Jitu

It was always annoying: In my Debian installation all GTK1 applications such as XMMS etc. did not have any describing text for the (radio) buttons, registers, menues, etc. A good guessing was always mandatory and sometimes resulted in surprising events.

All searching in the Internet did not lead to any solution. Suggestions such as changing the .gtkrc, .gtkrc.mime, etc files in the home directory did not help. The bug is located in the GTK1 library itself and it depends on the localization. Since I am in India and my standard localization is en_IN, not everybody is affected by this bug.

Changing the setting to en_US successfully brought back the missing button and menue text. Since en_US is the same as en_IN I do not see any difference.

How to change the localization?

First of all, check if you are really not in en_US already by typing in locale at the shell prompt. My output was like this:

LANG=en_IN
LANGUAGE=en_IN
LC_CTYPE=”en_IN”
LC_NUMERIC=”en_IN”
LC_TIME=”en_IN”
LC_COLLATE=”en_IN”
LC_MONETARY=”en_IN”
LC_MESSAGES=”en_IN”
LC_PAPER=”en_IN”
LC_NAME=”en_IN”
LC_ADDRESS=”en_IN”
LC_TELEPHONE=”en_IN”
LC_MEASUREMENT=”en_IN”
LC_IDENTIFICATION=”en_IN”
LC_ALL=

As far as I know, at least Debian and Ubuntu distributions are affected. To change these values to en_US in Debian perform the following steps. If you have Ubuntu installed, proceed to step 2.

1. At the shell prompt and as root type in dpkg-reconfigure locales and tick in the list en_US (UTF-8). Remove the star in front of en_IN and proceed to the next screen. Choose here en_US as your default language for the system.
2. Open .bashrc (in your home directory) in an editor of your choice and add the lines
   

   export LANG=en_US
   export LANGUAGE=en_US

   If the lines are already there, change them.

3. You might get a lot of error messages, run locale-gen as root.
4. I made the experience that changing the language in the graphical login screen also avoid the bug. Instead of en_IN, I have chosen POSIX en or something similar. Try it out…

I hope this could solve also your problem with the missing fonts. Let me know, if you have any suggestions.

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Ok, it took some time till the administration office namely the Society for Innovation and Development issued a cheque in my name to give me a little bit of award for my work here. Just a tiny little stamp saying “A/c payee only” makes it quite hard to cash it. It means that there must be a bank account with my name to which the money is transfered. Here is the dialog which I had in the bank.
I: “Good afternoon, I would like to cash this cheque. But since I don’t have a bank account, I would like to transfer the money (my money) to his account (pointing to a friend standing just beside me).”
Bank employee: “Go to that next next counter, but it wont be possible.”
So we went to the next next counter. Same question, same answer. So here it is, what happenes next:
I: “So that means, I have to open a bank account, cash the cheque and close the account immediately after that. Alright, where is the application form? I mean, it’s your work, not mine.”
Lady: “Ok, do it like this: cross the stamp and sign it, then we give you the money.”
I: “Ok, do you have a pen?”
Lady: “No no, you have to go to the issuer. He will cross it and sign it. Then you come back and you’ll get the money.”

Fine, so where is the guy issued this cheque? It took around 10 to 15 minutes to figure that out. First we went to the cashier of IISc, who directed us to the society. After a long walk, I asked the guy at the reception, where to find the one, who has this signature on the cheque (We had forgotten the name already) and we found the check issuer finally.
He directed the check to a lady who directed it to someone else and again it has been forwarded to the last person, who was told to cross the stamp, to write “cancelled” beside the crossing and put the stamp of the society below that. What did he do? He wrote beside the “A/c payee only”-stamp: “Crossing cancelled” without actually crossing the stamp.

Let’s see what the bank will say tomorrow…

[Update:] I went to the bank today and got the money. Unfortunately the bank ran out of Rs500 and Rs1000 notes, so that I have 200 Rs100 notes in my drawer right now. The height of the pack is around 2cm :-D

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Recently some spammers discovered the gallery powered by plogger and started to fill up the comments with some non-sense. Therefore I integrated Captcha! to verify, if a real person is writing a comment or just a spammer’s script. So far it is an efficient method to keep those annoying people away.
A free Captcha! is Gotcha!,

which runs on PHP and is easy to integrate. Since the deep integration of plogger into wordpress I am still running plogger in the version beta 1 and I did not upgrade so far. Maybe I will do that in the near future, so that I can give you some diff files. If you have some information about the integration into newer versions of plogger, let me know.

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