Category: Computers

A friend in Japan asked me what I thought about the future of blogging in Japan. I thought about it for around 5 seconds and suddenly realized that I don’t know if Movable Type, or any blog software supports Japanese language encodings. So now I’m curious, I have to find out.

Movable Type runs in Perl, and there is a Perl extension for Japanese language encodings, so it should be possible to add Japanese support to MT, if it isn’t in there already. I know the RSS XML specs have a language tag, but some blog programs (like the notoriously buggy Radio ) can’t handle anything but ASCII.

So I must do some experiments. I really should set up a Japanese language blog on this server, but there are a few major maintenance tasks I should do first. I can’t do an experiment without taking everything apart and putting it back together properly. And this blog sure isn’t put together properly. I have a feeling this is going to all blow up in my face.

Update: I found a few Movable Type blogs in Japanese, they’re using UTF-8. Looks like only a few minor changes to the page templates to add the encoding flags, and it’s all set. The RSS feed even works in Amphetadesk/Mozilla, it decodes and displays nicely. It works!

Another day in DSL Hell. My QWest DSL line died due to a hardware failure at the telco. I’ve been offline for a full day. If there were any alternatives, I’d switch, but I’m locked into QWest, they are the only broadband provider in my area. I hate QWest.

The Disinfotainment server has been offline, there were intermittent network outages due to problems in the QWest network. This is frustrating because it’s been going on for two days. As soon as I think it’s cleared, the line goes dead again. It appears to be fixed now, but just as soon as I say that, it will surely fail again.

I just returned from an Apple seminar in Chicago, a demo of Shake 2.5. It was an interesting demo, but I came looking for one specific piece of information on the new Maya 4.5 Mac release. They had a working Maya 4.5 installation, so I found the answer. And it is very bad news.

Alias|Waverfront has been heralding their Mac/PC/Irix products as having version parity. Unfortunately Mac Maya 4.5 is missing one feature that I consider essential to providing feature parity, the EPS import tool 3D Invigorator. If you do any 3D modeling professionally, you know you will be using 3D packages like Adobe Illustrator to make templates for common tasks like 3D beveled type. Maya’s 3.5’s native EPS import tool is broken and often makes huge errors converting type outlines. The tool is completely useless. This problem was solved in PC versions by the 3D Invigorator plugin, which includes a lot of bonus features. Maya 4.5 includes 3D Invigorator for free, but NOT in the Mac version. The Maya docs say it is not included in the Mac version and must be purchased separately. If you check the Zaxwerx site, you will see that they have discontinued 3D Invigorator, it is replaced by ProModeler for the price of $495. But there is no Mac version. $495 isn’t a bad price for a Maya plugin, but hell, it’s free with the Maya 4.5 PC version. What the hell is Alias|Wavefront thinking when they claim feature parity, when the Mac version has no way to reliably import EPS files? Without this single feature, Maya will be difficult, if not impossible to use in a professional workflow.

I was just reminiscing about an incident that happened many years ago, one of the strangest things I ever did with a computer. A friend of mine had a new PC and printer, a cheapo 286PC clone and an HP Laserjet I clone with a 3rd party PostScript ROM addon. It was a total kluge, and was incredibly slow. We finally got ahold of a primitive PostScript program to drive the printer, I think it was Ventura Publisher, I was anxious to take the printer on a couple of laps around the track, to see what it could do. I went over to my friend’s studio, it was Friday afternoon, we had a couple of beers and put the printer through its paces. And oh man, it was slow as a dog. I did a couple of odd effects like a PS pattern fill, and it would take 20 minutes to print. I found some funny patterns in the ROM like random bullet holes, so on a lark, I did a page using that pattern filled inside a highway sign (from a symbol font). It completely hung the printer. It was getting late on Friday afternoon and everyone wanted to go home, my friend said he just left his computer on all the time so we just walked away and the job never did print out.

Only 3 days later did I hear the end of the story. Monday morning, one of the studio workers came in early about 8AM and started brewing coffee. She was all alone in the studio, sitting by the computer when she was startled and spilled her coffee, the printer had dropped my freshly printed page right into her lap. We figured my print job ran from about 5:30PM Friday to 8:30AM Monday, that’s more than 2.5 days to print a single page! And it was just a random postscript pattern inside a simple outline. What was that printer doing all weekend?

I am King of the Geeks, but my reign will end soon. I recently bought a new dual 1Ghz Powermac, and oh boy is it nice. But I could not afford the top end dual 1.25Ghz machine, so I settled for second best. And suddenly it occurred to me, I have bragging rights to the fastest Mac in town, since none of the 1.25 machines have shipped yet. The new CPUs will ship any day now, but until they are delivered to customers and and I am dethroned, I’m still King of the Geeks.

I love the new machine, with one glaring exception, the video card drivers. On my old G3/400 machine, I used to set my CRT to 1600×1200, but the MacOS X 10.2 won’t switch to that rez. This is not a bug in the hardware, it’s a bug in the OS, since the same thing happened with the monitor on my G3 when I updated to 10.2. I’d revert to 10.1.5 but it won’t run on the new machine. I can set the higher rez under MacOS 9, but that doesn’t do me any good. I’d be really upset about this but I expect the fix is in the 10.2.1 update. I remember when my G3 was new, it crashed continually until they shipped a new video driver a week later, and then all was fine.

MacWorld UK has an interesting interview with Steve Wozniak. Woz says he wanted to own a computer more than he wanted to own a house. It is worth remembering that the Personal Computer was invented by engineers who wanted their own computer to solve their own computing problems. They didn’t quite know what the PC would be good for, but they knew it was the most important thing in their lives. It is also heartening to hear what people like Woz did with their interest in computers, they turned it back towards the purpose for which it served them best: education.

This site has been up and down for the past few days while I upgraded to MacOS X 10.2. I love the new OS, particularly CUPS. I set up Gimp-Print and now my Epson 1520 printer works in MacOS X! Unfortunately, my scanner is dead again, SilverfastSE needs an upgrade. The new Quicktime Streaming Server works well, Movable Type didn’t break, my CDR still works, PHP and MySQL have been updated, I’m very happy. Oh there is so much to love in the MacOS X 10.2 update.

I’m watching the MacWorld keynote right now, wow is the MPEG4 video stream hugely improved quality over previous live MacWorld broadcasts. I can actually see the contents of the screens during demos. I’ll be in the studio painting a bit throughout today, but I won’t get anything done until the Stevenote is over.

I’ve just completed the first release of a new document, Advanced Anti-Spam Techniques for MacOS X. It describes my strategy for reducing spam with simple procmail scripts. I hope to add new strategies to this page, if anyone has suggestions then please let me know.