作譜

I don't use iTunes, and the last time I bought anything from the iTunes store was some time in 2008. The recent shutdown of Lala.com, however, resulted in a $40 credit at the iTunes store, so I decided to update the software and shop around.

While I was updating iTunes, I figured I may as well install Safari for Windows, just to take a cursory look at my websites.

So all those problems with Japanese text and sans-serif fonts I've been laying down at Google Chrome's feet? Well, it's not Chrome's fault entirely -- it's Webkit's fault.

Chrome runs on the Webkit engine, which also powers Safari. Viewing this site in Safari produces the same result -- no font substitution when a sans-serif Japanese font is required. A visit to Bounce.com on Safari confirms it -- the site looks borked on Safari as well.

Just to be thorough, I checked Opera as well. It can handle sans-serif Japanese font substitution fine, although it looks a bit ugly.

Here's some text in Japanese: このセンテンスは日本語で書いた。

Nothing strange so far, right?

Here's the same sentence in a <span/> tag with a style attribute specifying Helvetica, Verdana and Arial fonts: このセンテンスは日本語で書いた。

If you're using Google Chrome, you may not even see the sentence at all. It will, however, render when you view the source code.

Curious to know why some parts of my sites render Japanese text and others do not, I started inspecting elements with Japanese text in Chrome, enabling and disabling rules. When I disabled font-family rules specifying sans-serif fonts, the Japanese text re-appeared. Enabling the sans-serif rule made them disappear again.

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Back when social media sites were cropping up left and right, I had a test to determine whether it could handle my more esoteric interests: Does it support Japanese characters?

I signed up with Twitter a good six months before it took off at SXSW in 2007, and one of the first things I did was tweet in Japanese. Success! I signed up with Grooveshark around the same time and tried to share some upload some music tagged in Japanese. I saw question marks where there should have been text. Failure.

Google Chrome is gaining market share, and even I have to admit I like its speed. But one thing prevents me from adopting it -- it can't handle the Japanese characters on my site.

That's not to say it can't handle Japanese -- I can visit HMV with no problems, but Bounce looks totally messed up.

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This American Life has an entire show dedicated to the story about how homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM-IV. The hour-long show is fascinating, but I was struck in particular by how one of the most pivotal events in the story happened at a gay bar in Hawai"i.

Part of me would like to visualize Hula's Bar and Lei Stand as the scene of that moment, but Hula's has been around for 35 years, according to its web site. That would put it around 1975. The American Psychiatric Association revised the entry in 1973, then removed it entirely in 1987. Maybe it's plausible?

I don't usually leave comments on blogs I don't frequent -- and honestly, I don't really comment on blogs I do frequent -- but back in late February 2010, someone on DZone posted a link to a blog entry from 2008 answering another blog entry regarding the role of passion in programming.

A semantic argument ensued, which usually happens when definitions of adjectives are up for debate, but in this case, both authors are correct. Passion, professionalism -- they're not mutually exclusive in the realm of programming. But both writers managed to talk around the one point on which they agreed.

The Carnegie Hall web site makes a coy reference to that age-old joke, "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" The reply: practice.

If you want to improve a skill -- be it C# or C-Sharp -- you need to practice. To become a master at that particular skill, you need to practice for 10,000 hours.

Malcolm Gladwell seems to get all the press regarding this figure, but Daniel J. Levitan mentioned it first in his book, This Is Your Brain on Music. Levitan says it's a well-researched figure, and I haven't scoured the footnotes of the book to verify. Intuitively, it makes sense.

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