I have a common problem that many developers have. I have small programs or processes that I want executed on a semi-regular basis, but having a whole server set aside for just running these processes seems like overkill. Back in May of this year I was thinking about this problem, because I had a small program that I needed run every day in the morning, but paying the exorbitant prices of a worker role from Azure or AppHarbor seemed like overkill for what I needed.

I knew there were others like me so I set out to build a service that provided an on-demand worker role, that allow developers like my self to only be charged for the small amount of time that their program was actually running.  I decided to call it Executify.

More is to come in the future, but if you would like to be an early adopter or test out the service you can sign up for an account on http://executify.com

This is a break from my normal postings about technology, but I just needed to rant on this a little. Because as a programmer I understand that bad math happens, but this seems deliberate on AT&T’s part.

Let me start out by explaining, I like many other Americans updated to the iPhone 5 on launch day.  I found a lot of the expected fees, such as the “One Time Charge for Upgrade” fee of $36.00, which still baffles me because I have to essentially pay for the privileged to being locked in for another 2 years, but I digress.

The fee that I didn’t expect to find, was one related to AT&T’s bad math, which seems to work out in the favor or AT&T.

If you look closely at this plan change, they changed the old “DataPro 2GB for iPhone” data plan costing $25.00 a month for the new “DataPro 2GB for iPhone on 4G LTE with VVM” data plan costing $25.00 a month.  And some how this change worked out in favor of AT&T to the tune of $3.33 for essentially what should have been an even swap.

So when I noticed this, I called AT&T and they were quick to turn around and give me a good faith credit, no fighting, no haggling, and no bartering required.  So they must know something is going on with their billing system, to part with their money so easily.  Personally I think AT&T should retroactively credit all customers this bogus fee back, instead of forcing people to call them if they actually notice the charge on their bill.  And obviously fix their billing system, because something is obviously wrong.

By the way this isn’t a rare incident.  This also happened to another account of mine that I also upgraded to an iPhone 5.

In this case the change worked out to a $6.00 fee that goes into AT&T’s pockets.

I encourage all of you to look your own bill, and make sure you weren’t hit by the AT&T bad math fee.

You may or may not be aware but Adobe released a new font a couple of days ago. Who cares right, you are not a graphics designer, you sling code for a living. Well you should care about this font. Adobe has released a font that has been optimized for coding. And I am here to tell you it is a beautiful font.

I have been a huge fan on Consolas ever since it was released by Microsoft. And I was excited to see a new alternative font from Adobe. And to make it even more interesting, Source Code Pro is open source font on GitHub and they are accepting pull requests for it. In other words, it can only get better from here.

Given that I am always looking for the perfect coding environment, I decided to install Source Code Pro, and set it up in Visual Studio. To get started you need to do the following:

1. Download the latest release from their GitHub page.
2. Extract the fonts to a folder.
3. Navigate to the folder that contains the Source Code Pro fonts.
4. Select the fonts. (I selected all the ones with .ttf to install)
5. Right-click the selected fonts and choose “Install.”
6. The fonts are now installed and will appear in the font menus of your applications.
7. Open Visual Studio.
8. Go to Tools > Options > Fonts and Colors.
9. Change the Font to Source Code Pro in the drop down.
10. Restart Visual Studio.
11. Now you are ready to start using Source Code Pro.

Here are examples of Consolas (on the top) side-by-side with Source Code Pro (on the bottom).

You can click on each image and open them up in new tabs in your browser, and switch back and forth to see the subtle changes between the two. It should also be noted that Consolas is running at 10 pt and Source Code Pro is running at 9 pt, which seem to produce the same size characters on my machine.

I am actually really digging the Source Code Pro font, and I am looking forward to updates when they are released. And if you know anything about creating fonts, please help out and contribute. Personally I enjoy looking through the source on GitHub and learning about how fonts are constructed.