Yeah, so, I just released some Windows software.

My program for converting and splitting Mac OS X .dfont files into TTF files, DfontSplitter has been a pretty popular route in to my website for some time now.

While the original program is written for OS X, it became apparent from my website statistics that many people who needed to convert .dfont to .ttf were Windows users.

So, today, I have released DfontSplitter for Windows, version 0.1. This program is, again, simply a wrapper script for fondu, which does the real work. It has a completely unique GUI, custom built for the Windows platform.

There is also a brand new project page for DfontSplitter, with links to both the Mac and Windows versions of the software and the documentation too.

Hopefully this can serve the need of Windows users who need to convert those filetypes, and don’t want expensive or spyware-ridden software. Enjoy!

A quick footnote – this is a bit of a licensing quagmire. There are lots of different licenses that apply to different bits of DfontSplitter for Windows, including GPL 3.0, GPL 2.0, BSD and Creative Commons. That’s all explained on the project page, and in further depth in readme and licence files in the downloads.

Oh and it’s also slightly ugly, in terms of how it interacts with fondu. But it works. 🙂

I’m not usually that much of a gamer. Apart from a brief stint playing World of Warcraft, which, incidentally wasn’t really for me, I generally don’t have (or make) the time to play lots of games.

That wasn’t always the case. Back when I was at school, I used to be a lot more of a gamer than I am now, and one of the games that I grew up playing was the Civilization series.

I wasn’t ever particularly skilled at it – mostly sticking to the lower difficutly levels and playing it more for fun than seriously, but I enjoyed playing the turn-based strategy game.

I lost interest in it, but recently went out and purchased Civilization IV thanks to a random urge to come back to the series (playing it on my games-only Windows installation which dual boots with Kubuntu on my desktop PC).

I’m really enjoying it. Again, I am nowhere near skilled, but Civ IV seems to get it right and go back to the series’ roots while introducing new elements, in a way which for me wasn’t done so well in III.

If, like me, you used to play the Civs, but sort of grew away from it, I would definitely recommend giving Civ IV a try (there’s a 100-turn playable demo for the Windows platform).

If you haven’t played the series before, you could very well enjoy it, but beware there is somewhat of a learning curve to get into the mindset of the Civ player. The lowest difficulty levels are a lot easier than in III, though, so I’d imagine it would be much less challenging to pick up and play than it used to be.

I don’t want to be unnecessarily Microsoft bashing here, but take a look at these two identical web searches on Google and Live Search:

First, Google (click to enlarge).

Now the same search on Windows Live Search (or whatever it’s called now):

Notice that in the Windows Live Search one, there is absolutely no mention of free software as in the freedom type. Not even a scrap of evidence that the FSF exist.

Now, either Windows Live Search is worse than I originally thought, or there’s some kind of conspiracy thing going on here. I hope for Microsoft’s sake it’s the former.

If it were the latter, I would be very worried.

It’s not Google being quirky either, Yahoo also list the FSF as the top result for the same query.

Do the searches yourself – on Live Search, Google and Yahoo.

UPDATE: turns out this only happens when Live Search is set to weight UK results (like when you come from a UK-based IP address through Live.com). More info.

You’ve probably seen this already, but if not, I just have to share this gem:

Man, I wish Windows still cost only $99. In case you were wondering, this ad is real.

This OSNews article.

Ballmer:

“The deal that we announced at the end of last year with Novell I consider to be very important. It demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property even in the Open Source world. I would not anticipate that we make a huge additional revenue stream from our Novell deal, but I do think it clearly establishes that Open Source is not free and Open Source will have to respect intellectual property rights of others just as any other competitor will.”

Clearly, Microsoft are openly admitting here that they are unable to sell Microsoft products on their own merits, and so they have to bully people into thinking that choosing open source solutions is legally unsafe by firing random bursts of intellectual property violation bravado.

Here’s a challenge for you, Steve. Show me some infringing code. It’s all out there, in the open. Show me some infringing code and we’ll collectively sort it out.

Except that’s not the point. MS don’t want to actually start a patent war – I guess they know full well they have infringed more than a few of other people’s patents, so they don’t want to open a can of worms.

The game is FUD. Fear, uncertainty, doubt. Here’s how it goes.

