This has no value whatsoever, but triple-clicking the title bar of a Finder window minimizes it to the Dock and then immediately boomerangs it back onscreen. The third click is processed after the minimizing animation finishes.

Speaking of useless UI tricks, it was briefly amusing when Apple arranged for the Shift key to toggle animations like this into slow motion, but after a few years it’s just annoying to lose control of an application for five seconds because you had a finger on the keyboard while minimizing a window.

Not the most significant, but certainly one of the most amusing major-media corrections for 2006, courtesy of The New York Times:

"Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans. Click here for the correct recipe."

I think my friends would be willing to try it as written…

I got an Xbox 360 at a nice discount (Microsoft Company Store holiday deal), but I’ve only picked up one additional game so far: Dead or Alive Extreme 2. The English dub is painful, so I switched it to Japanese (I had to get through the first virtual day to reach a point where I could disable the supplied music, which is pretty awful, but you can get rid of the dubbing once you finish enjoying the title movie a few times).

From previous games, I expected to hear some familiar voice actresses, but new character Kokoro sounded very familiar. I heard Mahoro in that voice, and I was not mistaken.

Sadly, the creators of the DoA franchise do not value Mahoro-like figures, so all of the girls are rather generously endowed. Said creators are proud of the fact that each breast is animated independently, but I think they should have spent a few minutes with an honestly-gifted nude model to learn precisely how large breasts should be animated. Tip for the day: when she turns rapidly at the waist, they should indeed move, but not so much, not for so long, and not up-and-down. Virtual implants might tend to stay more centered on the chest than Ma Nature’s Own, but if they’re loose enough to move that far up, they’re going to sway back and forth as well. [back and forth, back and forth, …]

But enough about breasts. What image have they attached to Mahoro’s voice?

more...

Please make the Xbox 360 Music Player more modal, with deeper menu trees and more confusing navigation. I understand that this may be difficult, but after using your current release, I’m sure you can manage it. Your goals should be to use as little of the screen as possible to display information about my music, and to double the number of keystrokes and screen transitions required to construct a playlist.

[Update: please also make it even easier to accidentally wipe out a new playlist while editing it.]

I caefully tested out the funky keyboad on the MacBook befoe buying one, but after seveal months, I’m eady to send mine in fo sevice. It seems thee’s a poblem with the ‘’ key not eliably egisteing keypesses. This is not a ecent poblem, but one that’s been botheing me since the day I unpacked it.

At fist, I thought I was just having touble adjusting to the key action, but it’s just the ‘’ key. All of the othes work fine evey time, but the ‘’ only woks about 60% of the time.

Unless I press really had, and then it’s still only about 90%. The annoying thing is that I eplaced the stock AM and had dive with bette stuff, and now I have to swap the oiginals back in, o AppleCae won’t touch it. Fotunately, that’s easy to do.

Jim Breen’s KANJIDIC includes cross-references for various printed kanji dictionaries, and KANJIDIC2 adds more. I’ve imported KANJIDIC into a SQLite database for use by my Perl scripts, and it’s quite handy (and much faster than repeatedly slurping in the original file and parsing it…).

However, it’s missing two cross-reference indexes that would be quite useful for me: JLPT level and White Rabbit Kanji Flashcards card number.

Most of the online JLPT references predate the 2002 test specifications, so the only reliable source I’ve found is The JLPT Study Page. The creator of that site is working from the latest edition of the test content specs, so apart from the occasional typo in the vocabulary, it’s solid data. It just wasn’t in a form directly useful to me, so I screen-scraped it and generated a simple text file, UTF-8 encoded.

The White Rabbit folks have an online lookup tool so you can generate your own cross-reference lists, but by the time I’d found it, I’d already read the forum article that explains their numbering scheme: Unicode sort order within JLPT level. A few seconds at the shell, and I had another simple text file (extended to include the planned Level 1 card set).

Just lean back and inhale the fumes:

"What does Firefox have to do with social justice? How will the one laptop per child project discourage genocide? How soon will Microsoft collapse? Watch Eben Moglen's inspiring keynote from the 2006 Plone Conference.

'If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of justice and social equality through the universalization of access to knowledge; If we know that what we are trying to do is build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; If we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep problems of human injustice; If we are conscious of what we have and know what we are trying to accomplish, when this is the moment for the first time in lifetimes, we can get it done.'"