When you mark a bug “closed as a duplicate of bug X”, it would be nice if I were able to actually see bug X. Apparently, if I want to know the status of a fix, I have to send email saying “I reported Y, can you tell me if there’s been any action on X?”.

In this case, X has ID 5647954 and Y is 6770720, suggesting that X has been gathering dust for quite a while, and is unlikely to be fixed in an upcoming release. Japanese keyboard support in general seems to be pretty dusty, and I doubt you’ll get them working with Boot Camp any time soon, either.

[yes, this is because XP and Vista are stupid about keyboard layouts, and it affects VMware, too, but so what? You wrote the drivers for Boot Camp, and tout it as a feature, and it doesn’t work with some of your keyboards.]

Why does Mail.app keep segfaulting in this method call:

[MetadataManager getAllCalendarStoreData]

I’ve turned off data detectors, rebuilt my iCal database, rebuilt my Mail indexes, and pretty much everything else I can think of, and it still crashes anywhere between 2 minutes and one hour after I start it up.

Mind you, I have no idea why your email client is importing all of my calendars in the first place…

[Update: various forum posts suggest that this is tied to Leopard’s merger of iCal to-do list functionality into Mail, which works by syncing your local to-do lists up with your IMAP server. Except that I don’t use iCal for to-do lists, and wouldn’t want them on my mail servers if I did. So, a feature I’ve never used that does something I don’t want has inexplicably started causing my email to crash at random intervals, and since the bug has been around since at least 10.5.2, it’s unlikely to be fixed deliberately. One can only hope that there’s enough mail-related cleanup in Snow Leopard that it starts working there…]

I get it, I do; you felt it was necessary and cool to have little video clips playing on the System Preferences panel for the new trackpads, to show all the cool multi-touch gestures.

But did it ever occur to you that the videos keep running as long as System Preferences is open to this panel, even in the background, even when the app is hidden? That’s 15-20% of one of my CPUs devoted to showing off multi-touch, when what I really care about is that you keep resetting the tracking speed of the trackpad whenever I plug in an external mouse.

Could you take some of that effort you put into the first five minutes of the user experience with a new piece of hardware, and maybe spend a little of it on how the device behaves for the next five years?

Why is this option here, and only here? And off by default?

perl -i- -ne '$s=1 if />ASCIIFilename
Yes, I really hate pasting text into a chat window and having
something like “(bug 4558)” turn into
“(bug 455”.

[update: don’t ask me how the kanji open-quote got turned into an accented a; it’s an ecto/MovableType thing that happens occasionally]

Unlike Windows (any version), Mac OS X correctly keeps track of keyboard layouts, even going so far as to ask the user about possibly non-standard layouts. Except in the Kotoeri input method, where it insists that all keyboards share the same layout, so that my English external keyboard is assumed to have the same layout as my laptop’s built-in Japanese keyboard, forcing me to guess where you hid the ‘「’ key (blackslash, by the way).

[filed as problem# 6770720] [updated 4/15 and marked as a duplicate of bug# 5647954]

During my brief vacation, which involved flying to the midwest to see family and catch a really bad cold, I ordered a new laptop. It’s a Mac, of course, because Windows is simply less functional for people like me. I ordered it online from Apple, so that I could get the precise hardware configuration I wanted: 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM hard drive, and the Japanese keyboard.

Oh, my, the Japanese keyboard. This is going to take some getting used to:

The worst thing about it is that it doesn’t work under Windows. Even a fully-updated Vista Ultimate install insists on treating it as a standard US keyboard layout, and none of the registry hacks or driver overrides you’ll find through Google will help. You know how MacOS X will ask you to press a few keys to help it figure out what kind of special keyboard you’ve attached? Windows doesn’t do that. This is true even for external USB keyboards made for the Japanese market. Apparently the only way to get it to work is to make sure you overrode the keyboard layout during the initial install of Vista/XP. Maybe.

The second-worst thing would be the absence of a “\” key. For historical reasons, the “¥” key replaced it on Japanese keyboards, and you have to type Option-¥ to get “\”.

Third-worst would be the massive slowdown in my typing speed for non-alphanumeric characters, which are in places my fingers don’t know how to find.

Nice things include the 英数 and かな keys adjacent to the spacebar. These handle the input-mode switching, replacing the usual Command-Space toggle. 英数 switches to English/numeric input, かな to kana input. I’m still using the romaji-style kana input, of course, even though this keyboard has a true kana layout printed on it; that’s a project for, well, “never”.

Also, the Control key is where god intended it to be.

Apart from the keyboard, there are no real downsides to the machine. I’m doing a clean migration to get rid of years of cruft, which helps. I think I’ve got all the finicky licensed apps moved over (Aperture and Photoshop adore their new home), and the bulk of the data. I need to reinstall a crapload of Perl libraries and random bits of code, data, and configs, but I’ve got basic functionality. The old MacBook is still under AppleCare for a few more months, so in a week or two I’ll revert it to the factory RAM and hard drive and send it in for some minor repairs I’ve been putting off.

Saved for future reference, since I don’t do it very often…

1. From another admin account, open System Preferences, click Accounts.
2. Control-click the username, select Advanced Options.
3. Change the UID and optionally the GID.
4. From a root shell, chown -R the user's files.
5. If you changed the GID, run:
   dseditgroup -o edit -a $USER -t user $OLDGROUP
6. If you want to add more local groups to match your NFS server, run:
   dseditgroup -o create -r $DESC -i $GID $GROUP