. . .is a pony. It's my pony. Her name is "Pretty Princess" and I love to brush her mane and look lovingly into her pretty blue eyes.
And why is this my pony?
Because none of you have signed up to paperbackswap via this link and gotten yourself some goldurned free books and a free pony from me!
So sign your asses up NOW and get a free pony.
(disclaimer: I won't really give you a pony. That's just an image I got from Google a while back. I'm a complete liar)
On an actual programming-related note, here's a link to a pretty good Consolas knockoff if you want a good programmer or console-window font and you don't have Vista (or you don't wanna look for the real-deal Consolas that's available for download somewheres). I love me some Consolas because it's clear and obvious and the zeros and capital "O"s don't look the same.
Putting 'em side by side, they're pretty close. I think Consolas is a bit thicker because it looks a mite darker than Inconsolata. Also some of the Inconsolata curves are a bit different. But unless you're a real font-snob, you won't notice.
Note: I hear that these fonts look ugly as mud unless you have ClearType (or whatever MacOS calls ClearType) turned on. I loves the ClearType, so that's not a problem for me.
On another note, here's an interesting article by the guy behind CDBaby (incidentally about the only place where you can get George Hrab music) about his philosophical switch to nice clean good-programmer Ruby on Rails after leaving yucky old bad-programmer PHP. . .followed by a return to PHP.
It's nothing surprising. You can write good code or bad code in damn near anything. I considered moving away from PHP a while back because I heard so many things were better, but I stick with PHP simply because there's such a wealth of things out there to help me. When I wanted to make some code to handle a "secret login with your code to get your download" download handling site, I found just the right library to do it, and it only required a couple of lines of code on my side to do the password handling. When I wanted to do MD5 hashes between my client Flash code and the server, I found that MD5 was already built in and required only one line of code. When I needed base64 encryption and XML to talk to Google Checkout, I found that it was already there.
My server-side code for thecodezone is pretty absurdly small, and that's mainly because of the enormous amount of libraries out there that do all the stuff for me.
And I've done server-side Java CGI's before, so I know what's a hassle and what's not. In my career, there are two major architectural decisions I would've changed if I had a time machine. That's to use winsock instead of NetDDE to handle inter-application communication for a web-database component back around 1996, and to use PHP instead of Java for some server-side code in a project a few years ago.
