Translation of 'That's a good idea'



  •  In hindsight I think I made a bit of a newbie mistake.

     To give a collegue a bit of encouragement and to be polite I said 'That sounds like a nice idea yeah...'

    The seems to have been translated as 'Actually I'll take on the whole mammoth project single-handedly, with no idea how much chaos and breakage I'm going to cause by doing it and in addition to a metric shedload of my own work' and said collegue had wandered off for a promotion.

    oops... now I know better than politely giving encouragement or enquiring how a project is going...

     

     



  • @blatant_mcfakename said:

     In hindsight I think I made a bit of a newbie mistake.

     To give a collegue a bit of encouragement and to be polite I said 'That sounds like a nice idea yeah...'

    The seems to have been translated as 'Actually I'll take on the whole mammoth project single-handedly, with no idea how much chaos and breakage I'm going to cause by doing it and in addition to a metric shedload of my own work' and said collegue had wandered off for a promotion.

    oops... now I know better than politely giving encouragement or enquiring how a project is going...

     

     

     

    I think a courier change is in order, you must be one hell of a motivational speaker.



  • @blatant_mcfakename said:

    metric shedload
     

    That the shed where you store the shit?



  • @Master Chief said:

    I think a courier change is in order, you must be one hell of a motivational speaker.
     

    Agreed. You might try Consolas, though make sure to turn ClearType on.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    @Master Chief said:

    I think a courier change is in order, you must be one hell of a motivational speaker.
     

    Agreed. You might try Consolas, though make sure to turn ClearType on.

    No, no. Everyone knows that Helvetica is the ultimate font. There's even been a movie about it.



  • Has anyone tried the Envy Code R font? I use it in Visual Studio along with the dark Moria color scheme. It's like VS is making sweet sweet love to my eyes.



  • Generic bitching about a vague circumstance complete with spelling and idiomatic errors and possibly a hint of jealousy.

    For this non-WTF, I bestow a D-.



  • @Smitty said:

    the Envy Code R font?
     

    Ew. Dude. Consolas is WAY prettier.



  • It looks a lot better with syntax highlighting on a dark background. The sample on dude's page doesn't do it justice. I had to give up Consolas.




    edit: Doubly true when running at a 10-point font size.



  • @Smitty said:

    Has anyone tried the Envy Code R font?
     

    Tried it; hated it. Unfortunately, I've never been able to fully articulate why.

    It may have something to do with the fact that the letters are all very tall and skinny, and many of the symbols (#, %, $, for example) inexplicably look they're a couple sizes smaller than the rest of the glyphs.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    @Smitty said:
    Has anyone tried the Envy Code R font?
     

    Tried it; hated it. Unfortunately, I've never been able to fully articulate why.

    It may have something to do with the fact that the letters are all very tall and skinny, and many of the symbols (#, %, $, for example) inexplicably look they're a couple sizes smaller than the rest of the glyphs.

    I just gave it a shot, too.  It's squished and scrunched together and weird!  And the italic variation is icky :(

    The more I stare at it, the more used to it I get; then I look back at Arial monospaced and my eyes give a sigh of relief. 
    (I prefer Arial monospaced to Consolas because at small-ish sizes, the Consolas glyphs bunch up and the lines get too close together and the letter M looks too bold and it's gross.)



  • @Xyro said:

    I just gave it a shot, too.  It's squished and scrunched together and weird!  And the italic variation is icky :(

    That was my experience when I tried to use it in XMLSpy. I even grabbed the 2010 trial edition so I could mimic my dark Visual Studio theme but it didn't help. I don't know why the same font looks so different between the two editors.



  • Monospaced fonts are all well and good, but I like my whitespace tabbed so it's generally not a problem.

     

    I actually use the 'lime' font  from the Artwiz font pack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artwiz_fonts).  I specifically took the time to convert it over for use in windows.

     

    Here I'll even link my copy so you can try, I like it at 8-point black background, white text :

     http://www.phynd.net/lime.fon

     

    Enjoy.



  •  Looks like 'lime' is indeed a fixed width font !



  • @Xyro said:

    (I prefer Arial monospaced to Consolas because at small-ish sizes, the Consolas glyphs bunch up and the lines get too close together and the letter M looks too bold and it's gross.)

    How do you define "small-ish"? I generally use Consolas at 12pt in text editors, and it looks great to me, but I normally don't go smaller than that with any font.

    Oddly, the Consolas font pack you can download for free from Microsoft refuses to install unless Visual Studio is present on the machine. This seems fairly silly to me, since it's relatively easy to copy the TTF file from one machine to another once it's installed.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    How do you define "small-ish"? I generally use Consolas at 12pt in text editors, and it looks great to me, but I normally don't go smaller than that with any font.
    8pt-13pt?  Looking over my IDE's settings, I had my font size set to 13pt, which seems to make fonts specially tweaked for 12pt and 14pt look awkward.

