Mitchell Baker, Chris Hofmann, Chris Blizzard, Taras Glek, Marcio Galli and myself just wrapped up an amazing visit to Porto Alegre for FISL, Brazil’s largest open source conference.  The conference drew over 6,000 people from Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Angola and more!  I wanted to extend a huge thank you to Bruno Magrani, Ronaldo Lemos, Mario Rinaldi, Clauber Stipkovic Halic, Giullermo Movia of Argentina, Felipe Gomes, Antonio Gomes, Andre Pedralho, Fernando Silveira, Marcelo Terres, Juliano Bittencourt and everyone else who helped make our experience so great!

Some of the highlights:

• We met many, many, many passionate Firefox users.  In fact, 6,000 of them and not nearly enough Firefox t-shirts to go around.  You can imagine the stampede!
• Our Brazilian contributors helped conduct a workshop on the various ways to get involved with Firefox and Mozilla.  Despite the heat and far off location we had a great showing of people. Stay tuned for video!
• In line with the Brazilian culture, we had a great community party to thank our Brazilian contributors and get to know some new people.
• Juliano Bittencourt of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project took us to a local deployment where we met students who’ve been enjoying, customizing and learning with the computers.  It was pretty amazing to see OLPC project coming to life.

It was great to see all the contribution that is going on in Brazil and to meet new volunteers.  Thanks for the hard work!

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If you’re a developer, there’s an easy way to give your eyes a rest and make yourself more productive. Use the Consolas font Microsoft developed specifically for you.

When we began work on a project to create a new set of fonts which would take maximum advantage of ClearType, we decided to develop a fixed-pitch font for developers - because no one ever thought of their needs, and we realized a highly-readable fixed-width font would make their lives a lot easier.

We call them the C* fonts because their names all begin with C (for ClearType), and we spent a lot of research and development time making them as readable as possible.

Look at the difference Consolas makes, for instance, in the CMD.EXE window. Here’s what the standard 8 x 12 pixel raster font looks like…

… and here’s Consolas

You’ll see Consolas doesn’t get you as many lines on a screen – but it’s so much clearer and better to read that it’s well worth the tradeoff.

Bryn Spears on the Internet Explorer team gave me the following simple instructions to turn on Consolas in the CMD Window:

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont" /v 00 /d Consolas

logoff

 Note: In Windows Vista, you need to run the reg command from an elevated command prompt.

When you log back in, Consolas will be an option in the “Command Prompt” Properties.  (n.b., Bryn tells me it actually shows up before you relog, but it won’t work.)

You can install Consolas on your Windows system even if you don’t have Vista or Office 2007 with a free download from Microsoft.com

The Windows International fonts team is working on another version that’ll support Vietnamese, and also the line draw characters that we made to support the console window.

Bill Hill
Program Manager
Internet Explorer

Edit: changed logout to logoff