Pragmata is better!

I’ve been using the free Microsoft Andale Mono (member of Microsoft core fonts) as my “coding font” for last couple of years. It’s been mostly fine, though at times I wished for a narrower font with a more refined zero, more standard-looking lower-case L, etc.

I’ve known of Pragmata for quite some time, but the $108 cost (e.g. at MyFonts.com) has been a deterrent since it’s not possible to test the font before buying it, and since the product is not returnable/refundable. After circling around the font for a long while I finally decided to give it a go, and I’m happy that I did, because Pragmata is better than MS Andale Mono, or Proggy, or any other coding font I’ve tried thus far. So while it’s difficult to say whether the investment is really worth $108, considering the amount of time I spend staring at code, it’d say a good font can be equated to a comfortable chair (almost, at least ๐Ÿ™‚ ).

Depending on how the editor treats the selected font (mainly whether the font is anti-aliased or not), it looks somewhat different in different editors, even at the same point size (while Pragmata scales, it seems to be at its best at 9pt).

I especially like the clarity of wavy brackets, digits, zero (vs. capital letter O). AND smileys don’t look stupid in it! ๐Ÿ˜‰

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     Pragmata 9pt in UltraEdit.

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     Pragmata 9pt in Eclipse.

Selecting radio button in JavaScript with jQuery

I’m learning jQuery, and really like all the endless additional features (not to mention the ease of writing code!) it brings to JavaScript. But for a newbie some things take time to sink in, especially since the concept of jQuery is a bit different from vanilla JavaScript.

It took me couple of hours to figure out the following two lines to control default selection of radio buttons in a form (I knew how it’s done in plain JavaScript, of course, but it was the jQuery format that was something new to figure out). Setting the radio button attribute isn’t enough; the value needs to be set separately. I might write a simple helper plugin for jQuery later once I become more familiar with it so that setting the attribute automatically sets the corresponding value to the radio group.

$("input[@name='us_edition']").val("both");
$("#us_edition_both").attr("checked", "checked"); 

That piece of code selects the “us_edition_both” (with value “both”) radio button in my form:

 

Of course it shouldn’t have been this difficult to figure out and, of course, it isn’t.  A month from now I’ll snicker at myself having spent more than two hours figuring out how to do this. ๐Ÿ˜€

Thunderbird.. not for me!

Being a fan of Firefox I gave Mozilla’s Thunderbird a try today. Granted, it’s a lot lighter than Outlook (currently using 2007), but… perhaps it’s too light. Yes, there are plug-ins to augment functionality and features, but..

Perhaps the biggest thing that bugged me about it was the lack of an option to set images from all remote sites to load by default. I realize it’s perhaps not a "safe" thing to do, or that it might increase the amount of spam, but the fact that I always have to click on "Load Images" to load the embedded images slows down processing emails. Emails arrive from so many domains/senders that setting a specific sites on the image-loading-whitelist doesn’t cut it.

I’ll give it another try later.. and if I happen to have missed a setting to set remote images to load by default (I couldn’t find anything on the topic by quick Googling, either), please write a comment.

Blogging with Microsoft Live Writer

I’m making this post using Microsoft Live Writer, and it looks pretty cool! Editing the WordPress-based My Galagzee! blog entry takes place on the PC (using a PC app rather than a browser), and is much more like using Word than a web-based editor. It has a WYSIWYG editor (based on the blog’s style รขโ‚ฌโ€œ it analyzes the blog’s style when you add a new blog account, multiple accounts/blogs are supported), integrated spell-checker, and more. Assuming that this message actually gets posted, ๐Ÿ˜‰ and that there’s no surprising instability issues (Live Writer is currently still a beta release), this program will join my standard set of tools!