I too developed a site just for my personal use and enjoyment. I hand crafted the css and tailored the design using the traditional core fonts of Georgia and Times New Roman. My desktop of choice is KDE using each of Firefox, Opera and Konqueror (and Lynx for text veiw) to validate the site design and layout. I do have windows boxes available, but with the maturity of virtualization (vmware or virtualbox), I rarely boot into windows at all.

To my great dismay, after spending a great deal of time and considering the site layout complete, I happened to be using vista and looked at my site — it looked like crap in vista.

WTF??

Microsoft Vista can’t even render Microsoft fonts correctly?? The irony is thick and the utter incompetence inexcuseable. So I commend your site and echo your sentiments exactly “So… fuck it. If this site looks a bit sub-standard on Windows, just because I happened to want to use, oh, a serif font, that’s too bad.”

And… I have the cure… Screw windows and load Linux (I’d recommend openSuSE for beginners or Arch Linux for the more daring) or buy a Mac. There you have it… Problem Solved!

I can indeed create a folder in my root directory, but do I name it or ?

How do I actually get these html code things in there? Do I copy and paste from your webpage into a word program, or…?
of us who use iWeb EXACTLY because we don’t have html-wired brains?

Thanks!

That said, even with ClearType turned on, it’s definite still far from acceptable…

Things are definitely at a virtually unparalleled low. I live in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, which is an inner-ring Detroit suburb, and we’re feeling the hurt badly. Detroit has an unbelievably extensive dependence on the American automotive industry. Obviously, things for the U.S. automotive companies have not been good, and the hurt has been abroad. We have the highest unemployment rate of any state in the US. The only area that has eclipsed use in unemployment are Hurricane Katrina disaster zones.

Things are different in Toronto, I’m sure, but not as different as they may seem. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Montréal, Scotiabank, and Toronto-Dominion are all run out of Toronto. Toronto has a large dependence on the finance industry, and it’s hard to avoid the presence of investment in these banks by U.S. companies, what with the two economies being so closely tied. It’s no wonder the US financial crisis is affecting Canada so badly.

However, I don’t think it’s quite time to get out the chicken bones. There’s still hope that something can be done, although I can’t imagine how to wade through the political soup of dilettantes, inept cowards, and competing interests that can’t come to a conclusion because they’re too busy bickering about pedantic garbage to move something through that will help solidify the world economy.

I personally, I couldn’t care less for having a phone with a bunch of whiz-bang features like a web browser and a bunch of pointless applications (See: I Am Rich) for download, so events like these don’t mean much to me. But they also give Apple’s events all around less significance. What’s exciting is the imminence of new Apple computer products, or expansion into new technological sectors.

What I think I’m trying to say is that the iPod is old and quite frankly boring. It’s really difficult to get excited over the fifteenth re-hash of the same basic product idea. It’s easy to get excited about a new Apple computer, like the MacBook Air (despite it being a bit of a disappointment) since Apple only really sells six different computers.

permissions differ on “private/var/log/secure.log”, should be -rw——- , they are -rw-r—– .
Permissions differ on “System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.usbmuxd.plist”, should be -rw-r–r– , they are -rwxr-xr-x .
Group differs on “private/etc/cups”, should be 0, group is 26.

Anyway, when I took this beast to the Genius Bar initially, I was told all my troubles that I was having had to do with the fact that I had about 4GB of free space, which would be fine except for the fact that I am running File Vault. I was urged to get an external drive, clear out the clutter and turn off the program. Not so simple, but I’ll not get into that. The reason I mention this, is that I suspect this is the same kind of issue. It’s much lesser version of the same weirdness I had before my adventures in external hard drives and computer illiteracy… So, checking through everything, my actual mp3’s are all fine, it’s just the communication between iTunes and my hard drive that is getting muddled (small miracles)… And it was just playing with the “Genius” option to see if iTunes could really make cohesive playlists. Before crashing, I learned that it isn’t that amazing but still better than random. Oh yes, and upgrading QuickTime (but that might have just been a coincidence).