    For science, I checked this theory out.  Consolas indeed looks fine at 12pt and 14pt, but at 13pt (un-anti-aliased) it really runs into some awkward pixeling.

    To be fair to Envy, I also checked it out again at sizes 12pt and 14pt.  12pt isn't too bad, although I notice the diagonal on a "z" gets doubled.  14pt stretches the font unconfortably, imo.



  • I'm a huge fan of the Terminus font. It's a bitmap monospace font, working out of the box on Linux console and in X11; the 4.3.0 release finally has a Windows-version installer that generates a .FON file for you. No size 13, sorry... 12 and 14 are there, among others.

    Unfortunately, the author closed his webpage and moved the files onto sourceforge, apparently just last week. So, right now there are no official screenshots, nor explaination of the "variants" you can choose in the installer. IIRC these are small changes to some characters - the vanilla version with no boxes selected is perfectly good.

    Some third party screenshots: [1] [2] [3] (ick, JPEG... but only one that shows the bold variant, which I actually use everywhere... after all, in a terminal "bold" is a color, not a change of thickness)



  • @Xyro said:

    For science, I checked this theory out.  Consolas indeed looks fine at 12pt and 14pt, but at 13pt (un-anti-aliased) it really runs into some awkward pixeling.

    To be fair to Envy, I also checked it out again at sizes 12pt and 14pt.  12pt isn't too bad, although I notice the diagonal on a "z" gets doubled. 

     

    You're one of those luddites who doesn't use Cleartype, aren't you.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Terminus f
     

    Oh, that's a very nice pixel font.



  • @dhromed said:

    You're one of those luddites who doesn't use Cleartype, aren't you.
    I have never gotten ClearType to look clear before.  I honestly don't understand what benefits I'm supposed to be seeing with it.  All it seems to do is make the font blurry. Single-pixel lines look doubled up and inebriated, like you're seeing with with double vision or something.

    I do run full anti-aliasing at home on my Linux boxen, but here at work with Windows, my options seem to be between jaggy or inebriated.



  • @Xyro said:

    I have never gotten ClearType to look clear before.  I honestly don't understand what benefits I'm supposed to be seeing with it.  All it seems to do is make the font blurry. Single-pixel lines look doubled up and inebriated, like you're seeing with with double vision or something.
    Have you tried using the ClearType tuner (note: requires Internet Explorer)?



  • Another good set of coding fonts is the Proggy family.  I use Proggy Clean (Slashed Zero) in Eclipse, works nicely.

    http://www.proggyfonts.com/index.php?menu=download

    And for the record, I also prefer not using ClearType.  Too blurry and distracting.



  • Had exact same feelings about ClearType... that is, I love the way Linux (Debian 5 at least) did the antialias, and ClearType sucked royally. But most of the non-AA'd fonts in Windows are also ugly as hell.

    I downloaded the ClearType Tuner control panel applet (I think it does exact same thing as the ActiveX), and on the Advanced tab (FUCK THE WIZARD!*) set the slider all the way to Dark.

    It's not perfect... but it's good enough. Actually, now I think that the "bolder" Linux AA seems a bit blurry to me in comparison.



  •  @bannedfromcoding said:

    FUCK THE WIZARD!

     Look, what goes on at your LARPing sessions is your own business. We don't need to hear about it.



  • @Master Chief said:

    I think a courier change is in order
     

    The most disturbing part is the realization that this isn't a typo -- you actually think that's how to spell "career".

     



  • @cconroy said:

    Another good set of coding fonts is the Proggy family.  I use Proggy Clean (Slashed Zero) in Eclipse
    Although I wasn't part of that era I wasn't too far off the time when the O's were slashed and the 0's were not.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @Master Chief said:

    I think a courier change is in order
     

    The most disturbing part is the realization that this isn't a typo -- you actually think that's how to spell "career".

     

     

    There's a good career in being a carrier.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @Master Chief said:

    I think a courier change is in order
     

    The most disturbing part is the realization that this isn't a typo -- you actually think that's how to spell "career".

    What makes you so sure he meant "career"? He might just have been suggesting to use UPS instead of FedEx (or vice versa, whatever).



  • For my own part I've actually found Vera Sans Mono to be very readable - but only at 7pt. Any other size and the hinting turns to custard. The Deja Vu mimic doesn't seem to quite get that right.

    Yes, I even have Cleartype enabled.

    For my own preference, pixel-fonts like Proggy are just too homogenous and the different characters are insufficiently distinguishable from each other (dare I say they're lacking in character?) for extended use. And the squarish cell dimensions make it look more spread out than optimal (that's also a charge that I level at Courier - HP's Courier Dark goes some way to mitigating this, but still not far enough).

