“This weekend I learned a lot of people think it’s perfectly acceptable to assault someone if you don’t like their ideas.”
"So the guys that invented JavaScript better watch their ass."
— Coder The Packetsmith looks on the bright sideIf I'm paying for hotel broadband...
…I expect it to actually work correctly. The Luxor in Las Vegas fails this test. They redirect any outgoing port 25 connections to their server, which silently discards the messages, and they do something peculiar to SSL traffic that made it impossible for me to establish a secure IMAP session with my server. The server showed a connection attempt, but never saw the username and password, and my mailer took a long time to time out.
Dear Apple,
Why did Spotlight suddenly stop indexing my email, and completely lose track of all previously indexed email?
… mdfind, mdutil, …
Ah, I see; it spontaneously disabled indexing on the entire drive, and masked this by continuing to report file-name matches. That’s nice.
Favicons are evil, but I have one anyway
Why? Because if I have one, each visitor will request it once and cache it indefinitely. If I don’t, they’ll ask for it again and again (with some browsers, every time they load a page), crufting up my logs.
Dear Sony,
I own a Toshiba SD-K700 DVD player. It’s a nice DVD player, and it’s never given me any trouble. Until tonight.
Tonight I attempted to watch Casino Royale, and it wouldn’t load. So I switched to Stranger Than Fiction, and that wouldn’t load, either. Then I tried The Prestige, which worked fine. All of my other DVDs still worked, too. (and yours worked in another player)
Three brand new releases, and the two that don’t work say “Sony Pictures” on them. Hmm…
[Update: the story has finally hit Slashdot]
Buying Windows laptops for work...
Rory has ranted a bit about our recent laptop troubles. After giving up on those two companies, and not being able to fit ThinkPads into the budget, we looked for an alternative. These days, we’re also constrained by the desire to avoid becoming a mixed XP/Vista shop, so I went to the vendor who likes us the most, PC Connection, and sorted through their offerings.
The first “fix me now” user really, really wanted a lightweight machine, and had a strong affection for Bluetooth, so we bought him a Sony VAIO SZ340P and bumped the memory to 1.5GB. He loves it, and I was pretty pleased with the out-of-the-box experience as well (including their new packaging). There are only three real problems: it takes half an hour and three reboots to delete all of the crapware that’s preinstalled, you have to spend an hour burning recovery DVDs because they don’t ship media, and the default screensaver plays obnoxious music on a short loop.
The second user liked the SZ340P, but wanted something even lighter, so we bought her the SZ360P. It’s a quarter-pound lighter, uses the same docking station (which ships without its own power supply, but uses the same one as the laptop), and is also a really nice machine.
The downside of 4-pound laptops is they’re not as sturdy, so for the next four new-hires in line, I looked for something a little bigger, and ended up choosing the BX640P, with RAM bumped to 2GB. Different docking station (nicer, actually, with room for an optical drive and a spare battery to keep charged), different set of crapware, and not a widescreen display, but a better keyboard and a sturdier feel, and I’m equally pleased with its performance.
The only serious negative: it looks like the BX series will be discontinued, so when they run out and I need to start buying Vista machines, I’ll have to switch series. At the moment, I’m leaning a little toward the FE890 series, but PC Connection doesn’t stock the full range yet, so I can’t get the CPU/RAM/disk combination I want. With luck I can put that off for a few months, though.
With the previous brand, 2 of five had video and wireless problems. The five VAIOs I’ve set up so far have been rock-solid, and I expect the same from the other three that just arrived.
Sadly, while we’ll be able to put off the Vista migration for a little while (hopefully until Juniper gets their VPN client working…), Microsoft Office 2003 is a dead product, and starting Monday we’ll have users running 2007. On each user’s machine, I have to open up each Office application as that user, click the unobtrusive button that looks like a window decoration, click on the “{Word,Excel,PowerPoint} Options” button, select the Save tab, and set the “Save files in this format” option to use the Office 97-2003 format. Or else.
[Update: Actually, if you like ThinkPads and you’re willing to buy them right now, PC Connection has some nice clearance deals. If we were a bigger company, I might find the “buy 15, get one free” deal attractive…]
[4/17/2007 update: okay, one of the Sony BX laptops just lost its motherboard, after locking up at random intervals over a week or two. That still leaves 9/10 good ones, which is better than we got with Dell and Alienware.]
Dear Microsoft,
Contrary to your claim, most web sites do not in fact explicitly specify their language setting in a fashion compatible with your auto-detection.
For instance, my site is carefully specified as UTF-8, and occasionally contains some Japanese text. Once someone activates the Windows features that let them see Asian scripts at all, IE renders the kanji on my site in a Simplified Chinese font, and the kana in a Japanese font, unless the first font in the CSS font-family list contains all of the characters used on the page.
Most browsers will fail over to the alternative font-family you’ve specified, but not IE. It goes straight to the options set in the Font menu in Internet Options. And it looks like crap.
Unfortunately, the latin alphabets in most kanji fonts are significantly less readable online than Verdana and Georgia, and the Simplified Chinese fonts not only don’t look good alongside them, they might be the wrong character entirely. That’s why CSS is supposed to do this sort of thing for you in the first place.
Why start poking at this problem now? Two reasons: first, I have Vista running on my MacBook to test it out for corporate deployment. Second, Vista is finally capable of anti-aliasing (some) kanji fonts, and they supply a very screen-readable Japanese Gothic font called Meiryo (also available in Office 2007, apparently). I’d like to have Meiryo used to render kanji and kana on any machine that has it installed, but continue using Verdana and Georgia for everything else. Safari and Firefox, yes; IE, not a chance.
And here I was all set to say something nice about IE7 for a change, after I discovered that the new page zoom feature actually does The Right Thing, scaling the entire page layout up with high-quality font rendering. The wrong fonts, but nicely rendered!
[Firefox’s font rendering quality is crap, but it’s consistent cross-platform crap, so I suppose that’s okay]
An atypical day...
Yesterday morning, I found a thank-you note attached to a bottle of 15-year-old Glenlivet on my desk at work. Some users understand…
Yesterday night, I found someone’s little kick-me dog in my back yard. It didn’t belong to a neighbor, and couldn’t possibly have made it over the fence, which means that someone opened the gate and let it in.
After I chased the noisy little monster out (and watched it make a beeline toward its home), I found a door tag from Clark Pest Control stuffed into the back door.
So, someone in the neighborhood lets their little dog run loose (which explains the occasional “present” in the middle of my front yard), and Clark has hired a new guy who not only forgets to leave the usual invoice on the front door, but also lets strange animals into the back yard and locks them in when he leaves.
Still, with a fresh bottle of scotch in hand, I couldn’t manage to get particularly upset about it.
Study materials...
With Winter quarter coming to a close, and only one Japanese class scheduled for Spring (well, two, but one will almost certainly be cancelled), I suddenly felt the need to acquire some fresh study materials to improve my spoken and written comprehension. Off to Amazon.co.jp…
