I stumbled on this picture recently, and was struck by how effortlessly she pulled off the classic Escher Girls boobs-and-butt pose.

After a bit of digging, I discovered that she’s Misa Kusumoto, a 21-year-old actress/model who’s just released her first DVD, which includes this photo on the back cover. A few more pictures from photographer Shin Yamagishi are available, as well as a very short bio.

…stay away from any unmoderated forums or comments for the next few days weeks.

I mean, damn.

[Update: also forums moderated by “diversity of everything except opinion” Leftists (redundant, I know); I’ve read several lengthy threads where not a single person participating has even a passing familiarity with what was presented in the courtroom. Their bigotry has left them filled with hatred over “facts” that the prosecution was unable to provide even a shred of evidence for.

Of course, these are the same folks still carrying a grudge over Bush “stealing two elections”, so law and reason were never their strengths…]

We bought a Dell R620 to run VMware ESXi 5.1U1. It was pre-configured to correctly boot the supplied ESXi image from an SD card. Bringing it up on the network was trivial. Downloading the Windows vSphere Client software was trivial. Configuring a datastore so that you could actually use the product was annoying.

Y’see, they shipped it with a Windows GPT partition table, and attempting to use the disk produced a lengthy timeout and disconnect, every time. Occasionally, I’d get a pop-up error message, but couldn’t select it to cut and paste, and enabling ssh on the server showed that no errors were being logged.

Typing the error message in by hand (“… HostDatastoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions … failed”) and googling it turned up detailed solutions for the problem, with obsolete commands. So, for the benefit of anyone else who gets into this state on ESXi 5.1:

1. Enable ssh, and log in as root.
2. Run esxcli storage core path list, locate your disk by the display name that showed up in the vSphere Client, and save the contents of the Device: field (mine was naa.6b8ca3a0e8405800195f77a21641467c).
3. run partedUtil mklabel /vmfs/devices/disks/device msdos

Now you can use it as a datastore.

So, we were completely unable to install Juniper’s Network Connect client on someone’s Win7 box. The error number we got led to N completely different solutions that worked for some people and failed for us, which suggested that there were N different problems covered by that error number, and ours was N+1.

While cleaning things up on the box, I came across a Virtual Router package that was installed, which he wasn’t using, and which hadn’t worked anyway. Coincidentally (coughcough), around the same time more than a dozen additional network interfaces had been created in the device manager, none of them with names, drivers, or any useful detail.

I thought that perhaps the crudware had hit some arbitrary limit on the number of devices, and deleted the garbage ones and uninstalled it. Still no good.

Later that evening, the user did a little more digging, found a different error string, and followed it to this thread on the Cisco support forums, where a similar mishap was preventing a VPN install. The limit turns out to be 1024 network interfaces, and the vast majority of them were concealed deep inside the registry, with no GUI-visible hint that they existed.

An unofficial registry-cleaning script was created by someone at MS, and is linked in the thread, and that solved the user’s problem. I generally frown on running random Windows binaries linked from forum threads, but he was a consultant, and it was his own laptop, and he ran it before I found out about it, so…

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