Wesley's Tool-Box

Well, no more jumping through the hoops now. Hot on the heels of the release of Flip4Mac WMV component 2.1, the first official universal binary version, the latest VLC Player nightly build for both PPC and Intel Macs have the ability to decode WMV3 video codec (a.k.a. Windows Media Video 9). Click on the picture above for the full look.

XiGL.net, a companion site to Tool-Box.info, is now open for business. The name is supposed to rhyme with 'jiggle'. It's an experimental site made purely with Apple iWeb. Because of the highly integrated nature of this tool with iPhoto, which I use to manage my vast pool of photos, I might be maintaining a photo gallery on that website instead of here. I just had the basic pages set up, so go take a look.

Apple Store / Experience Center in Samseong-dong, Seoul had just stocked boxes of Hangul Word Processor (HWP) 2006 for Mac today, which was announced a week ago. HWP is one of the most popular word processor in Korea (it used to be THE most popular, but Microsoft Word has made headways), and many companies and most government agencies / education institutes use it as the standard document format. But Mac users have largely been left out cold since the last HWP version came out in 1997. Since that version, OS X came out, and then there was a CPU platform shift from PPC to Intel. In other words, Macs haven't been able to 'natively' run the application for half a decade.

Here's an old one. Dong-A Pharmaceuticals contacted me in early 2002 about doing a newspaper ad. They were doing a series of ads featuring young people with extraordinary achievements, and how Bacchus, the company's flagship energy drink, was supporting such spirits. They showed me the concept design of the ad (on the right), which indicated that I was to be the second person on the series. After several hours of photo session, the studio came up with a finalized photo (small inset photo on the lower right) to be used for the actual ad. I went home and waited for the ad to appear, but eventually I was told that the ad run was canceled. A couple of months later the second series of the ad appeared, featuring a college student that flew fighter jets several times. Oh well. Click on the photo for a larger image.