September 30th. I wonder how much of my procedures and scripts survived to the end, on what was once the largest Solaris deployment inside Microsoft.

Emacs 23 adds line-move-visual, on by default, which changes the behavior of previous-line and next-line commands to take you to the next row on the screen. That is, if your line wrapped because it was too long to fit in the window, Control-N takes you to whatever position in that line happens to be one row below the current position.

This is the way the NeXT-derived widgets in MacOS X implemented their “emacs-like” editing, but it’s not the way Emacs has ever worked, which makes it a baffling choice for a default behavior. Especially since it breaks keyboard macros for line-by-line operations, something quickly noticed by users (update: actually, the official release notes don’t even mention a tenth of what they changed; you just have to guess, apparently).

So, using Emacs as an actual text editor now requires, at minimum:

(defun set-auto-mode (&optional foo) (interactive "p") (fundamental-mode))
(setq-default initial-major-mode 'fundamental-mode)
(setq-default enable-local-variables nil)
(global-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command)
(setq-default inhibit-eol-conversion t)
(setq line-move-visual nil)

[and why didn’t I notice when I installed it on my laptop several years ago? Because I reverted to the vendor-supplied Emacs at some point (I no longer recall why), and the Linux distros on our servers only recently upgraded to it]

Work has kept me from finishing this book, allowing me to defer the decision of what to do next, since I haven’t found OCRd copies of books 15-17 to run through my scripts, and I don’t feel like scanning and OCRing my own copies. Back to Kino? Back to Louie for another book and a half? Make an attempt at Haruhi, Dirty Pair, Tsutsui stories, Nishimura stories, porn novels (lots of new vocabulary!), or go back through and reread without the crutches? Haven’t decided yet.

Anyway, continuing with AsoIku 14 from where we left off, chapter five ends with our favorite teenage goth-loli cyborg MI6 agent kicking the asses of the same domestic terrorist group she slaughtered in her first appearance, who have been nudged by Nirumea into hating alien catgirls. This leads to a short discussion that there are so many violent fringe groups trying to get into Japan to stop the Pope from meeting with Catia that the Japanese agencies are merely coordinating the cleanup, requesting that each country take care of their own whackos.

The chapter ends with the revelation that this historic meeting is scheduled for 清命祭 (read as Shiimii in Okinawa), a Buddhist ceremony honoring one’s ancestors, or more importantly, exactly one year since Kio met Eris.

Chapter six finally brings the Pope onto the field. Antonia dispatched a private jet to Italy, and to save time, Kio is teleported there to meet him at the plane, as are the Catian escort craft, which consist of Eris and Manami in Ruros and a squadron of assistoroids in tiny little F-22s that leave their feet dangling as the landing gear. The Italian Air Force provides a more conventional escort, but of course the assistoroids steal the show, neatly diverting the reporters until the Pope is aboard.

While they’re waiting for him to show up, though, Eris has Manami trapped on her ship, and forces her to admit that she still wants Kio. Eris being Eris, she offers to share, and assures her that Aoi will agree. Manami denies everything, of course, until Eris reveals a secret she’s been hanging onto since book 8: 6-chan spotted her sneaking a box of homemade chocolates into Kio’s house for Valentine’s Day. Eris had also tried to question Yun-fa, and discovered that his memories of that period were quite thoroughly locked down out of loyalty.

I can pretty much insert the scene from the anime where Manami fought back against the idea of such a relationship by referencing Earth law and custom. It works about as well here, with Eris hand-waving it all away. Eris’ trump card, though, is a guilt trip: if the meeting with the Pope tips the balance enough to normalize relations between Earth and Catia, it wouldn’t be a first-contact situation any more, and she’d be recalled to the homeworld for extensive debriefing and retraining, and wouldn’t be back for 1-3 years. Left to themselves, Kio and Aoi won’t move their relationship forward; they need a sparkplug like Eris, or a pushy busybody like Manami. Or both.

Meanwhile, once they’re in flight, the Pope strikes up a conversation with Kio (in fluent Japanese), leading off with his favorite Japanese movies: Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro, and Yoji Yamada’s Love and Honor. Thanks to movie-buff Aoi, Kio is well-prepared to discuss these films and how they reflect Japanese character.

Via Althouse comes this Berkeley headline:

Firefighters use lid to put out kitchen pot fire in Berkeley

Twinkies return to the world on July 15th.

I plan to celebrate by buying exactly twice as many as I bought last year. So, zero.

Still, I expect there’ll be a large dish of Twinkiemisu at our next dojo party; the generic brand Chow used for the last party just wasn’t the same.

“No, we just moved our office, we didn’t change anything except the external IP address. The VPN problem must be on your end. Did you set the new IP address?”.

“Okay, we did install a new NAT router. But the problem must be on your end. Did you set the new IP address?”

“Oh, yes, it’s running a newer version of the OS. But the problem must be on your end. Did you set the new IP address?”

“Here are screenshots of our config. But the problem must be on your end. Did you set the new IP address?”

“Yes, we set it up with IKEv2 instead of v1. But the problem must be on your end. Did you set the new IP address?”

It’s actually been more than eight hours, and they still haven’t fixed their problem, but I at least got some sleep in the middle. We’d still be arguing about what the problem actually is if they hadn’t sent me the screenshots.

Oh, and it was urgent for me to make the change on my end Friday night (which they told me about on Friday afternoon…), but no one at their end actually checked their router for connectivity until this morning. And it’s been nearly an hour since they responded to the message that they’re using the wrong IKE version, but they still haven’t fixed it.

[Update: to add insult to injury, I just got a recruiting email from WalmartLabs. Perhaps the fact that it’s raining in Northern California in late June should have been a clue that the week was going to be a little odd.]

This boingboing article attempts an in-depth analysis of the recent flap about a Kickstarter campaign for pick-up artists that contained some controversial—and in some cases unsavory—advice for men who can’t manage to score any other way.

It jumps the shark the moment the author uses the word “cisgender”. You don’t need to read anything past that point to predict everything he says.

Officially, I mean. Fred Gallagher used Kickstarter to raise $20,000 to make a Megatokyo game, with a modest collection of stretch goals. Naturally, it was funded before he’d managed to write the announcement on his site, and has just cleared the $100,000 mark. There are only two goals left: Part 3 at $150,000, which advances the story beyond what has appeared in the comic (in a few years the boys may even overstay their 90-day visa!), and “Excessively Romantic Content” if they manage to reach the $500,000 mark.

Miho/Mugi? Miho/Ping? Ping/Junko? Perhaps he should write in some more “detailed” stretch goals…