Recently, Steven said:

After you've finished watching Misaki Chronicles, what becomes clear is that the story tellers had a really good story to tell, and knew they did -- but didn't think they could sell that story on the merits, either to their studio or to an audience. So they had to hide it, disguise it, attach things to it. Like huge boobs.

In the interests of clarity, I want to say that when it comes to the new manga series HEAVEN, creator Aoi Nanase has not gratuitously added large breasts and panty-flashing in order to market a serious story about the nature of good and evil.

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Whether I try to upgrade some of my music to the new iTunes Plus format, or buy something new, I just get this:

It can wait.

[update: I can’t buy anything at all; my account is now thoroughly confused in their database.]

[update: okay, it took a week, but they figured out which Dean Martin album shouldn’t have been trying to upgrade to iTunes Plus, and with that out of the way, I could determine that the season pass for The Dresden Files (not as good as the books, but not bad) was also broken]

Please point the download link on your site at the stable Mac client (4.4.1), not the CPU and memory-hogging “beta” (4.27.2) that not only clobbered my machine, but didn’t actually download anything to the directory it was pointed at.

While browsing the newly-updated iTunes store, I stumbled across the following podcast: 女の子の写真スライドショー/Japanese Cute Girl Slide Show. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Of course, you could download the same photos at higher resolution from someplace like Zorpia, and you wouldn’t be limited to this person’s taste in music and girls. But then it wouldn’t auto-download a new one to your iPod every week, which I guess counts as a feature.

I hate it when fixing one problem breaks something else, especially when it’s subtle.

A few weeks ago while testing our new IPSec VPN connections to external partners, we discovered that I could ssh/scp through the VPN from my Macs, but none of our Linux boxes could, and another Mac running allegedly-identical software had horrible performance issues.

The fix was a change in the OpenBSD firewall that also served as the IPSec endpoint: scrub reassemble tcp. The problem went away like magic.

Today, we found out that there’s a single external partner we have to post some data to via an HTTPS connection, and it worked fine from machines outside of our firewall, but failed about 50% of the time from all the machines inside our firewall.

…except for my Macs, which worked 100% of the time. I fired up a CentOS 5 Parallels session on one of them, and it failed 50% of the time. Surely it couldn’t be…

It was. Remove the scrub line, and the HTTPS post worked from everywhere, but now my IPSec VPNs were hosed again.

So:

scrub from any to $IPSEC1_INT reassemble tcp
scrub from any to $IPSEC2_INT reassemble tcp
scrub in

The root cause appears to be the partner’s IIS server failing to properly implement RFC 1323, causing some of the fragmented packets to be rejected during reassembly.

There’s a set of sample images over on No, Dave, it’s just you that, in theory, will help you determine if your Apple laptop display has 24-bit or 18-bit color. I can detect no banding in the 24-bit image, so I must have one of the (allegedly few) good MacBooks, right?

Wrong. Before trying this test, I used SwitchResX to determine that my MacBook has an AU Optronics B133EW01, which is definitely an 18-bit display.

I suspect that all Apple (and most other) laptops have 18-bit displays, and the real news here is that Apple bought some lemons.

I just had a user complain about not being able to delete files in her Inbox in Outlook 2007. When I tested, I got a dialog telling me that the outlook.ost file buried six folders deep somewhere was corrupt, and I should run scanpst.

It didn’t tell me where to find scanpst. When I found it, and tried to navigate to the folder containing the corrupted file, it didn’t exist. So I opened a cmd window and it didn’t show up for the dir command, either. I blindly cd’d to it anyway, and it existed, but the next folder in the path wasn’t there, either.

To make a long story short, the hidden file in the hidden folder in the hidden folder had to be located by searching the drive and then pasting the complete path into scanpst’s open dialog. Then all I had to do was exit every application that so much as mentioned the concept of email (including Google Desktop), and the tool quickly repaired the file.

In Office 2003, this entire process could be accomplished by selecting the “Detect and Repair…” menu option from inside Outlook. Hurray for usability improvements.

Back in August, my car was damaged in a hit-and-run. I got the guy’s license plate before he escaped, and filed a police report that included a statement from a witness. I paid my deductible and my insurance company paid the rest.

Last week, I received a letter from my insurance company announcing that they’d lost in arbitration, and since the other insurance company hadn’t paid up, I wasn’t going to be getting my deductible back. I have, in theory, really good insurance, such that if I hadn’t gotten the plate number or the other driver hadn’t been insured at all, they’d have paid. I called my agent and asked “WTF?”.

Today, they explained why the arbitration failed: because my insurance company didn’t submit a recorded witness statement. This was less interesting to me than why I wasn’t getting my money back, so of course they made sure to deliver it through a neutral third party who couldn’t give me anyone higher up to contact.

So I’ve gone back to my agent, and suggested he find someone to give me a damn good explanation, before I find a new company to insure my house, car, and motorcycle. Farmers is no longer my friend.