I needed to be able to use my G5 tower this weekend, so I took out the new Blu-Ray drive and put the factory DVD burner back in. This yielded an instant and total restoration of system stability.

Out of curiosity, I pulled off the jury-rigged SATA to ATAPI adapter they shipped the Blu-Ray drive with, and tried hooking it up externally using my NewerTech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter (a veritable “swiss army knife” of drive attachment which I have found very useful on occasion—they are selling a newer version with more blinky lights and a slightly higher price today.)

In this configuration, I still had the exact same error trying to burn a BD-video disk using Toast 9, but the drive otherwise worked perfectly. I was able to burn and read all different kinds of media with no issues, and my system remained completely stable. So it looks like the drive itself works fine, but the card they taped to the back to connect it to my older Mac is garbage.

I expect them to do something about this, because I would really much rather have it work internally. And even if I can’t get to that state until I upgrade my Mac, I can’t have it sitting naked on the floor with lab wiring running to my computer every time I want to work with Blu-Ray media. So if they can’t get me a stable internal adapter, I want a working Firewire or USB enclosure. And I want a response from their support teams, and an apology for the delay and silence so far.

I’ll also need to open a ticket with Roxio support to sort out the Toast issues burning BD-video when I get back from my trip.

The results so far have not been encouraging.

Getting it installed in place of the factory DVD burner seemed physically pretty easy, but I could not get my Mac to recognize it at all. I took it out and reseated it a few times, and finally realized the problem seemed to be with the daughter board mounted very loosely on the back of the drive. This board was evidently added to convert from the drive’s native SATA connectors to the ATAPI cable that is in my three-year-old Mac. The converter board is only held on by the SATA connector itself and a stack of foam mounting squares (the kind I used to use to put up pictures in my dorm room). Carefully reseating the adapter board and reattaching the drive finally allowed my Mac to realize it had a optical drive again.

My first test was to be burning an HD video disc, since I want to be able to save things to be watched on my TV in its full digital glory. Unfortunately, although Toast 9 (with its HD/BD plug-in) is supposed to be able to do this, I had no luck. Toast took a really long time to encode the program, and I suppose that should not surprise me—I only have two 2.5GHz G5 processors. So if I can get the drive working as it should, it will probably motivate me to finally upgrade to one of the new crazy 8-core Intel towers. But after hours of encoding, as soon as Toast started trying to burn it would immediately fail with an error about an invalid block size. So I need to hit up the Roxio support people about that issue.

But I wanted to see if the drive itself was the problem, so I erased the disc using Disk Utility (worked fine), and tried burning a huge file in the Finder. The first attempt failed, but with a different complaint: my machine was too busy and had not delivered data in time. This I could believe, because by then I was also working on rendering another movie. So I erased again, quit my other tasks, and tried burning the 8GB data file again. It worked just fine, and I was able to mount the resulting disc in the Finder. Great—basic functionality confirmed.

But I was not out of the woods yet. I went back to my other projects and my Mac kept locking up, requiring me to hold down the power button to force a shutdown. At first I thought DreamWeaver must be to blame, but then it happened somewhere else. Tired and frustrated as I was, I thought to check the console logs, and I saw errors being reported about the ATA bus being wedged. Huh, could it be because I had the Blu-ray disc mounted? I tried ejecting that, and suffered no further lockups. Grr, I can’t live with that. So now I need to talk to the tech support at MCE as well. I want to try with a few other media types first so I can give them a detailed problem report, but that will take a lot of time, with an intermittent problem like this. Argh.

And then through the rest of the weekend I noticed a few times that the machine failed to successfully go to sleep, even when there was no disc in the drive. This is a problem I definitely did not have previously.

Man, I hope there is an easy way to sort out these problems. I’d really like to have a drive like this, but I can’t put up with an unstable system, not when it has been working great for years. And I know troubleshooting something like this could be a royal pain.

So, it does appear that Blu-ray is still very bleeding edge. The delays in shipment of both the drive and the media suggest that this is an industry-wide issue, not just a Mac problem. As for my instability and inability to burn HD video, I’ll write an update when I’ve had a chance to hear from the two companies’ support teams.

I’m through that now, and ready to move back to more public thoughts. But I will be busy or away much of the next month, between catching up at work and going on a cruise from London to Barcelona with a friend. So I apologize for the hiatus, and hope it can be understood.

I’ve set up a memorial page to commemorate Joe, and will be adding links and resources to it as they are shared with me (and as I have time).

Well, the new edition’s been out for a few weeks, and I am happily making my way through it. The wait was painful, but a worthy update has been the result. So far the best major new content has been the chapter on Generics. I really wish I’d had this two years ago, it would have saved me hours of pain trying to figure out some of the subtleties for myself, from scattered sources and cryptic compiler errors.

So, definitely, pick up a copy of the new edition and read it all again, making up for lost time.

It looks great! My only disappointment was that I received just one copy. I know things have been scaling back since the Swing book (when all three revision authors got ten copies each). Upon finishing the Developer’s Notebook I got five. But one copy? I want one for reference, of course, and I’d always like to be able to send one to my parents. Well, maybe more are on the way later, or I’ll just have to buy a copy out of the vast royalty stream I can always dream of…

But really, I’m thrilled to have the book, and hope many people will find it interesting and useful. It was definitely fun working with Tim and Ryan to put it together.

If you’re not reading this on a Mac, it’s not going to be that useful to you (unless you’ve got one somewhere) and I won’t be offended if you go read something else. If you do stick with me, be warned that Internet Explorer doesn’t yet know how to display the symbol for the Mac’s “option” key, which is used a bunch. Firefox handles it fine, though, even on Windows.

OK, how do I do it?

