Sadly, that seems to not be the case any more. Just went and saw “Cloverfield” and discovered that the Century 16 is now the Cinemark 16, apparently bought out by another company. I assume that’s why we were treated to nonstop obnoxious pre-movie ads (now with harder-to-tune-out video and soundtracks), a full 25 minutes of previews and other ads after the scheduled start of the show, and an increased ticket price that is more for two people without drinks or popcorn than we pay for an entire month’s worth of Netflix service. The crowd is still less annoying but that’s it.

Sorry, Cinemark, you just crossed the line and I won’t be planning any more trips back to your theater. You forgot that the audience isn’t there to make you money — you are there to serve the audience. I can sit in my nice comfortable home theater (which, granted, is pretty high up on the fancy scale of home theaters) and watch whatever movie I want, whenever I want, in high definition in most cases these days, and my girlfriend and I always get the best seats in the house.

If ticket sales are plummeting, they deserve to be, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with piracy, though I’m sure the industry will trot that old trope out in a futile, misdirected effort to force their customers back in the door.

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.

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).

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 find myself using vocabulary words that I never had reason to use before, certainly, but I still pause and stutter a lot and very often completely fail to find the words to say what I want to say. For example, after I mentioned that I work with computers for a living, someone asked me exactly what kind of programming I did. How to say “I maintain the caching software we use to reduce our database load” in Chinese? No bloody idea. I can get as far as “I maintain” and it pretty much stops there, so I end up stumbling through something like, “The things you see on a web page, I don’t write, but I help the computers that make the things you see on the web page work faster,” and hope the general idea gets across despite the fact I’ve mangled my grammar beyond all hope of repair.

But today I went out for lunch with a Korean classmate and with only a couple of exceptions, we spent the entire two-odd hours speaking nothing but Chinese. So I guess that’s a good sign, even if I can’t describe what I do for a living.

I’m actually generally pleased with how well I’m doing in random situations outside of class. I can have not-totally-trivial conversations with people I meet, and although I rarely understand everything they’re saying to me, I think I at least get enough of it that my responses don’t evoke puzzled looks too often.

Class is interesting. It is 100% in Chinese. That has one huge plus: I think my listening comprehension has improved dramatically, much faster than I expected. After just two and a half weeks I can follow nearly everything the teacher is saying, which was definitely not true the first week. I can pick up substantially more of the content of conversations I overhear on the bus or elsewhere than I could when I first got here, though a lot still goes over my head. The TV news is still utterly impenetrable to me — as in, if I don’t watch the video, I can listen for five minutes and come away with absolutely zero idea what any of the stories were about — but I can sort of follow some drama shows and understand a lot of ads. I credit sitting in a room for three hours a day listening to a teacher speaking nothing but Chinese.

But teaching the class in Chinese has some big downsides too, mostly in the area of efficiency of learning. Sometimes the teacher will explain some new vocabulary word or grammatical structure and, after the explanation, I will still have no idea what the heck it means, because the explanation itself required vocabulary I haven’t learned yet, or because it’s something hard to explain in words. Last week we had “荷叶”. The teacher explained that it was a plant, something that grows from under the water and flowers above the water. She spent several minutes trying to zero in on exactly what it was, but I (and, I assume, the other people in the class who didn’t already know it) had only a very general idea. It wasn’t until after class that I looked it up in my dictionary and in a fraction of a second learned that it means “lotus leaf.” That sort of thing happens less often than I’d expect, but it’s always a bit frustrating when it does.

The other point of frustration is just due to this being a school that doesn’t have a lot of foreign students. There are a total of four classes, divided by level. The beginning and advanced ones probably don’t have this problem as much, but in intermediate land, there is enough of a spread of skill levels among the students that it’s hard to settle on an appropriate pace and language level for the class. Sometimes the teacher will tell the class stuff like, “Now the left side of the room will read, and the right side will listen to their pronunciation.” Invariably, at least one person on the right side of the room blithely reads along with the left siders, clearly not having understood the instructions at all.

According to one of my classmates, the taught-all-in-Chinese classes at the big schools in Beijing don’t have that problem nearly as much; they have hundreds of foreign students at any given time and can subdivide people into much more narrow skill level groups. But all things considered, I’d rather spend a month in Dalian and put up with the less-than-optimal class structure; it’s an amazingly pleasant city.

One thing that’s interesting is that some of the students seem to be happy to chatter away in their native languages at every opportunity, while others try to stick to Chinese unless there’s no choice. I have actually intentionally started going out to lunch with a mixed group of Koreans and Japanese rather than with the other two Americans, just because I am forced to speak and listen to Chinese if I want to hold a conversation. Nothing against the Americans — they’re both perfectly nice — but it’s too easy to slip into English, and if I wanted to speak English I could have stayed home!

