Ken’s Techno Tidbits

One of my favorite posts to the Unicode mailing list came during a heated debate about “simplifying” certain character sets. I believe it was Joe Becker who re-posted Mark Twain’s humorous proposal for simplifying English spelling:

In year 1, that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s;” and likewise, “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” ould be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealth with later. Year 2 might reform the “w” spelling so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant wile year 3 might well abolish “y,” replasing it with “i;” and iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jeneraly, then the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants; and iears 6-12 or so modifaiiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist kononants. Bai iear 15, it wud be fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c,” “y,” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu replais “ch,” “sh,” and “th,” rispektivli. Finali, xen, ater sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling iniuse xrewawt xe Ingliy-Spiking werld.

I wonder what Mark Twain would have to say about the MacBook Air…

A Plan for the Improvement of the PowerBook G4 12″ Laptop

For example, that useless Ethernet port would be dropped to be replaced by wireless only, and likewise the second USB and FireWire would no longer be available. The hard disk will be retained, but only the very slow iPod version or the very expensive flash version, as most people will no longer need to keep files other than system software on their computer.

Continuing our optimization, the DVD/CD-ROM drive is now useless, because there’s no space on the hard disk to install anything. And with the slower processor, the option to expand memory to 4GB is also unneeded as who would now do any heavy processing work with this computer?

Once the device has been tuned for email writing executives, the price can be increased to match their signature authority, thus eliminating problems caused by most other customers buying the product and complaining about limitations.

Finally, then, after extensive optimizations, we would have the perfect computer for our target customer, Steve Jobs.

While digging around in my musty Unicode mailing list archives, I can across a true classic.

For those of you who wonder what a quality technical mailing list post looks like, read Ken Whistler’s essay below on the “High Ogonek” character.

Side note - it’s of particular interest to me when I wound up doing the same kind of forensic character set research as part of my work on internationalizing the Mac OS. For me, the letter in question was the mythical “Y with diaeresis”, which had been faithfully ported to the Macintosh “Roman” character set from the Lisa character set.

But nobody really knew what language used it. Rumor in the hallways was that it somehow came into the Lisa character set from a Turkish character set. In the end there wasn’t sufficient information to declare it null and void, so we left it as-is.

Now you can actually do a Google search on ÿ, and find a Wikipedia article that references its use in Greek transcription and rare French place names like “L’Haÿ-les-Roses“, but nothing about Turkish.

On to Ken’s Opus, from 4 April 1991:

Warning to readers: This contribution contains real research, so if you haven’t got time to care, you can delete it now!

The “High Ogonek” has stuck in my craw for so long that I feel I must say something about it. The High Ogonek is symptomatic of one of the things wrong about the character standardization business, which encourages the blithe perpetuation of mistaken “characters” from standard to standard, like code viruses. At least, in the past, the epidemic was constrained by the fact that the encoding bodies only had 256 cells which could get infected by such abominations as half-integral signs. Now, however, with Unicode and ISO 10646 and the AFII registry, and other 2 byte corporate standards, the number of cells available for infection is vast, and the temptation to encode everybody else’s junk just seems to have become irresistible.

WHENCE HIGH OGONEK?

“High Ogonek” can be found in ISO DIS 10646 (JTC1/SC2/WG2 N666) at 034/126. What is it? Well, that’s a good question, and 10646 doesn’t provide a clue–but then it doesn’t say anything about where any of its content comes from. But for those in the know, the source of “High Ogonek” in the DIS 10646 can be tracked to ECMA/TC1/90/15, Latin Alphabet No. 6, and more specifically to Appendix A, which reproduces 34 characters “registered according to ISO 2375 as Registration No. 158″, for “text in the Skolt Lappish dialect, as well as texts using older Lappish orthography…” Position 03/00 in the code table of Registration No. 158 is our critter. So now we know what it is, right? Wrong. The ill-defined squiggle in position 03/00 does indeed look something like an ogonek (mistaken ogonek forms are themselves another tale of woe I won’t get into here), and the “ogonek” in 03/00 is indeed high in its box–hence the “High Ogonek” in DIS 10646, drawn in position 034/126 as a nondescript rightward hook.

