Tim Dupree

There was a submission about “What makes a good programming font?” on HN today and, as usual, the comments on the submission proved more enlighting than the actual linked post (Hacker news has a great community).  From the comments I came across some nice programming fonts; Envy Code R and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.  The user who posted about the Vera Sans Mono font also added a picture of it in action here.  I liked the syntax highlighting/code coloring of that code screenshot, so naturally I set out to try out something similar with dreamweaver and TextPad.

I have to say, I’m disappointed in the both of them.  While you can go to a preferences pane and change the code coloring in both editors, neither supports creating, saving, and loading new color schemes files.  Additionally, both editors made the whole process cumbersome to change just one color as there was no instant application of the change to the document, so I was forced to apply the changes and close the settings box every time I changed something to see how it looked.  Weak.

I think I am going to try the Envy Code R for a while and see how it goes.  I never got a color scheme going that looks like the nice screen shot (I did in TextPad but it was only applied to the working document), oh well.

In searching for answers I did come across a nice addition to the Dreamweaver Syntax highlighter which adds support for MooTools.

The other day I decided to play around with the Msgme SMS platform.  My goal was to create a application that lets my wife record the number of hours she works.  She just needs something very simple. So my idea was to make a little app that lets her use her cell phone or web browser to indicate start and stop times of when she is working.  I was going to tie in the Msgme SMS service to allow her to text “timeStart” or “timeStop”.  Msgme allows you to set up keywords that are tied to their SMS number.  Then when someone sends that keyword to the number you can return a simple message from Msgme or interact with an external web app (that you create), among other things.

So when she sends “timeStart” to Msgme, Msgme then sends that message along to a php page I create which then records the action “start” and the time and date of the request to a database.  Sending “timeStop” will record the action “stop” along with the time and date.  Then another pag ecan parse that info, figuring out time elapsed between start/stop actions and display that data textually and visually using the google charts API.

I was on my way to setting up the system when I encountered the dreaded “Exception Error” response from Msgme when clicking on the “Test” button for testing the response from the external application.  It for some unknown reason is failling on the call from Msgme to the external app.  I can change the msgme request to have it ask for an rss feed, and then format my output for the rss specs and it works fine, but the msgme service polls the rss feed twice, which results in two db entries, so it’s not a viable work around.  If anyone has ever encountered this and was able to come up with a fix, let me know.

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Update (12/19/08): After several emails and a couple days the problem got fixed.  I was very unimpressed with the support I received initially (I think whoever was answering the support emails wasn’t very technical and was just writing back canned responses).  But I just received an email from a developer for Msgme who informed me that it was an error on their side, he fixed it, and that everything should work fine now.  Yay! He was really genuine and apologized for the problems. I really appreciated it.

I came across a story from a fellow in Singapore who dropped his iPhone.  His account of breaking the phone read nearly identical to mine.  I wonder how many other people are breaking their iPhones as a result of dropping them in restaurants and having the glass hit the table leg. It seems an unlikely event.

A while back Google added SMS capabilities to the Google Talk client built into Gmail, but it was a bit buggy so they took it away. Yesterday they announced they again added the feature.  The Google talk client in Gmail is getting more and more robust, especially with the addition of video chat a month ago.  While all of the new features are really nice, it does leave me wishing that they would add them to the dedicated desktop app or at least to the pop out Gtalk client (which I could then wrap in an Adobe Air app or something).