How To: Fix Simplified Chinese Input Method

For no apparent reason a while back, my simplified Chinese input method stopped displaying characters in the character selection window, instead displaying only blocks or squares, looking like this:



You could see the characters in the text of the item you were working with, but when you wanted to select a homonym you couldn't see them in the selection pane (shown above) but rather had to just go through all the characters one at a time to make them display in the text you were working with. This made it even more of a pain to use the simplified Chinese pinyin input method. (Pinyin is a phonetic way to type in Chinese characters.)

This had started in Mac OS X 10.2.x and continued after my upgrade to Panther, despite my hopes that the upgrade would resolve it. Subsequent upgrades all the way to 10.3.8 didn't do any good either. Simplified Chinese worked fine with other users, so I knew the problem was within my own user folder. The other input methods I use - traditional Chinese, Japanese, and third-party pseudo-input method TypeIt4Me - had no problems whatsoever.

I called Apple to try to resolve this problem. They had me remove the ~/Library/Fonts/ and a few other folders from ~/Library/, but to no avail. They ultimately told me that what I needed to do was to either use a new user (which would require me to reset all my preferences) or go through every folder in ~/Library/ and log out each time to see if that folder was the cause. Not feeling like using either of these time-consuming methods to solve the problem, I did what any diligent computer user would do: I procrastinated.

Until today. Today the simplified Chinese input method decided to go a step farther and not even produce the characters. I would type in the pinyin and nothing would appear in the text when I hit the space bar to cover the pinyin to characters. So now it was time to resolve the problem as I needed to use Chinese.

Here's how I did it.

I took every single file out of ~/Library/, put then in a folder on the desktop, and logged out. I logged back in on the same user. I opened up ~/Library/ and noted down all the files that were there in TextEdit. I then opened System Preferences, went to the International preference pane and then the Input Menu tab. I checked simplified Chinese. I then noted again all the files in ~/Library/ in TextEdit and compared it to what I originally had. Any files that were in the new list that were not in the old list I could conclude were added there by the simplified Chinese input method (and were probably the only files of any relevance). I then went to my old Library folder on the desktop and deleted all of these files. I put the remaining files back in ~/Library/, logged out, logged back in, and, voila, it was working again.

The files that I deleted were the following:

~/Library/Caches/com.Apple.preferencepanes.cache
~/Library/ChineseInputMethodPlug-in
~/Library/Documentation/
~/Library/Documentation/Help/
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.Apple.HIToolbox.000a95d5f14c.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.Apple.help.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.Apple.systempreferences.plist
~/Library/Preferences/tmmr.rem
~/Library/Preferences/user.rem

While this did require a little bit of setting new preferences, it was minimal compared to what I would have had to do had I followed Apple's support's advice. It seems this method could be used to troubleshoot any problem that might have something to do with corrupted or damaged files, especially when affecting a single user.

In any case, Apple could have gotten me through this in ten minutes had they known what they were doing.

iTunes Subscription Service

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple may be gearing up to use the rental model in addition to the purchase modal in the iTunes Music Store. Seems my earlier prediction that if the rental model was successful, Apple would copy it. However, I wouldn't have guess it would have occurred so soon.

But it does make sense. What does Apple have to lose? Merrill Lynch's conclusion that "Apple can establish a subscription service with few barriers to entry" makes perfect sense, given the infrastructure Apple already has set up to sell music online. As I concluded before, despite its drawbacks the rental model will be cheaper for certain people with certain listening habits, notably those who want to massively expand their music library and constantly want the most recent songs. But even if the rental model will only support a niche market, which both Merrill Lynch's report and my previous analysis suggest, it seems reasonably likely to generate a profit if Apple's initial overhead is low. And, in the end, if it fails to be profitable for Apple, it will probably have failed for all the other competitors by the time Apple needs to jettison it.

Moreover, even if it does ultimately fail, it can't really hurt to fend off like-product competitors using the rental model by smacking them down with a superior product. To display my bias for a moment here, how much do you wanna bet Apple is going to do the rental modal way better than Napster, Real, and anyone else out there? Given Apple's ability to do this with a majority of their products (at least in my humble opinion for most products, but undeniably with the iTunes Music Store purchase model and the iPod), it seems a decent bet for me to make. As far as music goes, Apple's existing leverage in the recording industry seems to further support that they'll be able to pull it off better than existing competitors.

Related Posts

• Napster v. iTunes: By the Numbers (Part 3)
• iTunes 4.7.1 Suggestion: Let Users Download Lost Purchased Songs
• Napster v. iTunes: By the Numbers (Part 2)
• Napster v. iTunes: By the Numbers

Yahoo! How-To: Disable Yahoo!'s Spyware "Super Cookie"

If you have a free Yahoo! account, whether for Yahoo! Instant Messenger or for Yahoo! Mail or for any of the other services Yahoo! provides, you are being watched. I learned this from an article by James Derk. Basically, Yahoo! keeps track of the websites you visit with it's "super cookie" under the enigmatic "web beacons." Here's how Yahoo! describes it:

Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report aggregate information about Yahoo! users to our partners. This aggregate information may include demographic and usage information. No personally identifiable information about you is shared with partners from this research.

Yes, Yahoo! may know that you are a porn hound.

