August 15, 2019
From XP to X (software)
Homesite 1.0 (1996), PaintShop Pro 7 (2003), and JWPce 1.50 (2005) still run fine in Windows 10. The latest version of Notepad++ runs even better. The ancient and venerable DOS has left the building, but in real blast from the past, Webster's Electronic Dictionary and Thesaurus 1.20 (1993) runs great in vDos.
Microsoft's older Office apps "are not certified compatible with Windows 10 but might work with or without compatibility mode." At least Microsoft still sells new standalone editions of Office at a reasonable price. Getting used to Word 2019 wasn't that hard and it has a couple of nice new features.
Like Microsoft, Adobe is all about the subscription model these days, which makes no sense when I only occasionally have to convert high-resolution raster graphics to the PDF format. Thankfully, except for an inoperable printer driver, Acrobat 6 runs without any issues.
Windows 10 comes with a built-in Print to PDF driver. It's a much needed feature, but could stand to be a lot more configurable and user friendly. I only got it to work with non-standard page sizes after hacking the configuration files.
Update (8/30/19). Well, so much for configurability! The 1903 update broke that workaround completely. I finally gave up fiddling with it and installed Bullzip.
For the most part, everything runs fast enough on my entry-level PC. PaintShop Pro 2019 is the only app that pushes the limits of the system, but not intolerably so. I tackle day-to-day graphics jobs in PaintShop Pro 7 and use PaintShop Pro 2019 when heavy lifting is required.
Bill Gates and Microsoft don't get enough credit for maintaining backwards compatibility in MS-DOS and Windows operating systems for so long.
Related posts
From XP to X (hardware)
From XP to X (benchmarks)
Labels: computers, software, technology
January 21, 2016
JWPce (Unicode)
JWPce is my single most used computer app. It's been on every Windows PC I've owned, and is responsible for wearing out the letters "D" and "S" on my ThinkPad keyboard (I map the dictionary to CTRL-D and there's no autosave).
JWPce doesn't do much but what it does do it does quite well. It's a lightweight Japanese text editor integrated with a kanji radical lookup engine and the WWWJDIC bilingual dictionary database.
JWPce was written and had been maintained by Glenn Rosenthal at UCLA. He's since left UCLA for the private sector, and the JWPce web page he'd maintained on the UCLA servers from 1997 to 2005 has been taken down.
Thankfully, Rosenthal made the JWPce source code available under the GNU General Public License. Vladimir Lazunin preserved the code and recompiled it in Unicode. You can download the revamped install package here.
JWPce doesn't do much but what it does do it does quite well. It's a lightweight Japanese text editor integrated with a kanji radical lookup engine and the WWWJDIC bilingual dictionary database.
JWPce was written and had been maintained by Glenn Rosenthal at UCLA. He's since left UCLA for the private sector, and the JWPce web page he'd maintained on the UCLA servers from 1997 to 2005 has been taken down.
Thankfully, Rosenthal made the JWPce source code available under the GNU General Public License. Vladimir Lazunin preserved the code and recompiled it in Unicode. You can download the revamped install package here.
January 14, 2016
The ebook of the future
Nate Hoffelder documents another attempt to revive that digital zombie of the reading world, the interactive novel. A long-forgotten tech bubble was the hypertext CD-ROM boomlet back in the mid-1990s. The era did produce the bestseller Myst, which was more of a game than a work of narrative fiction.
CD-ROMs did pay off big-time in the less glamorous field of database indexing. When I was in graduate school, a single IBM XT loaded with the ERIC index on CD-ROM was the most useful reference tool in the library. (Nowadays, it's available online for free.)
As the old joke goes, the interactive novel is the ebook of the future, and always will be. Though that is not necessarily true abroad and may be changing here at home.
Because for as long as the "interactive novel" hasn't succeeded in the U.S., the "visual novel" has been huge in Japan, with studios like Key VisualArts becoming major players in manga, anime, feature films, and "light novels."
