Fontographer 5.0 is out. I knew they’d done a cleanup release after acquiring the old code, but I hadn’t expected the FontLab folks to do major new development on it.

Safari 5’s url-entry bar now searches through your history and bookmarks. This is annoying. It does a substring match on the complete URL and title of every entry in your history and bookmarks. This is stupid and broken and useless.

Want a perfect example? Let’s say I just got email that included a UPS tracking number, and I want to go to UPS. When I start typing the string “ups”, what does Safari 5 “helpfully” append to it?

ell-widgets/click.html?ie=UTF8&id=IzuMqjLyzABOgXIyvBfq%2Bb4Thlnt8bTV7mga4c387gBUh2iRceLRXyomIKkOqOwVt3Ls7s%2BXyUX%2F3K9ODY3sNS1N31swH02jL9e94x8tKmHptCn2WgLY1glo3Pjt6JsyfGmIkaAYQvXrtZF7iDSlpbLQ6v4CpAI7LCrB28mooRdPZqrKQ7jVzq2B1ajW6M9X

In the right half of the URL bar, in gray text, it shows the beginning of this amazing string, which turns out to be the result of clicking on one of the “people who bought X” buttons on Amazon. Yeah, that’s exactly where anyone who types “ups” wants to go, every time. Stupidstupidstupid, and no way to disable it.

Flickr user Eric Fischer has done a very nice bit of data-mining in his Locals and Tourists set, analyzing geotagged photos and overlaying them on city maps, color-coded based on how much time the photographer spent in the city (blue for “locals”, red for “tourists”, yellow for unknown).

The details of his data sources and processing are not included, but the background street map can be used to overlay his images on Google Earth, making it possible to visually survey the hot spots, and the results can be quite interesting.

Random notes about Tokyo:

• Only tourists take pictures from the top of Tokyo Tower; locals shoot from nearby.
• His source data includes many pictures from Japan's train-otaku community.
• There are a lot of very photogenic temples and gardens that tourists rarely find.
• The residential district north and west of Youga Station (west edge of the map) must have an incredible smartphone density. I'm guessing lots of upwardly-mobile young couples live there, judging from the number of women with strollers that were captured by the Google street view car. [Update! Almost all by one very busy guy on Flickr]
• The area south of Musashinitta Station is probably similar. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all those pictures are being taken by stroller-equipped young mothers. [Update! nope, it's another very busy guy]
• The Shiomi Koyama Building is an inexplicably popular location for locals taking pictures. Good views of Sazanami Bridge? Mitsubishi employees taking pictures during lunch hour? Product testing? Dunno. [Update! The pictures are actually from the apartment building next door, and are all of someone's cat]
• Yasukuni Shrine gets a lot of traffic from all three groups. Also, the current view in Google Earth comes from late afternoon on December 31st, so the place is packed for New Years Eve.
• Only tourists take pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's Jiyu Gakuen Myonichikan.
• Tokyo Disneyland leans a bit towards tourists, but also gets a lot of traffic from locals and unknowns. The nearby Kasai Seaside Park, however, is for locals.

So far, I’ve had less success getting a precise match on his Kyoto map, but I’m off by less than a block in most parts of it, so I can still see some interesting places to explore.

[Update: Something I found around Kyoto, by looking for isolated clusters of locals. It was taken at Yoshimine Temple; not an easy place to get to, but obviously worth the trip.]

[Ah, and found his data]

With regards to Safari 5’s new Reader mode (whose availability is subject to unknown and quite whimsical heuristics):

1. Palatino is rarely appropriate for online reading. Most serif faces not specifically designed for screen use should be avoided, in fact; sub-pixel anti-aliasing only buys you so much.
2. Setting body text fully justified is inevitably a bad idea online. Not only does Safari lack hyphenation, but proper hyphenation is language-dependent anyway. More to the point, the fixed column size in Reader creates rivers of white space in many documents, even for users who don't increase the text size. Those who do are doomed to unreadable crap.
3. Even if Safari did support hyphenation, you should still avoid justification, because the screen resolution simply isn't fine enough to do it well. Not even the magic pixie dust in the pixels of the new iPhone display give sufficient resolution to produce both crisp Palatino and evenly justified columns. There's a reason that 1200dpi is considered low for printing actual books.
4. Open up the stylesheet; hiding it inside the Safari bundle forces people to choose between invalidating your code signatures and putting up with your poor design choices.
5. Allow the new Extensions code to load into Reader pages.

While I’m here, every version of Safari has suffered from the problem that right-clicking a link disables all mouseover events on that page until you click somewhere else. Even the builtin cursor change on mouseover is disabled. This remains true in this latest major revision. Has no one else ever told you about it?

[Update: Bumped to the top (more precisely, recreated, since bumping hoses the navigation links), since the original videos disappeared almost immediately, and I just found another source for the show they came from. No short clips, and their embedding code doesn’t seem to let you specify the starting offset, but their simple link code does.]

South Korea has nothing to fear from the North. Not so long as their army knows what they’re fighting for…

[Broken Youtube link replaced with dailymotion; starts at 4:50]

Bonus clip of Yoona being a little too embarrassed to do a sexy solo dance routine, until the entire audience begs for more.

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What else would they be?

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In general, I am such a happy Amazon customer that it pains me to say this: “fuck you and that obnoxious pop-up-every-N-seconds Sprint ad”. Yours is one of the few sites where I have permitted Flash to function, because you generally use it in manners compatible with my wishes. Popping up a large ad every time I try to read the details of a product, and forcing me to dismiss it by moving the mouse, is Bad Form.

I note that it is exceptionally difficult to offer direct feedback to you regarding such things (asking me to clickthrough on an embedded Flash ad is not an acceptable means of soliciting feedback on it), so consider this a public notice that I am now blocking an assortment of URLs on g-ecx.images-amazon.com in order to restore functionality to your site.

Oh, and Sprint? Die in a fire. “will not buy”

Perhaps the greatest sin of the Hello!Project costume designers is that their young victims graduate with no awareness of their handicap. This has led to many post-H!P fashion disasters, of which this is not atypical.

Maki Goto, despite cutting all ties with H!P and signing with a much better record company, remains scarred by her long association with the agency. Take, for instance, the recent promo pic for her web site:

I am delighted to report, however, that she seems to have found at least a partial solution to the problem, now that it has come to her attention (NSFW):

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