    I have been looking for a good serifed monospace font, for even better distinction, but haven't been satisfied with any I've seen so far.

    That said, about a decade ago I was an avid user of OCRA for my monospaced needs. But that was back in the days of CRT displays.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Had exact same feelings about ClearType... that is, I love the way Linux (Debian 5 at least) did the antialias, and ClearType sucked royally. But most of the non-AA'd fonts in Windows are also ugly as hell.
    I downloaded the ClearType Tuner control panel applet (I think it does exact same thing as the ActiveX), and on the Advanced tab (FUCK THE WIZARD!*) set the slider all the way to Dark.
    It's not perfect... but it's good enough. Actually, now I think that the "bolder" Linux AA seems a bit blurry to me in comparison.

    All the way to dark? Absurd!

    My guess is that you should attempt to adjust your monitor brightness first, because it appears to be overlit. Link! Ignore the parts about the numerical gamma and Mac/Win differences because that's all bullshit, and just make sure it looks alright when you eyeball it.

    I'd love to post screenshots of XP/Vista's Cleartype, but as the colour fringing behaviour is different from monitor to monitor, there's really no point. It has to look good for you.

    Win7's Cleartype fixes the issue with it being applied only in the x-direction: it's now a full AA. Hurray.

    Ubuntu 9's AA is quite excellent, and if you think it's blurry, CONFIGURE IT. Properly set up, it's both smooth and crisp, which is quite the achievement. Hell, just for fun, I even used a handwritten font for title bars because it al looks perfectly clear. Hurray II.

    OSX's AA, while ultrasmooth, is a one-size-fits-all solution which turns out to be blurry-for-all, because the strength setting doesn't really do a whole lot, except for the extremes, in which case you create issues where black-on-white looks nice but white-on-black looks like the monitor's a 10 year old blurry overbrighted CRT, and vice versa.

     

    I have given you truth about AA, now make the most of it, my pretties.



  • @blatant_mcfakename said:

    'That sounds like a nice idea yeah...' => 'Actually I'll take on the whole mammoth project single-handedly'

    Huh? That's a pretty big leap, care to explain how that might happen without at least implicit consent from your side?



  • @ender said:

    Have you tried using the ClearType tuner (note: requires Internet Explorer)?
    ...

    Windows requires an ActiveX control on a webpage to configure its system-wide anti-aliasing?
    That's pretty bizzare, even for them.

    Ok team, I've set ClearType to full dark, and it looks MUCH better now.  dhromed, you must have some magical monitor (or unsensitive eyes) that makes everything look great for you.  Full dark seems to make ClearType usable for me.  My monitor isn't overlit, and the gamma is perfect.  (There are pungent color distortion issues that crop up when I'm slouching and looking at the monitor from the wrong angle, much more so than my LCD at home.  At least that reminds me not to slouch!)

    Yet, fonts still looks distractingly out of place to me.  All the icons, window borders, menu seperators, and other GUI widgets are all super crisp pixel-wide lines with no AA, which makes the AA fonts "feel" blurry in comparison.  I think I might keep ClearType enabled for a while to see if I get used to it.

    Although now legacy/crap applications (like Remedy!) look even more out of place, because they don't honor the system's font rendering.  At least it's not as jarring as GTK+ applications rendering fonts differently than KDE applications.  That always bugs me.  I still prefer Linux's antialiasing, I'm not sure how X.org got it so right.  Hum... Small small fonts (8ish pt) still look gross with ClearType.  Too bad there isn't a way to disable AA on fonts smaller than 9pt.



  •  Just for kicks, I'll have a go at Cleartype all the way to dark.



  • Wait, does ClearType not handle Chinese characters?  wtf?  Is mine broken or is it supposed to look like this?
    [img]http://imgur.com/VCXss.png[/img]

    That's with plain old Arial at size 14pt.

    I do not like ClearType.  Because it sucks.



  • I like Andale Mono.



  • @Xyro said:

    Windows requires an ActiveX control on a webpage to configure its system-wide anti-aliasing?
    That's pretty bizzare, even for them.
     

    To be fair, there is a Control Panel applet you can download and install that does the same thing. 

    Why it isn't included with the OS by default is beyond me, given how wrong the default settings often are.



  •  I have anti aliasing / smoothing switched off for fonts < 30 pts as it gives me a headache reading them.

    Anyway, Andale Mono is my programming font of choice - very easy to tell characters apart and not too tall.



  • @Xyro said:

    Wait, does ClearType not handle Chinese characters?
    Most Chinese/Japanese fonts include bitmaps for small sizes, which is what you're seeing.



