Adobe Illustrator CS2 on Intel Macs crashes a lot. Usually, the crash has to do with something involving a compound path, even simple ones. The kind that have been working just fine for twenty years. Today I had a reasonably simple, hand-drawn compound path which would crash Illustrator immediately if I so much as tried to change it’s color.

The improbable workaround is to restart Illustrator with the Appearance palette hidden. It really is that simple. Just close the Appearance palette, quit and restart Illustrator. The palette works file after that, at least for the current session.

Chelan on Adobe’s forums deserves credit for discovering this. Me, I just kept doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

A few years back, before Noemi was born, Lila and I trekked out to the Prospect Park Zoo to meet our friends Paula and her daughter. They’d recently moved to Brooklyn, but when we first met they were living on 13th street, literally across the street from our front window.

Walking around near the prairie dog mound, Paula said she had the craziest thing happen to her, and that I’d never guess what it was.

“What,” I said, “You have an identical twin?”

Paula’s jaw dropped while her eyes seemed to focus somewhere 30 or 40 feet past my head. “Yes, How’d you know?”

I didn’t, I was being a smartass. An accidentally and uncannily intuitive smartass.

Paula was adopted as a baby separately from her identical twin sister. Neither knew anything of the other’s existence until that day in 2004 when they’d somehow discovered each other.

Unfortunately, we’ve sort of lost touch, or at least haven’t seen each other in a long time. I don’t remember all the details of Paula’s story, but I just noticed that her book, written with her twin sister, is available for pre-order on Amazon: Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. My copy is reserved, I’ve been waiting to read this for three years.

Here’s hoping this makes it to Oprah. And I’m sending Paula an email now.

Update: Paula and Elyse’s site: Identical Strangers

A friend called in the middle of a promotional email disaster. Due to a screwup by their mailing service, messages only went out to a random portion of their list. It was a disaster because all he had left to work with were two text files, the masterlist and a log of what had already been sent.

So we basically needed to delete the contents of a small file, “deleteme.txt” from the contents of larger file, “masterlist.txt”. The lines to remove were not contiguous and some lines in the smaller file might have already been removed from the larger file.

Here is the piped unix command I used to do this:

cat deleteme.txt deleteme.txt masterlist.txt | sort | uniq -u > newmasterlist.txt

The uniq command’s -u flag outputs only lines which appear once, omitting every duplicate line. I used cat to join the deleteme.txt file twice to guarantee the interim file would contain at least two copies of every line to remove. If the lines already appeared in masterlist.txt, then there would be three to remove, but forcing duplicates made sure I wouldn’t end up with the already deleted lines being added back in (an XOR).

As I wrote this out, it started to seem more and more simple, almost to the point of silly. Writing this post took far longer than fixing the files. But the solution didn’t occur to me right away and this post is now exactly what I was googling around for.

Momofuku Ando died in Osaka January 5th, he was 96. In 1958, Mr. Ando invented the instant ramen noodle and changed the world.*

• Nissin Foods bio: Meet the Inventor
• Wikipedia: Momofuku Ando
• New York Times: Momofuku Ando, 96, Dies; Invented Instant Ramen
• San Jose Merc: Revolution in a bowl

I’ve been eating at the Momofuku Ssäm bar regularly, never realizing that the name of David Chang’s expanding restaurant empire was a winking nod to the inventor of the instant noodle.

* After writing this I found the Forbes obituary, which cited an inscription at the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum, “In 1958, Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles here in Ikeda, and changed the food culture of the world.”

More info at RobotGossip and RobotsRule. Here’s another video (via Digg):

The design is apparently based upon work by Sean Frawley and Dan Getz while in high school. Their work is said to be based on a 19th century french invention.