Backups are good and I do one every week or so… There is very little that gets added on in between time that is so valuable to me… Now, if I had as massive an mp3, video and photo collection as you, it might be a different story! Also, I am happy to see that you are still alive and thanks for your input! I hope all is well in your wasteland!

In a slightly related theme, a song that reminded me of you just popped up on iTunes. I guess that, not only is iTunes 8 very snappy, it has done some kind of freaky mind meld and is capable of generating playlists accordingly!

For what it’s worth, I also have my iTunes library on an external drive, with approximately 15,000 music tracks, and around 300 or so video files. More precisely, the media files are on an external drive on a server in my closet, and my main workstation mounts that drive over the network (so it’s sort of external, once removed I guess). However, my iTunes library files are on the workstation’s hard drive, and that’s what stores all the pointers to the actual media files. I’m going to guess that when iTunes crashed on you, the library files are what got messed up. And yeah – it’d be a royal pain to figure out what’s missing (along with losing various meta data about the media such as number of times played, ratings, etc.)

Unless you have the library files backed up, there’s not much you can do about recovering it short of manually fixing up the problems. That said, it really shouldn’t have happened in the first place – in fact, I can’t remember the last time iTunes crashed on me. Maybe your disk drive needs some structural repair? Try running ‘Disk Utility’ in the ‘Applications->Utilities’ folder. Select ‘Verify Disk’ on your internal hard drive, then run ‘Repair Permissions’ and see if that helps things. If you get some weird messages, it’s best to make an appointment with a ‘Genius’ at the Apple Store and have them take a look at your machine.

And I won’t mention anything about making regular backups. Ooops. I just did… If it makes you feel any better, take a gander at my tale of “I don’t need no stinking backups” here.

Any rate, I figure that I am not alone in the world and if this is happening to me, it is likely happening to others… Possibly yourself (cue ominous music here).

I’ve always wondered why the font rendering was so ugly with Windows. I remember reading a few years ago some information about the differences in font rendering (I think around the time that Microsoft introduced ClearType), but I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, as I rarely end up in front of a Windows machine (and when I do, I’m usually overwhelmed by all the unfamiliar, shiny buttons and controls to notice the font rendering much). Earlier incarnations of this website used sans-serif fonts (like the venerable Arial), which render reasonably OK on Windows. I only really noticed how terrible it was with this version of the website, now that I dared to use serif fonts. How foolish of me…

Your summary of the technology differences makes a great deal of sense, and it also explains why fonts always seem to need to diet when seen on Windows. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s rendering technology improves (or does not improve) as higher resolution displays become more common.

I am rather liking WordPress – and the price certainly can’t be beat. It’s definitely not a full-blown CMS (for example, media handling is rather limited), and certainly shows it’s blogging heritage, but I really like it’s “hackability”. Some of the plugins are quite amazing. And it does seem like I could bolt pretty much anything on it. My next challenge is to figure out how to make a decent photo gallery – so far, I’m not crazy about any of the gallery plugins for WordPress.

And, as you can see, there’s still a lot of messing about I need to do with the CSS…

It all boils down to an age old difference in philosophy between Mac OS X and Windows when it comes to font-rendering. Mac OS X uses softer, anti-aliased fonts that attempt to preserve the typeface as it was intended to be seen by the designer at the cost of some blurriness here and there. Windows tries its damndest to make the characters line up by whole-pixels with the pixel-grid to preserve clarity. This looks so awful on LCD displays (because of the more visible dot matrix) that ClearType was almost a necessity with Windows XP to force sub-pixel anti-aliasing on Windows displays. Unfortunately for designers, ClearType is only turned on by default in Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista. Even with ClearType, the view is not spectacular. It’s not using Apple’s sub-pixel rendering style, it’s still hammering characters into the pixel grid, and then anti-aliasing, which usually has the effect of adding weight to the font. The end result is even more disparity between what you see on your screen and what you see on paper. Microsoft’s method aims to improve readability on-screen and Apple’s method attempts to normalize the appearance of the font across all types of media.

With resolution independent vector-based GUIs on modern operating systems, Microsoft’s font-hinting will be come obsolete as the average DPI of consumer displays rises. In the mean time, we’re stuck with crapola font rendering for the majority of our Windows users.