Rants from Vas

Tonight, my wife and I decided to get out of the house for a bit. So we drove to Highpoint and walked around level one looking at the menus on display outside the eateries. We decided to eat at La Porchetta, as it’s quite good value, and I felt like eating a veal parmigiana. We placed our order, and waited, and waited, and waited…

After twenty-five minutes of waiting, we asked a waitress how our meals were coming along. She went off to the kitchen, and came back to tell us, apologetically, that whoever took our order didn’t put it in properly, so our meals weren’t being cooked at all. Now that’s pretty poor service, so we decided we’d go somewhere else.

But before we left, I thought I’d let the manager know that I wasn’t happy. And his response? No apology; no offer to make it up to us; just a justification. If he’d been nice about it, I might have forgotten the incident and come back next time I feel like pizza. But that just goes to show how little regard he has for his customers. Well, I won’t be coming back. Next time I want La Porchetta, I’ll go to Braybrook or North Melbourne. I’ll also go out of my way to let other people know, and encourage them to take their business elsewhere.

(Oh, and we ended up eating at the Pancake Parlour – the main/dessert/wine dinner package was quite good value, not to mention delicious, and the service was a lot better.)

I just read an excellent article on Apple’s current iPod/iPhone strategyby Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster. Definitely worth a read – the current trend is very worrying.

Yes, I really do (yes, I’m talking about the web browser, not the movie). And yet I use it every day. There are things that I like about Firefox – plugins like Aardvark, Firebug and Web developer, for example – but as a whole, I think it’s a lousy web browser.

Take its text rendering, for example. Since the primary purpose of a web browser is to get text on the screen, you’d think they’d have that right. But no, apparently version 2.0 is still too early to expect decent text rendering. Compare these two snaps:

Firefox	Safari

How has Firefox managed to screw up the fixed-pitch text so badly? It’s just plain illegible! I have absolutely know idea, but however they really should have fixed this kind of thing before version 1.0 – not left it in at 2.0. How about italic text. Maybe they could get that right:

Firefox	Safari

Once again, Safari has rendered it beautifully, but Firefox looks like it’s using a synthetic oblique style, the way System 6 used to when you didn’t have an italic version of the font available – it’s most noticeable in the capital S. And then when you select the text, some of the last italic letter gets cut off. Come on, this is pretty basic stuff, guys!

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After reading this and this about the new Apple keyboard, I got the itch to write, so here are my random musings.

• I think the new keyboard is just plain ugly, but that’s purely subjective. I think the PowerBook keyboard feels better than the MacBook keyboard, too, and would have preferred a desktop keyboard based on that.
• The wireless version is obviously designed for using on your lap, rather than on a desk. The lack of a numeric keypad allows you to have it both physically and logically centred on your lap.
• Dashboard functions/exposé on the left are interesting – here’s my theory: on a PowerBook, it makes sense to have it on the right, since you need your left hand to get to the fn key while you hit the F9/F10/F11 key with your right hand (otherwise you get keyboard illumination control); however, on the desktop keyboard, you need to use your right hand to get the fn key, so it makes sense to have the multiplexed F-keys on the left-hand side of the keyboard.
• I was sad to see the help key fall into disuse, and I’m sad to see it ultimately disappear.
• I won’t get one of these keyboards. I don’t like wireless input devices that need batteries (hence by Wacom Intuos3 with wireless power to the pen and hamster – it can’t be a mouse without a tail). I’m also very happy with my Sanwa IceKey keyboard, which has very nice notebook-like key mechanisms.

OK, that’s enough random garbage for today…

I’m talking about my new car. I got a tenth-generation Toyota Corolla Conquest hatch in Aztec Blue (this is called an Auris in Europe and Asia – I’m not sure what it’s called in the Americas). It’s almost funny. Ford and Holden are placing more emphasis on their smaller cars (Focus, Epica, Astra, etc.) but Toyota are making bigger, heavier cars. The Corolla is just one example – it’s 1.3 tonnes of car, which is more than a Tarago was in the ’80s. And speaking of the Tarago, you can get a thirsty V6 Tarago now alongside the straight four. But it seems to be working. In terms of sales, the Corolla is topping the charts, and the Hilux has pushed the Falcon out of the trifecta (the VE Commodore is there in between, of course).

