while researching the german word “wallen” i bought the universalwörterbuch from duden, a respected and well-known dictionary publisher in german speaking countries. the download page offers a debian–ubuntu package of officebib, the underlying application for a series of dictionaries from duden and other publishers. running kubuntu i naturally chose that one to install — and it worked…

…it worked but in contrast to all other applications was using pixel fonts instead of truetype fonts, rendering all text rather ugly. today i did a bit of searching around whether other folks had encountered this issue and had perhaps found a way around it. eventually i came across a post on the {} blog (sic) which recommended not to use the .deb package but instead to one of the .rpm packages:

% sudo apt-get install fakeroot alien

will install the pre-requisites. then download the SuSE .rpm package and turn it into a debian package like so:

% fakeroot alien officebib-5.0.4-1-suse.rpm

and install it:

% dpkg -i officebib_5.0.4-2_i386.deb

voila! no more ugly fonts.

now, why doesn’t duden do this instead of providing a flawed .deb package? puzzled.

a couple of weeks ago i added the regioninfo REST call to OpenSim. here is a little python script that shows you how to use it:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

import sys
import urllib2
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

def RegionInfo(url):
    if not url.endswith('/'):
        url = '%s/' % url
    regionInfoUri = '%sadmin/regioninfo/' % url
    print '== OpenSim server %s ==' % url

    riXml = ET.parse(urllib2.urlopen(regionInfoUri)).getroot()
    print 'regions (curr): %d' % int(riXml.attrib['number'])
    print 'regions (max):  %d' % int(riXml.attrib['max'])

    totalAvatars = 0
    totalObjects = 0

    for region in riXml:
        print '- region %-20s: avatars: %d' % (region.attrib['name'], int(region.attrib['avatars']))
        print '         %-20s  objects: %d' % (' ', int(region.attrib['objects']))

        totalAvatars += int(region.attrib['avatars'])
        totalObjects += int(region.attrib['objects'])

    print 'total avatars: %d' % totalAvatars
    print 'total objects: %d\n' % totalObjects


if __name__ == '__main__':
    for opensim in sys.argv[1:]:
        RegionInfo(opensim)

invoke it like this:

% osinfo http://opensim.zurich.ibm.com:9000

and you will get output similar to this:

== OpenSim server http://opensim.zurich.ibm.com:9000/ ==
regions (curr): 6
regions (max):  10
- region ST3D theatre        : avatars: 0
                               objects: 494
- region ST3D collaboration  : avatars: 0
                               objects: 283
- region ST3D boardroom      : avatars: 0
                               objects: 243
- region Zurich ISL          : avatars: 0
                               objects: 0
- region IBM ACVWS 2009      : avatars: 0
                               objects: 283
- region Sametime 3D         : avatars: 0
                               objects: 16
total avatars: 0
total objects: 1319

quite useful.