Well, reviewers of 10646 have complained about “High Ogonek”, and something has indeed been done. In JTC1/SC2/WG2 N680 “Updated code table charts”, dated 22 March 1991, the “High Ogonek” has now been printed using a high reversed comma, quite sharply distinguished from the “Ogonek” at 033/178. In fact, it looks remarkably like an aspiration mark–hmmm. For those of you with long memories or big filing cabinets, the 2nd DP of 10646 had just such a thing at 171/072, labeled “IPA ASPIRATION MARK”, but all the IPA later disappeared in the DIS, just as the strange “High Ogonek” appeared.

N680 was “generated by AFII using their publishing system,” so it would behoove us to check whether the “High Ogonek” virus has spread to AFII–and guess what! The draft AFII registry has a new glyph id 043B/241B devoted especially to printing the 10646 “High Ogonek”. The AFII glyph looks like a high reversed comma, and is labeled:

“High ogonek” (not a non-spacing character, but rather a separate character within words) (Lapp)

That’s strange, because AFII has what appears to be the same glyph encoded at 342B/110B, labeled:

Aspirated, IPA

So AFII and 10646 seem to have decided these things are different. Welcome to the “High ogonek”.

What about Unicode? I don’t think I would be telling any tales out of school if I revealed that Unicode almost got a “High ogonek”, too, since Unicode was busy incorporating all the 10646 mistakes in Unicode while 10646 was busy incorporating all the Unicode mistakes in 10646. (Gives you an Excedrin headache, doesn’t it?) But some degree of reason has prevailed, and the Skolt Lappish “High Ogonek” is now simply mapped to Unicode U+02BD MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA (which is explicitly intended as the IPA aspiration mark).

Is that the right answer? Well, how about doing what should have been done in the first place–some research–instead of just citing other character standards like holy books.

TRANSCRIPTION OF ASPIRATION IN LAPPISH

Based on a fairly quick survey, I note three broad groups of treatment of Lappish transcription:

1. Prewar (pre World War II) publications using systems based on Finno-Ugrian practice (which itself is an offshoot of the transcription used by Indo-Europeanists). Non-phonemic, non-systematic phonetic, and inconsistently narrow transcription.

2. Early postwar publications. Systematic phonemic, but with a nod to old-fashioned transcription and IPA usages.

3. “Modern” publications (70’s and 80’s). Phonemic, with systematic phonetic realization rules, and with tuned practical orthographies. (E.g. “sj” for esh, rather than s-acute or s-hacek, etc.)

Going from best to worst, i.e. recent to early, we have the following facts.

In modern treatments, aspiration is not part of Lappish orthography. Why? I’ll let the best analyst explain it:

Die Verschlusslaute werden in phonetischer Hinsicht entweder als mehr oder weniger stimmhafte Lenes [b d g] oder als stimmlose Fortes realisiert. Die letzteren ko”nnen entweder unaspiriert [p t k], pra”aspiriert [hp(p) ht(t) hk(k)] oder postaspiriert [ph th kh] ausgesprochen werden.

(Su”dlappisches Wo”rterbuch, Gustav Hasselbrink, Uppsala 1981, Ab Lundequistska Bokhandeln, p. 42.) In other words (South) Lapp has a lenis and a fortis series of stops, and the fortis series may be either unaspirated, preaspirated (in geminate contexts) or postaspirated, depending on the context. Since degree of aspiration is predictable by context, it need not be represented in the orthography. However, when Hasselbrink wants to explicitly transcribe aspiration phonetically, he does so with an inline “h” or a raised “h”–the distinction being primarily whether phonological pattern or phonetic quality is in question.

G. M. Kert published a very similar analysis in Saamskii Yazyk, Leningrad 1971, Soviet Academy of Sciences. See, for example, the phonological chart on p. 63. (I won’t quote anything–Cyrillic in ASCII is too painful.)

