Monday, September 13, 2010

kerning pairs

You know how sometimes we hear a term and get pretty excited easily from the connotations. Here's what happened. Being part of an internal mailing list on security issues, I got this mail with the subject that reads something like "... blah.blah .. kerning pairs... dooodah ... multiple PFEs .... double free corruption .... " and I'm like ....
multiple PFEs ... PFE ... hmm Page File Entry ... this .. I know .. man .... awesome !!
double free corruption .. Super AWESOME ... double free corruption related to multiple Page file Entry ...
Kerning pairs ... well .. I don't know this .. but ... this must be something God-level as it is mentioned in conjunction with page file entry and double free ... and now there is the word 'kerning' which sounds like kernel .. ...... If I know this stuff, I can casually bounce it on an unassuming friend at tea time and shake him to his core ... and have him on his knees !!!

So since I don't know - 'kerning pair' ... I go look it up on the net - wide-eyed and bated breath .. (much like some one waiting for Tom Cruise on a hollywood premiere) and when I opened this wikipedia link, I was sort of stumped .. the link was talking about digital typography, which isn't what I remotely expected. The page sort of slapped me on my cheek and told me kerning pairs in digital typography refers to the concept of adjusting space between two characters in a font for more aesthetic appeal ... they talk of a V and an A as a kerning pair because they can be aligned by their sides .. etc ...
The bug was in some kernel module related to fonts ... ahhem ...
Probably I shouldn't get too excited when I see something like .... ThreadedVMProc pairs ... they might be referring to a dance form ... ;-)

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