Someone had a top-ten poll online for Hello!Project members. Since all the cool kids are doing it, I quickly clicked my way through and picked a set. The auto-generated pictures are ordered 1-10, but I didn’t obsess over the order, I just tried to pick a group. Most of the ones who fell just outside the top ten were in the “too darn young no matter how pretty they are” category.

It’s no coincidence that 9 of my 10 were “graduated” during the recent agency house-cleaning; star-pimp Tsunku is focusing his efforts on catching them (very) young and refreshing the brand. I, on the other hand, find women more interesting than girls, and appreciate fully-developed personalities and talents as well as bodies. His most spectacular meltdown to date (still quite mellow by US child-star standards) was a girl who started at 12; the new kids are a lot younger.

So, the list:

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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

Q: What do the following sentences have in common?

• Dinner is ready.
• This cloth will make me a coat.
• A pool forms.
• A son was born to them.
• Mushrooms grow well in damp places.
• Watermelons are produced here.
• Some business turned up and prevented me from going there.
• His income enables him to live a decent life.
• He is good for nothing.
• A tender understanding seems to have been formed between the two.

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Why is plaintext email converted to HTML on the server? I ask because it’s clear that you’ve never seen what happens when Entourage tries to display the daily log output from a moderately busy mail server. It takes several minutes to render the message, during which time the single-threaded client is completely unresponsive.

I don’t dare kill it, of course, due to the risk of database corruption; I just listen to the fans as they crank up to full speed, and find something else to do.

[side note to the Entourage team: why does resizing the window that’s displaying an HTML-formatted message trigger yet another multi-minute formatting lockup? Did someone hold a gun to your heads and demand that you use an HTML library that was written by four-year-olds?]

Pirates who attacked a ship off the coast of Somalia got more than they bargained for when it turned out to be a naval vessel - from an international force against piracy, Nato said.

The pirates apparently mistook the FGS Spessart for a commercial merchant ship when they targeted it in the Gulf of Aden, between Somalia and Yemen.

(via The Daily Express)

It’s not a new idea, but it would be nice if they sent a few more merchant-ish naval vessels into the area, to thin the herd.

Reina says, “You can call yourself an artist all you want, shutterbug; the bikini stays on.”

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We’re planning a bad-movie marathon for some upcoming weekend. I’ve already acquired DVDs of some of my more memorable college rentals (in particular, Video Vixens and The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak)), but our planning reminded me of two others that weren’t available last time I checked:

…and now they’re mine!