While manga and anime have carved out profitable niches in Western markets, the visual novel has only recently found a tentative (though growing) foothold. It's another one of those touchstones that encompasses a universe of cultural differences (as usual, the easiest explanation is introverts vs. extroverts).
To better understand what the visual novel is all about, I recommend Rockmandash's Beginner's Guide To Visual Novels.
CD-ROMs did pay off big-time in the less glamorous field of database indexing. When I was in graduate school, a single IBM XT loaded with the ERIC index on CD-ROM was the most useful reference tool in the library. (Nowadays, it's available online for free.)
As the old joke goes, the interactive novel is the ebook of the future, and always will be. Though that is not necessarily true abroad and may be changing here at home.
Because for as long as the "interactive novel" hasn't succeeded in the U.S., the "visual novel" has been huge in Japan, with studios like Key VisualArts becoming major players in manga, anime, feature films, and "light novels."
While manga and anime have carved out profitable niches in Western markets, the visual novel has only recently found a tentative (though growing) foothold. It's another one of those touchstones that encompasses a universe of cultural differences (as usual, the easiest explanation is introverts vs. extroverts).
To better understand what the visual novel is all about, I recommend Rockmandash's Beginner's Guide To Visual Novels.
Labels: anime, books, business, computers, ebooks, japanese culture, manga, software
May 18, 2015
Revealing words
Writers have reasons to be wary of technology. Ann Althouse points to an Amazon review of Fifty Shades of Grey that, thanks to the Kindle's search function, reveals the author's writerly peccadilloes:
But technology giveth even as it taketh away. Writers can now defend themselves against embarrassing lexical exposés with a wide range of free online word frequency counters (like here). But it's the phrase counters (like here, here, and here) that really reveal the flaws.
The free Primitive Word Counter is a standalone Windows program that does basic text analysis. (Keep in mind that it's so primitive it doesn't understand apostrophes or smart quotes.) Textanz ($39.95) is a little less "primitive," with more tools and supported text formats.
And then there's WordStat, which will set you back a whopping $3,795. Heck, for that much, it should write the novel, edit and publish it, and attend the signing events.
Danger, Will Robinson! A very real problem with these tools is that seeing your writing so dispassionately deconstructed can make you overly self-conscious, like listening to a recording of your voice. Not all repetition is bad. It won Hemingway a Nobel Prize, after all.
One of the biggest mistakes beginning fiction writers make is trying to come up with different ways to say "said." (See rule #3.)
A few phrases duplicated in an 80,000 word novel won't be noticed. Your attempts to eliminate them might be. One thing I discovered back when I was producing educational videos was the extent to which people don't see--until it's pointed out to them--continuity problems.
I'm talking about the obvious stuff, like a prop changing color in the middle of a scene. A fascinating psychological question is what makes us notice some continuity problems and ignore others. Of course, once pointed out, you can't not see it.
With those caveats in mind, these tools do a good job of uncovering rhetorical tics, overused adverbs, and inconsistent usages. But with the curtain drawn back on your creative subconscious, you'll have to consciously learn what to ignore.
Characters roll their eyes 41 times, Ana bites her lip 35 times, Christian's lips "quirk up" 16 times, Christian "cocks his head to one side" 17 times, characters "purse" their lips 15 times, and characters raise their eyebrows a whopping 50 times. Add to that 80 references to Ana's anthropomorphic "subconscious" (which also rolls its eyes and purses its lips, by the way), 58 references to Ana's "inner goddess," and 92 repetitions of Ana saying some form of "oh crap" (which, depending on the severity of the circumstances, can be intensified to "holy crap," "double crap," or the ultimate "triple crap").
But technology giveth even as it taketh away. Writers can now defend themselves against embarrassing lexical exposés with a wide range of free online word frequency counters (like here). But it's the phrase counters (like here, here, and here) that really reveal the flaws.
The free Primitive Word Counter is a standalone Windows program that does basic text analysis. (Keep in mind that it's so primitive it doesn't understand apostrophes or smart quotes.) Textanz ($39.95) is a little less "primitive," with more tools and supported text formats.
