jon.smajda.com/blog

A lot of people new to programming just hate the fact that they have to used fixed width fonts. Personally, I also hate most fixed width fonts, but have always liked Monaco 10, which just so happens to be the default fixed width font in OS X:

However, one thing about fixed width fonts: they look drastically different at different sizes. Here’s Monaco 11, for example:

It just feels so much w i d e r, which makes reading chunks of text difficult, IMO. Anti-aliasing also comes on by default at 11 for Monaco, which makes the font look fat and fuzzy, especially on a dark background like this (which is how I like it). Turning anti-aliasing off doesn’t help: Monaco 11 looks nasty and jagged that way:

Most of the time, this isn’t a problem: for most tasks, I like Monaco 10 just fine. For reading and writing code, I find it nice & crisp and easy to look at:

Writing papers is a different matter though. It’s a different kind of reading and writing and I find Monaco 10 is often just too small in these cases, especially as I like to stretch out on the couch with the laptop in my lap, which puts it pretty far away from my eyes:

And, as I already mentioned above, even bumping it up 1 pt size just makes it ugly:

The fuzziness and the wideness, while not a huge problem with code, is a big deal when you’re reading paragraphs of text at a time. It’s just too hard to read. And so I’ve been searching like crazy through collections of fixed width fonts. I think I finally found one I like, though I’ve got to work with it for awhile before I decide for sure. Lekton 14 (download link):

It’s big, but narrow & not as fuzzy as Monaco at big sizes. It would drive me crazy to look at that php code above in this font, but for writing things like papers and dissertations in LaTeX, it seems to work quite well.

By the way, to make MacVim (or any GUI Vim, I’d guess) use this font only when opening LaTeX files (and defaulting to Monaco 10 for all other files), these two lines do the trick in ~/.gvimrc:

set gfn=Monaco:h10
autocmd FileType tex set gfn=Lekton04-Thin:h14.00

Okay, I’ve now had my fill of taking screenshots and obsessing over fonts. Time to actually get some writing done.

Charlie Cook on the state of the post-election GOP:

We also learned that there are two Souths. There is a “New South,” which includes Virginia, North Carolina, and, to a lesser extent, Georgia. In this South, which has lots of suburbs, transplants, and younger college graduates, Obama and other Democrats won or ran well above the norm for their party. In the older South, which has more small-town and rural voters, fewer transplants, and a more downscale electorate, Obama actually performed worse than Kerry.

In general, in the higher-growth segments of our country, Republicans lost ground, prevailing only in small towns and rural areas. When Democrats win the suburbs, Republicans are in trouble.

Republicans have lost an enormous amount of support among upscale voters, basically just breaking even among those with household incomes above $50,000 a year, a traditional GOP stronghold. Similarly, McCain’s losing to Obama among college graduates and voters who have attended some college underscores how much the GOP franchise is in trouble. My hunch is that the Republican Party’s focus on social, cultural, and religious issues — most notably, fights over embryonic-stem-cell research and Terri Schiavo — cost its candidates dearly among upscale voters.

The question now is whether Republicans will quickly learn from their mistakes — retooling and rebranding their party soon, putting themselves in a position to capitalize on the missteps of the Obama administration and the rest of the Democratic Party — or will languish, reduced to waiting for the Democrats to collapse and for GOP candidates to win simply because they aren’t Democrats.

My evil vision for the GOP: there’s no hope of resolving the division between the two wings of the party. One side has to win control: either the traditional big-money, fiscally conservative & socially moderate wing of the party takes back control, or the conservative Christians win out.

If the theocrats win, a good chunk of the fiscal conservatives would pretty much fit right in with today’s Democratic Party. Others may try to start a new party, and while they can certainly fund it, do they have the votes to get anywhere? I mean, there’s been a Libertarian Party for a long while now & they’ve not had much success. A Republican party taken over by the Sarah Palin wing of the party would probably continue the Republican party’s descent into being a nationally weak regional party.

On the other hand, I’m hard-pressed to bet against the wing of the party with the money. If the fiscal conservatives take back the party, what happens to the social conservatives? One possibility: isn’t it odd that the U.S., for all its religiosity, doesn’t have a major Christian Nationalist third party? I think they’d probably win some offices in the South and in rural parts of the country. As we’ve seen during the Bush years, they know how to run campaigns and win elections, which is more than you can say for most other third parties in this country, even those that have had some success.

I can’t decide if this hypothetical situation makes me happy or scared. On the one hand, I suspect it’d ensure Democratic dominance at a national level. On the other hand, if the Republican Party is unable to reassemble its coalition as in either of these two scenarios, there’s a decent chance of continued Democratic dominance in the short term no matter which side wins out for the Republicans: each wing is just too weak on their own. I’m also scared silly at the possibilities of an unchecked theocratic party gaining power throughout much of our country.

A more realistic scenario is that the Democrats win big for the next few years, but make enough mistakes that Republicans manage to settle their differences and win back some power. However, demographic trends suggest that this would ultimately lead to a weakening of the influence of the Religious Right has in the party, which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if leaders of the Religious Right try to go for broke with a third party strategy in the next few years.

I’m still making frequent use of my text-to-speech script to create audio files out of long articles. [1] Like I’ve said, this is great because when I find something I want to read, I can just quickly convert it and then listen later. Here are a few things I’ve read/listened to recently that I likely would not have read in their entirety if I had to stare at the computer screen the whole time:

• Newsweek’s Secrets of the 2008 Campaign, a long behind the scenes look at both campaigns that you’ve probably heard about elsewhere. I think all together it’s like 6+ hours of audio, which is kinda silly, but I listened to it over the course of several days worth of commuting & chores. If you’re in election withdrawal, it’s a good way to go over the election again.
• Welcome to the Party, a review of Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of Angels by Paul Starr. The basic argument is that increasing partisanship and increasingly clear divisions between the two major parties isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
• Geek Pop Star, a profile of Malcolm Gladwell. Like a lot of people, I find Gladwell’s work a bit too cute sometimes, but I still read them & enjoy them, even when I get annoyed with them. This is an ongoing interest of mine: how does one present academic research in a public-friendly way without some degree of oversimplification? Put another way: name one “public intellectual” who has written a popular book that hasn’t been torn apart by insiders in their field for oversimplifying things. Some of my favorite books in recent years have been by experts in other fields writing books that aim to translate the findings of those fields for a wider audience. (And, of course, this is our job at contexts, as well.) Gladwell’s a journalist though, and this profile takes a look at how that shapes the way he presents ideas.
• Does Religion Make You Nice?, by Paul Bloom. An essay in Slate magazine that argues that it’s the community aspect of religion—not the belief part—that contributes to a “happiness gap” between the religious and atheists…at least in the US. This is pretty much the argument virtually any sociologist would guess at, but it’s probably a bit surprising to many & this is a good read. (Bloom’s book Descarte’s Baby is one of those research-made-accessible books I referred to above.)
• The Misunderstood DMCA. The DMCA has been widely vilified for instituting draconian intellectual property laws, but at the same time, this article argues that another provision of the DMCA—which gave ISPs and services immunity for intellectual property violations of their users—has been central to the flourishing of “Web 2.0″ as we know it.
• The Genius Behind Steve, a profile of Apple COO Tim Cook in Fortune. An interesting read for us Apple Fanboys.

Footnotes

1. My current method is a little different though: instead of going from the clipboard to Automator, I’ve found it’s better to paste into a plain text file first and then pass the file to the Automator script using the automator command line tool. I’m actually close to having a bash-only way to do it, but I don’t want to post it here until I get some kinks worked out first. [↩]