just another hack » programming

Ready to develop

Oliver — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:46:09 +0000

After my server crash (thanks again for that, Hosteurope) I was able to recover everything from the former blog from my personal backups. Everything? Well, no. There was one draft I’ve been working on, that’s gone. It should’ve been an ongoing list of something, well, more about that some other time. Anyway, conclusion of that was, I will code a PHP application instead. Say goodbye to my spare time!

So let’s see:

Local XAMPP running [check]
Production server to be running [check]
Subversion ready [check]
(Let it never be said, that I’m not ready to commit. And yeeees, I know there are other great revision control systems, but I happen to like Subversion and have been using it for a long time. Besides, old people adopt harder.)
Skipping caffeine-free lent [check]

So let’s do this. Been a long time since I’ve been working on a larger application.

(I know, this is a totally uninformative, useless and uninteresting post for most people. Deal with it.)

Coder fonts

Oliver — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:32:41 +0000

I was searching for something completely different, but found something quite interesting. Small, monospace, readable, great fonts for programmers. Also very good to discriminate and so no more problems with l, I and 1 or O and 0.

ProFont and Sheldon

ProFont is great, but I prefer Sheldon for the simple reason that the ‘a’ can be easier distinguished from the ‘o’. The only thing that doesn’t work well with both fonts is bold highlighting, as some characters become unreadable, but then again I can live without that.

More easy-to-read code on one display, f*ck yeah!

Edit: I’d like to point out to the Dina Programming Font, that Manuel mentioned in a comment below. That one is even better and has been my standard coding font for quite a while. And if you don’t mind to pay for a font, PragmataPro™ might be the thing for you. Looks really great, but $70 or $170 is quite expensive for a font I would only use personally on my computer for coding.

Programming with Alice

Oliver — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:44:29 +0000

Speaking of 3D and learning. A few days ago I discoverd Alice, a 3D programming environment. Basically it’s a tool that let’s you create/program animations and simple games via an easy GUI, without having to worry about syntax and typing errors. Meaning the student/learner can concentrate on learning the basics of programing or tell a story, rather than search for a missing semicolon. According to some numbers the site casts around, it is improving the learning curve extremely. Definitely worth looking at for anyone from a hobby programmer to a CS major.

I’d love to hear if anyone already used it and can share their thoughts. I already gave the link to our CS department and am considering to let our trainees work with it.