Shareware Beach

Last month I set forth to take my blogging more seriously. The plan was to start three new blogs:

• Micro-ISV.asia where I blog about my business and the software industry in general.
• Regex Guru where I blog about regular expressions.
• Living in Phuket where I blog about my personal life and the island I’ve been living on since last month.

The Shareware Beach site will stay online for posterity. If you’ve linked there, thanks a lot. Your links will continue to work.

But I won’t be writing anything new here. If you have this blog in your newsreader, please replace it with any or all three blogs above.

Bye!

I’ve blogged several times about great programming fonts. That includes the Consolas font, which ships with Windows Vista and is available as a download for Visual Studio 2005 users.

Today a reader pointed out to me that the Consolas font is also included with the ree PowerPoint Viewer 2007 from Microsoft. This works on any computer with Windows 2000 SP4 or Windows XP SP1 or later. In addition to the PowerPoint Viewer 2007 itself, the installer will install the following fonts: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel. Only the Consolas font is monospaced. These are all fonts that ship with Windows Vista but not with earlier versions of Windows. These are not all the new fonts in Vista, however. Notably absent is Segoe UI, the new default font for application interfaces.

Note that just like software, fonts are copyrighted. So you can’t just share them without a license to do so. That’s why you can only get Consolas as a download from Microsoft, or preinstalled with Vista.

If you want free monospaced fonts, try Envy Code R or Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Vera Sans Mono is my personal favorite.

As promised, the final installment of my blog splitting operation is now online at http://www.living-in-phuket.asia. I have the .com domain too, but .asia somehow sounds better to me. Maybe its just the newest color of the season.

I’m indeed moving house once again. My published address will remain in Nonthaburi for some time while we complete our new house and the paperwork to officially move ourselves and the company.

I’m going to turn off the PC for the day now and celebrate New Year.

As you might have guessed, my interest in the new .asia top-level domain was part of my plan to set up several new blogs. The first one, Regex Guru, uses a .info domain, to match with regular-expressions.info.

My second new blog is Micro-ISV.asia. I was the only applicant for this domain during the landrush. All .asia domains with only one application are now live. Newly registered domains are activated immediately, just like for .com domains. Landrush actions are still “coming soon” or whatever that means.

Anyway, if you’ve enjoyed reading my posts in the conferences, cyberspace, ergonomics, hardware & gadgets, Just Great Software, shareware industry and software development categories on this blog, then you should definitely subscribe to Micro-ISV.asia. Essentially, that blog takes over the “shareware” part of “Shareware Beach”. My final new blog (coming soon) will take over the “beach” part.

The term Micro-ISV was coined around the time I started with Shareware Beach. Today, pretty much everybody prefers to speak of “Micro-ISVs” rather than “shareware companies”. Even the big players like Microsoft. And that’s a great thing. Because in 2004, whatever Microsoft liked to call Micro-ISVs at the time, simply wasn’t on their radar.

So if you want to know what’s cooking at a very small company on the world’s largest continent, head over to Micro-ISV.asia.