I think they must be using a similar approach to Apple, in attempting to preserve font shapes over and above on-screen crispness and readability, though Apple does it a lot better. Or maybe I’m just spoilt: once you have seen ClearType in action on Windows, the Linux sub-pixel font rendering seems pretty lame by comparison.

Another thing about Linux is software. I really missed Windows Live Writer, especially having used the new beta 2 version with its much improved WordPress support, and while I guess I could have tried installing it using Wine, I decided in the light of the fonts issue not to bother. There are a couple of equivalents available for Linux, such as Drivel, but they are nowhere near as slick as Windows Live Writer. I also much prefer Corel Draw (and Paint.NET for the simpler stuff) to the Gimp, Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, and of course I was missing out on Visual Studio.

This isn’t to say that I won’t be using Linux at all of course. I have been running Ubuntu servers on VMWare both at work and at home and I will almost certainly continue to do so. I don’t know if I’ll try a desktop installation of Ubuntu on VMWare though: when I’ve done this in the past it tends to get neglected somewhat, though it does occasionally come in useful for things such as testing cross-browser compatibility. However, I don’t think I’ll be making much use of it as a primary OS in the immediate future.

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Posted at 22:41 on 30 June 2007.
Tagged: laptop, Ubuntu, Windows, Windows Live Writer

There is a bug in the newly released Windows Live Writer beta 2 that causes it to choke if you are also using Bad Behavior on your blog.

I first discovered this when I installed it yesterday to check it out. When it refused to update the theme from my blog, I wondered at first if there was a problem with my custom theme, but then half an hour later I looked at my home page again to find that all the comments on my blog had closed. A quick investigation showed that Bad Behavior had been choking on the requests from Windows Live Writer and logging the failed attempts, which were then being picked up by my new plugin, Three Strikes and You’re Out.

It turns out that the problem stems from the fact that Bad Behavior expects Internet Explorer to include an “Accept” header with every HTTP request, and if it gets something that claims to be Internet Explorer yet doesn’t match up to its expectation, it throws an error.

Fortunately, it is not too difficult to fix this, though you do need to tweak the code base of Bad Behavior. Open the file msie.php in the bad-behavior subdirectory of your Bad Behavior plugin and find the lines which say:

if (!array_key_exists('Accept', $package['headers_mixed'])) {
    return "17566707";
}

Change this to read as follows:

if (strpos($package['headers_mixed']['User-Agent'], "Windows Live Writer")
    === FALSE && !array_key_exists('Accept', $package['headers_mixed'])) {
    return "17566707";
}

You should then be able to use Windows Live Writer on your blog once again, without losing the protection offered by the Bad Behavior plugin.

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Posted at 08:33 on 5 June 2007.
Tagged: Bad Behavior, Windows Live Writer

I’ve just downloaded the latest freebie from Microsoft — Windows Live Writer — and I’m trying it out on this post. It looks very slick — a simple Windows front end to your blog. It works perfectly with my WordPress blog, picking up the settings with a minimum of effort, and making posting a breeze. You can preview your posts (in the style of your blog itself), save them as drafts, and much more. It works with a whole raft of blogging software and services, including Windows Live Spaces (formerly MSN Spaces), LiveJournal, Movable Type, Blogger and so on.

It doesn’t seem to work with MySpace though, but then again MySpace pages aren’t real blogs. I am yet to come across a MySpace blog which has anything of relevance to say to anyone other than the author’s close circle of friends. But I’ll save that rant for another time.

[Update 5 June 2007: If you are looking for help getting Windows Live Writer beta 2 to work with Bad Behavior, check out this blog post.]

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Posted at 12:57 on 15 August 2006.
Tagged: Windows Live Writer