There have always been two multiplexes within easy driving distance of my house: the AMC Mercado 20 and the Century Cinema 16. The latter used to be much more pleasant. The pre-movie ads were still images with no soundtrack, the crowd tended to be a bit older and less rambunctious, and they kept the number of previews within reason.
Sadly, that seems to not be the case any more. Read the rest of this entry »
I “solved” the transparent menubar problem by going through all my desktop images and removing the ones with high-contrast parts at the top from my “desktop backgrounds” iPhoto album. Complete baloney that the OS is forcing me to do that extra work — this one thing has dropped my opinion of Apple’s UI philosophy by quite a bit — but it’s done now, and I no longer have to squint at stuff like this:
Now I go to do some Java development and I see that not only has Apple still not released an official version of Java 6 after over a year of a perfectly functional preview version being available, but they actually broke the preview version on the new OS. I knew before I upgraded that Leopard didn’t ship with Java 6, but I didn’t expect my existing install to stop working.
A huge number of the Java developers I know from my consulting days migrated to Macs over the last couple years because it was such a nice Java 5 development environment, and being UNIXish it was close enough to the deployment environment to do meaningful local testing. But the broader Java world is moving on — Java 6 has been officially released for close to a year now on Windows and Linux and Solaris.
Googling around, I see that a lot of the holdup appears to be that Apple wants to fix up the GUI implementation to use the latest native libraries. That’s a fine goal, but all of the Mac-using Java developers I know are doing server-side stuff! We do not care, even a tiny little bit, what the state of Java 6’s GUI implementation is. We do care about the new language features, garbage collector improvements, and so on. I can appreciate that Apple doesn’t want to release a half-baked Java, but they could certainly release an ugly developer-only version.
I think if Apple holds off too much longer on Java 6 they are going to find an increasing number of their recent adopters switching over to Linux or Windows to avoid falling too far behind the technology curve.
I’ve upgraded my personal Mac to Leopard and am mostly pleased with the changes. Major props for making the window with focus stand out visually a lot more; that was something I didn’t like about Tiger’s UI. Spotlight is fast enough now, and is good enough at guessing what I want, that I might stop using Quicksilver. A few minor glitches from Tiger are gone, e.g., the odd loss of resolution on images in the screensaver, and Terminal is much nicer now.
But please, someone tell me how to make the menu bar solid again, or at least less transparent! I know from reading a bunch of Leopard reviews that I’m not the only one who finds that particular bit of eye candy a detriment to usability. Maybe I’m getting old, but it absolutely takes me longer to read the menu bar when the text is splattered with different light and dark blotches from whatever image the “choose a random iPhoto picture” wallpaper mode has chosen to put on my screen. So far the only workable suggestion I’ve seen on the net is to edit all my images and put a solid-color bar at the top. Um, no thanks, not so interested in defacing all my vacation photos. (A little bird from Cupertino tells me that the translucent menu bar was not something Apple’s UI people wanted, but they were overruled from above. Listen to your UI people next time, Apple.)
The Mail application is now almost at a point where I’d use it instead of Thunderbird, but not quite. The IMAP folder subscription feature seems to be completely broken; I have yet to get it to show me a list of folders to subscribe to, and it ignores my existing subscription settings in favor of showing me all my folders. There is no way to set the names of the various folders it uses for internal purposes (”Sent Messages” and “Deleted Messages” — I’d prefer “Sent” and “Trash”) though I imagine someone will come up with a “defaults write” I can use to tweak that stuff.
My upgrade wasn’t painless. I let it do the default upgrade process and was left with the “blue screen of death” when I rebooted after the install. I spent a while bouncing in and out of single-user mode trying to diagnose it, but never did figure it out. I ended up reinstalling with the “Archive and Install” option and everything was good after that.
Hopefully there are answers to the above nits (and if so, I’ll update this article for the benefit of people who land here via search engines).
Netflix has the most awe-inspiring development schedule in the entire industry!
I made a Netflix profile - basically a separate list of movies attached to my account - for my previous girlfriend to use. We stopped dating over two years ago. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to remove her profile, not least because seeing it in the nav menu is a constant annoyance for her successor. Netflix has this to say on that score, a message that has remained unchanged since the first time I tried:
Note the third sentence of their answer: the ability to remove a profile is scheduled for a future release. This message has been there for at least two years. Unless Netflix is flat-out lying to its customers, that means they plan their feature sets and schedule their software releases years in advance!
At most of the web companies where I’ve worked, you’re lucky if you can put together a schedule that stays intact for two months. Two years is astonishing — and for all I know, it’s three, or five, or ten years, since I don’t know how long I’ll be seeing that message. Hats off to your engineering team, Netflix. I wish I were half as disciplined and forward-thinking as you guys.
I’m typing this from my dorm room at Dalian’s Liaoning Normal University rather than the comfort of my own home because I wanted to immerse myself in Chinese to increase my fluency. Has it worked? I think so, but I am honestly not quite sure.
Read the rest of this entry »
Or, why learning to read Chinese is twice as hard as you might think. Here’s part of the label on the back of the power adapter for my girlfriend’s laptop (Taiwanese model):
This adapter is made in China. So maybe you’d expect it to be labeled in simplified Chinese. On the other hand, it was sold in Taiwan, so maybe you’d expect it to be labeled in traditional Chinese. You’d be wrong either way: it’s labeled in a seemingly random mix of both! Read the rest of this entry »
Update: It’s working now! See below.
I just bought a copy of Photoshop CS2 and installed it on my MacBook Pro. When I launch it, it exits immediately. Anyone else had — or better, solved — this problem? More details after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
When I first started learning Mandarin, “le” (δΊ†) seemed simple enough: slap it on the end of a sentence, or sometimes right after the verb, to make the sentence past-tense. Then it started creeping into other places that seemingly had nothing to do with the past tense — even in sentences about future actions — and I became confused. Now I think maybe it’s starting to make sense again. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m using Darcs on a new project and one annoyance was that when I did, say, a text search, Eclipse would happily descend into the “_darcs” directory and pull up the Darcs internal files in the editor. When I Googled this I found people asking about it but nobody with the answer, which turns out to not be too hard. You can also use this to hide metadata from Monotone or any other system that produces directories you don’t want Eclipse to mess with. Read the rest of this entry »
A couple of sites with some photos and descriptions of North Korea taken by tourists. I picked up a cool graphic novel-style book called Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea a few weeks ago and was interested to see color photos of a lot of the odd things described in the book. What a strange place — too bad as an American there’s pretty much no way I can go see it for myself.