tkh’s blog

Mozilla and Unicode

When I see a Japanese webpage which uses Unicode (UTF-8) with Mozilla, the ugly Japanese font is used even if I specifically set the Japanese fonts for Unicode charset in the Mozilla preference panel. I encounter this problem only if I launch Mozilla with non-Japanese locale. In Japanese locale, Mozilla correctly chooses the fonts for Unicode charset from the preference settings.

Using gucharmap, I was able to pin point which font has this ugly Japanese characters. As you can see the screenshots of the gucharset windows below, FreeSans and FreeSerif fonts has fairly ugly Japanese fonts.

Surprisingly, FreeMono has a decent Japanese font. These Free fonts are included in the ttf-freefont debian package. As I don’t know how to specify the Unicode font, I simply removed the package. After that, I don’t see ugly Japanese fonts in Mozilla.

What I don’t understand is why Mozilla doesn’t pick the Unicode fonts from the preference settings in non-Japanese locale. I had specified the GTK font in .gtkrc-2.0, but no success.

Scrollbar

With the recent upgrade of Emacs in debian sid, xaw3d (3D version of the ugly Athena widget set) scrollbars are finally back. I really hate the original Athena widget because it’s not intuitive to operate widgets. For example, you have to use the middle mouse button to move a scrollbar and the left and the right button toscrolls up and down a scrollbar. This is incompatible with other GUI toolkits and very annoying. xaw3d fixes this so the look and feel is just like Motif widgets. For this reason, sometimes I’ve built a custom debian package so that Emacs uses Athena3D scrollbars. Now I don’t have to do it.

kernel

I’ve been running 2.6.4 kernel for about a month. It’s running great and I really like the new scheduler, but I still have some problems. First, when I connect my digital camera to the computer, two gtkam (gphoto2 GUI frontend) windows bring up. Second, the ini9100w SCSI driver is not supported in 2.6 kernels. The first one is not serious, but the second one is. I searched on the web and found that it’s one of the drivers that have to be ported to the 2.6 kernel interface. I also found that somebody did the porting, but it’s still not incorporated into the kernel tree. Until this driver is incorporated into the kernel, I’ll stick with the 2.4 kernels on the server machine.

mozilla

I have a long standing problem with mozilla. When I see a pdf document with acroread plugin, CPU is heavily loaded. I have no idea how to fix this.

automounter

After I installed 10.3.3 update, the behavior of the auto-mounter has been changed. When I mount an SMB volume, now Finder mounts a specific share and don’t mount all available ones. The mounted share is placed in the left pane in Finder and has an eject button. When I press the eject button, the share is immediately unmounted. This seems to be an obvious behavior, but until 10.3.3, sometimes I wasn’t able to unmount some shares especially if the machine is disconnected from network. This is a really good change.