His Deeds Are Dust

Kindle Previewer is a great time saver for checking formatting, and I’m very pleased that it runs under Wine, as I’m currently running Fedora 16 (Verne).

However, this morning when I ran it, it auto-updated to the latest version, and that crashes. Auto updating is bad enough when you know you have a set of software that works exactly as you like, but updating to a version that won’t run is just bloody rude.

I bet that there’s a cute SELinux trick that could be used to stop Kindle Previewer having network access, but a simple stop-gap is to reinstall the old version, go to the directory where you installed it, and prevent autoupdate.jar from being used. In my case, that’s these two lines:

 $ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/kindle\ previewer
 $ chmod 0 autoupdate.jar

Kindle Previewer now moans that it can’t access that jar file when it runs (duh), but pressing “OK” allows the rest of it to run just fine. I’ll investigate more when I decide I want to see how things look on the Kindle Fire, and that’s not going to be until they’re available in the UK.

My first upload to the reborn Open Font Library was Segment14, and it failed badly as a web font in Firefox 3.6.17 on Fedora, not displaying at all.

Christopher Adams confirmed that it worked on the WebKit-based browsers Safari and Midori, and it works on my HTC Desire.

After some minor, unrelated, cleanups, FontForge gave both the SFD and OTF files a clean bill of health, but it still wasn’t working in Firefox, so I took a deeper look and found that Mozilla had added the OTS font sanitizing library to Firefox from version 3.6.13, back in December 2010.

OTS is mainly designed to be added as a font condom for OpenType-consuming applications, as Firefox apply it, but it also has a standalone checker called ot-serialize. OTS isn’t packaged in Fedora yet, so I collected it from upstream and ran it over my font, with these results:

ERROR at /home/paul/projects/ots/ots-read-only/src/cff.cc:377 (bool::ParsePrivateDictData(const uint8_t*, size_t, size_t, size_t, ::DICT_DATA_TYPE, ots::OpenTypeCFF*))

Ugly. Still, it’s a “yes/no” tool, so I’m prepared to do a little hunting through the source to find out exactly why it hates me.

The answer is that my FontForge source had a definition of BlueValues in the Type 1 Private dictionary. I don’t remember how it got there, because it is optional, but I had put one in, and I had defined it as an empty array. OTS decided that, if arrays exist in the Private dictionary, they must not be empty. With a quick snip, my font works again.

I’ll certainly be adding OTS to my fonty toolchain, and it strikes me that this would be a useful tool for packaging and using in font reviews. You wouldn’t want to fail a review because of it, but it would certainly help to know whether a font will fail on the Web, which must be a large part of users’ expectations now.

I have a Samsung X120 notebook. Commiserate with me, please, for ever since F13′s kernel went from 2.6.33 to 2.6.34, I’ve been without ACPI. Anything other than acpi=off in the boot settings produced a giant stack trace that scrolled off the tiny screen so fast and so early in the boot that only videoing the screen would have enabled me to transcribe it. Even boot_delay didn’t work, because that won’t delay every line of output when the kernel is curling up in a corner and dying.

It’s a bug in the Samsung BIOS no doubt, and it has an upstream kernel report, but the bisect points to a sane commit that’s good for everyone else.

Running without ACPI isn’t a realistic option on a laptop. I wouldn’t know when to plug it back into the mains, and shutting down requires rather more persuasion than should be necessary, so last night it was time to patch the kernel.

Fedora Wiki to the rescue. I followed the instructions on building a custom kernel to the letter, and eleven hours later, I had a functioning laptop. I’ll break that down, lest you think me hard of understanding: five minutes to read the page, 20 minutes to grab the kernel src.rpm and make the appropriate patch, and 10 hours and 35 minutes to compile the entire thing on the laptop. I went to bed for the last bit, after ensuring that the mains was plugged in and on so that my laptop wouldn’t do the same.

So, to everyone who has had a hand in that page on the wiki, thank you.