Found an online test to see if you’re American. I pretty much hit most of
the marks…. well duh. However there’s one that sounds like it was written
by someone who can only see black and white:
Between “black” and “white” there are no other races. Someone with one black and one white parent looks black to you.
This one I emphatically, disagree with. In fact, to the test maker .. here’s
a dime … get with the program.
I was following a discussion on the Squeak Mailing List and found this
interesting discussion regarding the differences in text encoding of keyboard
input and the clipboard for the Japanese and English version of Windows:
J.S. posts his initial problem
… thank you for replying. Perhaps I should have just asked if there was a
Japanse IME for Squeak.
Your page said that you were using the operating system IME, but I couldn’t
get the Windows 2000 Japanese IME to input into Squeak.
…
Perhaps the problem is that I’m using the English version of Window 2000
with the “Microsoft IME 2000 (Japanese)”.
Y.O. responds
Precisely speaking, the problem is that the Squeak doesn’t know
about this configuration (i.e., English Windows with Japanese IME).
On the Japanese Windows, the clipboard and keyboard input uses
Shift-JIS, but apparently it is not the case for this configuration.
If you can figure out what kind of keyboard input encoding the VM is
receiving, some 10 lines or so of Squeak code should fix the
problem.
J.S. responds
Microsoft Word is putting Japanese text into the clipboard in unicode format
in English environment Windows instead of using Shift-JIS.
Probably the IME is entering unicode too.
This is a very subtle but really intrusive annoyance when trying to use
Squeak in a multi-lingual environment. It doesn’t affect most programs
normally however in a program like Squeak that takes over the environment
a little bit more than other types of Windows programs this difference
is really exasperating.
Multilingual computing has made lots of progress since I first having
headaches just trying to input and read Japanese on a computer on
an English-based operating system. But there’s still lots of these
very small but very important differences. I wonder how many people
know what’s happening underneath when it comes to multilingualization.
I’m not sure I really do most of the time. But it’s posts like these
that really clear up what’s happening underneath the scenes.
Just because Windows 2000 and above supposedly went to
processing all text as Unicode underneath the hood does not mean that
all versions of Windows are doing the ’same’ thing when it comes to
handling it on the clipboard and keyboard input. Makes you wonder
what the Chinese or Arabic version of Windows does.
Well, I know what option I want on my next car.
Wouldn’t you?
Seems authorities nabbed a giant squid stuffed with approximately 700 kg
of cocaine on its way to Mexico and the U.S. from Peru.
Street value is about $17.5 million
That’s one way to try to sneak in something. Seems also that Peru
is one of the leading producers of cocaine in the world as well.
This
is from around 2002 when the job slashing in the U.S. was at some of
its worst however I find it an interesting read on one person’s journey
to unemployment (again).
Not being in the U.S. it’s hard to judge the job market now but
it seems certain locations are doing better than others in the
hi-tech field. I’m not sure about other fields.
It does seem to me that the that the ‘have a job’ continue to hold their own.
The ‘have nots’, well, I’m not sure. Frankly, the tech bust was overall
a good thing in clearing out many people who probably were not qualified
for certain jobs. But it was also a great time to cut your teeth in the
field of hi-tech if you were so inclined. My guess is only a small
portion of those who broke into the field were able to keep with the
ground running and build up the necessary years of experience so you can
get the ‘green pass’ to other jobs. One thing is for sure, many
qualified AND unqualified people were put on the chopping block so
you have a veritable mix wandering the job market right now.
This means that the competent people will be battling for many of the same
position that unqualified people are also aiming at. And there is A LOT
of both. One problem in this game is that not everyone is
telling the truth regarding their competencies. And just to make things
even more difficult the people that have any influence in the hiring
process might not be able to distiniguish competent from incompetent even
if it’s staring then in the face. But, that is old news.
The big question is… what’s next on the hi-tech radar? And if it’s
big how do you get the experience? Wish I knew… wish I knew…
Being into 3D and all that, I also follow the Open Croquet
project. I need to be more productive one of these days rather than passively
observing. Anyways here’s some really interesting news from one of the
Croqueteers:
I have decided to write the Wicket editor in Python. There are a number of
good reasons for this:
– We need to have a number of alternative languages available in Croquet.
It would be a shame for people to get turned off of it just because they
don’t want to learn Smalltalk.
– It would be nice to have a substantial application running in Croquet in
another language as part of the demonstration of the systems capabilities.
