schrödinger's dog

Worldwide juggling ability

After starting to teach some co-workers to juggle, I got to thinking about how many people in the world can juggle, and how well. So I came up with some wild guesses as to how big the worldwide population of jugglers really is. These are, of course, really crude order-of-magnitude estimates:

100,000,000	people can juggle 3 balls
1,000,000	people can juggle 4 balls
100,000	people can juggle 5 balls
10,000	people can juggle 6 balls
1,000	people can juggle 7 balls
100	people can juggle more than 7 balls
1,000,000	people can juggle 3 clubs
100,000	people can juggle 4 clubs
1,000	people can juggle 5 clubs
100	people can juggle 6 clubs
10	people can juggle 7 clubs

Jim on 01.27.05 @ 10:21 PM ET [link]

Linux Fonts Fixed

Finally, I've found the magical way to make Linux fonts beautiful. The poor anti-aliasing of TrueType fonts has been driving me batty. Well, it turns out it was a patent problem. The people who built the FreeType font engine put in some features to render TrueType fonts correctly (called "hinting"), but some of this is covered by patents owned by third parties. So this feature is off by default, and all the major Linux distributions keep it off in their binaries to avoid legal snarls.

It's actually pretty simple to rebuild the FreeType components with hinting enabled, as described here and here. The end result are fonts that look as good as on Windows or the Mac, if the app uses this font system.

Now if only OpenOffice would use this font system!

Jim on 01.16.05 @ 03:21 PM ET [link]

Last man standing

In a department of 25 or so people whose sole product is a piece of equipment for cellular phone carriers, and whose sole customers are cell phone carriers, I seem to be the only remaining member without one of those nasty ringing nuisances. Barb has one, but I remain defiantly uncommunicative.
Jim on 01.09.05 @ 08:38 PM ET [link]