GNOME 2.2 includes nifty new font technology, I see; including ‘drag into ~/.fonts’ font installation, at last, thanks to Keith Packard. I especially like this:
Jim Gettys and the GNOME Foundation Board worked with Bitstream, Inc. to arrange the donation of the Vera font family to the Free Software community.
Here’s what Vera looks like; very nice. Finally, some decent free fonts — kudos to Bitstream.
And I see subpixel smoothing is now right in there, in the basic font preferences. Excellent news!
But where TF is the Metacity documentation? Maybe there’s none, in the tradition set down over generations of GNOME hacks^Wapplications. (Pet peeve: every command in the default PATH should have a manual page IMO.)
The ‘documentation’ and ‘home page’ links I can find all lead to a directory of tarballs. Great. The best result Google can find, after the aforementioned tarballs, is a blog posting complaining about Metacity. Hmm — scary — I really don’t like the implication that the only way to do my own key-binding prefs, is to run a batch of 15 gconftool commands every time I log in… ah shaggit, I’ll use sawfish ;)
(PS: yes, I’m still on GNOME 1. That’s what happens when you’re stuck on the wrong end of dial-up.)
Crypto: The Crypto Gardening Guide and Planting Tips by Peter Gutmann. Excellent advice on how crypto designers should design protocols so that they can actually get implemented. Also, as a corollary; good tips on common crypto gotchas for implementors to watch out for. Some bonus funnies, too:
Note: PGP adopts each and every bleeding-edge technology that turns up, so it doesn’t figure in the above timeline. Looking at this the other way, if you want your design adopted quickly, present it as the solution for an attack on PGP.
A little bit more introduction on some of the items would be worthwhile though. I don’t have a clue what OAEP is for example ;)