About me

My name is Veeti Paananen, and this is my website. Read more about me here!

Mirror for Linux “sharp fonts” configuration

April 30, 2011 in Linux

The default font rendering in Linux distributions has always bothered me: so one of the first things I install on a new machine is the “Sharp fonts” configuration package to make the font rendering look more like Windows. However, I stumbled into a small problem when doing so today: the sharp fonts website domain seems to have expired.

Fortunately, I found a copy of the configuration files on one of my hard disks – download them here. Extract the files into /etc/fonts/ after installing the Microsoft TrueType fonts (ubuntu-restricted-extras, etc.), and log out to apply the changes. All done!

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setForeground() missing in Android 3.0 services

March 06, 2011 in Android, Java, Programming

While upgrading my application’s code to use the Android 3.0 SDK, I stumbled upon a small problem in my service code: the setForeground() function has been removed from Android 3.0 completely, making the compilation process fail. The function removal broke the compatibility methods I had copied straight from the Android documentation ages ago for backwards compatibility:

Note: The methods startForeground() and stopForeground() were introduced in Android 2.0 (API Level 5). In order to run your service in the foreground on older versions of the platform, you must use the previous setForeground() method—see the startForeground() documentation for information about how to provide backward compatibility.

(So in other words, if the user’s device has Android 2.x, the startForeground() function must be called. If the user’s device has 1.x, setForeground() should be called instead. setForeground() will not work on Android 2.x, and vice-versa).

Fortunately, this was an easy fix – the documentation has been updated with a new, more future-proof code sample for calling the right functions depending on the device’s Android version. In my case I had modified the old sample code to my liking, so I decided to add a small function to my service that will call the setForeground() method through reflection instead:

Problem solved!

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Announcing Simple Textile for WordPress

November 10, 2010 in PHP, Programming, WordPress

Simple Textile is a simple, easy-to-use WordPress plugin for processing posts with the Textile markup language. ST uses the latest 2.2 version of Textile, taken from the TextPattern source code, ensuring full compatibility with the latest versions of PHP.

One thing I have always hated in WordPress was the process of actually writing something: because of the default WYSIWYG editor, which functions like a word processor (but doesn’t work nearly as well). I prefer writing things in markup languages such as Markdown or Textile. And in order to solve this problem, I decided to write Simple Textile. Other plugins do exist, but when testing them, many did not function at all and others were buggy.

Using ST is simple: when writing a new post (or editing an old one), you will see something like this below the editor:

Simple Textile toggle in the editor

Simply tick the checkbox, and all default HTML filtering will be disabled for the entry, and the posts will be rendered through Textile instead. HTML can still be mixed with the Textile markup in case you want to add images or media, or to do other things that you can’t with Textile.

The source code of the plugin is available at GitHub, and feedback is welcome!

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Announcing Clipper 1.2

October 30, 2010 in Android

I’m excited to announce a new version of Clipper, version 1.2. Clipper is a free clipboard & snippet manager for Android, and is available on the Android Market.

In the last six months, Clipper has received almost 9000 downloads, and tens of users have sent me feedback and have helped me develop Clipper to what it is today. Version 1.2 is the direct result of this feedback – it’s a big overhaul of the whole application, and includes many features that have been requested in the past months.

Starting with 1.2, Clipper is also split into two versions: the free version, and the Plus version which (at the moment) costs 0.99 euros in the Android Market.

You can read more at the rojekti announcements blog. If you use Android, why not check it out from the Android Market?

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The world of desktop Linux

September 04, 2010 in Fedora, Linux

For a very long time I’ve been a user of Microsoft Windows – an operating system that needs no introduction. It’s not perfect, but it’s always worked great for me. But one day I decided to try something completely different: Linux.

Now, this wasn’t my first venture into Linux or anything – I administrate many servers running Linux and my netbook has probably seen every distribution in the world. In any case, after making some space on my hard disk, I decided to set up Arch Linux with the GNOME desktop environment (an Arch installation is bare-bones: there is no desktop environment or X server installed until you do it yourself). After I was done my computer was basically just like any other distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora: they all use GNOME by default.

And I really liked my new setup. After fighting with the graphics drivers for my ATI graphics card, everything ran pretty smoothly. My desktop’s aesthetics weren’t exactly on the level of Windows 7, but that did not concern me.

Of course, everything has problems. ATI drivers have never worked very well in Linux. OpenOffice isn’t really that great when compared to the latest versions of Microsoft Office. And of course, there aren’t many games for Linux – and WINE doesn’t really work that well with ATI’s drivers.

But I kept going. I used my Arch setup for months and even thought that I might never use Windows again.

One day in June I started thinking of trying out Fedora. Even though I was mostly satisfied with Arch Linux, the lack of support from proprietary apps (Adobe AIR, for example) and lack of software in the repositories started getting a bit annoying. In addition, I just thought that I’d feel more comfortable with something that comes with a desktop out of the box.

So I made more space on my hard disk. I ditched my old Windows install and backed up all files to another drive. I installed the latest version of Fedora – 13, and it was good. The biggest complaint I had was the yum package manager, which was slower than others like Arch’s pacman.

My desktop looked exactly the same as before: vanilla GNOME, with the exception of the Avant Window Navigator dock instead of the classic taskbar. And I used this setup for months.

Never say never

So I really liked desktop Linux and I wanted to stay with it. But the effects of the Kool-Aid started to wear off – things like the lack of some Windows applications started to annoy me. The rumors of Steam coming on Linux started to sound more and more unlikely. I started researching alternatives: what I liked the most in Linux was the *nix environment and the command line – could I get that in Windows?

There would always be Cygwin, but the lack of package management is a huge downside and it never felt right to me. So I got the idea of using a virtual machine – I installed Windows 7 and Debian squeeze in a tiny VM. I set it up so that I could SSH into it from Windows using PuTTY, and set up hard disk sharing from the host (Windows 7) to the VM.

And it seems to work pretty well. All my Ruby development happens inside a VM. Instead of using the Windows port of git, I use git through the virtual machine. Even all my SSH sessions go through the VM instead of using PuTTy directly – Xzibit would be proud!

I don’t think that I’ll be changing operating systems any time soon. But the logical next step would be OS X, right…?

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