Wednesday, August 18, 2010

IPA Palette now available for 64-bit Snow Leopard

About a year ago I asked if anyone could help me get IPA Palette working on Snow Leopard. I didn't get much of a response. I found some workarounds.

A couple days ago, Brian 'Moses' Hall, the author of IPA Palette, found the post and responded.

Snow Leopard "broke" some aspects of Input Methods (because it suddenly went all 64-bit crazy) so people like me (and those write screen saver plugins and such) suddenly had to scramble. IPA Palette 2.0 addresses all these changes and works great on SL. Cheers, Moses Hall.


So IPA Palette 2.0b4 is available for download.

A couple images:



It's a nice utility. I've set up some text replacement preferences for most of my IPA input, but I'll definitely use IPA palette for more of the fine tuning and narrow transcriptions.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Imagine how they treat your luggage

Seven dogs died because of a flight from Tulsa to Chicago. I know the reports say they died afterwards, but that's according to the airline, and how much trust can we put in puppy killers?

Whoever wrote or edited the article apparently subscribes to a mysterious usage rule that I wondered about a couple years ago: the rule is that you can't autopsy another species. So:

The incident was under investigation. The dogs are being necropsied.
Necropsied. When I first read about this usage belief, I asked if autopsies couldn't be performed on non-humans, or if it was just about a species other than that of the investigator.
[W]hat is it that technically keeps a pathologist from performing an autopsy on anything but another human? … The comment says the issue is "a different species" so does this mean that if horses were smart enough (and had opposable thumbs) they would be able to perform autopsies on other horses?
This is a sad story. It seems the airline didn't follow its own policies, and it's hard to imagine how to see them as anything other than sloppy enough to kill your pets. To borrow an old George Miller joke, I don't want to name the actual airline, but I will tell you that it's an american airline.