Type-loving US lawyers will need big monitors

OK, that’s a little beside the point. But you will need plenty of pixels to read through this new and commendable introduction to typography that has been provided by an lawyer, ex-typographer, to other lawyers not ex-typographer from the kindness of his heart.

NB I’m a real enthusiast of web sites with large type. Let’s have more!

Link via the LETPRESS list.

Sparks to fly

Good to hear that major UK rail electrification plans are to go ahead. This is a significant government policy change. Lots of metalwork will be required. Is this work for the Teeside steelworks?

And I wonder what will happen to the rest of the related proposals in Network Rail’s Rail Utilisation Strategy document?

Speaking of TTF web fonts …

Here’s a commercial font-hosting service that is just starting up

Updating Ubuntu major version in a Virtual Box VM

Yesterday I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 using the system’s Update Manager (System>Administration>Update Manager). This worked perfectly, which is impressive considering I upgraded to a new major version of the software, but because the Ubuntu in question is a VirtualBox VM the new OS version’s X11 video software wouldn’t work properly. It complained that it couldn’t find a suitable driver and it would not work in low resolution mode.

The fix was to log in to the console (a dialog box reporting the error offers you this option), then mount the VirtualBox kernel additions ISO image (which is called VBoxGuestAdditions.iso and is, I think, something internal to VirtualBox and hence always associated with the VM by default). The ISO image contains scripts called VBoxLinuxAdditions-<arch>.run [the one suitable for my hardware is VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run], which you can run to install the twiddly bits, hacks, patches, extensions or whatever that enable video and probably a lot more too.

$ mount /media/cdrom
$ cd /media/cdrom
$ sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
[script runs]
$ sudo shutdown -r now

Good news for web designers: acceptable web-linked fonts are here

A rumbling debate on www-font, the W3C mailing list forum for discussion of how linked, downloadable fonts should be implemented, has been cut short by the action of commercial font publishers. At least one significant player is now issuing TTF fonts with web server licences, which is effectively an end-run around the discussion because it means that the dual-format (TTF/OTF and EOT) question now has an answer from the font software publishing world as well as implementations from the browser authors and publishers. These two groups held the power between them, with web designers and developers yapping and clamouring to more or less effect in the middle. Now the matter is resolved you can expect to be able to license TTF/OTF and EOT versions of many high-quality commercial fonts very, very soon. I’m not sure whether anybody lost out here, but I think commercial font publishers will fall over themselves to avoid being the last ones to make their libraries available.

Personally I am disappointed because I was hoping that the debate might move forward the concept of licence expression, where information about creator and publisher of linked items in a page (like video, photography, typefaces, etc) is available to the user through a machine-comprehendable format that is partially or completely wrapped around the media themselves. It would bring to the surface a load of people working in the second tier of the web: the designer and publisher of a typeface, the photographer who took the spectacular travel picture, the painter of a portrait and its licensor (typically a gallery, museum or private owner), the writer and producer of a video, etc as well as the people who design and code web sites. Such a system would play well to the idea of a semantic web. Tom Lord’s proposal, MAME, now seems likely to stay that way because, as clearly demonstrated in the font licensing discussion, nobody cares.

How it works

Here is a method that might be used to prevent TTF/OTF font files being ‘stolen’ (used outside the terms of the licence under which they have been provided) and hence could be acceptable to a commercial font software publisher:

• Server implements referer checking and denies the requested download if the check fails (making it hard for people to simply look for the URLs of the font files and download them by typing the URL into a browser)
• Font name table in the linked font file is made unintelligible by the publisher (the name table is critical for the font to be added to UI menus, caches etc on the operating system but, because all the info is replicated in the @font-face rules, browsers don’t need it)

Nowhere in any specification is the referer check or the obfuscation of the font file made mandatory; instead they are conditions of doing business with the font software publishers and you can always use permissively-licensed fonts instead if they meet your requirements.

The rising public cost of communications surveillance

It's moderately interesting to see that the money that the Home Office spent on ‘sponsoring systems to enable communications service providers to store communications data that they are required to retain [...] or retain voluntarily’ under a couple of security-related laws has increased from £84,582.23 in 2004–5 to £10,175,527.73 in 2008-9. So public spending is about 120 times greater now than it was five years ago.

I wonder how much ‘bigger’ the communications world has grown in five years.

See Hansard for 9 July 2009. NB times, locations and people – and not content – are stated as being stored. The mandatory storage requirement comes from European Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC and not from the UK’s own legislation.

Look, mistakes!

I’m struck by the honesty of this account of theory versus practice or rather ‘how we thought we should do things’ and ‘what happened when we tried to do it the right way’. It is quite rare to encounter such frankness and I hope that makes the lessons imparted – ‘what you should do instead’ – go in deeper. The text is a section from Social By Social, a collaboratively-authored book/site intended to help relatively responsible and technologically conservative people to understand how to make effective use of online collaboration tools and social media.

I have worked on projects with two of the authors; on that basis, and having skimmed through this section, and brushed against some others, I’d say the whole work is likely to be valuable for its audience.

But, perhaps because being thought of as a book, it also appears to be about five times longer than the market will bear: without irony, I hope there is a ‘Dummies’ version out soon.