The following is how to disable it.

1. Log in to your Yahoo! account.
2. Go to http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy.
3. Scroll down to the "Cookies" section.
4. Click on the web beacons link.
5. Scroll down to the "Outside the Yahoo! Network" section.
6. Click on the click here link.
7. DO NOT click on the "Cancel Opt-out" button. Yahoo!'s trying to be tricky here by having you opt back in without thinking about it. Just close the window.

Don't Buy iPods Because They're Not Korean

Apparently Korean producers of digital music players are beating a patriotic drum to encourage people Korean brands rather than the iPod.

First, to take the companies' side. Let's say your a Korean company. You know some Koreans might by the argument that they should buy locally to fend off the latest affront of those damn imperialists. If I were a Korean company and thought that would work and increase my sales, I'd do the same thing. That's the joy of a free market economy: companies can do whatever they want to if they can trick some unthinking consumers to make a few purchases. And that includes pretending there's some fuzzy nationalistic advantage to buying domestic at a higher price and/or lesser quality.

Then there's the obvious other side... buying because of the country of origin - as opposed to product quality - lets domestic producers sit more complacently with inferior products rather than stepping up to the plate and really competing with the threatening companies.

Let's not kid ourselves here though... Korea's not the only one to have companies jump on the nationalism boat to boost flagging sales. In particular, this sounds a heckuva lot like U.S. automakers' reaction to Japanese imports. U.S. automakers eventually decided to get down to business.

In the end though I question how effective this will be. Even in this era of Republican-induced hyper-patriotism, if you started flying the flag and telling American kids to buy Xbox instead of Playstation 2, how effective do you think that would be? I doubt it'll be much more effective in Korea.

How To: Remove ABF Hotkey from the Startup Items

A while back I experimented with A Better Finder Rename, eventually to decide it wasn't for me. Unfortunately, it had and continues to have the annoying effect of propagating ABF HotKey in my Startup Items (Startup Items tab of the Accounts preference pane in Mac OS X 10.3.8). I've deleted it a bunch of times from there only to find it reappearing, strangely resembling Windows-esque spyware and the like.

Here's the removal procedure from A Better Finder Rename's website:

How can I get rid of the "ABF HotKey" application. I don't use the hot key anyway.

(Applies only to version 6.6.6 and later)

Simply go to "System Preferences...", select the "A Better Finder Preferences" pane and untick the "Activate hot key" checkbox.

The hot key application is unpopular with some people who closely monitor their installation and configuration. In order to prevent confusion, here are some technical details about how this works:

The "ABF HotKey" application provides hotkey access to all A Better Finder products and is an essential part of A Better Finder Launcher. It registers itself as a login item, so that the hot key is always available.

When the application is not used (i.e. Launcher is not installed and all "Activate hot key" checkboxes are unticked), it quits of its own accord to save memory. Every time you log into your account, the application will be launched, but will quit automatically if it is not required.

Now it'd be easy enough to uncheck the "Activate hot key" option if I had it installed. So I reinstalled the most recent version, unchecked it while I briefly had it installed on my computer, and then ran the installer again, this time to uninstall A Better Finder Rename. And so far that evil gremlin hasn't reappeared in my Startup Items list.

But a word to the folks over at A Better Finder Rename... let's leave the intrusive programs in the world of Wintel. Even a case like this where it's totally benign (and probably very useful for those who take advantage of it) but way too persistent might raise the hackles of those who've fled the Wintel world's adware, spyware and viruses.

An iPod's Demise

So my third-generation iPod died last week. I connected it to sync it via the FireWire dock. When I did that, the spinning disk/magnifying glass image appeared.

My iPod was never to be the same again.

It went through the whole spinning disk routine and came up with a check mark, which apparently indicates that everything was a-OK.

But it wasn't.

I was expecting my iPod to appear in iTunes and sync with all the stuff on my hard drive.

But it didn't.

Instead, what it did do was boot up to the Apple icon that comes on at the beginning, flash off, boot up to the Apple icon that comes on at the beginning, flash off, etc. Nothing more, nothing less.

No short sentence with an ominous message required here.

Today I got around to getting on the phone with Apple (I've been using my wife's iPod to survive the commute in the interim). After trying to milk the $49.95 required for tech support, the gatekeeper went through a few steps with me and figured out that the techies wouldn't be able to help me since it was a hardware problem.

That led me to the http://depot.info.apple.com/ipod/, where I could do what need to be done to get my iPod sent in for fixing. After going through to the end, the total price with tax was a whopping $271.31. That money would put me a good bit of the way to the 60GB iPod Photo I've been itching for. In short, that ended that venture.

So now I'm sitting here with this broken iPod pondering what to do. iPodMods has a repair service, but they charge you a $20 fee before they do anything else (which I find to be sketchy at best) so I've written them an email to see if they can tell me if it's gonna cost me $300 or if they can even do it at all before I drop $20 on them.

So now I'm pondering what happens when you need to get rid of an iPod? It's dead but my Address Book and iCal entries are all in there, which aren't really things I wanna see get pulled out of the trash by some identity thief. If my iPod's truly dead, I'm tempted to take it apart and see how it ticks, but being that I have no idea what I'm doing that might not be such a good idea.