"We give free health care to the rich, but nothing to the poor."

"Sometimes you need to take a medication holiday."

Oddly enough, these statements came from different people, although both were likely Stanford students. The first came from a guy talking about someone he knew who had a bleeding ulcer, and who was just toughing it out due to lack of health insurance. The second came from a young woman on her way into Starbucks with a friend, discussing their Spring Break plans.

Sony’s first Minolta-compatible SLR was the A100, which was a rebadged and slightly improved Minolta 5D. They’ve now shown off prototypes equivalent to the old 7-series and 9-series bodies, which is good news for people like me with a significant investment in Minolta glass.

In your book, Modern Japanese Vocabulary, the content seems to be quite reasonable. The layout and typography, however, sucks rocks through a straw.

There’s no index.

The handmade table of contents is set centered, with (usually) three periods separating the apparently-randomly-arranged section headings from their page numbers.

The actual content pages are covered in gratuitous horizontal rules (classic chartjunk), and set in a proportionally-spaced, slightly-condensed sans-serif kanji font.

Sub-section headers are honest-to-gosh sheep-stealing letterspaced lowercase. Also centered.

No running headers or footers to help the reader find a section in the book.

No obvious method for the arrangement of individual entries in each section.

The kanji column on the right-hand pages is hard to read due to the tiny margins and tight binding.

In short, you’ve self-published a reference book that’s hard to reference. Please hire an experienced book designer for any future products, including any revised editions of this book.

On the way home from work tonight, I needed to stop for gas. The most convenient location was the Shell station at Embarcadero and 101.

I will never stop there again. I will never stop at any Shell station that installs their new video screens that play LOUD COMMERCIALS while you’re filling up the tank. It was remarkably obnoxious, and distinctly audible even inside the car with the windows rolled up.

So, the new World of Warcraft Armory is up….

• Nishtir
• Zenra
• Nyarne
• Komusume
• Harlaath
• Krina
• Ikariya

Detailed data seems to come and go, even if all of the characters have logged in today, but that’s why they call it “beta”.

It’s interesting that someone, somewhere, has copied our Alliance guild name on another server. “Defias Rod and Gun Club” is pretty distinctive, and all we can think is that some of our friends have made alts there.

Most of my character names are unique on all the worlds. A bunch of other people have used Krina and Zenra, but of the ten who’ve used Ikariya, I’m the only one playing a Draenei. Since the only reason I picked the name was its association with tentacles, it’s surprising that someone would use it with another race.

I’m actively playing Zenra and Nishtir right now, and I’d be playing Komusume more if they hadn’t cut off the free server transfers to Arathor right before most of our Horde guild made it over. I’ll probably have to do a paid transfer back to Bronzebeard, because our petition to move the rest has been ignored.

Nyarne is mothballed due to the regular game of “nerf paladins” that the developers love to play; apparently the kids who enjoy ganking other players are annoyed that it’s hard to kill a paladin, so they whine until the devs respond with the nerf bat. Feh.

Harlaath is mothballed because I enjoy being arcane-specced, and they’ve found a new way to screw up Arcane Missiles while leaving the old misfire bug intact. Double feh.

Krina is viable, but if I’m going to play a pet class, I like warlocks more. Hunters occasionally have to stop and drink, while a good warlock never runs out of health or mana.

As for Ikariya, I enjoy the new Draenei quests, and killing Hogger and VC never gets old, but I’ve done the low-level quests so many times that I burn out easily. I can rip through Elwynn, Westfall, Redridge, etc at ridiculous speed, but it’s not as much fun as doing something new.

I had a downright peculiar problem. Any Java app I ran on my Mac apparently painted the window in the wrong order, so that the content was overwritten by the canvas. In some cases I could drag or tab through and get to see the fields, but not reliably.

I tried logging in as another user, and it worked fine, but deleting every preference and cache file that mentioned “java” in the name didn’t help a bit. And so, the search began.

Binary search, that is, where I started by moving my entire home directory out of the way without rebooting, tested (worked!), and gradually narrowed it down. To make a long story short, it was ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist, specifically the AppleDisplayScaleFactor key, which was set to “1”. [note: use plutil to convert plist files back into the old XML format]

Why? Because long ago and far away, I once played with the under-development GUI scaling feature in Tiger. It wasn’t ready then, still isn’t ready now, and setting the value back to “1” is supposed to be the same as never having set it in the first place. One of the recent Java updates disagrees.

Nuke that pref, and instantly every Java app paints correctly.

I do not like IPSec. I do not understand IPSec. Sadly, cheap VPN routers purchased by external partners to whom we must give some access pretty much speak nothing else. [don’t get me started on packaged SSL VPN servers…]

Fortunately, our firewall runs a recent release of OpenBSD. Even more fortunately, there’s an excellent site on configuring OpenBSD as an IPSec server, including sample PF firewall rules.

I used a recent build of Parallels to set up a private, non-routed network with three virtual servers on it, put one of them on the real network as well, set it up as a firewall and router, and tinkered with a pair of Netgear VPN routers until they both could connect to one of the private servers without seeing the other.

Then I worked on the PF ruleset until I knew I could cut off either Netgear without affecting anything else, and transferred my configuration to our real-world firewall. Works like a charm.

It appears that the best way to use IPSec is to completely ignore all of its management features, set up a generic tunnel config, and handle all the access controls in your firewall. One less convoluted config-file syntax to learn, one less place to screw up and allow the wrong people to get at the wrong stuff.

Results for last December’s Japanese Language Proficiency Test are being mailed out now, and are available on the web site. I took Level 3, which is roughly “have finished two years of college Japanese” (something that will be true for me in July), and scored 80.5% (322/400). Lower than I expected, which means that I missed some questions I didn’t already know about, but still comfortably above the average for someone taking the test outside of Japan.

In particular, the listening comprehension section kills people who don’t hear Japanese every day, so I was quite pleased to get 78% on it. I think that’s largely due to the hundreds of hours I spent with the Rosetta Stone software a few years ago.

[Update: Here are the average scores in each section for the last three years for students outside Japan. Vocabulary (100): 64.7, 69.1, 63.7; Listening (100): 47, 45.2, 49.8; Grammar (200): 125.9, 118.6, 120.6. People who take the test in Japan average about 20 points higher on the listening section.]