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.]

I think this is the single finest example of premature optimization in existence today. From “Life with djbdns”:

The format of this datafile is documented at http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tinydns-data.html. It looks a bit strange at first because it is not optimized to be readable by humans, but rather is optimized for parsing.

Following the link turns up this quote, which had me on the floor:

The data format is very easy for programs to edit, and reasonably easy for humans to edit, unlike the traditional zone-file format.

Yes, I think we can all agree that a colon-separated data file where whitespace is illegal and record type is indicated by a single ASCII character (+%.&=@-’^CZ:) is easy for a simple-minded program to edit. I don’t think anyone with two brain cells to rub together can agree that it’s “reasonably easy for humans to edit”.

I must confess that, between his famous Usenet debut and my first look at the daemontools package he inflicts on all users of his software, I have never been particularly open-minded as to the merits of “the DJB way”. I’ve never heard a compelling technical reason for a site to abandon Bind and Postfix, and his advocates tend to have the glassy-eyed stare of veteran kool-aid drinkers, so until recently I hadn’t even bothered to look at his data formats.

The djbdns data file format? Fucking stupid.

Just to be clear, I think the “One Laptop Per Child” project is doomed to failure. That is, if the goal is “educating children”, I don’t think it’s going to produce a statistically significant improvement that justifies the expense. Perhaps that’s because all of the press accounts I’ve seen have allowed the sponsors to handwave away the quite serious issues of how they’ll be used.

To date, I have seen only one piece of software that provided significant educational value for children: Rocky’s Boots. I’m sure there have been a few others, but educational software is a tough market to succeed in commercially, and it has characteristics that make it “less than attractive” for the typical open-source developer.

Given the target demographic for OBPC, there simply won’t be a software market; they’ll get whatever open-source stuff is ported, plus whatever is commissioned by the local government educrats.

And that local government will have the power to brick each and every one of those laptops at any time (section 8.19):

We provide such a service for interested countries to enable on the laptops. It works by running, as a privileged process that cannot be disabled or terminated even by the root user, an anti-theft daemon which detects Internet access, and performs a call-home request -- no more than once a day -- to the country's anti-theft servers. In so doing, it is able to securely use NTP to set the machine RTC to the current time, and then obtain a cryptographic lease to keep running for some amount of time, e.g. 21 days. The lease duration is controlled by each country.

...

To address the case where a stolen machine is used as a personal computer but not connected to the Internet, the anti-theft daemon will shut down and lock the machine if its cryptographic lease ever expires. In other words, if the country operates with 21-day leases, a normal, non-stolen laptop will get the lease extended by 21 days each day it connects to the Internet. But if the machine does not connect to the Internet for 21 days, it will shut down and lock.

[Update: I just spent half an hour browsing the OLPC web site and wiki, and all I could find about the actual educational toolsmithing for the project was words to the effect of “we’re Papert-izing the world!”, which tells me precisely dick.]