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Today I informed my remaining customer that I am departing from Epic. This marks the start of my official departure from Epic and the start of my journey as an entrepreneur. What’s next for me, you ask. I am going to be concentrating my energy on ShopFiber. ShopFiber is an exciting new service that will help you be a better online shopper and allow you to easily connect with your friends. For more information about ShopFiber make sure to checkout our blog. I will continue to blog on this site, but most of my energy will be focused on ShopFiber.

Oh, and by the way, I will be attending the Future of Web Apps conference in February. I am excitedly looking forward to that conference because I finally get to see and possibly meet some of the people that are the “voice of internet” (Michael Arrington, Joel Spolsky, etc.). Hope to see you there!

This is a very useful command if you are using subversion for version tracking. I just found out about the -u flag last week and I am loving it. It tells you exactly how an svn update would affect your working copy. This way you can decide whether you want to update to trunk with confidence. Previously there were times when I would update to the latest version only to realize that merging my code would take a little time, now I run this beforehand and decide whether to proceed right now or wait till I have more time. Enjoy 🙂

Cache’ Object Script is an interesting language. Take a look at the following two loops

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test
	s done=0
	f ln=1:1:10 d  q:done
	. w !,ln
	. i ln=5 s done=1
	w !,"ln after loop "_ln
	q
test2
	s done=0
	f ln=1:1:10 q:done  d
	. w !,ln
	. i ln=5 s done=1
	w !,"ln after loop "_ln
	q

The goal is stop after five iterations and then use the ending index to do something more. Executing the above code results in…

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PLAY>d test

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ln after loop 5
PLAY>d test2

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ln after loop 6
PLAY>

Can you spot the difference?

So, with Service Pack 2 beta installed on my Windows Vista x64 machine Windows Explorer would crash every time I would mouse over a program entry in the taskbar. After a few crashes I noticed that UltraMon was causing this behavior (even with the smart taskbar disabled). I was running UltraMon 3.0.2 and checking on UltraMon’s site I noticed that they had 3.0.3 beta available. So, I upgraded to that and now the crashes are gone. Hopefully this will save you some time in case if you have UltraMon installed and are trying out SP2 beta. Other than this issue everything else seems pretty good (I have only used it for a few hours now).

Upgraded the tablet to Vista Service Pack 2 Beta, let’s see how this goes. So far things are pretty good (the hard disk seems to be quieter, but that might just be psychological).

Lately I have been playing around with Minefield (i.e. the development of firefox 3.1) with all its goodness of just in time (JIT) Javascript feature. Today I was browsing through its source code viewer and noticed something different. The JavaScript, CSS and other includes were actually links! How nice! 🙂 Now you don’t have figure out whether something is coming from the root or some other intertwined directory, just click and you are good to go. You can even drag and drop image reference to a tab and it will load from the correct location.

Take a look at the screenshot below to see for yourself 🙂

I just posted a new article about fixing offline files in Windows Vista. Take a look!

…with a font, that is! 🙂 If you haven’t guessed already, I like to write code. So, naturally, the one thing that I see the most during a normal day is fixed width font. Previously I didn’t care so much and used whatever default the operating system had. On Windows this is generally the [Courier New)] font. Recently, I started to look around to “spice up” my environment, and font was the first thing that came to my mind. So, I started looking around for options and ended up on Consolas.

Now, nothing is perfect and Consolas is no different. Consolas was designed with ClearType and pretty much for ClearType because it doesn’t look very good if you don’t have ClearType enabled (checkout the comparison in the wikipedia entry). That is something that I can live with because majority of the coding that I do is either through a shell session running on Windows or in some other Windows programs so it isn’t really an issue for me. For the cases when I do have to use other operating system, there is always the similar looking Inconsolata font.

To really enjoy this font I have all my fixed width programs set to 10pt font size, which I have noticed is the best size for this font. At this size the font looks awesome and you can easily distinguish the similar looking characters like o (lower case o), O (upper case O), and 0 (zero).

So, if you code a lot or look at fixed width fonts all day long for some other reason then I suggest that you should give this font a try, maybe, you too will fall in love with it! =D It comes standard on Windows Vista, for other Windows version you can download the Consolas Font Pack if you have Visual Studio.

If you are looking for some other options you might also want to consider another excellent font that supports box drawing: Envy Code R.