So what’s it like? It’s a comfortable car. You couldn’t describe it as exciting. My previous car was an Echo hatch. It was 400 kg lighter, and 30% less powerful, but you felt the road, and when you were doing 150 km/h, you really felt like it. In the Corolla, you can speed without noticing. You need to use the cruise control, or your speed just creeps up. The seats are comfortable, too. You have plenty of space in the front, and enough in the back. It’s a bigger, more serious car.

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Well, it looks like Ford is going to stop making engines in Geelong in favour of importing cleaner engines from other Ford subsidiaries. In all honesty, I’m not sad to see them go. If they can’t take the heat, they can get out. I do feel for the six hundred workers who will lose their jobs, but they will get some government assistance, and they are all skilled workers who will be able to find other manufacturing positions.

Now you can clearly see that my position is at odds with the unions. They’re claiming that the federal government should do more to help Ford keep the Geelong engine plant in business. But I definitely don’t want the tax money that I pay going to prop up a poorly managed foreign company.

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Well, John Gruber is at it again. This time, he’s calling MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan a jackass over this article about the iPhone’s battery performance. It all stems from this fragment in the iPhone specs:

A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. You may choose to replace your battery when it no longer holds sufficient charge to meet your needs.

Now Sullivan has decided that this means the battery becomes completely unusable after 400 cycles, and written a whole article about it. So yes, he’s guilty of spreading FUD, and I guess you can call him a jackass for that.

But Gruber has gone to the opposite extreme. Notice the use of “properly maintained,” “designed to” and “up to” in that quote. Gruber seems to think that this means the iPhone battery will hold 80% of its original capacity after 400 cycles. It doesn’t say that at all. It also doesn’t say how much of the 80% capacity that’s retained might actually be usable. Remember, too, that because we carry our phones around with us, we just charge them when we can. None of us are really in a position to “properly maintain” their batteries. In this case, it would appear that Gruber is spreading fanboyism.

Is the built-in battery really such a big deal? To me it is. I like to be able to carry a fully charged spare battery and swap it in. I wouldn’t be able to do that with an iPhone. But it’s a well-known fact that iPhone batteries are non-removable, and the performance figures and price don’t really look that much worse than the competition. So for people all the people who only use one phone battery anyway (I imagine this is the majority case), it probably isn’t an issue.

As you probably didn’t notice, I’ve moved this site from a data center in the US to a data centre in Brisbane. To my surprise, the operation was completely painless. I had everything back up in a couple of minutes. The Internet really is becoming simpler and more accessible to non-technical users. I guess it’s a testament to how bad things used to be that I was expecting things to be difficult.

While I’m on the topic, I’ll put in a plug for my hosting provider Selpaw Services in Perth. Their support is always speedy and first-rate. Thanks for everything, Luke.

Localising a software product is a painful, time-consuming process. After much thought, I think there is just no simple way. If you ever plan to tackle the process, be prepared to sink a lot of time and effort into it. Then when you’re coming up to the next release, be prepared to go through it all again.

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So Imus has been sacked by CBS for referring to some women of African descent as “nappy-headed hos” on air. Now I’m not a fan of shock jocks, and I don’t make a habit of listening to them, but this strikes me as ridiculous. Hello! What’s a shock jock suppose to do? Say things that upset people on air, perhaps? And he’s been sacked for, guess what – doing his job and saying something that upset someone.

But besides the obvious irony, does anyone else see the glaring double standard that’s applied? It’s OK for all the gangsta rappers to talk like this, but as soon as a white shock jock says it, then it’s racist and degrading to women. Or should we look at it another way. Is this a different kind of racism at work? Is it OK for black guys to call women hos, because we know all black guys are a bunch of dirty bastards, anyway, but higher standards apply to decent white guys? Either way, something’s seriously wrong.

Is it OK to call women hos? How would you like it if someone called your sister (substitute mother, daughter or girlfriend if that works better for you) a whore? I wouldn’t refer to women as hos. But then I do know people who address each other as “гадна пичка” in a perfectly friendly manner (if you don’t know what that means, ask a Serb or Croat – suffice to say it doesn’t sound nice).

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