porges » Review

Sans-serif fonts for coding

Porges — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 00:41:30 +0000

After reading a post about colour schemes and font choices for use in an IDE, it seems I’m one of the only people on the planet that uses non-monospace fonts for coding. So, in the spirit of equal access, I’ve decided to try a couple of different fonts in MonoDevelop. While it doesn’t have the greatest highlighting support at the moment, or any code folding (although I suspect these shortcomings are due to libgtksourceview), it’s still good enough for my purposes. My colour coding is based upon the default, but with blue keywords instead of green, and the comments changed to a light grey colour to make them more ignorable (the default is a bright blue which is quite startling).

First up is DejaVu Sans, which is my default sans-serif font on my system. It is quite plain looking which is possibly a good thing as it doesn’t distract from the task at hand. The ’0′ and ‘O’ characters are different enough, but you may have problems with ‘I’ and ‘l’.

Next I tried Candara, which is a new font that is bundled with Windows Vista. It has a bit of character, but the text figures are a bit distracting, and the punctuation really doesn’t fit in nicely with the rest of the font.

Finally I picked URW Gothic. While this was just a test to see how extreme the fonts could be before they were completely unsuitable for coding, it turned out to work surprisingly well. The large open geometric shapes make for easy reading and the punctuation goes well with the other glyphs. The only problem I could identify is the square brackets looking too much like the rounded ones, but if you can get over that it looks like a very nice font to program with. In fact, I’ve just changed it to be the default in MonoDevelop.

Of course, there are many other sans-serif fonts out there, but I picked these three as representative of several classes of styles. If anyone knows of sans-serif (or even serif!) non-monospace fonts that have been specifically designed for programming, I’d be glad to hear about them.

Toilets and Thread Synchronization in C#

Porges — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 07:15:15 +0000

It dates from 2003, but this is still the best explanation of thread synchronization using Monitors that I’ve read.

The Ur-Quan Masters on Ubuntu AMD64

Porges — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:41:31 +0000

At the moment, The Ur-Quan Masters doesn’t work on AMD64. This is a shame, because I just found it and realised Star Control II was the game that I had played on my friend-down-the-road’s computer so many years ago.

Attempting to fix this by forcing the install of the 32-bit version of uqm doesn’t work, because for some reason then apt won’t recognise that it is installed and complain that uqm-content has unmet dependencies. So here’s the official recommendation from me:

Install uqm normally with the package manager.
Download the i386 .debs, extract them and overwrite the binary files from uqm (there are two of them).
Install ia32-libs-sdl for the 32-bit versions of the libraries it depends on.

… and it should work perfectly. If you want voice-overs and music (yes!), head to the UQM download page, and download the second two files listed under “Content” (you already have the first). These are in fact just renamed zip files, so unzip them to /usr/share/games/uqm/content/ and you’re good to go.

And the game? Excellent. This is much better than the last game I bought—Civilization IV.