Today – praise the lord – I might have found a place I can bring my New York friends to without being embarrassed. Gigio’s Pizzeria is the most unassuming storefront you have ever seen, with the best pizza I have had during the 2.5 years in Chicago. The store looks so shabby, in fact, that despite living in the neighborhood for almost a year now, I had never ventured to walk in. After a few Google searches for “NY style pizza in Chicago” pointed me there I finally decided to stop by and boy, was I shooting myself in the foot for not doing so earlier.

The dough still isn’t quite right – maybe the secret really IS “in the water.” But it was thin, foldable, chewy, and honestly, the least like cardboard of all Chicago pizza joints’. The cheese and toppings (I got pepperoni) were up to par with NYC, down to the dripping grease detail. Overall, not perfect, but at least comparable. So I stand corrected – it is indeed possible to get a decent slice of the pie in Chicago, and I know where I’m getting all my pizza from now on.

Honestly, the web-safe fonts for Korean totally suck. Gulim is too round for my taste, Dotum too pixelated, and Gungsuh… who wants to use that font for anything, really. The trick to use @font-face in Korean (or any other non-English characters) is to know your unicode range. Speaking Korean and Japanese (with some Chinese), I’ve had to work with unicode pretty extensively in my projects, working with PHP encode/decode methods, etc.. But I had to ask the guys at FontSquirrel to figure it out properly for Korean. For this quick tutorial, I’m going to use FontSquirrel @font-face generator to get the appropriate fonts displaying in Korean.

1. Pick your font.

Needless to say, you have to pick a font that’s compatible with the language of your choice. I’ve had hits and misses with this: some fonts decide to bail on you on browsers, but 99% of fonts that display fine on your local machine have worked for me. Newer browsers like Chrome tends to break some characters, but I’m hoping that improves over time. Here I’m going to work with Daum. Daum is a free font authored and distributed by daum.net, one of the biggest portals in Korea. It’s very clean yet carries enough umph to draw attention, which is rare to find in a Korean font, not to mention it’s one of the very very few that are free.

2. Figure out your Unicode range.

The unicode universe is well documented, and all you need to do is look.
UNICODE CHARTS
On the right side is our beloved Korean language under “Hangul (which is our writing system).” Unlike Japanese or Chinese writing systems, Koreans write by combining alphabets into characters, each of which represents a syllable. It’s so scientific, and I’m proud of it every time I learn a new language and realize how much sense our system makes. The “Jamo,” at 1100-11FF, are the 24 alphabets and their combinations. You could probably leave this out of the range, but that means you’re going to get broken characters if any syllable is incomplete. I like to leave them in just in case. The real range you want is in the “Hangul Syllables,” at AC00-D7AF.

3. FontSquirrel Generator Adventure

The FontSquirrel interface is pretty easy to work with as well. First, upload your font:

To enable unicode characters, you must go into the Expert mode:

Then, under Subsetting, click Custom Subsetting.

This brings up a bunch of rows of options, and we are really only concerned with the Unicode Range setting. A word of caution though: FontSquirrel uses AJAX to let you preview the unicode ranges, and since the Hangul Syllables range is so large, it may freeze your browser while it loads. If you click in the input field and start typing “1100-11FF, AC00-D7AF” you will almost certainly freeze your browser for a few minutes with each letter you type. I would recommend copying it onto your clipboard like that, and pasting it. This will freeze the browser for…5 minutes max, then it will display:

Voila!

4. Download & Implement CSS

If all went well, you should be able to download the generated webfont package by clicking a button at the bottom. The ZIP archive will contain the TTF, EOT, WOFF and SVG fonts (for all sorts of compatibility) and automatically generated CSS (how kind of them) so you just have to stick it into your CSS file! The result is beautiful, simple, SEO friendly and clean renderings without involving sIFR or FLIR:

I’ve only tried this with Korean, but I’d expect this to work the same way with any language. Hope this helps.

