Author: Ashley Bischoff

Tab Energy — The Trucker Hat of Energy Drinks

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Apparently, the hipsters within Coke Inc have come up with the wacky idea of releasing Tab as an energy drink. That’s right — Tab Energy:

Tab Energy, which Coke’s bottlers tasted in meetings last week in Atlanta, will come in skinny pink 10.5-ounce cans with the old Tab logo and “energy” in small yellow letters, according to materials from the meetings. The target market for the low-calorie drink, which does not taste like the original Tab, is young women. […]

I'm all for innovation, but this seems like a bit of a step backwards. Is this not the William Hung of energy drinks — a beverage marketed solely for its so-bad-it’s-goodbad factor? I mean, why can’t we get Tab with Splenda instead? Or, while we’re at it, how about Caffeine Free Tab with Splenda with Lime? I’d buy it (no, really).

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is a Sweet Programming Font

Ashley Bischoff7 Comments
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono — “l” and “0” characters

Since reading on Matt’s site about his opinions on monospace alternatives for coding, I’ve been giving some thought to trying a different font for my editor. The fonts that Matt suggested were “Andale Mono on Windows or Monaco on OS X ”. Windows is still my primary development environment — at least until TextMate gets indented soft wrapping — so I thought I’d check out Andale Mono. As I soon learned, though, it doesn’t come with the OS (apparently it came with IE5, but of course that’s no longer available).

I then came across a gold mine of monospace font alternatives from the TextMate wiki. Looking over the list, my eye was drawn to the Bitstream Vera family, specifically Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. In case you aren't familiar with it, the Bitstream Vera family is a set of 10 fonts that Bitstream released as open source. Many people get to know them as one of the fonts that come with OpenOffice.org or Gnome, but they’re available for anyone to download.

In any case, I tried Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and I’ve been using it ever since. Compared to Courier New (my programming font up until this point), its stroke width is a bit wider (at least how Windows XP’s ClearType interprets it). My favorite characters within the font are probably the lowercase “l” (el) and the number zero (pictured above).

The glyph for “l” has a lovely subtle bend at each end, almost like a backwards “S”. And, as for the zero, it’s differentiated from the letter “O” through a dot in its center. Now, maybe it’s just the nostalgia speaking, but I’ve liked that zero-style ever since the days of playing around on the DOS command line (where I’d see it all the time).

I’d give it a try, if you haven’t already. It’s a free font so you have nothing to lose :).

Update: Ah, it looks like those old Microsoft fonts might just be available after all — maybe I’ll give Andale Mono a try sometime.

JSLog — Unobtrusive JavaScript Logger

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Linked off the FAQ for Firebug (another nice Firefox extension for debugging), I ran across JSLog. In short, it's a JavaScript library for unobtrusively adding logging to a page. The extension’s web page puts it this way:

Every language needs a System.out.println() or a Console.writeLine() — a quick and easy way to output messages to you, the developer, during development and testing. Historically, Javascript programmers have used alert() for this purpose. […] Safe to say that if you've done AJAX programming, you are sick of alert(). JSLog solves these problems! […]

Considering that I’m working on a webapp with heavy DOM Scripting, I think this’ll be just what I need:

  • It’s absolutely positioned, so it doesn’t affect the layout of the page
  • It can be enabled or disabled by setting a single variable, so debug statements can remain in scripts and appear only when needed
  • It supports several alert-levels (debug, warning, info, and error) to differentiate messages of varying severity

What’s also nice is that it’s pretty small — in minimized form, it’s just a box with a number in it (counting the number of messages in the console). I suppose it could be conceivably left enabled on a development server without getting in the way of other developers. I can’t wait to put this to use.

The End of The Line for “The Shield”?

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

TV critic Aaron Barnhart writes on his blog about the goings-on with The Shield. In case you’re not familiar with it, the show is about a set of corrupt cops on LA’s “strike team”, a group brought together to bring down drug dealers, prostitution and the like. Oh, and it’s no spoiler that the cops are corrupt — that’s a running theme throughout the show. What makes the show interesting, in part, is that the corruptness of those cops isn’t black-and-white; in many cases, the cops are merely bending the rules (in other cases, they’re busting heads).

The show is on its fifth season and it’s one of my favorite shows on the air. However, what Barnhart reports is that series creators Shawn Ryan and David Mamet have also been working on another show, The Unit on CBS. So far, so good, right? Well, indeed, The Unit has been doing very well in the ratings and that could spell an exit route for Ryan and Marnet:

The outcome of “The Shield” may be turning on another program that aired last night. “The Unit,” from “Shield” creator Shawn Ryan plus David Mamet, scored what CBS is promoting as a significant share of its previous week's rating (85%), given the fact that last week's had a “NCIS” first-run lead-in and this was a rerun.

If “The Unit” keeps putting up decent numbers, the temptation would be strong for Ryan to make these next 10 episodes of “The Shield” the last. He intimated as much in an interview last week on public radio.

I’m not saying that I want The Unit to tank, but I sure would like to see The Shield continue. It’s one of those shows where, at the end of an episode, I just can’t wait for the next one. It’s that good :).

Inside Man Was Good But Confusing

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I saw Inside Man last night with some friends. I hadn’t heard much about it up to that point and I actually had to seek out the trailer to try to learn a bit about it beforehand. It scored well at Metacritic (76) and, in particular, The Onion A.V. Club and Stephanie Zacharek at Salon — two critics that I trust — liked it. Having said that, I enjoyed the movie, but it didn’t quite make sense to me at the end.

Up until the final moments of the movie, it seemed to make sense. At the end, though, I was just left asking “What just happened here?”. Fortunately, Ask MetaFilter is around for just these type of things :). I posted a question there about the movie (yes, with spoilers) and some readers have chimed in to help clear up a few things. I still don’t quite have my head wrapped around it, but I’m a little closer to understanding it than I was before.