Author: Steven Garrity

CNN and The Onion Quiz: Spot the Satire

by Steven Garrity

Sign of the end-times: CNN is syndicating The Onion on their home page and The Onion is syndicating CNN on their home page.

On any given day, you could read a selection of headlines and I wouldn’t be able to tell you which of the two sites they came from. CNN has walked from being bad news into the world of farce (and it has nothing to do with The Onion).

Here’s a quick quiz – which headlines are “real” (CNN) and which are “satire” (The Onion). Click the links to see the answers:

Surprise, they’re all from CNN – all from one day.

 

The Silent Majority (of laptop users)

by Steven Garrity

I’ve often wondered how it is that Apple remains in the single-digit percentages of market share, while any computer-related event I attend (even open-source software related conferences) seems riddled with MacBooks (and PowerBooks, though to a less extent these days).

Who’s the other 95% of the market? Well, I am, for one (a happy ThinkPad user running Linux). However, I couldn’t figure out who the other 94.99999% were.

Then, I piggybacked into the fancy-pants Maple Leaf Lounge at the Toronto Airport with a friends’ membership. Side-note: the Maple Leaf Lounge is where rich people wait in the airport for Air Canada flights – free food, magazines, wifi, etc.

Here I found the other 95% and he/she is the Business Traveler.

The lounge was riddled with laptops, but there was but one MacBook (proudly carried by the good Rob Patterson, in this case). The rest were a slurry of Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, and mystery-machine models.

Note: The market share percentages I’m using here came out of my “derriere”, so don’t bother correcting me. I do suspect Apple has a larger chunk of laptop sales than desktop.

 

Inconsolata: Quality Free and Open Font for Programmers

by Steven Garrity

Inconsolata PreviewIf you spend a significant amount of time working with any type of scripting, code, or markup, then you’re probably looking at a monospace (fixed-width for each character) font.

The quality of these fonts varies, though the defaults that ship with Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista are quite good. The Consolas font included with Vista is particularly good.

Fortunately, there is a quality free/open alternative. Raph Levien has developed a great programming font cleverly called Inconsolata. I have been using it as my primary terminal/coding/text font for several months and find it superior to anything else I’ve used.

Incosonata is freely available under the Open Font License. The OpenType version of Inconsolata will work on all major platforms. There is also a PFA version available.

Font geeks can download the Inconsolata FontForge source file and a PDF sample is available.

Here’s a quick screenshot of Inconsolata used in a simple PHP file on my desktop.