The early postwar treatments of Lapp also use a standardized orthography for Lapp, with two stop series, but are sometimes hazier about the status of each series. They also tend to use the {raised reversed comma} to indicate aspiration explicitly. Examples are: Wo”rterbuch des Waldlappendialekts von Mala{ring} und Texte zur Ethnographie, Wolfgang Schlachter, Helsinki 1958, Suomalais- Ugrailainen Seura. Also: The Lappish Dialect of Jukkasjo”rvi, A Morphological Survey, Bjo”rn Collinder, Uppsala, 1949, Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri Ab:

31. k, p, t are unaspirated (as c, p, t in French) if they are not followed by the sign [{raised reverse comma}] (see Section 59).
–p. 11

Then we get to the pre-phonemic transcriptions. These have no systematic understanding of phonological derivation and phonetic realization, and tend to have either broad or narrow “phonetic” orthographies, with symbols derived from Finno-Ugrian practice. Example 1: Lappisher Wortschatz, Eliel Lagercrantz, Helsinki, 1939, Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura (2 vols.). This lexicon systematically transcribes aspiration, and does so with a {raised small cap h} after stop consonants.

Example 2 is a massive work, and represents the extreme of unsystematic narrow phonetic transcription: Lappisk Ordbok, Konrad Nielsen, Oslo 1962, Universitetsforlaget (5 vols.). Don’t let the date of publication fool you–the words were collected from 1906-1911, the compilation was begun in 1929, and the first signature was printed in 1930. Nielsen uses a plethora of diacritics for all kinds of things, since this is a cross-dialectal compilation. For explicit aspiration, he uses a {raised left half ring} (cf. Unicode U+02BF), which is a common Indo-European and/or Finno-Ugrian typographical substitute for the {raised reversed comma}. Since Nielsen also follows the Indo-European tradition of typesetting cited forms in italics, the {raised left half ring} also gets leaned over a bit and then is strongly kerned up over the “knee” of the “k”’s or “h”’s (yes!, aspirated “h”’s), and nestles in above the cross-bar’s of the “t”’s. So for the typesetter, these aspirated forms were probably a single piece of type, but the analysis clearly shows the {raised left half ring} to be, in principle, a “spacing” diacritic following a stop (or “h”).

My brief survey of these works did not turn up any specifically dealing with the “Skolt Lapp” dialect, but the general picture is clear. Aspirated phones do exist in Lappish dialects, and the aspiration has been traditionally transcribed using either a {raised reversed comma} or a typographical variant of that, the {raised left half ring}. The Skolt Lapp texts referred to in ECMA/TC1/90/15 presumably follow this orthographic tradition, influenced by Nielsen or other early analysts. Modern Lapp orthographies omit transcription of aspiration altogether. (Incidentally, Nielsen appears to be the source of the g-bar for transcribing a palatal voiced fricative in Lapp; modern analysts like Hasselbrink sensibly substitute a “j” for this sound. And as long as I am picking nits, Nielsen’s “g-bar” is actually a “g” with an underline strike-thru at the baseline, not the “g” with a short bar sticking out the side as shown in position 034/188 in 10646.)

WHITHER HIGH OGONEK

Into the nearest dumpster, I hope. We are dealing here with a perfectly normal manifestation of European transcription of aspiration–as manifested in thousands of transcriptions of hundreds of languages. There is nothing specifically Lapp about it, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the ogonek.

Back in 2002, I was working on getting a PV solar panel system installed on my house.

My initial calculation for the pay-back period was 15 years, due to slightly less-than-optimal roof orientation and some shade from large cedar trees around the house. This was based on the “easy” approach of having a local company handle the entire project, including the rebate.

By paying for consulting to design the system, buying the equipment myself, hiring a contractor to install it, and dealing with the California state rebate program directly, I managed to get the break-even time down to about 7 years. Though at the expense of significant hassle and a few close calls, like the fact that my original inverter couldn’t deal with the (lower) voltage gain from the Kyocera panels I wound up buying.

