A few weeks ago I stumbled across Inconsolata, Raph Levien’s monospaced font and it has since become one of my favourites. The font is clearly inspired by Consolas, the new monospaced font designed by Lucas de Groot for Microsoft’s Windows Vista Operating System. Inconsolata borrows several characteristics of that font, but is longer in height (Consolas is too ’rounded’ for my taste, even though it is by far one of the most æsthetically pleasing monospaced fonts I’ve ever seen) and, as the Inconsolata web page explains, borrows from a wide variety of fonts and styles.

There are a number of reasons I am not using Inconsolata on my development machines yet. First, it is completely devoid of any Hellenic characters, which for me is a problem as, more often than not, I come across them. Second, I prefer monospaced fonts where zero (0) is slashed as opposed to just thinner than the capital O. Obviously, Raph disagrees. While my latter ‘complaint’ is not that important, the former is.

I can only hope that in the future Raph will extend Inconsolata to support the Hellenic alphabet too.

Raph states that the completion of this font is sponsored by TUG and that donating to TUG would help finance the design and implementation of other fonts by him. If you’re interested in seeing this amazing monospaced font finished and possibly extended to support Hellenic drop Raph an email (check his page for details). Also, consider donating to TUG’s DevFund.

It’s now been close to four months since I modified the Akismet plugin to show me the country flag and name for each Spam message received on this blog on the administration pages (using my improved ip2nation database).

While it’s been (and was expected to be) a somewhat useless and geeky exercise, it proved that most spam was coming from the developing world (China, Russia, Thailand, India, S. Korea etc.), some more from the U.S.A, but little or no spam from Western Europe (with the exception of the UK), Latin America or Africa. This all makes sense for one reason or another.

These past few days cosmix.org has witnessed a surge in comment spam. From about 50 a day the rate shot up to more than 200/day over a period of a week. Being fed up with work and being somewhat tired, I decided to start keeping a count of spam received by each country and share my statistics with you, or at least share the identity of the Top 5 Spamming Countries on cosmix.org. The SpamMeister list was born!

You can check it out on the bottom left of the main page of the blog, in the ‘In Numbers…’ section, along with the scary percentage of spam comments received on this site and the number of posts. Mind you, we just exceeded the global average (93%) reported by akismet.com. Yikes!

Anyway, ‘enjoy’ the list (and avoid the spam!)

I have decided to postpone my purchase of a new Macbook Pro for another 3-4 months. I had a chat about this with several friends these past few days. The reasons?

Several actually. Here’s why:

As I’ve written before, I really (really!) dislike getting first-revision Mac products. They more often than not have either design or manufacturing issues. While the latest Macbook Pros are not radically new in terms of their design, they might have some manufacturing flaws, being new models and all. Just a few weeks after the release of MeromBook Pro, there seem to be some problems [1] with them. Living in Hellas makes repairs (and/or replacements) very difficult, so I’d rather not risk it.

Then there’s the lack of free time. I’m probably busier than anytime since 2004 and I need to finish my doctorate thesis so there’s little time to play around with a new laptop. While my busy schedule means a lot of my time is spent coding and doing I/O (i.e. reading and writing :) ) on computers, I’d rather use my desktop setups instead of a 15″ MeromBook screen. My main development machines are much faster and much more comfortable to work with than the MeromBook, so there’s little need for additional CPU power. Moreover, I’m hardly using my laptop for any other CPU intensive task lately, hence I don’t need the extra processing power offered by the new Macbook Pros.

Finally, there’s Leopard. I’m relatively tight on money right now and I wouldn’t want to spend an additional $130 requested for Leopard when it comes out early next year when I can get it for free then with a new MBP.

All in all, it seems that cosmix’s eternal advice for Macheads still stands: don’t let Steve’s RDF and the aura of new gadgets rush you into getting an Apple product as soon as it is announced. The display and fan ‘reports’ may be affecting only few of the hundreds of thousands of C2D MBPs sold by Apple, but it’s a pain getting laptops repaired and/or replaced, especially if you’re depending on them to do work. Hmm, well, multiply that pain by 15 million times and you may come close to how bad it is if you’re living in Hellas.

March or April 2007 it is then for me! Well, depending on Leopard I guess :)