• Some open source solutions are better and cheaper than MS ones. Lots of people start investigating them to use instead of MS solutions.
• MS notices this and invents some wonderful reason why open source is ‘unsafe’ legally.
• MS spread the idea that “open source is unsafe”.
• The people that were investigating the open source products hear MS’s idea, believe it, and go “we don’t want trouble with MS lawyers, we better not choose the open source product”.
• These people go on to buy MS products.
• MS get money and retain market share.

I don’t think they can play that game forever. At some point, they’re going to have to change their strategy.

It’s just a shame they have to resort to such childish methods to sell their products. Imagine what they could do if they put all their time, effort and money into making great products instead of bullying the world into rebuying their stuff.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Firefox has taken off on home computers as the second most popular browser, and it’s looking very promising for open source, Mozilla and, more widely, non-MS software.

In fact, it supposedly has around an 11% global market share now, which is great news.

The next thing that needs to be tackled, however, is getting Firefox into the enterprise sector, and getting more and more businesses to roll it out. And before that can happen, Firefox needs:

• An MSI installer for Windows, to make it easy for Windows administrators to roll it out across all desktops instead of running exes manually on each workstation.
• Integration with Microsoft Active Directory, and respect for AD policies, like IE has now. It’s far too much to configure hundreds of installations of Firefox manually. Many corporate environments utilise proxy servers and other network setups, and there needs to be a way to get this configured centrally via AD or similar and rolled out to all FF installations.

If this happens, sysadmins are much more likely to choose Firefox for security reasons, and if it becomes as easy to manage remotely as IE is now, Firefox 3.0 will hopefully be a winner.

I’m not saying the personal sector isn’t important though – we still need to keep pushing Firefox to the average PC user and marketing it.

The success of Firefox could also prove vital for FOSS becoming mainstream in the future. If people use Firefox and have a good experience with it, they then associate open source with good user experience and being a good product. If that happens, we’re much more likely to see FOSS becoming more mainstream, which is good. Best of all, it keeps the traditional software companies on their toes and making good, well-priced products. 🙂

I got IE3 under Windows 95 to display my site. But I didn’t stop there.

After a quick trip around the web to find a copy of IE 5.5 SP2 (the last IE for Windows 95), I manage to grab it and get it installed on Windows 95. Not only does this modernise the browser a touch, but it also installs various DLLs we’ll need to run a much better browser. 🙂

Thumbnails are clickable to enlarge, by the way.

Now we have IE 5.5, albeit at a rather bad 16 colours (not 16-bit colour, 16 different colours).

After an install of VMware Tools, we have the drivers to ramp up the colour depth to a respectable 65,536 different colours (that’s 16-bit colour).

A quick run of Windows Update to apply some security updates from, hmmm, looks like 1999. 😀

And finally, we install Firefox 1.5.0.9 (it crashes on first run, but a reboot and relaunch and it works perfectly). Finally, a decent browser.

Unfortunately, Firefox 2.0.x apparently doesn’t want to work with Windows 95 anymore.

Great fun – and I couldn’t have done it without this guide.

Oh the joys of VMware and a copy of Windows 95. The picture says it all.

So, Vista hit the shelves yesterday. Now, anyone that knows me even a little bit will know that I sometimes indulge in a little healthy Microsoft bashing now and then, but today I’m going to try and be balanced.

I could rant on and on about how Vista is good, and at the same time how it’s bad, but for now I’m just going to share with you three of the things I like and three things I don’t like about Microsoft’s new release. Bear in mind that the last version I used was Release Candidate 1 and not the final version, so some of what I say might be out-of-date or based on the pre-release version.

» Read the rest of this post…

FireBug is an awesome Firefox extension for web developers.

The FireBug developers have just put out a 1.0 release and it includes loads of cool features. There’s one that I just have to share, though, and it is awesome.

If you use inspect to select an element on the page, you can then double-click on bits of the CSS in the right hand pane, and get this, edit them in real time! That means you can literally play around with how a website looks in real time and it’s really useful when you want to make a CSS tweak to something. You just use FireBug to preview it in real time and adjust your edits to make it just right, then you can tweak the actual file. No page reloading needed (or worse Ctrl-F5 to clear the cache).

Download and install it from the official Mozilla add-ons page.