“Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn’t tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn’t want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.”
— Stuart Feldman explains Makefile syntax, in 'The Art of Computer Programming'Dear Apple,
I plugged in a freshly formatted external drive, copied a bunch of files to it, and tried to eject it. I couldn’t, because it was in use. Why? Because Spotlight was indexing the contents (specifically, a pair of “gnutar tf” processes were grovelling over the very large archives I’d just copied).
This is now the second major OS release to embed Spotlight into the OS, and there’s still no way to stop it from the GUI. If I didn’t know about “sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/foo”, it could be hours before I’d be able to eject that external drive. This is really stupid.
Also, a big “WTF?” to the person who replaced the Berkeley “ps” command with a SysV-style version in Leopard. After twenty years of practice, my fingers don’t type in “compatibility mode”.
I was expecting another 9
After making my latest Amazon order (no, not the boy’s shoes they recommended because I rated a Microsoft mouse, or even the Bourne Ultimatum DVD they recommended because I bought a book on Tokyo (although, to be fair, I did see that movie dubbed into Japanese…)), an HP ad popped up that included a statement that seemed surprisingly honest:
Ink-cartridge technology must be pretty bad when you’re proud that only one in a hundred are no good.
Been there, done that...
Anybody else?
[Update: apparently everybody else. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen an Xkcd cartoon spread around the net.]
Ma-ha-a?
This is the Asus EEE PC slogan localized for Japan: “manabu hataraku asobu”, which copies half of the English slogan, leaving out the whole “easy” part. Then again, it ships with Windows XP instead of a dumbed-down Xandros derivative, which might make it less approachable for a complete novice, but definitely more familiar to the Windows-centric Japanese audience.
Now that there’s a working Fedora 8 distribution for the EEE (thanks to the new official kernel support and Philip Pemberton’s RPMs), I can really start using mine. The supplied Xandros-derivative was amusing, but much too limited. Among other things, WPA2 Enterprise wireless was messy to set up, the Juniper VPN software simply didn’t work, and I really, really like chkconfig.
The most important software I’ll use on it? Claws Mail, Perl, emacs, minicom, Firefox, and StarDict. StarDict isn’t as useful a Japanese dictionary as Jedict for the Mac, but at least it uses the same source data. I’d prefer the “Green Goddess” dictionary that’s being included in some of the recent handhelds, but the EEE is small enough for most occasions, and I’ve already got a WordTank and a DS Lite running Kanji sonomama.
The world changes
Toshiba has abandoned HD-DVD, and Castro has stepped down. I wonder which one of these will get more attention over the next week.
Ume no hana
The test last week in my Japanese conversation class covered some useful grammar, including “dou yattara” and “~ka dou ka” (also humble form, about which the less said the better). The structure of the test was that the tutors composed a number of questions in advance, and students were chosen to answer each one. Grading was subjective, but just understanding what you were being asked was as important as composing a grammatically correct answer. There’s no penalty for occasionally passing with “wakarimasen”.
One that stumped a few people was a very polite and grammatically annoying version of “where can I go to see plum blossoms blooming?”. After someone finally got it, I said “my back yard”. It’s not as fancy as a proper Japanese plum garden, but at least I’ve got some.
Leopardized for your protection
So, with 10.5.2 and SuperDuper 2.5 out, I was finally willing to upgrade my primary Mac.
First problem: it merged down an old version of my Safari bookmarks from .Mac, even though I had sync turned off, and the last sync had reset this machine as the master. Fortunately, it was a merge, rather than a replace, so I didn’t lose anything, and only had a small amount of cleanup to do.
Second problem: I can’t turn .Mac sync back on to reset the bookmarks, and it falsely thinks that I’ve got local iDisk sync turned on as well (something I used to use a lot, but shut off a while back due to .Mac flakiness). The whole .Mac connection seems pretty hosed, actually.
Third problem: Mail.app’s IMAP insists on showing my entire home directory on one of my servers, and walking the tree each time to check for “new messages”; this behavior cannot be overridden from the GUI. It also completely lost track of how to connect to my primary SMTP server, but after the third try I was able to get it to send mail again.
[this doesn’t include the many problems I already knew about from upgrading other machines, of course…]
[…and I’m sure I’ll find more…]
