Place Of Interest

2008-02-15T23:07:19Z

Day 3 on Windows XP. I note the Mozilla does not display the ⌘ (a.k.a. Place Of Interest) sign on Planet Intertwingly. I had put that in as a placeholder for all feeds that do not supply an icon. I try Opera. It doesn’t show up there either. I try Safari. Also not there.

On Mozilla, I see a question mark. Opera and Safari show a rectangle.

The problem turns out that Windows XP does come with a proper Unicode font. Jacques Distler has some recommendations.

Even with the font installed, I still see a rectangle in putty -cygterm, even though I have utf-8 turned on, and have :set encoding=utf-8 in my .vimrc. Copying and pasting that rectangle to an HTML textarea shows the corect symbol, however.

I’ve noticed other oddities in Cygwin, like:

Command completion for scp and rsync across machines doesn’t work. I’ve had that since Dapper. When you are setting up a machine by copying files across a network, you tend to notice things like this. You notice it a lot.
if you create a symbolic link of Desktop to /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/Administrator/Desktop/, and then cd to ~/Desktop and mv a file to “..”, the file doesn’t go to your Cygwin home directory, instead it goes to your Windows home directory.
if you do a gem install of libxml-ruby, it will first tell you that you don’t have libm installed. What that really means is that you don’t have gcc installed. Get past that, and you get a message that you don’t have libiconv installed, which means that you don’t have libiconv installed. An iteration or two more, and you have a clean build. You can verify this by issuing:
```
$ ls -l /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/libxml-ruby-*/lib/xml/libxml_so.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rubys None 103424 Feb 14 14:06 /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/libxml-ruby-0.5.2.0/lib/xml/libxml_so.so
```
Then go into irb and try require 'xml/libxml'. The response:
```
LoadError: No such file or directory - /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/libxml-ruby-0.5.2.0/lib/xml/libxml_so.so
```

Purchase order 5003020074 has been placed for a hard drive for Ubuntu. While it will certainly do in a pinch, Cygwin is rapidly ceasing to be a place of interest to me. I long for the real thing.