Code Away

Hardly anyone I know (even developers) is aware of the fact that Windows XP, the most used OS in the world, has an option to anti-alias screen fonts.

Just as a brief intro on smooth fonts, here are some screenshots:

Yahoo homepage with default screen fonts

Yahoo homepage with ’smooth’ screen fonts

For those who don’t see any difference in particular, I’ve marked areas in (rather out-of-place) 3 magenta-colored rectangles. The smoothening effect makes the difference most in case of Arial Bold font. And you should certainly check it for Verdana Italic or Arial Italic font

To enable smooth screen fonts, all you have to do is:

• Right click on desktop
• Select “Properties”
• Go to “Appearance” tab
• Click on “Effects…” button
• Check “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts”
• Select “Clear Type”
• Proceed with “Apply”s and “OK”s

Well, this doesn’t make a difference to many. But because of this default setting, many sites which want to give a polished look end up displaying everything in images which use smooth fonts, thereby increasing download time and bandwidth for the page.

Agreed, WinXP was brought in when the hardware was not great and “anti-aliasing” or smoothening the display fonts would require bit of (already low) processing power. But Windows XP SP1 and SP2 were available much later. I wonder why the default setting is still good old jagged edges.

In degree college whenever I had a data processing task that can be expressed in less than 2 lines, I used to enthusiastically sit and code in C to achieve the desired result. There’s no need to express my grief for the time and effort wasted, because if anything was achieved by the programs, it was my typing speed, which was already more than adequate. The way to go about this is by quick bash script or a few perl commands, or simply a couple of commands separated by pipes are ample in many situations.

The other day I was required to extract a string from a few perl scripts (around 50 of ‘em). Some observation showed that the string appeared after the last comma and after it, 2 end paranthesis ‘)’ were present. Although not being a tabular data in any form, `cut` could still be used pretty nicely in this scenario. The quick-hack though, was the `rev` command which allowed me to cut the last column

grep 'filter_required' *.txt | rev | cut -d ',' -f 1 | rev | cut -d ')' -f 1

cool enough! and pretty quick too… A Unix screen sure is handy at times, even if one loves to stick with Windows for the daily chores.

I am Swapnil Pathare, working in Server Technologies division of Oracle India Pvt. Ltd., after having completed my MTech at Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

I love web technologies and that’s what I work on, in Oracle. In fact that’s been my passion ever since I graduated and joined NSEiT (now NSETech). User Interface in general and web-UI’s in particular also hold quite a bit of interest for me.

I’m a bit of a Java fan. I work mostly in Java. However for smaller hacks, I prefer python and php. So far, I’m pretty bad at creating windows-specific software, although this doesn’t affect my affinity to Windows XP.