San Bei Ji

三杯雞好吃!

May 24, 2002
by Joe
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Adobe problems

I was working on what I thought to be a fairly standard document creation process this week, and have encountered a really annoying bug in Adobe’s products that is driving me nuts. Here’s what happened:

The goal was to create a technical document that would be distributed in PDF format. This document had several data tables, three illustrations in the form of bar graphs, and was about 6 pages long.

First I created the illustrations in Adobe Illustrator 10. I turned the bars of the graphs into cylinders because they looked nicer than plain old rectangular bars. To add to the depth of the cylinder, I applied a gradient fill to each one. The three illustrations were not complex by any means, created very easily and saved as EPS.

I then placed the text into Adobe InDesign 2. After getting the basic layout set in a way I liked, I then placed the illustrations into InDesign. Finally, I exported the document as a PDF from InDesign, using the default settings for screen optimized PDF output and making sure that the output would be compatible with Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.

Testing printing from Acrobat Reader 5 for Mac OS X and Acrobat Reader 5 for Windows worked just fine. I sent the file out, but nobody was able to print the file using Acrobat Reader 4 for Windows.

Now, one would think that this would be a simple process, right? Using all core Adobe products, even the client reader, and the document was intentionally non-complex. This should just work, right??? I haven’t even deviated from the Adobe line of products in this process. You’d think that a single vendor would have found such a problem and addressed it before shipping these things! I mean, how freakin’ hard should it be just to get a simple PDF to work with all the Acrobat 4 users out there???

No, I’m not bitter…

May 22, 2002
by Joe
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Life is good…

So, more bike upgrades today. I slapped on some new lightweight toe-clip style pedals because I decided that after a year trying them, clipless pedals just don’t work for the kind of extreme mountain biking I like to do. It’s not so much the clip vs. the pedal, it’s the shoe issue. I like to have very lightweight running shoes or cross country shoes when mountain biking, and the soles on biking shoes are just way too stiff. When you dismount, you feel like you have a couple of planks strapped to your feet. When you are hitting extreme terrain, with boulders, logs, fences, and rivers, you spend a significant time jumping on and off the bike.

I also put on a new seat – nice one from Specialized that has a tad more padding than the racing saddle I had on there before, but is still quite lightweight.

Did an hour-long ride along the local greenbelt trail and man does this bike ride sweet now! Had to re-clamp the back tire once because the wheel moved, but it’s not going anywhere now… This weekend is looking like one big mountain fest. Life is good…

May 21, 2002
by Joe
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How to successfully further the aims of your critics…

It is a week after it was exposed that the White House had advance warning and details of a possible plot to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings before 9/11. The Democrats are calling for a full inquiry and the White House looks like they’re in a real bad position no matter how you slice it. Now the White House is pumping out daily headlines with vauge information that they may again be up to something, while at the same time criticizing the Democrats for questioning their authority.

It is a week after former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited Cuba and called for lifting of the 40 year old trade embargo between the U.S. and Cuba. Jimmy says that the Cubans are definitley not developing weapons of mass destruction and, being the first current or former President of the United States to do so, has delivered a public and uncensored speech to the people of Cuba extolling the benefits of democracy. And now George Dubyah is in Florida with his brother, Gov’nah Jeb, hyping up his demands for Cuban reforms and shoring up his position on refusing to lift the embargo.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the White House is a bit too interested right now in domestic PR campaigns to cover their collective butts. Would it not be better to keep a more reserved and conservative profile and move forward with working on resolutions rather than embarking on these somewhat tasteless campaigns to enhance their own political image? (Which in turn has quite the opposite effect, IMO…)

When someone tries to bait you into an argument, if you react and lash back out at them, then they have already won. It makes you look like a fool, or an ogre, and the more noise you make, the more foolish or ogre-ish you appear. If you remain focused and stay on the path, you have a better chance of coming out on top. Engage in constructive dialogue, but don’t engage in public tit-for-tat speeches about who should be doing what. That just serves to polarize the opposite parties rather than bring them together.

If it were me, I would have made one clear public statement regarding the advance warnings and left it at that. I think it is pretty obvious to any reasonable person that there are simply thousands of these kinds of reports that come along and while it is possible to prevent many incidents as many have been so already, it is quite probable that things can slip through the cracks of such a complex world. In hindsight a lot more could have been done, but we could say the same thing about Pearl Harbor, right? The bottom line is that going on the defensive sends a signal that you have something to hide.

If it were me, I would have invited Mr. Carter to come to the White House and provide a full report. My only public statement would have been “we are evaluating Mr. Carter’s report in detail and we thank him for his sincere patriotism and proactive sense of diplomacy”, and left it at that. Who cares if you really think he’s a naive and reckless idealist, at least you remain neutral and allow both parties to save face. Again, going on the defensive only serves to make you look worse than you may already, rather than seizing the opportunity to take advantage of the situation in a more diplomatic fasion.

But hey, that’s just me…

May 19, 2002
by Joe
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Trauermusik

I am listening to this pice by Paul Hindemith called Trauermusik right now. Actually, I have the one track set to loop over and over, this is about the 5th time this session, and I listened to it this morning a few times too. I’m not sure what it is about this particular pice with me, but sometimes I get in a mood and this is the soundtrack for it. (It’s raining right now, maybe that’s it…)

In January of 1936, Paul Hindemith was in London preparing to perform his new viola concerto in the Queen’s Hall. But the day before the performance, Kinge George V died. The entire nation was in mourning. As a tribute to the late king, Hindemith composed this piece “Trauermusik” for Viola and String Orchestra in the space of six hours and performed it in a studio concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra the following day.

This piece is sublime, haunting, beautiful, and heart-wrenching. It is a piece that for me conjures up feelings of nostalgia, of sorrow, of pristine beauty. It is said that during the BBC performance, many of the musicians were openly weeping. The performance I am listening to by soloist Geraldine Walther and the San Francisco Symphony is one of the finer recordings I’ve heard of this piece. She really makes the viola cry and mourn with sorrow and anger.

To me there are three things that are amazing about this piece of music. One is that Hindemith accomplished this feat of composing the music quickly for a tragic occasion and performing it a day later. The next thing is that this piece has far outlived the occasion for which it is written – being one of the finest continuing pieces of standard repertoire for both the symphony orchestra and for the solo viola alike. Lastly, the sheer haunting, organic beauty of this piece itself is what amazes me the most.

May 19, 2002
by Joe
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AppleScripting

I finally broke down and taught myself some AppleScript today. The motivation was that Adobe neglected to include a way to save your panel layouts, and I, being a PowerBook G4 user, often switch between a dual monitor config at work, a dual monitor config at home, and remote “laptop style” (I know what you’re thinking and you should be ashamed!) *grin*

So what I discovered is, once you get used to it’s literal nature, syntax, and way of doing things, it is actually quite easy to write fairly useful scripts.

After reading a few semi-useful tutorial/primer pages from Apple and O’Reilly, I opened up the Script Editor, a few sample scripts, and started hacking away. Eventually I got it so that I could back up my preferences file for whatever local configuration I was at, restore them based on what location I was in (and lauch Illustrator after restoring), and initialize the preferences file for use with going through the tutorials in the Adobe Illustrator 10 Classroom in a Book.

Well take my skates off and call me shorty! It works! After adding the AppleScript Menu to my toolbar and creating a Illustrator directory in my Example Scripts file, I have solved my location problem with Illustrator. Now to create sets for InDesign…

If anybody wants these scripts, contact me. If there’s enough demand, I’ll post them with some instructions on how to install.