Guillermo Esteves

Some of my recent visitors might have noticed that the current version of this site uses Helvetica Neue Light¹ for almost all the text, a look inspired by the beautiful pages of Panic’s products. As reference, here’s a screenshot of part of CandyBar’s website:

Pretty, huh? After snooping around their CSS I saw they’re using the following declaration for the body text:

font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

I thought this seemed like a slightly unusual way of declaring the font name. Why not just use “Helvetica Neue Light”? After a quick Google search I found that, as Josh Pyles and Steve Cochrane point out, Safari allows you to use a font’s additional weights by referencing their PostScript² names — in this case, “HelveticaNeue-Light” — in your CSS; whereas you simply declare the font’s full name (“Helvetica Neue Light”) in your stylesheets to use it in Firefox 2 and other Gecko-based browsers like Camino. Thus, the following declaration will give you gorgeous Helvetica Neue Light in almost every Mac browser:

font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", sans-serif;

Almost every Mac browser, except Firefox 3 and recent³ WebKit nightly builds, that is. Instead, you’ll get regular Helvetica Neue.

So what’s the deal? Why doesn’t this work in the nightlies anymore, when it worked in previous ones and in the shipping version⁴ of Safari? I thought it was a bug in nightly r31623, so I filed it and got a response from Philippe Wittenbergh, stating:

I believe the current (@ r31623) is correct. Per CSS 2.1:15 Fonts, the author specifies a font ‘family’ (e.g. Helvetica Neue). If you then want a specific face (e.g. ‘Helvetica Neue-Ultra-Light’) within that family you use the font-weight property, in this case font-weight: 100.

Which is absolutely correct: Firefox 3 and the recent WebKit nightlies are simply following the standard to the letter, and calling a font face by its full or PostScript name is non-standard behavior⁵. Shame on me for not knowing the CSS spec better. So, the standards-compliant way of getting Helvetica Neue Light is:

font-family: "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
font-weight: 300;

For backwards compatibility, we can add both the PostScript and full names of the font to the declaration and end up with:

font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light",
             "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
font-weight: 300;

To sum up, if you want to use a specific font face, you have to use font-family along with the font-weight property, calling both the PostScript and screen names of that face for backwards compatibility. Now go forth and spruce up your websites with some beautiful typography.

1. Unless you’re in Windows. Then you just get Arial. I’m sorry. ↑
2. To find out the PostScript name of a font select it in Font Book and click Preview → Show Font Info (⌘I). ↑
3. As of April 4th, 2008 (r31623.) ↑
4. Safari 3.1, as of this writing. ↑
5. Although a patch was submitted for the bug I filed, which reverts old behavior for full-name based matches but prefer match by family name. ↑

What’s the first obvious thing to make with the new Pownce API Leah just announced? A bookmarklet to post links quickly to Pownce. Drag this sucker to your bookmarks bar and Pownce away, my friends.

If you’d rather use the activities feature of Internet Explorer 8, feel free to install the Pownce activity, which pretty much does the same thing as the bookmarklet. It’s also compatible with Firefox, courtesy of Michael Kaply’s activities extension.

Friends, I need your help.

On December 27 2007, CADIVI (Commission of Currency Administration), an entity of the venezuelan government, published its Providence № 084 (PDF link, in spanish), titled Providence which establishes the requisites, controls and procedures for the acquisition of currency destined for offshore payments. It includes the following article:

Article 12. The Commission of Currency Administration (CADIVI) may authorize up to a maximum amount of four hundred United States dollars (US$ 400) or the equivalent in other currency per year, i.e., the period between January 1 and December 31, to each user, for credit card payments for goods and services, made to offshore suppliers from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

This simply means that the venezuelan people’s right to acquire goods and services online, which was already limited to $3,000/year, is now further reduced to only $400/year. To say that this makes it much harder to pay for web hosting, domain names, web services, software, books, photography equipment and many other things that simply can’t be bought in Venezuela is a severe understatement. In other words, the venezuelan government effectively took away my right to spend my hard-earned money as I please.

So here’s how you can help: if you visit Amazon by clicking on the logo below, I will get a small commission (between 4% and 8%) for any items you buy for yourself, at no extra cost for you. In most cases this amounts to pennies, but at this point every little cent counts, so any help is appreciated. Hopefully this will help me get around this ridiculous restriction by helping me stretch my $400 quota to the end of the year.

I deeply appreciate your support and help.

