“These are serious times and the senator is not a serious man. And so we have a campaign that has a sharper position on Mary Cheney’s lesbianism and the deficiencies of Laura Bush’s curriculum vitae than on the central question of the age.”
— Mark SteynDear 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…
In a Parallel Universe...
[Peem] whispers: wiped in TIB, can u tank 4 us
[Ferendo] whispers: Maybe, what's up?
[Peem] whispers: need 2 clear 4 1st boss, u tank 6 whelps we dps
[Ferendo] whispers: That sounds easy. Go ahead and summon me.
Ferendo joins the party.
[Ferendo] says: Okay, where are the whelps?
[Peem] says: dead ahead, dood
[Ferendo] says: What, past that nest of elite dragonkin?
Peem points at Enraged Harbinger Whelp.
[Ferendo] says: Ah, right in the middle of the nest of elite dragonkin. That’s a problem.
[Peem] says: u said easy
[Ferendo] says: I said tanking six whelps would be easy. Nobody told me about the 18 elite dragonkin fireballing me and healing each other in the middle of the fight. All my fire resist gear put together won’t keep me alive for fifteen seconds in that, and there’s no way you can DPS them down before I die. And when I die, you die.
[Ferendo] says: Look, send a tell to my friend Akamai; he’s got a full set of Molten Core gear and some fire pots, and he could clean this room out with his eyes closed.
[Peem] says: tried, he said no pugs
[Ferendo] says: What’s your repair budget?
[Peem] says: ??
[Ferendo] says: Without the right gear, we’re going to wipe half a dozen times before they’re all down, and that’s going to cost me at least six gold.
[Peem] says: no cash, just got [Gaudy Shiv of the Poser] at AH
[Ferendo] says: Then you’re fucked. Sorry, guys, I’m out of here.
Ferendo leaves the party.
[Peem] whispers: u suck
Ferendo is now ignoring Peem.
Overheard on University Ave.
"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 pre-announces pro and semi-pro SLR bodies
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.
Dear Edward Trimnell,
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.
How Shell lost my business...
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.