But back to the title of this post - while working on the design, I searched the net to see if somebody had a way of calculating the optimal angle for the panels on the roof. I found exactly what I was looking for here. Then I noticed that the author of this page is Charles Landau, somebody I had worked with briefly while consulting at Palm. And then I found out that he lives in Nevada City, about a mile away from my brother-in-law.

Now we’re both members of the Nevada City tech lunch group, so we get to talk about solar panels, environmental testing, and open source projects like his CapROS operating system.

We were in Mill Valley, visiting our friends (see Dipsea Redux), and at the end of the Dipsea stairs I saw this guy grinding up a hill on a bike, with three (that’s right, three) kids on the back.

Now after a few years of living in Hong Kong, this wasn’t so strange to me - though he was missing a side of pork, and his wife (smiling in the background above, because she wasn’t hauling that load) should have been sitting on his handlebars.

On closer look I realized it was an Xtracycle, which is what you get when you let the Xtracycle company convert your regular bike into an SUB (sport utility bike). And the cool thing for me is that they’re based in Nevada City, or more accurately in North San Juan just up Highway 49 a few miles.

Back in the early ’80s, MIT got vending machines with prices displayed using LCDs.

At the time, I was taking a Principles of Microeconomics class. I noticed how these machines got most of their business during the break between classes. And thus began my speculation about profit-maximizing vending machines, based on supply and demand curves.

Imagine that this machine tracked buying patterns by time of day, day of week, and month. It should be able to reasonably predict the expected odds of a purchase (the demand) being made in the next 10 minutes or so. Given that information, what would happen if the price fluctuated up/down based on the expected demand? Heck, you could even throw in the number of remaining cans and the anticipated restocking time.

I’d expect that the price between classes would jump up dramatically, and fall over the weekends. This doesn’t seem like classic supply and demand theory, in that it’s really taking advantage of local, repetitive variations in the overall demand curve, but the basic concept is still similar.

But what happens with a similar machine from the Pepsi-Cola company gets installed next to it? A cola price war? And would students start sneaking out during lecture to get the better price? As you might guess, my micro-econ lectures provided lots of opportunity for such idle speculation.

It’s been almost 15 years since I last hiked the Dipsea trail from Mill Valley to Stinson Beach.

My wife & I used to regularly do this 7.1 mile trek across the coastal range to the ocean, with traditional celebratory beer at The Sand Dollar. The food there is so-so, but as one reviewer on Yelp said, it’s not about the food, it’s about the atmosphere.

Then when we were living in Hong Kong, we simulated this by hiking from our apartment in Happy Valley to The Curry Pot in Stanley. Not as far, but the Hong Kong humidity was a big equalizer.

Things are different now, with kids and all that, but I recreated part of the old ways by having a beer in Stinson Beach and at least hiking the first two miles of the Dipsea. And yes, the stairs are still painful, though no worse than I remember - I think as I get older, I just achieve the same pain level sooner and slower.

But perhaps with age comes some wisdom. We took a side trail and wound up at the Tourist Club.

I can’t wait for a Sunday when I can enjoy their beer garden. I only hope the selection and quality are as good as what Rob described in his blog post from a few years back.

When my daughter was a toddler, my wife & I would joke about starting a “child-proofing” service. We could show up at a house with our daughter, and in 10 minutes Jenna could locate every way that a child could hurt themselves. Exposed electrical sockets, sharp corners, stairs with no gates - you name it, she’d find it.

I kind of feel the same way about the Capitol Corridor commuter train system. I’ve got a long list of issues that I’ve run into over the years, and sometimes it feels like it’s just me, pushing the extreme commuter envelope.

On Thursday, for example, it was the Sacramento parking garage. The Sacramento train station lot was full when I arrived on Wednesday afternoon, but if you ride the train you get the same rate at the nearby parking structure.

But when you leave the garage, you have to give them something they can keep that proves you rode the train, to some definition of the word “prove”. Normally this would be your train ticket, but I use a multi-ride 10-pass.