When attempting to capture footing into FCP from the Canon HV10 camcorder, I got the following message:

It turns out that something in either FCP or the HV10 is very finicky about the camcorder’s power source. Here are a few solutions:

1. Close the Log & Capture window, plug the camcorder into wall power, re-open Log & Capture.
2. Open iMovieHD. Just opening iMovieHD seems to be enough to kickstart the FireWire connection. iMovieHD was able to read and capture from the camcorder even when FCP couldn’t.

I haven’t had the issue pop up at all when running on wall power. It may be related to a low charge camcorder battery.

Occasionally, when correcting the state of the camcorder, FCP’s Log & Capture window gets stuck and won’t close. I haven’t found any way to close it other than restarting FCP.

So I was 6 for 25, ouch. That’ll teach me for throwing too many things out there. How’d other MacHeads do?

• Dan Benjamin: 4 of 18, also totally wrong about the iPhone.
• Mike Davidson: 3 of 10, mostly right about the iPhone.
• Steven Frank: 1 for 2, he’s going to be very, very happy in June. (yep)
• John Gruber: 5 of 13, he got the iPhone mostly right.
• Daniel Jalkut: Let’s say 50%, he was kind of vague and didn’t mention OS X.

In all of our defense, the fact that there was absolutely no mention of 10.5 severely affected our scores. A bunch of these predictions will probably come to pass whenever Apple gets around to demoing Leopard.

As usual, it was a lot of fun, congratulations to Bruce for landing himself in the 9th row.

iPhone

Best wrong quote about the iPhone comes from Steven Frank again:

“Apple’s about “the whole widget” and I can’t imagine them making you suffer some idiot at a Cingular store who can’t figure out which data plan you need, but it’s probably this one ’cause he heard that MACs have a problem with this other one because MACs don’t use TCP/IP networks or DNS and you have to use the AppleTalk Chooser or something I dunno Gary the Apple Guy should be back after lunch but check out this awesome RAZR.

While I’m suitably blown away by the iPhone, there is quite a bit of lingering disappointment that this great phone will still be hamstrung by Cingular’s crappy contracts and customer service. Somewhat pathetically, Cingular may be rebranded as AT&T (once again) by the time the iPhone goes on sale.

My cell phone, of which I am not fond, is currently through Verizon. We’ve got a somewhat convoluted multi-phone business/family plan, so it’s probably going to be a pain in the butt to move to Cingular. Yay.

There’s plenty of griping in the IRC channels about being Cingular only. I agree that it definitely feels like a letdown. If it were Cingular with a complete re-thinking of the contract and customer service model, I’d be more excited. Cingular itself was the only real choice since  the other large US wireless carriers are all CDMA networks. But no matter how great the phone is, contracts and the same-old cell phone service crap will bring down the whole experience. Perhaps it was a bad omen that Jobs clickers broke after Cingular took the stage.
On the positive side, it seemed as though the iPhone will be able to run third-party apps. If it really is running MacOS X, then Mac developers should be able to port their apps to run on the phone without too much fuss. This is outstanding news and could finally lead to the level of personalization and customization I’ve dreamed about having in a phone.

AppleTV

Very surprising that the AppleTV will be shipping without common Standard Definition connectors. Essentially it’s a HD playback device with no clear source of HD content aside from movie trailers. The AppleTV TV Compatibility description underlines this:

Enhanced-definition or high-definition widescreen TVs capable of 1080i 60/50Hz, 720p 60/50Hz, 576p 50Hz (PAL format), or 480p 60Hz

Those are all HDTV or recent SDTV requirements. HD has to come to iTunes soon.

The Name Change

I’m curious whether or not Apple’s name change to Apple Inc. has anything to do with the most recent Apple Corps lawsuit and the Beatles music library. Jobs used “Lovely Rita Meter Maid” for one of the demos, either he was taunting Apple Corps’ or something is up with iTunes and the Beatles.

AAPL

Wow. While Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, the value of Apple increased by more than 5 billion dollars. Five billion dollars, out of thin air, because of a great speech and a new product that won’t ship until June.