Warning Signs for Tomorrow is a collection of warning signs for tomorrow. Amusing and potentially usefulones (for me; your mileage may vary) include 'lack of internet connectivity','ubiquitous surveillance', and 'motivation hazard'.

(From James Nicoll .)

Imagine for a moment that you have an almost arbitrary string(no nulls, newlines, or other funky control characters) thatyou want to quote so that it passes through the Bourne shellintact. How do you do it?

The Bourne shell offers you two quoting schemes, strings insingle quotes and strings in double quotes.

Strings in double quotes need special characters escaped withbackslashes. There are five of them (quick, do you know them all?), orsix in some situations in some versions of the

In a comment on a recent entry , Ryan asked me howstable my 64-bit Linux installs have been. The answer is kind ofcomplicated, but the quick summary is that I am happy with themachines and they're stable.

Currently and in the recent past, I have dealt with three AMD 64-bitmachines, two using ASUS M2N4-SLI motherboards, and one with a TyanTomcat K8E S2865ANRF, and all with 2GB of

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