[update: Blech: Safari now constructs synthetic italics for fonts that not only don’t have them, but shouldn’t, such as kanji. Just like IE! Oooooh, smell the bug-compatibility!]

Blech: The excessive translucency really sucks in the Dock and the menubar. I’ve got application icons that are invisible, and a multi-colored menubar that varies between mostly-functional and useless. UI visibility should not depend on the user’s choice of background screen.

Woo-hoo: The behavior of Software Update is a significant improvement; previously, it was possible to keep working while binaries and libraries were changing on disk, which had some nasty failure modes. Now, if an update is going to do something like that, the machine logs you out before replacing everything.

Blech: existing WPA/802.1X configurations are not preserved correctly, and the new dialogs are goofy and glitchy. I’m still not sure I’ve got it fixed, or that I’ll be able to repeat it on a dozen other machines. The “strongly-recommended” keychain update didn’t help in the slightest.

Partial Woo-hoo: Spaces works. It behaves in odd, unexpected ways, however, and will definitely take some getting used to.

Blech: the Finder is a mess.

Woo-hoo: adjustable desktop icon grid.

Um, okay: the Finder’s built-in smart folders have potential, but why does the “All Images” search sort the porn to the top?

Blech: why is “Bluetooth Sharing” turned on by default?

Blech: why was my previous firewall setting replaced by “Allow all incoming connections”?

Woo-hoo: Japanese and J-E dictionaries integrated; the search capabilities aren’t as comprehensive as JEdict, but it’s not based on the free Edict data. I don’t know how good Shogakukan’s dictionaries are, but just having a second opinion is often useful.

[yes, this is a test machine; nothing I actually rely on will be upgraded for weeks]

PS: It’s probably coincidence that one of the backlights on the LCD panel started to fail after the upgrade…

PPS: why does the wireless fail to authenticate (WPA2, EAP-TTLS) when I log in (showing connected but with a self-assigned IP address), but succeed immediately if I run “sudo ifconfig en1 down” (note: just down; it brings it back up on its own)?

I knew I’d find a use for my Xbox 360 sometime: Portal. I’m trying very hard to hold off until after we finish the building move and I get back from Japan, but I doubt I’ll be able to resist, between the trailer, the 2-D Flash version, some of the many gameplay videos, and this:

This should never happen on a Mac: “reboot in single user and type several cryptic commands if you can’t log in after upgrading to Leopard”. It will give months of ammunition to the paid Ubuntu shills, and even let some Windows users feel good about themselves (“see! see! I told you the grass wasn’t green over there!”).

Changing how user passwords are stored: good. Forgetting that they used to be stored another way in a previous release: bad.

As usual, when my copy arrives, I’ll install onto a test machine and let it bake for a few weeks. My primary machine won’t get upgraded until we finish moving the company into a new building and I get back from my upcoming vacation in Japan.

I’m pleased that I’m not the only one whose response to Gizmodo’s latest round of “wacky, mysterious Japan” articles was “could you at least tell us the name of the store?”. At least with this one, one of the pictures had a URL in it, but it’s a chain with a number of locations, not all of which have a robot department.

I’ve been tracking down cool stores for the last few days, and it’s just peculiar to see people who are online and plugged in failing to do simple things like, oh, link to their web site, or for the advanced student, find them on Google Earth. The directions to the various Hello!Project stores read like treasure maps: “after you pass through the arch, take fifty paces east, enter the alley, follow it to the end, then back up ten paces and turn left. Arrr. Me hearties.”

• Passport
• Tickets, tour vouchers, limo and luggage-transfer coupons
• Cash and traveler's checks in appropriate quantities
• Comfortable walking shoes that are easy to slip on and off
• Camera (20/2.8, 50/1.4, zoom, charger, mini-tripod, media, USB cable, GPS geotagger)
• Laptop (also charger, ethernet cable)
• Rented cellphone, in case the company gets really desperate
• One set of nice clothes (well, better than my usual standard)
• Enough clean clothes to get through several days, not so many that I can't fill the rest of the suitcase with souvenirs on the way home
• Headphones, earplugs
• Coat suitable for sightseeing at ~8,000 feet above sea level on the slopes of a dormant volcano
• Sony Reader filled with Wikitravel dumps, subway and bus maps, and a whole bunch of stuff located through extensive use of Google Earth Plus
• Sunglasses
• Daypack
• Compact umbrella
• Sundries
• Partner in crime
• Eleven days

Soon. Soon.

So I bought the second-generation Sony Reader. Thinner, faster, crisper screen, cleaned-up UI, USB2 mass storage for easy import, and some other improvements over the previous one. It still has serious limitations, and in a year or two it will be outclassed at half the price, but I actually have a real use for a book-sized e-ink reader right now: I’m finally going to Japan, and we’ll be playing tourist.

My plan is to dump any and all interesting information onto the Reader, and not have to keep track of travel books, maps, etc. It has native support for TXT, PDF, PNG, and JPG, and there are free tools for converting and resizing many other formats.

Letter and A4-sized PDFs are generally hard to read, but I have lots of experience creating my own custom-sized stuff with PDF::API2::Lite, so that’s no trouble at all. The PDF viewer has no zoom, but the picture viewer does, so I’ll be dusting off my GhostScript-based pdf2png script for maps and other one-page documents that need to be zoomed.

I’ll write up a detailed review soon, but so far there’s only one real annoyance: very limited kanji support. None at all in the book menus, which didn’t surprise me, and silent failure in the PDF viewer, which did. Basically, any embedded font in a PDF file is limited to 512 characters; if it has more, characters in that font simply won’t appear in the document at all.

The English Wikipedia and similar sites tend to work fine, because a single document will only have a few words in Japanese. That’s fine for the trip, but now that I’ve got the thing, I want to put some reference material on it. I have a script that pulls data from EDICT and KANJIDIC and generates a PDF kanji dictionary with useful vocabulary, but I can’t use it on the Reader.

…unless I embed multiple copies of the same font, and keep track of how many characters I’ve used from each one. This turns out to be trivial with PDF::API2::Lite, but it does significantly increase the size of the output file, and I can’t clean it up in Acrobat Distiller, because that application correctly collapses the duplicates down to one embedded font.

I haven’t checked to see if the native Librie format handles font-embedding properly. I’ll have to install the free Windows software at some point and give it a try.

[Update: I couldn’t persuade Distiller to leave the multiple copies of the font alone, because OpenType CID fonts apparently embed a unique ID in several places. FontForge was perfectly happy to convert it to a non-CID TrueType font, and then I only had to rename one string to create distinct fonts for embedding. My test PDF works fine on the Reader now.]

First line in the description of a random ebook that turned up in a general search at Fictionwise:

Desperate straights call for desperate measures

[FYI, the quality of most of their content seems to range from fanfic to slush.]

So it turns out that the reason the Choco Party girl is making the hand gestures is that she’s playing janken:

choco = choki = scissors,
party = paa = paper,
goodgood = guu = rock.

(what, you somehow missed the video? NSFW, unless you stress-test lingerie for a living)