Jonas discovered that, if you write a comment here with three links, you’ll be taken to a 403 page without explanation. I haven’t found the configuration setting that does this.
Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life came back to life in July, after 15 months dormant. That doesn’t happen every day!
toward a graceful imitation of the crude
I’ve long had an idea to design “outline” typefaces which, at appropriate low resolution, would mimic certain bitmap fonts that have sentimental resonance.
The orange discs are the original dots, of course. The blue arcs are least-squares fits (linear, quadratic) to subranges of the dots. The arcs are blended with a weighting function that favors longer arcs, as well as the middle of each arc. Finally, the stroke is thickened by adding ±i/2 to the parametric variable.
This is the first version in which the stroke-ends are neither brutally stiff nor (in some cases) grotesquely exuberant. I don’t know yet whether the lumpiness, here and there, reflects a flaw an opportunity to improve the blending function or a limitation of the cubic splines used to simplify the final curve.
(I previously made a TrueType version of Apple’s “Los Angeles” font, by a much more ad hoc approach.)
The local Humane Society has such a hard time placing black cats that it offers a deep discount on the adoption fee.
yet another flavor of referral spam
In September, some clown created “user profiles” on thousands of sites in the names jennyl8221, jamessylar33, alberty788, melvinwong522, jinnlost5, rickdcurry82, jeffsmith7223, davemartial223. How do I know this? My HTTP log shows two thousand hits (most of them from customers of xninet.com and ubiquityservers.com) giving those “user profiles” as referring pages.
Whom do they think they’re fooling?