And then there's WordStat, which will set you back a whopping $3,795. Heck, for that much, it should write the novel, edit and publish it, and attend the signing events.
Danger, Will Robinson! A very real problem with these tools is that seeing your writing so dispassionately deconstructed can make you overly self-conscious, like listening to a recording of your voice. Not all repetition is bad. It won Hemingway a Nobel Prize, after all.
One of the biggest mistakes beginning fiction writers make is trying to come up with different ways to say "said." (See rule #3.)
A few phrases duplicated in an 80,000 word novel won't be noticed. Your attempts to eliminate them might be. One thing I discovered back when I was producing educational videos was the extent to which people don't see--until it's pointed out to them--continuity problems.
I'm talking about the obvious stuff, like a prop changing color in the middle of a scene. A fascinating psychological question is what makes us notice some continuity problems and ignore others. Of course, once pointed out, you can't not see it.
With those caveats in mind, these tools do a good job of uncovering rhetorical tics, overused adverbs, and inconsistent usages. But with the curtain drawn back on your creative subconscious, you'll have to consciously learn what to ignore.
Labels: computers, language, software, technology, thinking about writing, writing
April 06, 2015
The Peter Principle of interface design
The Peter Principle--that in any organizational hierarchy, every employee eventually gets promoted to the level of his incompetence--isn't only a management problem. In a world that expects "new and improved" on a yearly basis, the temptation is to keep tweaking a design until it fails.
The 1995 Taurus was the epitome of a conservative family sedan, that still doesn't look out of place 20 years later. But then came 1996 and Ford turned it into a squashed jellybean. "All the aesthetics of a beanbag chair," says Cars.com.
This is an increasing problem with consumer PC products because there are fewer and fewer reasons to upgrade software or hardware.
Loaded with 96 MB of RAM, my old Windows 95 machine was a snappy and reliable platform for most routine Microsoft Office 95 chores. But the Pentium 100 could barely run Winamp (it couldn't run Media Player without stuttering), and I'd maxed out the 4 GB hard drive (in two partitions because of FAT16).
My 10-year-old Windows XP Thinkpad is mostly fast enough, the 2 GB of RAM an only occasionally bottleneck. Though the on-board video card can't handle streaming HD video, SD is fine on a 1024 × 768 screen. I've got a tad more free space than the capacity of old hard drive. Still, 4 GB isn't much these days.
But I can wait until Windows 10 comes out.
The only reason to upgrade from Office 2003 is buying a new computer, and Microsoft OSes since Windows 8 don't support 2003. I appreciate that Office 2013 can edit and save PDF files, though I can do that now with my ancient version of Acrobat 6.
Upgrading will be nice but not necessary. And it'll be a big pain in the neck because I'll have to upgrade most of my software.
Microsoft is betting its future on customers like me, and designed Windows 10 to appeal to us XP and 7 diehards. Even with Windows 8.1, Microsoft was quick to assure its user base that, "No, no, we haven't killed the desktop! It's still there! Promise!"
Windows 8 "improved" the interface in ways that nobody had asked for, hardly anybody wanted, and the tech press scorned. And yet now every other tech website sports big blocky boxes in bright primary colors surrounded by acres of wasted screen space, while giving barely a thought to actual usability.
At least the Google News page can be customized in a utilitarian, information-rich format. And Craigslist gives you lots of useful text in a few rudimentary columns. No fancy-dancy anything. Good for them.
The genesis of this rant was that Netflix has again "improved" its interface to the point of being useless. In the past, you could switch from the "video store" display, with its slow, space-hogging images, to a "spreadsheet" master list that was fast, flexible, and sortable.
Not only is the spreadsheet gone but so is the master list. Now to scan through the anime titles (the only category I'm really interested in), you have to sort the ten sub-genre lists separately. Netflix couldn't have made itself less user-friendly if it tried.
