I have been doing a teeny bit of work on a new version Drivey , but it’s coming along a little slowly because I am in the process of porting it to C++, which really means I’m rewriting it, since the original sort of evolved in a very organic way and is written in very messy JujuScript.

I’m not working on it right this second because a) It is very late, and b) I have nasty stomach cramps [probably because I've consumed only toast, chocolate and coffee today – although it could also be related to the enormous amount of leftover pasta I ate last night]

I’d go to bed, but aforementioned cramps are bugging me too much, so instead I will blog – something I had only just privately resolved to do a little less of [in favour of more productive activities]. And not only will I blog, but I will blog about unrelated subjects within the same post…

Got ClearType?

I use an LCD monitor, and therefore it makes sense for me to enable ClearType*. But for the past fortnight I have been using a CRT [while houseminding] and was surprised to find that even when using a CRT, I have come to prefer the appearance of ClearType over that of the "Standard" font renderer [on WindowsXP].

If you are using WinXP, and your fonts currently look like the first example but you would prefer the second, you can change your preference by opening ControlPanel->Display->Appearance->Effects and choosing ClearType for font smoothing.

* Link to previous post: LCD, ClearType™, Tahoma and MS Sans Serif

Robots

A minor issue with blogs is that you can often get multiple search results for the same terms, because those terms are repeated on the front page, permalink pages, monthly archives etc. At time of writing a Google search for "lose the horrible ripple" returns 4 results on intepid, and although Google is obviously very smart and seems capable of guessing that the permalink version is the "best" one, I’d really prefer it if that was the only result that was returned [ Yahoo seems less smart, returning links to the fron page for such searches ]

To this end I am going to ask search engines not to index any pages on intepid.com except for permalinks, by adding the following to the headers of all non-permalink pages:

In theory this should mean that the page will not be indexed but the links will still be followed, so Google [and others] should still be able to find their way to the permalink pages. Should be interesting to see how quickly this works [if it works].