jmoiron.net

After a few days of actually getting things done, I relapsed into staring lazily into the depths of the internet and finding entertainment in what most people would probably consider the most mundane of places. This time, it was one of the rare interesting reddit articles in which a guy mails typographers asking them for handwriting samples.

I fancy myself to have at least a little bit of taste, and moreover understand that there is a philosophy to type design and a kind of method to the madness. I can do the basics; which is to say I can spout off without really knowing anything. But some of the fonts he's linked are fantastic looking; they are interesting without sacrificing readability. The ones that hit me as the best were from Kris Sowersby and Veronika Burian.

Searching for information about the fonts, I cam across a forum thread with POCs from Kris during his development of Feijoa which was very interesting and worth a read for anyone interested in typography or type design.

My CouchDB/WSGI development has been on standby as I start my new web development job at Advance, and lately I've been leaning more towards bringing the current code up to snuff. Part of this is the difficulty in managing everything on your own when doing it live without a framework to help. Part of it is the pain and suffering of writing CRUD forms that have to be dynamic and almost can't have help of any kind that you normally get with an ORM.

The last part is, sad to say it, the actual development of CouchDB itself, which is kind of fast paced for the time I can spare these extra projects. As it turns out, I still think that non-rdbms is the perfect match for my Gallery application ideas (and for various things we're doing at work, actually), but by and large I can make things fit the relational model quite well and SQL has a lot more migration capability for small systems than it's given credit for.

Back to Couch, which I still think is "the answer" to a lot of my problems. Since I last touched my code, trunk has changed drastically. map has been renamed to emit, reduce functionality has been implemented. Using my todo list the past few days to manage filling out HR forms, emailing people about SeriousBusiness, and getting my Visa for my upcoming visit to china, has given me some ideas about how to improve the user interface side of that, and since I am going to be dealing with some javascript in my upcoming work assignments, I'll probably be focusing external efforts there.