Firefox 3 was having some font rendering issues on my machine. Certain web sites were displaying a wierd bold looking font in place of the default font described in the CSS. See this screenshot. After doing some searching around the internet I found out the issue.

Early in the year I had installed Adobe Type Manager and added a bunch of Helvetica Postscript Type-1 fonts. These were for some reason being used as Firefox’s default font. Removing them from the system fixed the issue.

Larry O’Brien over at knowing.net has a great series called 15 Exercises to Know a Programming Language, It’s an older article but after going through parts 1-3, theres really nothing in there that changes often enough to warrant any kind of an update.

• Part 1 gets you used to using some of the more basic features of a language including, calculations, the standard libraries, file i/o, GUI development, and debugging.
• Part 2 introduces some more advanced data structures, object oriented programming, idioms, memory issues, design patterns, and concurrency.
• Part 3 presents web interaction, libraries, encryption, and databases.

There’s obviously a lot to learn when starting to cover a new language. Larry’s posted some great ideas for getting used to a new language, and once you accomplish all these, you go from playing with the language to knowing the language.

Is it possible to make it so that I laptop running synaptic drivers can make it so that you can scroll pages with two fingers on the pad?

Update: Thanks to okke in the comments, all you have to do is add a line to your xorg.conf file to enable 2 finger scrolling. There’s a wiki entry on the Gentoo Wiki about doing so.

After using Drupal for about 6 months now I felt it was time to move on to something a little easier to use. Welcome wordpress, its popularity is unrivaled. I’ll be testing this out over the next few weeks, to see if this is what I am searching for.