Daniel Schneller's Blog

If you have ever wondered (as I have years ago ) why the text rendering on Linux usually looks inferior to both Mac OS X and Windows text, no matter how much you try and tweak the settings, there is a great and very in-depth article at http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html . It is quite long, but it contains excellent background information, theoretical and practical discussions of the concepts behind text rendering in general, what Windows and Mac OS do right/wrong and how to improve the situation in general. This is a must read for anyone remotely interested in font rendering.

I just came about this Star Wars – The Phantom Menace Review on Daring Fireball . Yes, the movie has been out for years, so why a review? Well, go see for yourself (it is 7x10 minutes long!). Be aware that if you loved it (who would?) you might be offended by the heresy against George Lucas’ creation, but I for one mostly agree with it. You might have to get used to the guy’s voice, but the contents and the insight are definitely worth hanging on. Technorati Tags: fun , star wars , movies

In one week, on December 24th, it will be exactly one year since I was first contacted by Packt Publishing. After reading several posts from this blog they asked me if I’d be interested in writing a MySQL administration cookbook with hands-on recipes for those among us who have to make sure the MySQL servers are kept running and in good shape. Funny thing, I almost deleted their email, because initially I thought GMail’s spam filter had not caught some sort of bulk or phishing email, because I had never heard of Packt Publishing before and at first only saw an unfamiliar sounding sender’s name. As I was one of very few people in the office on that day I decided to read it anyways. Turned out to be not so spammy after all… What followed were several weeks of sending mails back and forth, convincing a colleague to co-author and together set up a chapter outline. Finally, around February we started writing actual contents. Boy did I underestimate the amount of work this was. This bein