Sincerely,
Guillermo Esteves

Today I was in the car with my dad, and he’s telling me about the garage sale my family’s having at my grandmother’s house, and he mentions that my uncle brought a really, really old computer to the sale, and that he was about to sell it to some guy for about Bs. 40,000 (20 bucks, give or take). I asked him if he knew what kind of computer it was, and he said an Apple. What kind of Apple?, I ask, and he tells me that it’s one of the first ones. Why? Do you want it?, he asks me, and I tell him sure, why not. He calls my uncle, and he tells the guy that the computer had already been sold earlier.

So we drive over to my grandmother’s house to pick up the computer. It’s an Apple Macintosh 512K, circa 1984. According to the Wikipedia article,

The Macintosh 512K Personal Computer, the second of a long line of Apple Macintosh computers, was the first update to the original Macintosh 128K. It was virtually identical to the previous Mac, differing primarily in the amount of built-in memory, which quadrupled the original’s. This large increase earned it the nickname Fat Mac. The additional memory was significant because more ambitious users with computer experience stretched the capacity of the original Mac almost immediately, despite the limited number of applications.

It’s in pristine state, except for a slight scuff mark at the top of the computer, and the 20+ years worth of grunge. It even works perfectly! I have a whole stack of floppies (copies, unfortunately, instead of the original ones) with apps like MacPaint and MacWrite, and the original System Software, plus the original keyboard and one-button mouse (hello, computer!). There was also an Apple printer (I forgot to write down the model) at my grandmother’s house, but it was rather heavy and I don’t really have any place to put it, so I left it there in the meantime, and I told my family not to sell it.

Now I’m the proud owner of a great piece of computer history.

Update: I picked up the printer today, it almost broke my back… that thing must weigh at least 30 pounds. It’s an Apple ImageWriter I dot-matrix printer, model A9M0303. That’s all I know about it, so if you have any further info, please contact me. I also spent a few minutes checking out that stack of disks, and I found some good stuff, like two versions of Finder: System version 1.1 with Finder 1.1g; and another System software with a version of Finder number E1-5.3; a few games, including Hangman, Memory, Billiard, IAGO and On-the-Contrary; and A Guided Tour of Macintosh, which, among other things, explains in detail the use of that newfangled device called the “mouse”. I can’t imagine how alien that thing must have looked like 25 years ago.

Update (08/31/2006): Sweet, one of my pictures of the Macintosh has been featured on TUAW’s Rig of the Day. Go Digg it!

A few days ago I installed the latest version of Ubuntu Linux (version 6.06, Dapper Drake) on my old Compaq Presario 1200 laptop. The installation went smoothly, and Ubuntu runs beautifully, considering it's an old 800MHz Celeron. Except for one small issue: My D-Link DWL-G650+ 802.11g cardbus adapter wouldn’t work. The status LEDs would come on, and the adapter was properly detected by the OS, but I couldn’t manage to get an IP from the router. After looking around in Google for a few minutes, I found this website, which explained that:

As in the summary, acx111-based d-link dwl-g650+ does not work with the default firmware. It works with 1.2.1.34 (tiacx111c16) - this is the firmware recommended (as the better of the only two working) on acx100 development website - see http://acx100.sourceforge.net/wiki/Firmware

According to the comments section in that page, there are a few ways to fix this, and I'm going to describe two of them. I’m writing this mostly as a reminder for myself since I’ll probably have to do it again next week after I replace the 10GB hard drive in the Compaq with a new 60GB one, but I thought this might be useful to somebody else.

Solution 1

This first solution involves deleting tiacx111c16 from /lib/firmware/[kernel version]/acx/default, which links to /lib/firmware/[kernel version]/acx/2.3.1.31/tiacx111c16 (the broken firmware), and replace it with a link to /lib/firmware/[kernel version]/acx/1.2.1.34/tiacx111c16 (the working one). To do this open a terminal window and type:

sudo rm /lib/firmware/[kernel version]/acx/default/tiacx111c16

Replace [kernel version] with your kernel version, obviously. The system will ask you for your password. Enter it. Now type:

sudo ln -s /lib/firmware/[kernel version]/acx/1.2.1.34/tiacx111c16 /lib/firmware/[kernel version]/acx/default/tiacx111c16

Eject the card, reinsert it, and that’s it. It should be working properly now.

Note: To find out your kernel version, type echo `uname -r` at the terminal.

Solution 2

I think this solution is easier, but you’ll have to reboot your PC. Again, open a terminal, and type:

sudo pico /etc/modprobe.d/options

Your system will ask your password; provide it. Now add the following line to the file you’re editing:

options acx firmware_ver=1.2.1.34

Press Control+x to exit, and press Y to save the changes. Reboot the computer, and you’re done.

I think that's it. Feel free to comment if you have any observations or corrections to make.