I’ve been slowly getting into 3-D. One of the coolest FREE tools I’ve found
is Blender however like any 3d artistic
tool it’s not exactly simple to learn. But having a free version available
is definitely nice. I also try to follow what the Blender community
does once in awhile. Every year there is a conference that is held
in the Netherlands. This year, once again, I didn’t make it but they
were nice enough to put up the conference videos via BitTorrent!
The link for the conference videos is here.
Enjoy.
I just went to see Howl’s Moving Castle in theaters in Japan now. Being
a Studio Ghibli fan it was a must see in the theaters for me.
I will try to avoid any spoilers since I don’t believe in ruining the fun
beforehand. That’s like giving away The Sixth Sense. First off, if you
have read the novel
by Diana Wynne Jones, then the first thing you’ll notice is that there were
some changes between the movie and the original novel. Personally, I didn’t
think the changes were bad but the changes did bring up what I felt were
some inconsistencies in the overall flow of the story. Actually, that is
my main gripe with the film. The overall story flow felt a little stilted
as it jumped from one scene to the next and you were left wondering why
event X happened. I guess this stems from the fact that this story wasn’t
written by Miyazaki himself so he had to spend time loading the original
story into his mind and trying to figure out what made it on-screen and
what needed to be cut. If the story is your own work you would have
a much clearer picture of what would work translating it to the big
screen and what would not. And unfortunately, this shows in Howl’s. This
is a disappointment compared to watching Spirited Away or Laputa
which have a superb story flow progression.
However, having said that, the cinematography and artwork are exactly
what you would expect from Studio Ghibli film. Absolutely stunning. Watching
a Studio Ghibli film on the big screen is such a different experience from
watching it on a televion screen at home. The voice actors did a fine
job of conveying their characters. Kimura Takuya, a well known star in
Japan, lent his voice to Howl (I could barely tell it was his voice). I
can’t remember who else played what voice roles, I’m afraid.
Overall, I’d say this was worth going to the movie theater to see at
full admission but it’s still a little bit of a disappointment compared
to previous works by Miyazaki due to the inconsistent progression of
the story. I think adding another 30 minutes to add a scene here or
there would have made this a much better movie than it was. But I’m
glad I caught it.
Paul Graham has another essay up. His last sets were not too bad but
this one I find has some interesting remarks regarding the general
character of America versus other countries when it comes to building
products:
But the just-do-it model does have advantages. It seems the clear winner for
generating wealth and technical innovations (which are practically the same
thing). I think speed is the reason. It’s hard to create wealth by making a
commodity. The real value is in things that are new, and if you want to be
the first to make something, it helps to work fast.
Paul has some good incites on what makes the designs go well but I think
it also feeds back into the average consumer culture so Americans get
impatient regarding products. DYSKE happens to mention an interesting
observation on technology and how we must push forward even if we’re not
really willing just to keep ahead. You can read that here
Thanks to Nanjinren
one of life’s mysteries has been revealed in what they do at Chinese
Beauty Pageants (which seem to be picking up in the mainland).
Calligraphy … while in a bikini
If you’re old enough to remember the text adventure game then you probably
eventually at one point decided to enter in profanity into the game to see
what happened. Here’s a gallery of some of the responses those games
would give you. Seems the earlier developers did put some anticipation
of foul language in their text parsers.
Well, it is about time a study finally hints that overusge of computers
can lead to eye problems. I’ve always suspected it but the doctors
have always been telling me otherwise. Guess, I need to start being
more careful in front of the computer.
Pacman VR! Now you can live the fever with lots of hi-tech augmented
gadgets. And as Pac Man you can communicate with people over the net
to give you navigational help. Why, all I need now is a rocket launcher…
The UK news.telegraph has a story
about Miss Vietnam becoming the target of a kidnapping. The reason being
that she was about to go to England to study on a scholarship. That’s
really pathetic.
One thing that is definitely necessary to increase economic output is
a good supply of WELL EDUCATED people that can be tapped to help build
the economy. I’m glad that in Vietnam they decide that they should
hold them for hostage instead.
I’m sure most people have forgotten about Vietnam after the Vietnam war and have
a very vague notion of what Vietnam is like now. And if the topic of Vietnam
DOES come up it’s always in reference to that war in the 1970s. While it
does mark a very important part of modern Vietnamese history it is not the
only thing about Vietnam. I have reasons that I would really like Vietnam
as a country to have an economic boom like China is having. However, it seems
the current government just makes it impossible to do anything.
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