Ubuntu - smooth fonts (continued)

I wrote this yesterday.

And today I've removed Arial font from my system (you can type fonts:/// in Nautilus and delete appropriate files) and, in my opinion, Google and Gmail look now even better than yesterday, because Firefox uses sans-serif instead of Arial.

Ubuntu - smooth fonts

My OS is Ubuntu and the browser of my choice is Firefox. Some WWW developers seem to be unaware of the fact that not everyone in the world runs Windows and specify only fonts like Verdana, Tahoma, Helvetica or Arial in the CSS files. On my machine such webpages (example) were rendered with a font that looks like Times New Roman and looked really awful.

To solve this problem I installed msttcorefonts package. This solved one problem... And created another one. Google and Gmail started to look worse than they did before.

After some searching I found this thread and enabled autohinting in /etc/fonts/local.conf file. Both Google and Gmail started to look good again. And what's more all fonts on the system seem smoother and clearer.

Autohinting disabled
Autohinting enabled

I made amaroK show ID3v2 tags! Finally

I have been using amaroK during the last few months and I think it is an excellent MP3 player (on the other hand, I like foobar2000, too). However, throughout all this time I have struggled with one problem - amaroK kept trimming long song titles, band names, etc (for example, instead of Anyone Can Play Radiohead: A Tribute To Radiohead it showed only Anyone Can Play Radiohead: A T).

Today I have found this and the problem is gone. I've pasted an appropriate piece of amaroK's FAQ below:

amaroK is not using the tags I know are in my files!

If Konqueror or other apps are displaying different Title, Artist, Album or Genre information than amaroK is picking up when it creates your collection, it may be reading the older ID3v1 format tags rather than the newer ID3v2 tags. This can be due to your Encodings setting:

• Go to Settings, Configure amaroK, and then find the Encodings section of the Settings panel. Unclick all checkboxes to "Do not decode the following as latin1".
• Rescan your collection to pick up the ID3v2 tags.

Reflections on installing MSDE

So you've been working with SQL Server for almost two years now?
And you've installed SQL Server a few dozens of times?
And you've passed 70-728 with more than 900 points?

Believe or not, but you still may encounter some problems while installing MSDE. Firstly, there is no wizard; you need to execute setup.exe with appropriate parameters from command-line. And secondly, if you install MSDE using only SAPWD and INSTANCENAME parameters, it will later run in Windows Authentication mode, despite the fact that you have to provide an sa password.

If I had found this article yesterday, it would have saved me a lot of headaches. I didn't, so I had to work it out all by myself. I learned a lot.