Sam's Site

Small function to check if a font is available to use on a web page. No external libraries required, just plain JS.

How it works

It works by first calculating the widths of the generic font families monospace, serif and sans-serif for the letters wi repeated 99 times. w because it's a wide and i because it should have a different width in monospaced and proportional fonts.

To check if a font is available, the CSS font-family of the test node is set to the font with either monospace, serif or sans-serif set as the fallback. The widths are then compared to the pre-calculated widths of the fallback and if the widths don't match, it means the fallback wasn't used and the font is available. If the widths match, another fallback is used until all 3 fallbacks have been attempted.

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Not that long ago I discovered the Spotify puzzles and thought they would be a good excuse to improve my limited Python knowledge.

So here are my attempts at solving the ”Reverse” and “Zipfsong” puzzles in Python:

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Prerequisites

Before anything else, install the prerequisites:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 git-core

Although Aptana Studio doesn't officially support OpenJDK, I've yet to encounter any problem using OpenJDK with Aptana Studio.

If you would rather use the Sun Java instead, do the following:

sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 git-core

# Java source: http://goo.gl/X0J6e
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

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The easiest way to use Cloud 9 is to simply use it online (in the Cloud) at c9.io.

But if like me you want to run it on your own computer with Ubuntu 12.04, here’s how.

1. Install the prerequisites

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential g++ curl libssl-dev apache2-utils git libxml2-dev
# Remove any previous version of node
sudo apt-get remove nodejs

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Update: An updated version of these instructions for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) is available here.

1. Install the prerequisites

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk libjpeg62 libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 git-core

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