Reading is my biggest problem. I recognize a bigger percentage of the characters I see every day than I expected to, so that’s good. However… I knew I was slow before I got here, but wow, I did not have a visceral realization of just HOW slow. A couple examples.

Most of the family-run restaurants here have their menus posted up on the wall (most often on a white posterboard with red letters printed in the exact same font, oddly). When a customer comes in, the owner points out the menu, gives them a moment to look at it, then asks what they want. The Chinese customers quickly scan the menu and find something good. But I’m usually only done deciphering the third or fourth menu item by the time the owner asks what I want. I’m not just a little slower, I’m at least one order of magnitude slower, possibly two orders. Just about every time I try a new place, I scan a few items at random and order the first one that I can read and that sounds decent. And very often, ten minutes later, having read the rest of the menu, I say, “Damn, if I’d known they had that, I’d have ordered it instead.”

When the bus passes by a store, I am rarely able to read the name before the sign has passed out of view. Unless the name is made up entirely of very simple characters, I’m still stuck on the first or second character, trying to (a) mentally convert it from whatever cursive style it’s written in to the standard form I’m used to studying, (b) recognize it as one of the 1800 or so characters I’ve learned already, and finally (c) recall the meaning or the sound, or both if I’m exceptionally lucky. If any one of those steps fails, which happens often, I’m stuck. When I read just about anything I go through the same process for each character, one at a time, then combine the characters into words, then pull the words together into clauses and phrases.

At some point I hope my brain’s ability to recognize larger patterns will start to kick in more substantially than it has so far. There are some sequences of characters I recognize as groups rather than individually, so I know it is possible, but they are far too small in number so far. The only solution for that is just to read, read, and read some more. I was actually hoping that walking around town being surrounded by Chinese signage would help me in that regard, but honestly it doesn’t seem to have — perhaps my time here has just not been long enough yet. I think I’m just as slow and baffled by signs now as I was when I landed, with the exception of a couple specific common ones I’ve learned to recognize.

So, um, yeah. The writing system definitely makes Chinese a challenge to learn. If you want to get comfortable in a new language quickly, I highly recommend Spanish. A completely phonetic writing system, what a concept!

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!

On the top line, for example, you have five characters 电源转換器. The first character, meaning “electricity,” is simplified (traditional would be 電), though it’s one of the many simplified characters that’s also widely used in Taiwan. The next character is the same in both forms. The third one, meaning “to turn,” is definitely simplified; the traditional version is 轉. But the very next character, meaning “to exchange,” is definitely traditional. In simplified it would be 换 instead of 換.

It gets more random than that, though. See the text to the right of “Made in China”? The second-to-last character, meaning “to manufacture,” is simplified: 制. The traditional form would be 製. And you don’t have to look far to verify that: you will find the traditional version on the very same label (second line from the bottom, left side). Even for the same character, they couldn’t decide which writing system to use!

Which brings me to the title of this post. If you’re learning Chinese as a foreigner, you pretty much have to learn both forms of the writing system. Not a pleasant fact — there are enough characters to memorize already, even in just one form — but it’s pretty much what you’re stuck with.

So far I’ve encountered exactly one instructional item that treats learning both character sets as a primary goal rather than (at best) an optional exercise for especially ambitious students: an oldish computer program called “Easy Chinese.” But that program is so deeply flawed in most other respects that it’s hard to recommend more than halfheartedly. It’s easy to understand why most books don’t throw a bunch of extra work at beginning students, but it’s also a shame because (I can say from experience) it’s discouraging to go out into the real world and have little idea how to read words that you’ve already learned in the other form.

Still, I suppose I shouldn’t complain. It just means that this “learning Chinese” hobby of mine will last me that much longer! It’s like a bunch of hidden levels in a video game or a director’s commentary on a DVD: more entertainment value for my language buck. Or something.

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.

The install went without a hitch; I let it use the default values for everything. When I try running it from a terminal window, I get the following:

2007-01-22 13:37:35.017 Adobe Photoshop CS2[340] *** _NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×181967a0 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2007-01-22 13:37:35.018 Adobe Photoshop CS2[340] *** -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: selector not recognized [self = 0×18195710]
2007-01-22 13:37:35.018 Adobe Photoshop CS2[340] *** _NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×18196ae0 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2007-01-22 13:37:35.019 Adobe Photoshop CS2[340] *** _NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×18196de0 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2007-01-22 13:37:35.020 Adobe Photoshop CS2[340] *** _NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0×18196dc0 of class NSException autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
2007-01-22 13:37:35.020 Adobe Photoshop CS2[340] *** Uncaught exception: *** -[NSCFString _getValue:forType:]: selector not recognized [self = 0×18195710]

I’ve Googled around for that error message and only found one other instance of it, from a guy who had messed with his font anti-aliasing settings. I haven’t done that. The Adobe tech support pages suggest running Bridge first; that doesn’t help. Bridge itself fires up fine, though.