Or maybe they are trying. Netflix tried to get out of the physical media business before (turning the DVD business into a wholly-owned subsidiary), and I don't think they ever gave up on the effort. I can take a hint.
Netflix used to have the best anime selection anywhere. Its DVD backlist is still very good. When it comes to the new stuff, though, Netflix doesn't try to compete with Hulu and Crunchyroll. (This may change with its upcoming entry into the Japanese market.)
Given the first-sale doctrine, once the infrastructure costs had been sunk, each additional DVD could be warehoused for pennies. Mailing them cost the bucks. With physical media going extinct, long-tail streaming video aggregators had to allocate their licensing and broadband budgets more strategically.
Netflix has clearly focused on capturing cable and network offerings in the fat part of the Pareto curve (this graphic published 3/14). Except I'm not interested in subscribing to a glorified cable channel.
For the time being, Netflix is my Redbox substitute, good for the occasional Hollywood flick and TV series and the rare new anime DVD title from GKids. Otherwise, when the DVDs run out (though at two/month, it'll be a while), I can see a Roku in my future but not a Netflix subscription.
The 1995 Taurus was the epitome of a conservative family sedan, that still doesn't look out of place 20 years later. But then came 1996 and Ford turned it into a squashed jellybean. "All the aesthetics of a beanbag chair," says Cars.com.
 |
| A car and a half-melted gumdrop. |
This is an increasing problem with consumer PC products because there are fewer and fewer reasons to upgrade software or hardware.
Loaded with 96 MB of RAM, my old Windows 95 machine was a snappy and reliable platform for most routine Microsoft Office 95 chores. But the Pentium 100 could barely run Winamp (it couldn't run Media Player without stuttering), and I'd maxed out the 4 GB hard drive (in two partitions because of FAT16).
My 10-year-old Windows XP Thinkpad is mostly fast enough, the 2 GB of RAM an only occasionally bottleneck. Though the on-board video card can't handle streaming HD video, SD is fine on a 1024 × 768 screen. I've got a tad more free space than the capacity of old hard drive. Still, 4 GB isn't much these days.
But I can wait until Windows 10 comes out.
The only reason to upgrade from Office 2003 is buying a new computer, and Microsoft OSes since Windows 8 don't support 2003. I appreciate that Office 2013 can edit and save PDF files, though I can do that now with my ancient version of Acrobat 6.
Upgrading will be nice but not necessary. And it'll be a big pain in the neck because I'll have to upgrade most of my software.
Microsoft is betting its future on customers like me, and designed Windows 10 to appeal to us XP and 7 diehards. Even with Windows 8.1, Microsoft was quick to assure its user base that, "No, no, we haven't killed the desktop! It's still there! Promise!"
Windows 8 "improved" the interface in ways that nobody had asked for, hardly anybody wanted, and the tech press scorned. And yet now every other tech website sports big blocky boxes in bright primary colors surrounded by acres of wasted screen space, while giving barely a thought to actual usability.
At least the Google News page can be customized in a utilitarian, information-rich format. And Craigslist gives you lots of useful text in a few rudimentary columns. No fancy-dancy anything. Good for them.
The genesis of this rant was that Netflix has again "improved" its interface to the point of being useless. In the past, you could switch from the "video store" display, with its slow, space-hogging images, to a "spreadsheet" master list that was fast, flexible, and sortable.
Not only is the spreadsheet gone but so is the master list. Now to scan through the anime titles (the only category I'm really interested in), you have to sort the ten sub-genre lists separately. Netflix couldn't have made itself less user-friendly if it tried.
Or maybe they are trying. Netflix tried to get out of the physical media business before (turning the DVD business into a wholly-owned subsidiary), and I don't think they ever gave up on the effort. I can take a hint.
Netflix used to have the best anime selection anywhere. Its DVD backlist is still very good. When it comes to the new stuff, though, Netflix doesn't try to compete with Hulu and Crunchyroll. (This may change with its upcoming entry into the Japanese market.)
