Decent terminal font

I haven’t been able to find a good replacement for Monaco for use as a terminal font on OS X.

try figuring this one out with bleary eyes
try figuring this one out with bleary eyes

My personal favourite terminal font, neep alt isn’t readily useable from OS X.

None of the Proggy fonts are as clean as Monaco, although Proggy Tiny 11 comes close.

  • lower-case “a” should be double-storey, so it doesn’t look anything like lower-case “o”
  • zero “0” should be slashed
  • lower-case “l” should have a serif on the bottom like lower-case “t”, and not look like numeral “1” or upper-case “I”.
  • upper-case “U” and “V” differ by at least 7 pixels
  • gentle curves rather than blocky rectangles, please

It’s disappointing that Monaco can get so much right and get lower-case “a” wrong. Still, if anyone wants to port neep alt to a format OS X and iTerm can handle (even if it’s only at 13pt semicondensed)… I tried once with fontforge but it was pretty broken.

Twitter not sending 304s

The twitter JSON API that I’ve been using for my status widget has a caching problem, which has caused it to be broken in Opera for a while now. Opera is quite aggressive in re-using its cache (which IMHO is a good thing). However, bad things happen when webservices deviate from the HTTP cache validation model. Twitter is recognising that the browser should be hitting its cache, but its response is broken.

Here’s how it goes:

  1. Load up the JSON document for the first time with an empty cache.
  2. Twitter sends a Last-Modified header and the expected JSON document.
  3. Refresh the document (in Opera, hit enter in the address bar as opposed to clicking the Reload button, since the latter forces a cache refresh). Opera sends an If-Modified-Since header.
  4. Twitter (presumably) recognises that the last status update was not after the browser’s cache timestamp. It sends a degenerate response entity: “[]“; an empty array in javascript, with a 200 OK status.

To test this from a shell:

url='http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/p00ya.json?count=1&callback=f'
lm="$(wget --debug $url 2>&1 \
 |grep '^Last-Modified:' \
 |sed -e 's/Last-Modified/If-Modified-Since/' \
 |tr -d '\n\r')"
[ x != "x$lm" ] && \
  wget -nv --save-headers -O - --header="$lm" $url

The brokeness comes from the half-baked response. A 200 OK status code would be fine if the full JSON object was written out. A 304 status code with any kind of entity would be fine too. The empty array might even prevent breakage in user-agents that don’t handle 304s (but do send If-Modified-Since? wtf?). Sending a 200 response overwrites the correct cached entity, replacing it with the degenerate response.

Firefox seems to be unaffected since it doesn’t cache the document at all and so doesn’t send the If-Modified-Since header.

One workaround is to use something like jQuery’s cache breaking capability (where it adds some random tokens to the URL each time). I refuse. Just remember the widget breakage wasn’t my fault!

A separate issue is that it seemed to break Opera quite badly. Perhaps it was because I’m using jQuery’s ready event, but Opera hangs as if the XHR was synchronous. The document wouldn’t receive any events (no mouse-wheel scrolling). I’ve got no idea why though; my callback functions are robust enough to handle being passed the empty array twitter calls them with, and I wasn’t getting any exceptions.

miniupnpd stale EXTIP

Miniupnpd comes with the script iptables_init.sh, which among other things adds an iptables rule:

#adding the rule to MINIUPNPD
$IPTABLES -t nat -A PREROUTING -d $EXTIP -i $EXTIF -j MINIUPNPD

Unfortunately, this rule isn’t replaced when the connection is dropped (and the router gets a new dynamic IP). OpenWRT does have a hotplug script:

[ "$ACTION" = "ifup" -a "$INTERFACE" = "wan" ] && \
/etc/init.d/miniupnpd enabled && \
/etc/init.d/miniupnpd restart

Problem here is that /etc/init.d/miniupnpd enabled returns false! It’s a function defined in /etc/rc.common that checks for /etc/rc.d/S95miniupnpd. So the solution is:

ln -s /etc/init.d/miniupnpd ./S95miniupnpd

Realistically, the ipkg should come with this file (effectively enabling miniupnpd by default). A more robust solution would be to modify the hotplug script so that it restarts the daemon without the enabled check, and rely on the restart function not to start the daemon if it wasn’t already running.