I recently started working for a few other web agencies, which means I’m getting more work but I don’t get to credit myself for any of it. Here is a freelance project I just finished – the client already had all the graphic elements ready, so I did not interfere in any way with the design save for the navigation, which is done in CSS(3) and jQuery (just for nice fade-ins. Looks completely harmless with JS disabled). Everything’s pretty straightforward HTML/CSS so…there’s that. I’m kind of bummed out I don’t get to upload all the other stuff I’ve been working on, but there are benefits to freelancing only half the time

Last weekend, I broke my long hiatus from going to the movies with RED. And man, did I pick the right one (I wavered between RED and Social Network). I can’t deny I’m a total sucker for graphic-novel adaptations. Though you might expect something like Sin City from the illustrious cast, RED is a completely different animal. It makes no effort to be artsy or classy, and as we know from Shoot ‘Em Up, awesome things happen when a movie knows exactly what it wants to be. It’s emphatically not another Die Hard, though Bruce Willis plays yet another old man who refuses to retire. The screenplay is impressively non-cliche and the acting is superb – they could not have casted this movie more perfectly from John Malkovich’s Marvin and Helen Mirren‘s…stone-cold crazy grandma killing machine. There is no trace of any CIA-related cliches, like ex-agents knowing exactly how long it takes to trace a call and hanging up right before it completes. Nope, not in this movie. From start to finish it’s a powerhouse of adrenaline (pumping alarmingly slower in the old characters), and garnished with colorful supporting characters played by Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfuss. It will be totally worth buying the DVD so I can pop it in when I’m bored or knitting. I don’t really knit, but it feels appropriate to do while watching a grandma pump rounds of machine gun ammo into cars. Someone has to switch roles with her.

An extensive list of Googling later, I decided to sell the Powerbook, buy myself a Netbook to hackintosh. After consulting the most amazing hackintosh guide table ever, I went for a used Dell Inspiron Mini 10v (1011), which was one of the very few models that could support every Mac OSX function.

Once I got it though, it wasn’t smooth sailing at all. I originally intended to get partitioned dual-boot working between Mac OSX and Windows 7, but I kept running into the not-so-well-documented “boot0″ error, which seems to occur because the two operating systems have completely different boot protocols. A couple threads online recommended using fdisk in terminal to fix this error, but I went wrong somewhere and ended up not being able to boot into ANY of my partitions.

I ended up re-installing the OSX, this time giving up on the dual-boot. I wasn’t really going to need Windows anyway. With one partition running OSX, the netbook seemed to be hacked without problems… until Snow Leopard updated to 10.6.4. This resulted in a kernel & CPU mismatch error, crashing mid-boot. Panicking, I re-installed OSX yet again. Later I found out there is an easier solution to the problem, which is using the NetbookInstaller from Meklort’s Blog after starting the computer in recovery mode – hold shift while booting, and type “recovery=y” as a boot option.

So it’s been a long journey, but I finally got the thing to work. My Dell Mini 10v is now running OSX 10.6.4 with iPhone SDK installed.Hopefully I’ll teach myself fast enough to make some apps soon!

I was in Manhattan last weekend and walked into a regular hole-in-the-wall on upper east side. It was emotional. I was very close to bursting into tears. I asked the slice, why did I move so far away from you?

Last night I finally walked into Cafe Luigi. I’ve been meaning to check it out because it looked more legit than other Chicago pizza joints. Not only did a slice cost an ungodly $3, it again failed to meet my standards. The sauce out here is way too sweet – is it an American boondocks thing to always strive toward diabetes? The dough almost always tastes like cardboard, with slightly charred odor I could really do pizza without. You can’t possibly screw up cheese and toppings, but man, the sauce and the dough really ruins Chicago pizza. They say it’s in the water – well, isn’t it time some chemists ran the Hudson River water through an HPLC or NMR and came up with a “pizza dough water electrolytes” mix?? I understand it’s important to use those machines to analyze things like antioxidants and paramagnetism, but really people, first things first.

