Why then do we hear so much bad news about the environment? Why do polls consistently show that people believe that the conditions are getting worse and not better? Not to put too fine a point on it, it is because environmental activists often lie, in big ways and small, in order to create the false impression that we are going from one environmental crisis to another and will soon become the victims of an environmental cataclysm.
— Alex Kozinski, "Gore Wars," Michigan Law ReviewSony Reader firmware update, finally!
[Update: sample picture of a PDF with kanji and furigana below the fold]
Quite a while ago, Sony promised to update their e-ink reader (the 505 model, at least; owners of the original 500 are SOL) to support Adobe Digital Editions (emerging DRM ebook standard), as well as fix a lot of bugs and in general support the product. People have been wondering if it would ever happen, or if it would be a new model. The recent UK release of the 505 was a head-scratcher as well, since it came without any announcement about the overdue update.
It took a while, but it’s here (more precisely, it’s linked from here; there’s no direct download link). Lots of other improvements, including SDHC compatibility and… (wait for it)… kanji in PDF files! You still need to use one of the hacks to see Chinese and Japanese text in text files and menus, but now that there’s a real firmware installer for the 505, you can recover from bad hacks.
Looks good so far.
[Update: the PDF reflow works pretty well for straightforward text-heavy PDFs with sensible internal layout. That is, the order the text was generated in the PDF file is the order it will appear; it doesn’t understand “columns” as such. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Word equation editor violates this constraint, and furigana in Word is implemented as an equation. Net result: Japanese PDFs may turn into crap when you ask the reader to reflow them, so you should format them for its page size.
This also means that graphics-heavy PDF files can’t be resized at all. Maps and complex diagrams must be converted to JPG to be useful, because the PDF viewer still doesn’t scroll, and the resize button is always a reflow button now.
Generally, the UI is much faster (except the date-entry screen, which is glacial), and page-turning is slightly faster. The only EPUB-format document I’ve tried turned out to be very graphics-heavy, which basically locked up the device during rendering. I haven’t tried an SDHC card, but people are reporting very mixed results. I’m loving the kanji support in PDFs, and look forward to trying an updated version of the Unicode font hack to get kanji working in text files as well.]
Ah, the classics
Dear PocketMac,
Blow me.
“Hi, I’m a badly-written installer for a small utility that does only one thing, and does it poorly. You’re stuck with me, though, so I can fuck up your machine as much as I want and make you spend half an hour getting your environment back the way you like it.”
“PS: this update might fix your problem. Or not. But I’m going to make you reboot just to find out. Nyah nyah.”
"Germans?" "Forget it, he's rolling."
Barack Obama, July 16, 2008, as seen on CNN:
Throughout our history, America's confronted constantly evolving danger, from the oppression of an empire, to the lawlessness of the frontier, from the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor, to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Americans have adapted to the threats posed by an ever-changing world.
Dear Hello!Project Costume Designers,
I think Yuuko Nakazawa has a few issues with how you’re dressing her. If you see her approaching the wardrobe dungeon carrying some sort of long, vaguely cylindrical package, run.
Or, you know, don’t. I’m on her side.
Dear Free Software Foundation,
$20 says that the Neo FreeRunner, which you think will someday surpass the iPhone and all others, will be about as successful in the marketplace as the Hurd.
Precisely because the FreeRunner is, as you say, “supported by a worldwide community of people rather than a single greedy, dishonest and secretive entity.”
[Update: Ouch. Also, ouch. Second-rate hardware is acceptable on an early dev model that you don’t intend to actually sell to users, but when even the “improved” UI is crap, that “worldwide community” has a lot of focused, carefully directed, market-driven development and testing ahead of it. Oh, wait, that’s the boring work people want to get paid for. Never mind.]
Dear Adobe,
I think I’ve figured out why the Creative Suite 3.3 Standard (upgrade version) installer insists that you exit every running application and not try to use your computer at all until it’s finished: you don’t want anyone to find out that the guy who wrote it doesn’t know how to manage memory.
I made the mistake of trying to open a file containing all my software licenses, so I could look up my CS2 keys if they were needed to validate my upgrade, and I couldn’t fork a process to do so.
What’s more, the act of opening a terminal window to look at the file caused the installer to fail on the current and pending pieces of the application. I had to stop, undo the partial install, clean up some other cruft, and do it all again.
Later, after I started using my computer again, I ran the updater, and since it looked like it was going to take forever, left it overnight. Sometime in the wee hours, the InDesign update noticed that Safari was running and aborted, throwing up a dialog box that blocked the rest of the updates as well.
Gosh, thanks. I just remembered why I hate upgrading your software: my time is worthless to you.
PS: remember when complicated expensive professional software came with documentation? Yeah, didn’t think so.
