Some TrueType fonts look significantly worse on some Linux distributionsthan on Microsoft Windows or MacOS. This is due to the usual reasonthat things suck on Linux: patents. TrueTypefonts can have special hints for looking good at low resolution, butusing those hints is apparently covered by some Apple patents in (some)countries with software patents.

(For the gory details, see here .)

Pretty much everyone on Linux uses the FreeType library to renderTrueType fonts. FreeType has implementations of the patented stuff,but Fedora Core

In the spirit of earlier heroic failures , I justsaw someone attempt to put an entire POST form in the actual HTTPrequest. No, really. The incoming request looked something like this:

login=%5Burl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.nextlevelnews.com%2F [.. elided..] %2F70.html%0D%0A+&view=login&page=blog%2Flinks%2FBestToolPOST/~cks/

The more I do stuff on my x86_64 Fedora Core 5 machine, the more Icome to understand that people must not have actually tried to use thisstuff. The latest adventure was trying to build an i386 RPM.

The best tool for this is mock , a tool forrebuilding RPMs in distribution environments, like (in theory) 'FedoraCore 5 for i386'. In practice, it needs some clubbing. The mainproblem is that when mock sets up

Here's wcat , which is short for 'web page cat':

#!/bin/shexec wget -q -O - "$@"

(At some point I may need to add ' -e robots=off ' to this, but Ihaven't needed it yet.)

I have a flaw when it comes to my little scripts :often, I think that sometime is too small and trivial to botherturning into a script, so I don't for ages. And