Rants from Vas

If you’ve actually visited the web page, you’ll see a new link in the sidebar – To Arcade. I’ve put up a few translations of Japanese game service menus and test programs. Tell me what you think. Also, I’m open to suggestions for more candidates for translation.

Incidentally, I’ve changed the look of the site a bit. I’m now using CSS to simulate the look of a frameset, so the sidebar scrolls independently of the content. The sidebar is automatically suppressed when printing, and the background of all the boxes is set to white, so I don’t need to create special printable versions of pages.

Oh, and the only browsers that seem to render the site properly are Firefox and Safari. Opera made it all look a bit weird, and I didn’t try Internet Explorer, but I don’t expect it would work.

Well, Mac OS X 10.5 “Tiger” has been released. As usual, it’s feature-packed, and goes faster than the previous release on the same hardware. And as usual, Apple has deprecated and dropped several legacy features. It seems with every release, there’s a little less of NeXTstep hiding under the covers.

In Leopard, Input Managers are no longer supported, and are severely restricted. Now I know why this is being done – there is great potential for Input Manager malware. Also, Input Managers were never suitable for system-wide input because they didn’t work with Carbon applications. But I’m sad to see them go. Mac-style Input Method components are a far less elegant way of performing the same task (albeit with far lower potential for evil), and the APIs Apple themselves use for writing new-style input methods still don’t seem to be documented on ADC.

The other thing that’s disappeared is NetInfo. It’s been replaced by Directory Services. I guess it’s time for us to learn to configure static hostname resolution, DHCP/BootP/NetBoot servers, unusual account settings, and all the rest of it all over again.

I’ve been using WordPress to power my blog ever since I started wasting time with it, and it’s been pretty good to me so far. However, there was something that bothered me: despite serving UTF-8 to the browser, the actual database table collation being used was latin1_swedish_ci. Now the way WordPress was getting away with this was by passing 8-bit UTF-8 text to the database server and telling it that it was 8-bit Windows Latin 1. This is very bad, as sorting and searching wouldn’t behave properly.

Now with WordPress 2.3, all that’s in the past. WordPress now seems to be able to do the right thing with text encodings. It’s just too bad the upgrade script can’t clean up the rot left from previous versions. After running the upgrade script, I found that every piece of Japanese text, every typographical quote, every accented character, in fact everything outside 7-bit ASCII, was horribly mangled. Now I had a number of options for going forward:

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, since everyone else seems to have an opinion on it, I may as well, too. First up, I wouldn’t buy one, for a number of reasons:

• I like having a mechanical keypad – say what you like, but you can’t use a virtual keypad without looking at it.
• I like being able to use Java MIDP applications.
• I can’t tolerate the lack of performance you get without 3G.

The iPhone isn’t a smartphone – it’s a feature phone. The defining feature of a smartphone is the ability to run user-installed applications, and the iPhone forbids that (it’s priced like a smartphone, though). Now if you want a smartphone, buy one – there’s no point buying an iPhone and trying to hack it. Apple doesn’t care about people who hack iPhones – they already have your money.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, my wife and I decided to get out of the house for a bit. So we drove to Highpoint and walked around level one looking at the menus on display outside the eateries. We decided to eat at La Porchetta, as it’s quite good value, and I felt like eating a veal parmigiana. We placed our order, and waited, and waited, and waited…

After twenty-five minutes of waiting, we asked a waitress how our meals were coming along. She went off to the kitchen, and came back to tell us, apologetically, that whoever took our order didn’t put it in properly, so our meals weren’t being cooked at all. Now that’s pretty poor service, so we decided we’d go somewhere else.

But before we left, I thought I’d let the manager know that I wasn’t happy. And his response? No apology; no offer to make it up to us; just a justification. If he’d been nice about it, I might have forgotten the incident and come back next time I feel like pizza. But that just goes to show how little regard he has for his customers. Well, I won’t be coming back. Next time I want La Porchetta, I’ll go to Braybrook or North Melbourne. I’ll also go out of my way to let other people know, and encourage them to take their business elsewhere.

(Oh, and we ended up eating at the Pancake Parlour – the main/dessert/wine dinner package was quite good value, not to mention delicious, and the service was a lot better.)

