Security advisory from Adobe about all versions of Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash/Acrobat except the just-released CS6. The fix? Buy CS6. The workaround:

"For users who cannot upgrade to Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe recommends users follow security best practices and exercise caution when opening files from unknown or untrusted sources."

…unsurprising.

Doctor’s orders. The science is settled. I need more cholesterol.

So, basically, I get to google for “high cholesterol”, avoid all the foods they recommend, and eat all the foods they say to avoid. I love modern medicine.

Just a quick FYI: the default encoding for text files on a Mac is UTF-8 with no byte-order-marker, with each line terminated by the ASCII NL character (0x10); this has been true for many years. I say this because Microsoft Word is still incapable of opening a UTF8-encoded text file without turning it into garbage, even if I explicitly override the default (wrong) encoding in the dialog. Outlook does some goofy text-molesting as well.

I can, at least, override the default (wrong) encoding in the save dialog, and it will write out the file in UTF-8, but then it will add a byte-order-marker for no good reason, which then has to be edited out. Quoting:

UTF-8 always has the same byte order. An initial BOM is only used as a signature — an indication that an otherwise unmarked text file is in UTF-8. Note that some recipients of UTF-8 encoded data do not expect a BOM. Where UTF-8 is used transparently in 8-bit environments, the use of a BOM will interfere with any protocol or file format that expects specific ASCII characters at the beginning, such as the use of "#!" of at the beginning of Unix shell scripts.

Ironically, the best way to get Unicode text files into Word is to convert them to HTML first…

[Update: two problems so far: 1. video codec eventually crashes, requiring a reboot (after a few days). 2. increased power draw in sleep mode, even with wireless and bluetooth off. So, I expect an update soon.]

Well, my Sony Tablet S does now, anyway; my doctor still frowns on gratuitous sugar for me.

Here’s one thing he can’t try to pin on Bush!

I spent two hours trying to buy stuff from a site that uses Paypal’s shopping-cart system. Why? Because it kept resetting the cart. This seems to happen at random intervals, but is guaranteed to happen if you’re actually logged into your Paypal account and that session times out while you’re loading up the cart.

It was so bad that I ended up pre-staging the desired items in multiple tabs, so that I could rapidly add them all to the cart and hit the checkout button before the session expired. As it is, I ended up missing the click on one item, so the merchant will not be selling me that particular $250 product today.

There are three ways to write the word for cloves in Japanese: クローブ (phonetic loanword), 丁子 (common kanji), and 丁字 (which can also be read as “teiji”, where it means the letter “T”). In JMdict, these are completely separate entries, and I just submitted a request to have the first two merged, with 丁子 as the primary. Arguably, they should all be consolidated, but I just did the one; I wouldn’t be surprised if the editors merge the other on their own after looking at my suggestion.

And the underwear? A Google image search for 丁字 is all about the T-backs…