Tag: Windows Vista

I generally do my development on a dedicated development server running Linux with a fairly good amount of RAM (2GB) and a fast processor (the server does a lot more than just server django :)). Even when I am out of office I SSH to the development server. A few weeks ago I was on a trip where I wasn’t going to have good internet access for a lot of time. So, I decided to setup django on my tablet (Windows) to work locally. Everything was great until I had to access the site.

http://localhost:8000

waiting…

waiting…

Finally, after a few seconds the main page showed up. Then I clicked on a link.

waiting…

waiting…

Once again the page showed up after a few seconds. I was surprised how slow this was behaving. I booted to Linux and there it was very snappy. Unsatisfied with this performance issue, I did some searching and debugging and finally found out that the ‘localhost’ is what was causing the problem. As soon as I switched to the local IP address (127.0.0.1), the server came back to life!

If you are developing on Windows and the server seems to be a little slow then make sure to use ’127.0.0.1:8000’ instead of ‘localhost:8000’. If you are curious about the cause then search on google for complete explanation. Apparently this has to do with IPv6 and might a be non-IE issue.

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).

…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.