diary @ telent

:; phoenix#

Mon Dec 30 19:54:37 2002

:; phoenix
:;

Writing Error Messages, Rule 0: failing silently is not acceptable 

:; phoenix --display :0
Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file
:;

Writing Error Messages, Rule 1: when the problem is with an external file, print the file name. Rule 2: if there's an OS error of some kind, print the errno information. 

:; sudo apt-get install fontconfig
[...]
:; phoenix
.. and suddenly, it works. There's some comment to be made here also about Debian packaging, but the package was labelled experimental anyway, so I'm probbaly not going to be too harsh there.

First impressions:

  • it works
  • it works with emacs' browser stuff, so I can use it for hyperspec lookup
  • It has a weird unlabelled extra dialog box beside the url bar, with an icon that looks like a lollipop. Clicking on this gives a dropdown menu which allows the selection of 'Find in this Page', dmoz.org or Google, so I would guess it's intended as some kind of search box. There's no way of activating it that I can see, though - certainly, typing into it and pressing Return doesn't seem to do much. Maybe it's displaying into a hidden sidebar? From the release notes it looks like this program appears to like sidebars. This user, however, doesn't.
  • It supports that new-fangled font stuff that looks pretty but is actually harder to read than the apps I was using five years ago

Here's a screenshot. You may need to shift-click and save it if apache mod_proxy is interfering with my content-types again. Need to get that looked at, yes.