Blog posts page 17 of 44

Envy Code R coding font v0.7 preview

Envy Code R font preview #7 highlighting some of the characters in a chartThe next version of my Envy Code R font especially designed for programming (monospaced, easily distinguishable characters) is nearing completion and represents a very response-driven update to feedback, specifically:

I have also fleshed out a number of additional symbols and accented letters that has seen the number of code pages supported increase to 12 pages and made a large number of tweaks to the italic version which was a last-minute addition to 0.6 (PR6) and had a number of errors especially round the accented letters.

Shrinking JS or CSS is premature optimization

Rick Strahl has a post on a JavaScript minifier utility the sole job of which is to shrink the size of your JavaScript whilst making it almost impossible to read in order to save a few kilobytes.I thought I’d take a quick look at what the gain would be and fed it the latest version (1.6) of the very popular Prototype library:

The 30.7 KB saving looks great at first glance but bear in mind that external JavaScript files are cached on the client between page requests and it looses some appeal.If you also consider the fact that most browsers and clients support GZip compression and the savings there are around 4.7 KB4.7 KB and you might wonder if you are wasting your time.In computer science there is a term for blindly attempting to optimize systems without adequate measurement or justification and that term is premature optimization.As Sir Tony Hoare wrote (and Donald Knuth paraphrased)

Publishing .NET applications with prerequisites

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Now .NET 3.5 is shipping I took the opportunity to update one of our internal applications and elected to have it install the necessary components (in this case the .NET Framework 3.5) using the Download prerequisites from the same location as my applicationDownload prerequisites from the same location as my application option.

When trying to install the application via the IIS web server the installer would fail with a download error.

Calculating CRC-64 in C# and .NET

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Seeing how the CRC-32 C# class I posted some time ago continues to get lots of Google hits I thought I’d post a CRC-64 version which will no doubt be far less popular being the more limited use. Again, do not use this as a secure message signature, it’s really for backward compatibility with legacy systems.

This is the ISO-3309 version of CRC-64 algorithm. It is not compatible with the ECMA-182 algorithm.

Droid font family courtesy of Google & Ascender

Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine.

One thing not too many people have yet been raving over is the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender Fonts known as the Droid family.

Droid Sans Mono great coding font

Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine which includes the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender known as the Droid family.

Check out previous coverage of the well-known and lesser-known coding fonts.

Show Package Contents in Mac OS X

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Bundles are a concept in Mac OS X whereby a specially named folder becomes what appears to casual users to simply be a file that can be copied as usual and often launched by double-clicking on it.

Other operating systems have file formats that are little more than containers for other files and in doing so keep those interesting resources out of your reach. (Okay, we have DMG but that’s more of a transportation mechanism like ZIP, TAR etc.)

SQL Server replication blocking on cleanup job

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For some time my primary workplace has been having a problem with SQL Server replication delaying for several minutes at a time which is surprising given the 12GB of RAM and quad processor hardware behind it.

Activity Monitor showed a number of processes on the distribution database used for SQL Server’s replication were blocked by another process which was in turn blocked by a SQL Agent – TSQL Job executing on the distribution database.