I just read an excellent article on Apple’s current iPod/iPhone strategyby Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster. Definitely worth a read – the current trend is very worrying.

Yes, I really do (yes, I’m talking about the web browser, not the movie). And yet I use it every day. There are things that I like about Firefox – plugins like Aardvark, Firebug and Web developer, for example – but as a whole, I think it’s a lousy web browser.

Take its text rendering, for example. Since the primary purpose of a web browser is to get text on the screen, you’d think they’d have that right. But no, apparently version 2.0 is still too early to expect decent text rendering. Compare these two snaps:

Firefox	Safari

How has Firefox managed to screw up the fixed-pitch text so badly? It’s just plain illegible! I have absolutely know idea, but however they really should have fixed this kind of thing before version 1.0 – not left it in at 2.0. How about italic text. Maybe they could get that right:

Firefox	Safari

Once again, Safari has rendered it beautifully, but Firefox looks like it’s using a synthetic oblique style, the way System 6 used to when you didn’t have an italic version of the font available – it’s most noticeable in the capital S. And then when you select the text, some of the last italic letter gets cut off. Come on, this is pretty basic stuff, guys!

Read the rest of this entry »

After reading this and this about the new Apple keyboard, I got the itch to write, so here are my random musings.

• I think the new keyboard is just plain ugly, but that’s purely subjective. I think the PowerBook keyboard feels better than the MacBook keyboard, too, and would have preferred a desktop keyboard based on that.
• The wireless version is obviously designed for using on your lap, rather than on a desk. The lack of a numeric keypad allows you to have it both physically and logically centred on your lap.
• Dashboard functions/exposé on the left are interesting – here’s my theory: on a PowerBook, it makes sense to have it on the right, since you need your left hand to get to the fn key while you hit the F9/F10/F11 key with your right hand (otherwise you get keyboard illumination control); however, on the desktop keyboard, you need to use your right hand to get the fn key, so it makes sense to have the multiplexed F-keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard.
• I was sad to see the help key fall into disuse, and I’m sad to see it ultimately disappear.
• I won’t get one of these keyboards. I don’t like wireless input devices that need batteries (hence by Wacom Intuos3 with wireless power to the pen and hamster – it can’t be a mouse without a tail). I’m also very happy with my Sanwa IceKey keyboard, which has very nice notebook-like key mechanisms.

OK, that’s enough random garbage for today…

I’m talking about my new car. I got a tenth-generation Toyota Corolla Conquest hatch in Aztec Blue (this is called an Auris in Europe and Asia – I’m not sure what it’s called in the Americas). It’s almost funny. Ford and Holden are placing more emphasis on their smaller cars (Focus, Epica, Astra, etc.) but Toyota are making bigger, heavier cars. The Corolla is just one example – it’s 1.3 tonnes of car, which is more than a Tarago was in the ’80s. And speaking of the Tarago, you can get a thirsty V6 Tarago now alongside the straight four. But it seems to be working. In terms of sales, the Corolla is topping the charts, and the Hilux has pushed the Falcon out of the trifecta (the VE Commodore is there in between, of course).

So what’s it like? It’s a comfortable car. You couldn’t describe it as exciting. My previous car was an Echo hatch. It was 400 kg lighter, and 30% less powerful, but you felt the road, and when you were doing 150 km/h, you really felt like it. In the Corolla, you can speed without noticing. You need to use the cruise control, or your speed just creeps up. The seats are comfortable, too. You have plenty of space in the front, and enough in the back. It’s a bigger, more serious car.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it looks like Ford is going to stop making engines in Geelong in favour of importing cleaner engines from other Ford subsidiaries. In all honesty, I’m not sad to see them go. If they can’t take the heat, they can get out. I do feel for the six hundred workers who will lose their jobs, but they will get some government assistance, and they are all skilled workers who will be able to find other manufacturing positions.

Now you can clearly see that my position is at odds with the unions. They’re claiming that the federal government should do more to help Ford keep the Geelong engine plant in business. But I definitely don’t want the tax money that I pay going to prop up a poorly managed foreign company.

Read the rest of this entry »