2003-03-17»
fonts of all wisdom»
So, a couple of things. First, thanks to a pressing deadline and my amazing
procrastination powers, I now understand FontConfig. Did you know that if you
really want to have the 7x14 Misc-Fixed bitmapped font for your
gnome-terminal, you should specify "Fixed 10.5" in the profile setting? Well,
now you do.
Secondly, Robin's posted a great
update on the Kate Adie story below,
clarifying matters a little (basically, Adie won't swear to having had those
words spoken to her by the US military). It's amazing how many ongoing
discussions online I now hear end with "well, why doesn't one of you just
email [controversial person] and find out what they think?". And you do, and
they say, and it's done.
Thirdly, Robin published his update before I published my last entry,
thanks to something getting stuck between my dev server and my live server, so
it looked like I was ignoring it. I shall try and fix that. Sorry.
Fourthly, I appear to think "a couple" means four.
2003-03-11»
kate adie reports on the war media. war media doomed»
When I first came to Silicon Valley, I joked to people in back in the UK
that I wanted to be the Kate
Adie of the upcoming dotcom collapse. It was a nice funny shorthand to
explain less what I was doing, and more what I thought would happen to the
Valley in the next few years. Adie is famously the reporter who the BBC used
to send into the midst of any major disaster, all flack-jacket and pearls,
from the Iranian embassy siege to Lockerbie to Tiananmen square. She's more
than an icon of war reporting in the UK. She's the fifth horsemen of the
apocalypse. When Kate turns up, you know you're in trouble.
So when she
starts talking about a senior officer in the Pentagon telling he that all
TV uplinks from journalists will be fired upon, and that the American forces
are asking the press who go with them whether "they have feelings against the
war" before they let them tag along, and that she is "enormously pessimistic
of the chance of a decent on-the-spot reporting, as the war occurs.", I sat up
and listened.
Adie says "You will get it later." I hope so. I hope someone watches
it.
(from robin @
ambiguous)