Now I’d run into this same situation a few months before. The garage attendant refused to give me the commuter rate unless he got my ticket, but there’s no way I’m giving him my $150 10-pass. In desperation I gave him the stub attached to the ticket, but then the next time I rode the train the conductor gave me grief about the ticket not really being valid unless the stub was still attached.

So this time I was better prepared. I asked the conductor on the train if he could give me some proof of ridership. No go. He suggested I ask at the Sacramento station…they also had no good suggestion, but the guy at my window did give me several stubs from old tickets he had on his desk, so I had something to hand over when leaving the garage.

I asked the attendant a “what if I had a 10-pass” question, and he admitted that it was a hole in the system. His suggestion was to copy the 10-pass and give a copy to them. Unfortunately I don’t carry a portable copying machine around with me, and I’m guessing that’s true of most other people on the train.

So it’s time for my semi-regular email to Gene Skoropowski, managing directory of the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority. He’s a minor deity, by the way - an effective bureacrat who cares. It’s amazing how much good a single person like that can do in the right job.

My friend Carol just started her own WordPress blog, called life on the corner (of Winter Street, in Nevada City).

I’m looking forward to reading what she writes, given the quality of her regular Editor’s Letter column in the Family Post. She also runs Winter Street Design Group, so maybe we’ll get some handy web design tips too.

A while back I blogged about Home town news from Nevada City, and all the fun connections I’ve found.

One that I somehow forgot was the Tarptent story. It starts back in 2003, when Matt Strain did an email intro to another friend named Bob who was talking to this company called “Tarptent”. They make lightweight backpacking tents, and he knew I was into lightweight hiking, so he thought Bob & I should talk.

Then in 2005 a friend (Dave White) bought a tent from Tarptent:

And he had a successful outing with it on the 2006 Sabrina/Evolution Romp (photos start here).

So this past summer I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy a lightweight alternative to my bivvy sack, which isn’t so great in bad weather or bugs. I wound up getting the Rainbow, since I liked the free-standing design.

It worked great on our Sierra High Route trip from Convict Lake to Cox Col/Dade Lake, where we met up with the Krugle climbing trip participants. Some photos here, a bunch more from Stefan are here.

But the funny thing was when I poked around the Tarptent web site, looking for a fast delivery option. I was leaving on a test hike in a few days (of course), so I needed it soon. Just for grins I clicked on the “Local pickup” option - imagine my surprise when I saw that the Tarptent corporate offices are located in Nevada City, about 4 miles from my house.

You read about how companies are realizing that the real key to repeat customers is the one-on-one interaction between the customer and individuals at the company. I know, kind of a no-brainer, but sometimes truths like this get lost at companies in noise about efficiency, quality, marketing, sales, technology, and the habits of really effective people.

So now the latest rage is to focus on training personnel how to ensure their interactions with customers wind up being a plus, even when the conversation is about a problem. Or rather, especially when the customer is having a problem.

That all makes sense, but where it hit home for me was this past Monday morning. I was snowboarding at Sugarbowl, and the toe strap binding broke. Which put me in a bind, as I’d rented the snowboard back in Nevada City, not at Sugarbowl.

I went to the rental shop at the Mt. Judah lodge, prepared for the worst - waiting in line to rent a new board for the remainder of the two hours I had. But it was a great powder day, so I was ready to do whatever it took to get back on the slopes asap.

And that’s when Alex stepped it up. He quickly finished helping another skier, then checked out my bindings, took a credit card imprint, and swapped in a pair of his bindings for mine. 5 minutes later I was back in the lift line. And when I finished up, I went back, he swapped in my broken binders, and tore up the credit card slip.

So now, instead of being unhappy about my bad luck, I’m telling my friends about the quality of service at Sugarbowl.

My winning streak continued when I got back to Nevada City. Mountain Recreation gave me a rain check because of the problem, so I’ll get a free rental next time. Again, they turned something bad into a positive.

There’s hope for customer service in the US