Archive for December 2007
Wikipedia’s logo
has several errors.
Here’s the image:
and although I had seen it thousands of times, I hadn’t really noticed it until I saw it for a moment in Lessig’s corruption video. The errors in the Devanagari and Kannada scripts are immediately obvious; the New York Times ran an article about the error (they knew of only the Devanagari and a Japanese error).
Apparently, the original author has lost his source files, and no one knows how to fix it (seriously), so they have been either simply giving up, or using the ingenious argument that the logo is appropriate, as the existence of errors is characteristic of Wikipedia.
Edit [2010-05-13]: With the new Wikipedia logo, the errors are finally fixed, after seven years.
Goodbye Adium: Pidgin on Mac OS X… with native GTK!
So you’re on Mac OS X, and want to use Pidgin on it.
First: Why not use Adium? Adium is a Free multi-protocol IM client for Mac OS X that uses libpurple, the IM library that was developed as part of Pidgin. It has several popular features such as message styles, and uses the Cocoa API native to Mac OS X, and all round looks pretty. Being a native Cocoa application, it is more well-integrated with the Mac desktop than a GTK-using application like Pidgin can ever be.
On the other hand, if you, like me, have tried Adium and have reasons for finding it unusable, then it is possible to install Pidgin on OS X too. There are two ways of doing this:
[Edit: Note that this post is from 2007. Probably a lot has changed since then.]
- Install Pidgin to run inside X11. Any default distribution of Pidgin should build fine on this, as long as you have all the dependencies installed. However, using an X11 app on OS X is really like entering another universe entirely… it’s like having two entirely disjoint OSes that just happen to run simultaneously. It is cumbersome, and I would not recommend it unless you are already doing much of your work inside X11 for some reason.
- Install Pidgin to run on the Mac desktop directly (without X11), using native GTK+ for Mac OS X and some minor modifications to Pidgin. This is very simple to do and requires only one step, described below.
Instructions:
Timing
The Wikipedia article is not very good; this reference says it can’t be taught, only imitated, and this is an excellent article.
Hindi history
I had a vague idea, but wasn’t aware of the extent:
Wikipedia has an article (version I read); it freely injects opinion into the page and is amusing to read.
Ramachandra Guha’s historical summary from The Hindu
Articles like this are alive and well, I see…
Bitching about science
For those who haven’t noticed:
“Science”, XKCD #54 and PHD #941 are in direct disagreement.
The point about the COBE mission, explained by Randall Munroe, is that it gave an amazing fit between theory and data.
And I remember something about the theory itself being somewhat normalized against the data… or was it? I can’t find it now…
But this (admittedly impressive) coincidence is all they have to go on.
Much of “science” isn’t really.
