A howl on the wind…

I’ve finally had enough of looking at Bitstream Vera, so I uninstalled it. I had previously merely changed the system default to Tahoma via the MS TTF core fonts, which helped immensely, but then today I stumbled upon the Try KDE page. For some reason, they have hard-coded their site to use Bitstream Vera. I suppose it makes KDE users feel at home.

I recognize that it is a free full-featured font, and as such it is nearly their only choice for distributions, but I just can’t stand it any longer. I find it to severely lack polish; some parts of letters are visibly thicker than other, and in odd places. The second font in the KDE.org list of acceptable fonts is Lucida Grande, so I tested out how it would look in that…

Comparison with Lucida Grande

• The Try KDE page in Bitstream Vera Sans (png)
• The Try KDE page in Lucida Grande (png)
• Single word: , Bitstream Vera Sans.
• Single word: , Lucida Grande
• Single word: , edited from Bitstream Vera Sans to show how it needs to be polished. All I did was remove the extra pixels in the letters S, c, e, and o. But even so, e still looks off-balance.

Should be noted that I do not use font anti-aliasing as I find it makes all text on the screen very blurry, plus I can clearly see the sub-pixel adjustments making all letters have hazy colored outlines. Doesn’t matter what engine is used (even MS’s ClearType), it only makes reading on the screen impossible. I did test whether anti-aliasing would help with Bitstream Vera’s problem, but no, it only made it much worse.

While the Apache HTTP Server is a wonderful piece of software, it sadly does not have any built-in way of running vhosts as the user they represent, which has been the headache of many an admin. Either have to fiddle with groups, running multiple daemons, or something worse. In most cases, it led to users being able to access eachother’s files. There was an experimental multi-processing module called perchild designed to combat this, but it ultimately never made it into the 2.2 branch. Speak no evil of the dead, and so forth.

If one is able to apply and maybe edit a patch, one can achieve near-perfect user seperation in a single Apache process, though.

The two projects, Telana peruser by Sean Gabriel Heacock and the ITK mpm by Steinar H. Gunderson, provide such patches. Each have their own gotchas and configuration, but once you get either of them working you’ll never want to go back to running Apache as a single global user. Why neither of these have been included upstream or in major distributions, one can but wonder…