“This might be a contender for one of the most obscure bugs I’ve seen. Not only does it depend on the fact that your last name begins with ‘egg’ but it also depends on the fact that the egg-prefixed name appears in the last segment of the pathname, and it depends on the fact that you’re on Windows, which provides compatibility with the decades-old 8.3 convention.”
— Unusual failure mode for Python applications"Nice shooting, Tex"
Judging from the backlash, I’m guessing that the assault on Chick-fil-A just set back the gay-rights movement about five years.
Judging from the responses to the backlash, they plan to keep digging.
Pro tip: when framing your opponents as intolerant hate-filled bigots, try not to showcase your own hatred, intolerance, and bigotry.
Epoch Incantations
Calculate the offset required to convert from Mac OS X Core Data timestamps to Unix timestamps.
date -uj 010100002001 +%s
Better than just saying “add 978307200” or “add 11323 * 86400”.
Things you can do more easily in Word than in InDesign...
[Update: “…without spending an extra $180 on a third-party tool that unlocks hidden, unsupported functionality”]
Layout a sentence that contains a mixture of English and Japanese.
In Word, you can say “use this font for Japanese characters only”, automatically leaving the rest of the sentence in a more-appropriate font. If you want to do this in InDesign, you must assign a character class to each string of Japanese text, or else layout the whole sentence in the same Japanese-capable font.
And that character class will not be applied if the sentence is used in a running header. Which means that you cannot use character-class-based styling in text that will be used as a header.
The workaround, which doesn’t work, is to use position-based nested styles in the header.
The workaround for the workaround, which doesn’t work, is to use regular-expression-based styling in the header. You can do something half-assed with regexps in a normal paragraph style, but the exact same regexp that works in the body text doesn’t work in a header style; the regexps are apparently applied before the variable substitution (which, come to think of it, is likely the problem with nested styles as well).
You can probably do Word-style font-mixing in the Japanese version of InDesign, along with vertical text, furigana, and all of the other things Word gives you in all versions, but I can’t buy that in the US. And, frankly, it’s far too expensive to ever consider trying to import a copy just to get potentially prettier printouts than Word.
[Update: it is claimed in a number of places that all of the Japanese functionality is present in the US version of InDesign, but that none of it is exposed in the UI. So, if someone sent you a document made in the Japanese version, you could print it, but not edit it. This suggests that it would be possible to export such a document to either the Tagged Text or XML formats and do some scripting work.]
When you buy a 10 Terabyte desktop NAS...
…it really sucks to run out of inodes when the device is barely 40% full. I mean, it’s not like I’m adding 250,000 files a day or something goofy like that.
Oh, wait, that’s exactly what I was doing. Drat.
I'll just leave this here...
…in case anyone needs it. Yuu Hasebe.
Resonance
Peter da Silva posted a link on G+ to a collection of “redneck haiku”, most of them “not very good”. I commented with something I think is better:
Gently melting snow,
rusty pickup truck on blocks.
Spring revelation.
...and so it begins
The Amazon listing for the upcoming Niven/Benford collaboration contains the following sentence:
At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.
