Random thoughts from the depths of my brain
Having just taken up a new job in Malaysia, I'm over here looking for somewhere to live before the family join me in late September. I've been here a week now, and am still getting handle on what flats, houses and apartments are available and where all the facilities are that we will need.
Kenichi Handa has been hard at work on a Unicode based Emacs for some years now. For Windows users, there is nothing radical in the default build, a few more languages are supported, and a wider range of Unicode characters, but the Windows specific code has only been updated enough to keep working. In future, optimisations and simplifications can be made due to the internal encodings of Emacs and Windows being both based on Unicode. Messing around with code pages to get fonts displaying will be a thing of the past, and can be already thanks to the new font backend.
While work progressed in parallel on Emacs 22 and the Unicode codebase, there were several other developments happening outside the core Emacs development team. Multiple terminal support (multi-tty) has already been merged with the CVS trunk, though it doesn't mean much to Windows users. Limitations in the way Windows handles console output mean that it is never likely to provide much in the way of new features on Windows, though it may be possible to rid ourselves of the runemacs.exe hack without sacrificing console support using the multi-tty feature.
Another new development was support for X freetype font rendering. On the face of it, this doesn't seem to mean much to Windows users either, but after being merged with the Unicode branch, it has been refactored into a new font backend design, with better support for unicode fonts. No longer are fonts defined by their character-set, Emacs can make use of font meta-data to determine which Unicode subranges each font supports. Currently the font backend is not enabled by default, but has to be enabled with a configure option. A backend has been implemented for Windows native fonts, and is ready for testing.
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co -r emacs-unicode-2 emacs
cd emacs\nt
configure --enable-font-backend
make bootstrap
The new font backend is noticeably slower on Windows. A lot of this is probably down to the fact that the old font code cached the font metrics for ASCII characters of fixed width fonts, whereas the new font backend does no such caching yet. We can probably do a better job of caching by calculating which ranges of characters the fixed width applies to, rather than just ASCII. We might even allow multiple such range/width combinations to be associated with a font, to speed up CJK text display (where characters in the font are one of two widths).
There is no support for BDF fonts in the new font backend. BDF fonts will be given their own font backend, hopefully mostly reusable on other platforms.
A Uniscribe font backend may be introduced to enable some of the more advanced layout features in Windows XP and later. The new font backend design makes it easier to add new support like this without complex dynamic loading logic to support older versions of Windows.
An izakaya is a typical drinking establishment in Japan, though they have always had more emphasis on food than the typical English or New Zealand pub. Like English pubs, and New Zealand cafes, some izakaya have recently started to modernize their menus, combining different styles and bringing foreign influence to traditional Japanese favorites to create new "modern Japanese" dishes. This is especially noticeable in competitive areas like Ginza, where izakaya have to differentiate themselves from the hundreds of other eating and drinking establishments in the area to attract customers.
Unlike Western pubs, much of the izakaya is private areas where you reserve a table, so more like what we would see as a restaurant, although many after-work groups use it as we would a pub. Some traditional izakaya have seats at the bar, where you interact with and are served by the owner, but more upmarket ones are strictly table service, with waiters and waitresses rushing about in response to bells at each table, making you imagine you are on an aeroplane.
Despite being in notoriously expensive Ginza at the heart of downtown Tokyo, a variety of dishes and several hours drinking at Tomoru came to approximately ¥6000 per head. As well as the crayfish salad, branded omelette and meaty morsels pictured, we also had several other mouth watering dishes washed down with wine and beer.
Okonomiyaki is native to the Osaka and Hiroshima areas of Japan. It is a pancake made with potato flour, and containing cabbage, and assorted other vegetables and meats, and in the Osaka variation, noodles. Once cooked, the pancake is topped with brown sauce, mayonnaise and bonito flakes or tiny flakes of nori (seaweed), which appear to dance as the heat rises around them. If you are a connoisseur of Korean pa-jeon and Vietnamese banh xeo, then okonomiyaki is a must try dish, along with takoyaki, small dough balls containing octopus that are often sold from carts on the street.
This Okonomiyaki Special was ¥900 from a small store near Hiroshima station. We had another in a quick lunch stop at Shin-Osaka for ¥650.
You can easily make okonomiyaki at home following this recipe or many like it. Often at restaurants, you will be given a bowl of raw mix, and cook it youself on a hotplate at the table. At other restaurants, you might sit at a counter in front of the chef as they cook in front of you, as common in many types of Japanese restaurants, and probably the closest you'll come to "teppanyaki" style cooking in Japan.
Google's Picasa is great for managing your photos. It even has an Export as HTML Page option, which lets you generate a webpage for your photos. But all of the page styles it generates are very simple - if all your photos aren't the same size and orientation, the result is messy.
There are some good web page designs around for photos. Lightbox 2.0 is one, but you have to code all the HTML pages by hand, which is tedious and error-prone.
Picasa lets you generate ugly web pages easily, and Lightbox 2.0 lets you generate good looking web pages with a lot of effort. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to generate good looking web pages as easily as you can with Picasa?
When exporting from Picasa, you have the option to export the page as XML Code. This isn't very useful by itself, but with an appropriate stylesheet, you can easily transform it to anything you want. I wrote a stylesheet for converting to a Lightbox 2.0 style blog entry.
Because I use this for blog entries, not complete webpages, there are some stylesheet definitions missing from the generated html, along with the rest of the html head section. See the Lightbox 2.0 webpage for details on what is needed.
To convert Picasa's generated index.xml using Xalan, I use the following command-line:
java -cp xalan2.jar org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN index.xml -XSL picasa-to-lightblox.xsl -OUT blogpost.html
Leave a comment if you have any more Picasa tips.
At every tourist attraction, people will get hungry, so there is always a restaurant somewhere, usually something quick and cheap, so families can get on with sightseeing and save their money for the gifts they need to take back to friends, family and workmates back home. Here at Yoshimi Hyakettsu (Yoshimi "100 caves"), there was a small family run restaurant which had run out of everything on this chilly spring day except hiyashi udon - cold udon noodles. Udon are a thick white noodle made from wheat flour. They are normally served in a hot soup, but in summer they can also be eaten cold with a soy based dipping sauce on the side. Here you see the noodles, sauce and wasabi, chilli and ginger to be optionally added to the sauce.
Udon are not the only noodles eaten cold. Zaru soba (buckwheat noodles on a bamboo mat) is another popular dish, as is hiyashi chuka (cold ramen noodles). Harusame (rice or bean vermicelli) is another noodle that is commonly eaten cold in Japan and elsewhere.
Fresh seafood is very big in Japan, and it doesn't get fresher than when you collect it yourself. These live clams were collected in Ise Bay by the uncle of the family I stayed with as an exchange student in 1989. We used them in miso soup and spaghetti vongole, it sure beats the canned or frozen variety you would get in most Italian restaurants here in the UK.
While I was staying with the family, and whenever I have visited since, uncle Jouji would often bring some fresh food over. He lives just out of town, and is retired so has plenty of time for gardening, fishing and gathering shellfish.
Spotted today on the front page of Google News UK. The article itself was worded slightly differently.
Someone's asking to be sued, but is it Google, or ABC News?