Given the first-sale doctrine, once the infrastructure costs had been sunk, each additional DVD could be warehoused for pennies. Mailing them cost the bucks. With physical media going extinct, long-tail streaming video aggregators had to allocate their licensing and broadband budgets more strategically.
Netflix has clearly focused on capturing cable and network offerings in the fat part of the Pareto curve (this graphic published 3/14). Except I'm not interested in subscribing to a glorified cable channel.
 |
| Cable TV for people who already have cable TV. |
For the time being, Netflix is my Redbox substitute, good for the occasional Hollywood flick and TV series and the rare new anime DVD title from GKids. Otherwise, when the DVDs run out (though at two/month, it'll be a while), I can see a Roku in my future but not a Netflix subscription.
Labels: business, computers, crunchyroll, gkids, hulu, netflix, software, technology
January 18, 2010
Nanami Madobe
Microsoft created an avatar, wallpapers and sounds (by pop singer and voice actress Nana Mizuki) called "Nanami Madobe" (窓辺ななみ) for the Japanese Windows 7 rollout. Her first name can be read "beautiful seven" and her last means "by the window."
Nana Mizuki's first name (奈々) is also a homophone for "seven," but in this case is derived from the kanji for the ancient capital city of Nara. Still, a clever bit of casting.
These (previously) unofficial software mascots have been around for a while in Japan. They're called "OS-tan" (tan is a slang form of the diminutive suffix chan). But Nanami was developed internally and with a healthy budget, as Nana Mizuki is a star in her own right.
Alas, the U.S. Microsoft site doesn't mention her at all. I found a single reference on the Microsoft-Japan site. Even in Japan, Nanami Madobe is only available with the Windows 7 Ultimate edition.
For once, Microsoft has completely out-cuted Apple, but is doing its level best not to admit it. I mean, doesn't John Hodgman deserve a girlfriend? By gum, yes he does! (Sit-com possibilities abound.)
Nana Mizuki's first name (奈々) is also a homophone for "seven," but in this case is derived from the kanji for the ancient capital city of Nara. Still, a clever bit of casting.
These (previously) unofficial software mascots have been around for a while in Japan. They're called "OS-tan" (tan is a slang form of the diminutive suffix chan). But Nanami was developed internally and with a healthy budget, as Nana Mizuki is a star in her own right.
Alas, the U.S. Microsoft site doesn't mention her at all. I found a single reference on the Microsoft-Japan site. Even in Japan, Nanami Madobe is only available with the Windows 7 Ultimate edition.
For once, Microsoft has completely out-cuted Apple, but is doing its level best not to admit it. I mean, doesn't John Hodgman deserve a girlfriend? By gum, yes he does! (Sit-com possibilities abound.)
Related posts
"Get a Mac" fail
Nanami Madobe CM
Me and my mechanical girlfriend
Labels: japan, pop culture, software
December 11, 2008
Anki
The theory behind "spaced repetition" is quite simple. When memorizing material using flashcards, cards you know are repeated less often, and the ones you don't more often. Sebastian Leitner developed the algorithms to mechanize this process, and Piotr Wozniak incorporated them in a program called SuperMemo.
Damien Elmes has written an implementation called Anki ("memorization") based on Wozniak's SuperMemo algorithms. The free download includes JLPT vocabulary levels 2-4. User-generated sets in many languages can be downloaded here. Flashcards can also be individually created or imported from Unicode text files.
Anki is available for Windows, Mac OSX, Debian/Ubuntu, iPhone/iPod touch, Zaurus and Windows Mobile. A similar free program is Mnemosyne.
Damien Elmes has written an implementation called Anki ("memorization") based on Wozniak's SuperMemo algorithms. The free download includes JLPT vocabulary levels 2-4. User-generated sets in many languages can be downloaded here. Flashcards can also be individually created or imported from Unicode text files.
Anki is available for Windows, Mac OSX, Debian/Ubuntu, iPhone/iPod touch, Zaurus and Windows Mobile. A similar free program is Mnemosyne.