dpk’s weblog

Edited 5/1/06: As pointed out by Peter, it looks like A9 doesn’t include either the standard Google search or the Google Images search as options. It’s not locale related, as his experience matches mine. Guess I’m going back to google.com directly, although I’ll miss the parallel searches.

Before I start let me explain why I use A9: I get a kick out of seeing the images that come up for my searches, sometimes they’re just ridiculous. The text results show up on the left, and the image results on the right.

It looks like A9 just switched the default engine for my searches from Google to Live. Google has been relegated to the “More choices…” menu. I have nothing against Live, exactly, however I don’t really dig how it was just changed without a user prompt.

The real suck of this, though, is that with Google being a later option than Images, Google search results now appear to the right of the images instead of to the left, which is just plain silly.

While it wasn’t hard to find in “Help”, the method for changing the order of the result boxes is in a non-intuitive place: You can change the order of the search result boxes by going to the “Add/Remove” option of “More Choices…”. Problem solved I guess. Still, an irritating development that I’ll chalk up to the “anti-user user interface movement”.

Time zones are a major source of annoyance for me, when writing code or working with databases that store time-keyed data. It’s especially irritating when you have to deal with the abomination that is daylight savings time.

So, I’ve finally decided to go ahead and set my server clocks to UTC (or GMT). It wasn’t hard to figure out how to do this, but documentation for this specific task was rather sparse as most people seem to want to move away from UTC.

On FreeBSD and Debian (Sarge) Linux, you can do this by copying /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC to /etc/localtime . On Debian, you’ll want to replace what is currently in /etc/timezone with the string “Etc/UTC”. Then run ntpdate against your favorite time server, and reboot so all applications have the proper timezone setting.

You’ll need to figure out how you want to set your CMOS clock. I’ve left them as they are, set to local time, because it’s not convenient to load up the BIOS and change them. On FreeBSD, if your CMOS clock is on local time, touch /etc/wall_cmos_clock . If UTC, rm /etc/wall_cmos_clock . On Debian (Sarge) Linux, run “hwclock –localtime” or “hwclock –utc”.

jpgraph is a pretty slick tool. It makes nice looking charts and graphs, and it is very easy to use. You simply pass it an array and it can draw it. Many other tools require serious data massaging and configuration to simply display a simple graph.

However, it’s hard to use your own truetype fonts. I verified that TTF works on my PHP installation, but I received frustrating errors for commands that probably ought to work (but I see now why they didn’t). There’s nothing as simple as:

$graph->xaxis->SetFont("/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/luxirr.ttf");

One error I received was “unknown font family specification”, which, according to Google, has only been seen by a couple people in Japan. Heh.

The FAQ has an entry about adding new TTF fonts, but what it describes involves modifying the library to add your font family, which is something not everyone will be able to do, or will be willing to do. (I chose not to because I prefer to use libraries as-is whenever possible).

Here’s how I use a .ttf file that does not exist in the one directory JpGraph checks, without modifying the library. It should work for .ttf files in your local directory. Quick summary: You should be able to put the first block of code near the top of your file, and use the lines from the second block of code just before calling the Graph->Stroke() method. I’ve included some boring details below as well. This has been tested with JpGraph versions 1.19 and 1.20.3 and PHP 4.4.x. It does not work with PHP 5.

Note: This is a hack. You’ll be creating a new TTF superclass, since jpgraph uses a hardcoded TTF_DIR variable for the path, and you’ll be replacing an existing font family in the code, because jpgraph hardcodes the font count. (PHP doesn’t let you redefine constants for some undocumented and unknown reason, making this class stuff necessary). The new class is as follows:

class TTF_local {
  var $font_files, $style_names, $ttf, $family_local;
  function TTF_local($fontfile,$fontfamily) {
    $this->ttf = new TTF();
    $this->style_names=$this->ttf->style_names;
    $this->font_files=$this->ttf->font_files;
    $this->family_local = $fontfamily;
    $this->font_files[$this->family_local] =
      array(FS_NORMAL=>$fontfile);
  }
  function File($family, $style=FS_NORMAL) {
    if ($family == $this->family_local &&
      isset ($this->font_files[$family]) &&
      isset ($this->font_files[$family][$style]) &&
      file_exists ($this->font_files[$family][$style]) &&
      is_readable ($this->font_files[$family][$style])) {
      return $this->font_files[$family][$style];
    } else {
      JpGraphError::Raise("Error with font $family/$style . It may not exist.");
    }
  }
}

(Note: The error handling in this class could be greatly improved).

And the following code will instruct JpGraph to use the new class, and will redefine font family 43 (this value must be 10 < = x <= 43 as defined by jpgraph.php). This assumes $graph is a Graph() object, and that you want the luxirr.ttf file from FreeBSD 4.10's XFree86-fontScalable-4.3.0 package.

$family_local = 43;
$graph->cache->img->ttf = new
TTF_local(‘/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/luxirr.ttf’,$family_local);
$graph->xaxis->SetFont($family_local,FS_NORMAL);