It’s just data

Place Of Interest

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:

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.

I don’t believe I did anything special on my XP installation, and I see the Place Of Interest icon just fine.  I wonder what’s different between our setups.

Posted by Scott Johnson at

Uh, and I don’t see that symbol in debian :/

Posted by Giacomo at

Correction: I don’t see it when using Konqueror. In Firefox it does work. Time to file a report...

Posted by Giacomo at

I wonder what’s different between our setups.

All it takes is installing a program which includes the necessary font.  MS Word appears to be one such program.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

I believe PuTTY only displays characters from its configured font. Deja Vu Sans Mono includes quite a lot of Unicode symbols, and may be a good choice.

Posted by Carey at

The symbolic link behaviour cygwin does not seem out of the ordinary.  On Linux:

  

james@nibbler:~/tmp$ mkdir foo foo/bar
james@nibbler:~/tmp$ ln -s foo/bar bar
james@nibbler:~/tmp$ cd bar
james@nibbler:~/tmp/bar$ touch somefile
james@nibbler:~/tmp/bar$ mv somefile ..
james@nibbler:~/tmp/bar$ cd ..
james@nibbler:~/tmp$ ls somefile
ls: somefile: No such file or directory
james@nibbler:~/tmp$ ls foo
bar  somefile

While the mv command knows what its current working directory is it doesn’t know how you got there, so it can’t do the same magic as “cd”.  You might have some luck with a junction point (similar to a bind mount on Linux), but I don’t what cygwin thinks of them.

Posted by James Henstridge at

For the ssh completion across machines, install bash-completion.  It’s installed by default on Debian/Ubuntu, but it’s a manual install for cygwin.  It’s still Not Quite Right, but it should work sometimes.

Posted by Matt Reynolds at

The symbolic link behaviour cygwin does not seem out of the ordinary

Good point.  I guess a more accurate statement is that symbolic links are too much of a leaky abstraction to completely mask the differences in filesystem layout differences.

install bash-completion

Thanks!  That did it.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

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