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Leopard introduced a number of system level changes to font handling. There’s a system daemon, fontd that handles runtime font registration. Some of the new features that are implemented include on-demand font activation, on a per-application basis and system font-protection, which guards against removal or disabling certain fundamental system fonts.

There’s a couple of situations where you might need to interface with the font registry database. Sometimes the system font caches can become garbled, and require a manual flush – before leopard these could be easily found under /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS – now they’re squirreled away under /var and managed by fontd. Font protection might stop you from legitimately manipulating certain font files; in a prepress environment you might need to replace one of the magic System protected fonts with a custom version.

There’s a command line utility provided, called ‘atsutil‘ which offers a user interface to these features. It has a fine man page.

To purge the font caches, which will fix persistant text rendering problems, you use the command atsutil databases -removeUser

To display the list of System protected fonts use the command atsutil fontprotection -files.

To globally disable the font protection feature, use the command atsutil fontprotection -off. Re-enable it with the -on switch.

Don’t remove system protected fonts, unless you are replacing them with a workable substitute.

I can’t ever remember the name of the Debian package for the library manpages, I often have the same trouble recalling the names of the OpenSSL development packages in Debian.

The openssl binary and man pages are in the openssl package.

The SSL shared libraries are in the libssl package. Similarly, the SSL headers and library man pages are in the libssl-dev package.

Now I can google bing for it.

As usual, beatworm.co.uk is the last site with the news.

The baby finally came. We have a daughter. She’s called Ada. I love middle initials, I enjoy my ‘M’ so much that I thought she might like one too, so she’s Ada May. Her birthday is the 23rd of October. She came one day early.

Lots of people have spotted the connection to the proto-programmer and feminist icon, or the programming language that took her name. Truth be told, these are excellent associations, but supplementary; the original inspiration came from a pop song I was very taken with. It’s got Sufjan Stevens on piano, you know.

These photos are all taken at the “Woah dude, I’ve got a baby!” and “troops of admiring relatives”‘ phases, and are a few weeks old. We’re currently at the “Oh bugger, she actually isn’t going to sleep for more than 30 minutes in 24 hours” phase, and photo-ops have been pushed far from mind.

Back at the start of the summer, I went back to Barcelona, for a second visit to the very wonderful Primavera Sound festival. I travelled with the rather pregnant Mrs S., and (Uncle) Danny came along for the latter half of the stay, and also joined us for the festival.

Barcelona is still a marvellous city, and Primavera is still my favourite rock festival. While we were out there, Barcelona FC won the champions league. I can’t pretend that I have any sympathy, interest, or even understanding of football, but I really enjoyed the electric city-wide atmosphere on the day; silent, tense and concentrating, as countless viewers watched the televised match, suddenly punctuated by sighs and unison cheers as chances were missed, and goals won; culminating in the riot of celebration erupting from every door and window onto the streets when the final victory was realised.

The festival was another success. The personal highlight, for me was the chance to finally see Lightning Bolt, unusually for them, an on-stage performance, that was one of the most exhilarating live shows I have ever seen. Shellac, playing again on the same ATP stage as last year, as good value as always, another chance to see Oneida, and sample some of the “heritage” acts, giving it some legend, like Sonic Youth, Throwing Muses, and Neil Young. A suprisingly energetic Michael Nyman band set in the indoor auditori was an unexpected highlight, as were a couple of new-to-me performances from Andrew Bird, and Gang Gang Dance. I was amused by Sunn O))), but sadly unable to persuade either of my companions to stay and watch more than ten minutes of their set.

More disappointing were Marnie Stern, who I’d been looking forward to seeing again, seemed to be suffering from terrible sound and equipment problems, Deerhunter transforming a great album into a weak coldplay-lite live experience, an uninspired and frankly routine Art Brut performance, and a generically dull Jarvis set.

It turns out that I edited and uploaded my photos to flickr shortly after returning to the UK, but what with all the busying and rushing around re-organising and home renovating, I seem to have forgotten to switch the set to public, at least until now.