Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software by Jono DiCarlo of Humanized is a great article despite it’s “10 Ways” title.
The Silent Majority (of laptop users)
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.
Miles at Par
Now that the Canadian dollar and US dollar are at par, perhaps we should start accepting miles at par with kilometers.
The US Dollar’s fall from Grace
CBC Radio 3 has a great recording of Two Hours Traffic live at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto
Inconsolata: Quality Free and Open Font for Programmers
If 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.
Career Advice for Michael Vick
I think I’ve come up with the perfect solution for Michael Vick’s career. Vick should join the WWE under the name The Rottweiler.
The public outrage that would ensue would only fuel his infamy as a bad-ass wrestler.
Food for thought.
Solitaire: The End of Desktop Applications
The web-based version of Solitaire at WorldOfSolitaire.com is as smooth and playable as the version included in Windows or Gnome by default. This is the end of desktop software – Solitaire was the final frontier.
Note that it is not built with Flash, but Javascript, CSS, HTML, via YUI.
“Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned”, and by the comptroller general of the US, no less.