Fonts again 
I am in font hell since my screen res changed from 95 to 101 DPI. On my box there are four separate font rendering systems:
- "Classic" X fonts, those which would use XFS if I was running XFS. These are ancient X apps like xterm, etc.
- KDE, which uses Xft.
- Mozilla / Firefox
- OpenOffice

All these use four different DPI and antialiasing settings:
- No antialiasing at all in the case of classic bitmapped X fonts
- KDE allows you to control the Xft antialiasing setting via Control Center abd DPI via /etc/X11/Xresources
- Mozilla does its own thing, which looks like crap.
- Openoffice does its own thing, which looks even crappier.

Setting "Xft.dpi: 100" in Xresources helped the most. At 96 (the old default DPI) and 101 (as the video driver calculatea the DPI) some kind of rounding error caused all kinds of problem with kerning, 0's looking like O's, etc. I think I've just about straightened it out.

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New Monitor, Old Eyes, Linux Fonts 
The venerable 1280x1024 flat panel I've had for 11 years finally died on Sunday night so I had to run out to Best Buy and settle for what they had in stock. I ended up with an LG "Flatiron" E2241 (21.5", 1900x1080, 100dpi) for now (the IPS panels were way too expensive), which is your basic consumer model. It's still a TN panel, and the gamma is quite nonlinear, so my photos look like poo, but it's fine for office use.

The increase from 95 to 100 dpi makes quite a difference (I probably should have bought the 23-inch model; same price). Either:

- Linux fonts still suck
- My eyes are getting old

I vote for a combination theory - Linux fonts are developed by young whippersnappers with perfect vision. We need more geezers designing fonts.

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Funniest Slashdot comment ever, regarding announcement of Debian release of Hurd:  
BSD userland on top of GNU Hurd.

"What the hell do you call an OS like that?"

"I'll call it 'The Aristocrats'"

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Good GNUPLOT Intro 
The Gnuplot docs are not very well organized for beginners (hey, I know what a sine wave looks like. What if a have a big file of disorganized, real-world data, with missing data points?) Here's a good guide:

http://t16web.lanl.gov/Kawano/gnuplot/index-e.html

I'm still trying to figure out how to load only lines N through M of a data file..... "tail" will have to do for now.

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Launching Ganglia Daemons at Mac OSX Bootup 
The daemon launch process at http://www.deanspot.org/comment/reply/261 says "could use some help here", so here's how I did it:

I never got gmond and gmetad to start under launchctl as background daemons at boot, gmetad would die after a while and gmond would go nuts and respawn over and over until the machine was unusable. Running in the foreground works, this is how to set it up:

OSX 10.6.7, ganglia built in /opt/local from sources, rest of dependencies from Ports, daemons are in /opt/local/sbin, using OSX's Apache and PHP:

- Create two files in /Library/LaunchDaemons:

org.ganglia.gmetad.plist:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd" >
<plist version='1.0'>
<dict>
<key>Label</key><string>org.ganglia.gmetad</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/opt/local/sbin/gmetad</string>
<string>-d</string>
<string>1</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

org.ganglia.gmond.plist

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd" >
<plist version='1.0'>
<dict>
<key>Label</key><string>org.ganglia.gmond</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/opt/local/sbin/gmond</string>
<string>-d</string>
<string>1</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

- Incorporate them into launchctl's config:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.ganglia.gmond.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.ganglia.gmetad.plist

- Reboot to test. You should see

54 - org.ganglia.gmond
55 - org.ganglia.gmetad

in the output of "sudo launchctl list", the first column is the PID which you will see in the output of ps. Output goes into the system log.



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