  • dhromed, well... Any setting other than full dark gives me a colorful halo to the sides of every character. Maybe it works better on your monitor, but for me it's the only possible setting. And yes, I know the Linux one is better, I meant that after a few weeks of starting at Cleartype the Linux one "feels" blurry. A matter of what you're used to at the moment.



    Xyro, it's not X.org, it's, IIRC, libfreetype2... and it can be used with any output device, be it a printer or anything. With funny results. And yes, it was the same to me - after setting full dark Cleartype feels "tolerable", then after a few days you get used to it and it's "not too bad". Still bad, mind.



  • libfreetype2, X.org, Linux, open source, whatever.   I think it's actually the lack of viruses that makes my Kubuntu fonts look better. (Or maybe the lack of antivirus scanners hogging resources in the background.)

    I think staring at white-on-black ClearType text in my terminal is doing funny things to my eyes.  I'm really having issues adjusting to the subpixel color halos.  It's so strange that every letter seems to have its own color.  m and w are reddish, while a, t, and d are greenish in comparison. Capital I is inebriated.  c is a nice plain white.  I like that one.



  •  I still believe that there's something amiss in either your monitors or configurations. The colour fringing is not supposed to be that noticeable, although it is far more noticeable on white-on-dark, such as the title bar.

    Here's a screenshot of my monitor, useless as I fear it may be.

     



  • Geez, dhromed.  There is either something magical with your monitor or wrong with your eyes.



  • I see no colour fringing in that image on my monitor.

    Which, by the way, is an S-IPS LCD turned sideways.

    My settings, from the tuner application, are BGR and 1.3. Have you tried BGR yet?

    Hey, could you make a screenshot? By this point, it's clear that prefs are prefs, but I'm still curious if I can discern any real difference when zooming it.



  • @Xyro said:

    Windows requires an ActiveX control on a webpage to configure its system-wide anti-aliasing?
    That's pretty bizzare, even for them.

    Been fixed; it's a control panel in Windows 7. (Might be in Vista, too.)

    That said the control panel version doesn't seem to have the Advanced tab someone else was talking about... I'll try the IE thing.

    Edit: The website and the downloadable PowerToy control panel only work in XP. So now the Real WTF is that not only is everybody on this board using XP, but to the extent that they don't even imagine that someone might be using Windows 7 (or that Microsoft might have changed how the ClearType settings work in Windows 7.) It's been 8 years! Move on!



  • @dhromed said:

    I see no colour fringing in that image on my monitor.

    Which, by the way, is an S-IPS LCD turned sideways.

    You have to tell us it's turned sideways before you post the screenshot. Of course it's going to look crap for people who don't have their LCD sideways.



  • @dhromed said:

    Have you tried BGR yet?
    BGR makes my eyes bleed more, but only slightly.   Actually, I'm starting to get used to it.
    @blakeyrat said:
    Edit: The website and the downloadable PowerToy control panel only work in XP. So now the Real WTF is that not only is everybody on this board using XP, but to the extent that they don't even imagine that someone might be using Windows 7 (or that Microsoft might have changed how the ClearType settings work in Windows 7.) It's been 8 years! Move on!
    Tell that to my employeer.  Heck, we had some server applications upgrade from a ten-year-old version of Perl just a few months ago, and that doesn't even cost money.  We just like old software, apparently.



  • @dhromed said:

    Hey, could you make a screenshot? By this point, it's clear that prefs are prefs, but I'm still curious if I can discern any real difference when zooming it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    It's been 8 years! Move on!

    My company was about to re-image every developer's machine with the standard company image; XP SP2 (yeah SP2) and IE6. My team has been fighting the move for two years. Right now we all have XP SP3 with IE8, so they actually wanted to downgrade us in the name of...whatever. Our servers are all sitting at .NET 3.0, so we don't get to use any of the newer features in C#. Management won't let us install 3.5 or GASP 4.0 because "we don't know what's involved". We finally convinced the 'enterprise architect' (who is a 60-something swinger with a drinking problem) that the wise move would be proper hardware and Windows 7. Now the fight is to get a 64-bit OS, Visual Studio 2010 and more than 2 GB of RAM in our shitty Dell laptops. I would fucking LOVE to move on.



  •  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

     Just in the middle now of upgrading 200-some machines from XP to Windows 7, in two languages. Business justification: because it's newer.

    Please understand: if there were functionality available in 7 that's not in XP and that we require, I'd be in favor of the upgrade. (Well, given a hardware upgrade as well.) There isn't.

     Response from most of the users who have completed the upgrade: WTF is this?

    At least the guy who pushed the upgrade through volunteered to do the training.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Xyro said:
    Windows requires an ActiveX control on a webpage to configure its system-wide anti-aliasing?
    That's pretty bizzare, even for them.
    Been fixed; it's a control panel in Windows 7. (Might be in Vista, too.)

    There was a power toy for WinXP that added that control panel applet.


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