I’ve tried removing all the Adobe-related preferences I could find (everything with “adobe” or “photoshop” in the filename under my Library directory) but the problem still happens.

This is a Core 2 Duo MBP running 10.4.8. Any Mac experts out there have some advice?

Update: It’s working now! At the suggestion of a friend, I tried creating another user and running it from there. It worked fine. So then the trick was to figure out what the difference between my account and the test account was. It turned out to be something wrong with my global preferences file, not really sure what. Copying the test user’s file into my account made Photoshop start working for me. That’s Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist in the home directory.

The root of the confusion is that Mandarin does not express past events using the same mental model as English. To put it in nerdy computer-science terms, English’s notion of time is level-triggered, while Chinese is more edge-triggered. That is, English models an event as an indivisible whole, and it either occurs before the present time or after the present time or is currently happening. The Chinese notion is instead, has this event gone from “happening” to “not-happening” (where that can mean “finished” or “failed” or other things.) “了” expresses the transition.

So, for example, in English we say “I ate dinner.” In Mandarin it’s “我吃晚饭了,” literally “I eat dinner [weird mystery word]”. What that actually means is, “The action of me eating dinner has ended.”

Okay, that one is simple, the sort of thing that made me think 了 was just a past-tense marker at first. Now let’s take a more confusing one. “I’m going to leave,” which you say as “我要走了.” Literally “I will go [mystery word].” If 了 was just a past-tense marker, then that sentence would be nonsense. But with 了 as a transition marker, you can think of it as “The act of me going will finish.” In other words, “I’m going to leave.”

“我中文学了两年了” means “I’ve been studying Chinese for two years.” What’s up with the two “了”s there? Here the first 了 refers to the transition from “not studying” to “studying” rather than the other way around. So you can pick this apart as “I started studying Chinese, and two years have finished going by.”

Okay, how about “今天的天气太热了” meaning “The weather is too hot today?” That’s also a transition, though it’s a little harder to spot: the weather wasn’t too hot before, but today it has gone from “not too hot” to “too hot.” The “了” still indicates a change in condition.

Of course, like any other language, these rules aren’t hard and fast and the person you’re talking to will pay attention to the context of the conversation; you can throw in an extra 了 or leave one off and most of the time people will still understand what you mean.

Any native speakers reading this are invited to comment. Do I have it more or less right, or am I completely misunderstanding what it’s all about?

Either way, this is a great example of one of the reasons I chose Chinese as a language to learn: it is great brain exercise because speaking it forces me to think in different terms, not just speak a different set of words in a slightly different order.

The first thing to deal with is searches. That is very easy: bring up the Properties dialog for the _darcs directory (e.g. via its context menu) and check the “Derived” checkbox. By default, Eclipse will not search derived resources.
But that directory still shows up in various views like Package Explorer. That view in particular has a very easy way to solve the problem, so I’ll describe it first. From the Package Explorer view, click on the little triangular popup menu icon (usually in the upper right). Select “Filters…”. Check the box at the top of the Java Element Filters dialog if it’s not already checked, and add “_darcs” to the list of patterns.

Presto, the _darcs directory will disappear from the Package Explorer view, so you won’t open it accidentally.

Unfortunately, it will still appear in the Navigator view. Fixing that is less straightforward; for some reason Eclipse doesn’t let you add your own patterns to the filters in the Navigator the way it does in the Package Explorer. So you will need to create a working set instead. (This approach will also work with the Package Explorer.)

Once again, click on the popup menu button. This time choose “Select Working Set…”.  Then click “New…” in the dialog. Select “Resource” as the working set type and click Next. Enter a name for your new working set (mine is “Exclude Darcs”). Click “Select All” then, for each project that has a Darcs directory you want to exclude, open it up and deselect that directory. You can also deselect the “.settings” directory and any others you want to hide. Click Finish and select the new working set from the dialog.

That’s all there is to it! You can now work on your project without worrying about stumbling across Darcs’ private copies of your files.

One other approach bears mentioning, though it may not be an option for existing projects: Put a top-level directory in your Darcs tree and use that directory, not the root of your Darcs workspace, as the Eclipse project directory. Then Eclipse will never even know that there is a Darcs directory. But that only works if you own the project and can adjust the directory layout to your liking.