The best pizza I’ve had out here remains D’Agostinos at Addison and Southport. Even these guys fall short of the most plebian NYC joints, but they put good Chicago-style toppings on like Italian Beef.

And don’t even give me that deep-dish crap. That’s not pizza. It’s quiche.

Is it too much to ask? I don’t think so. Learn to make pizza right, Chicago. Throughout history Chicago has been trying to catch up with NYC, and with this problem unsolved, it will always be so far behind.

I have been writing HTML and CSS codes since high school – about 10 years now – and thought I had learned most, if not all, tags and tricks to make my code do what I want. That is, until I was shown an HTML/CSS introductory page for Japanese people. If you can read Japanese, it’s here, still containing a lot of deprecated tags. It reminds me of HTML Goodies years before the emergence of W3C standards.

Anyway, browsing through this page I found two tricks I had never known before – and rightfully so, because they are completely useless if you don’t code Japanese pages.

Trick 1: Vertical write mode

Japanese books, newspapers and other print media are often printed in vertical lines, with the lines moving from right to left. Though they for the most part have abandoned this for web and other screen media, it is possible to replicate this with a CSS styling writing-mode:

Here’s how the above would look in Internet Explorer:

How cool is that!

Trick 2: Furigana

Furigana is a way to clarify the Japanese pronunciation of Kanji, or Chinese characters. While hiragana and katakana are original, phonetic, Japanese characters, they also use Chinese characters extensively (as do Koreans, but we don’t usually write out the words in Chinese characters) in their writing. So they write hiragana pronunciations in tiny letters above the character to tell you how to read it. You would often find this in manga, since most kids would have trouble reading all the kanji in them. It turns out, since the early days of HTML, it had tags for this.

I made the font large so you can see the effect:

No separate lines, no tables, just in-line, semantic tags.

There’s also a trick to make your characters display from right to left, which I assume is useful for languages like Hebrew and Arabic, but I don’t know those. Granted, these tricks are so close to being useless, and possibly deprecated. They also only seem to be supported by *GASP* Internet Explorer. Having dealt with Korean clients, I know Asians are very reluctant about changing to a “better” browser like Firefox or Chrome, and I wonder if it has to do with IE’s support for international features like these.

I learned something today in a field I thought I knew everything about! And for the very first time in my life, I said, “way to go, Internet Explorer.”

HappyKorean is a giant project I have been working on for the past four months or so. It is a start-up social networking site for the Korean community in Chicago (although they are open to expansion in the future), and I must say it was a grueling task to create this site from scratch – I delivered all the graphic components, front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript, back-end PHP and MySQL, not to mention the dual-language support requirement, allowing users to toggle between Korean and English at any time.

Here’s my “profile.” You can add people as your “neighbors,” track your “groups,” send messages, winks, and follow blogs.

The movie runs three parallel plots, jumping in and out of all three until the end. Virginia Woolf, in her manic-depressive self, writes her famous Mrs. Dalloway while Moore’s character is inspired by it to attempt suicide, while Streep’s character is somewhat of a real-life version of Mrs. Dalloway. As always I’m going to stop myself here before I bore myself describing the plotlines, but the movie is chalk-full of metaphors, parallelisms and concurrent motifs – it is a great thinking movie. Every line is painfully meaningful, and when the movie finished I had to devote a good amount of time just thinking about all the elements. It is a wonderful refreshment for all of us who feel like we were forced into lives quite different from our desires; obligations and responsibilities that the adult life represents. In the face of death, one can appreciate life so much more, and the themes are well-contrasted in the three plotlines, each in its own social frame.

I forgot all about Nicole Kidman winning an Oscar for her role in this, but all acting in this film is superb. All the requirements of a great movie are there: script, acting, cinematography, and score. The eerie, Danny-Elfmanish music runs consistently through all three plotlines, and gives otherwise neutral images a somber air. A must see, and I’m glad I got to.