It’s always been pretty easy on the Mac, and the key commands have been fairly stable over the decades of the Mac’s existence, although the graphical tools I’ll introduce later have evolved and expanded. When the Mac first came out, few computers could deal with any characters other than the standard US ASCII alphabet (which is barely richer than your average manual typewriter), and even lowercase was relatively new.

The key to typing most of these special characters is the “option” key, represented by the symbol ⌥. (Note that this discussion assumes you’re using a US keyboard, since that’s what I have available to me. I am sure there are important differences when using keyboards for languages that commonly use these characters.)

Accented letters

Accents are implemented using what are called “dead keys” where you type a symbol first, then type the character you want to apply it to. To get an “ì” you type ⌥-` (hold down ⌥ and type the key to the left of “1” then let go of both). You will see a grave accent (“ ` ”) on a yellowish background—that means the system knows you want to combine that accent with another letter. Then you type “i” and you get the combined result, an “ì” with a grave accent.

Other accents are not quite as obvious, alas. I think they were trying to avoid requiring multiple modifier keys for the accent key prefix, so you don’t type ⌥-⇧-` (option, shift, and the key left of “1”) to get a combining tilde (~) even though that would be visually intuitive since ⇧-` is how you normally get a tilde. Instead, you have to know that the tilde is most commonly used create an eñe (the “nyuh” sounding letter in Spanish), so you produce it using ⌥-n. So to get “ñ” you type ⌥-n followed by “n”. But you can get other funky letters like “õ” by ⌥-n followed by “o”.

Similarly to get an acute accent, like you see on the “e” in “¡Olé!” you type ⌥-e followed by the letter you want to accent. And how did I get that upside down exclamation mark? ⌥-! will do that. It’s not a combining symbol, so it’s not a dead-key combination; as soon as you hit that set of keys, the symbol is added to your text. ¿Y la pregunta? To get an upside-down question mark you do need to add the shift key; that’s ⌥-⇧-/ (option, shift and the key on which the question mark appears).

Other choice symbols

There are a bunch of other useful symbols you get via the ⌥ key. I will mention a few of the most important, then show you how to explore on your own. First, let’s look at real quotation marks. Most of the people, most of the time, use foot ( ’ ) and inch ( ” ) marks instead of quotation marks ( “ ” ) and apostrophes ( ’ ), because that is all that old typewriters and early computers could produce. But in real typesetting, like in handwriting, there is a difference between opening and closing quotation marks, and apostrophes have a directionality to them as well. You use the “[” and “]” keys to produce them. Alas, I think Apple got this a bit backwards. I would think the “[” key would produce opening marks and the “]” key would produce closing marks, and you’d use ⇧ to pick between single and double, but no. ⌥-[ gives you an opening double-quote, ⌥-⇧-[ gives you a closing double-quote, ⌥-] gives you an opening single-quote, and ⌥-⇧-] gives you a closing single-quote, also known as an apostrophe.

Some people call these “smart quotes” but that is inaccurate, and comes from a feature in some word-processing programs which automatically converts straight quotes when you type them to curly quotes, guessing which version is needed by looking at the context in which you’re typing. That can seem handy, but often screws up, so once you learn the keyboard combinations for typing them yourself, you are better off seizing control and doing it yourself, turning off this feature in the software.

Last—but by no means least—I typed those lovely long dashes (called em-dashes in the typography world because they are as long as a capital “M”) by typing ⌥-⇧ and the minus key (to the right of “0”). The slightly shorter en-dash (-) is just ⌥ plus the minus key, but there’s not as much visual difference between that and a normal minus/hyphen, and less call to use it. Where you might find yourself tempted to use a double hyphen, use an em-dash instead. Pretty much everyone’s email client can handle Unicode these days. And certainly everyone’s web browser can.

Finding obscure stuff

OK, now the tips on how to learn more. The key is to get easy access to a couple of palettes, which you do in an unexpected way. Open the International section of your System Preferences:

Switch to the “Input Menu” tab and make sure the “Character Palette” and “Keyboard Viewer” items are checked, and that “Show input menu in menu bar” at the bottom is checked also:

If you are interested in practicing typing in other languages, you can check them as options too (switching to their input methods using this menu will also change the system spell checker to work with that language), but be sure at least your most common language is checked (I think it will be already checked for you).

Once you do this, a new menu will appear:

In this menu you can switch languages, and also open the two palettes that will help you type special characters. The Keyboard Viewer is a nice way of teaching yourself what symbols you can get with the ⌥ key. It shows a picture of your keyboard, and as you hold down modifier keys, updates to show what symbols you get by pressing that key. Here I am showing it with the ⌥ key held down:

The “dead keys” which produce combining symbols (e.g. the accents for letters I started this discussion with) are shown in orange. Note how you can get an ümlaut and circumflex (“î”) which I did not discuss above. Now you can figure those out, and remind yourself of them, whenever you need to.

Beyond the keyboard

The Character Palette is for when you need even less common symbols. Unicode has tens of thousands of characters in it, and not all of them fit on the keyboard, even with modifiers like ⌥, so sometimes you need another way to get them. This window lets you explore the whole Unicode space, find interesting symbols (like the keyboard modifiers I have been using in this email), and then insert them into your document by double-clicking them, or using the “Insert” button at the bottom:

If you find, as I have, that there are some symbols you use often, you can make them “favorites” using the little gear menu at the bottom left, and then access them easily using the Favorites tab. You can also search for symbols by their description or code using the search bar. This has become a very powerful tool, but seems intimidating at first because of the vast number of symbols available. I’d encourage you to just play with it for a while, learn about the different views and organizations of the symbol space it offers, and how to use it effectively.

OK, that was probably more than you wanted to know, but hopefully you will find it useful! Go forth and type beautifully.