Posted in Linguistics, Mew at 12:15 am by TBBle (Visited times)
Went to see Race tonight. It's actually not marked on the Hoyts site, but it's Hindi/English blend with English/nonsense blend subtitles. It's mentioned on the IMDB front page, but I missed it looking for the comments on the plot. The front page comment was satisfyingly spoiler free, and very positive. Had I noticed that the commenter was Indian, I might have clicked. Ah, hindsight. >_<
As an aside, the Hindi/English mix was interesting. I haven't seen enough Bollywood films to know if it's particular to this film or is part of the style (a friend suggested it was the latter) although I noticed while researching this post that one of the actresses doesn't speak Hindi. I need to learn more languages, at least reaching the point where I can watch movies in Japanese, Cantonese and now Hindi. And of course I wonder if I can possibly swing a research project into a Hindi/English pidgin. A university-funded Bollywood movie collection would be a thing of beauty...
So I took a few friends, all of us completely unprepared. I really should have clicked to it being Bollywood, given I'd noted the Indian director, actors, etc...
On the plus side it's really good. Turns out that the best way to improve a twisty, turny, windy plot, double-plot, cross and recross fest (ala Wild Things, which I've raved about here before) is to have the actors stop to sing and dance about what they're feeling every so often.
I also want to get married in Cape Town, at the registry office.
If you haven't seen Wild Things or Race, go do so.
Now Playing: Wild Things. My housemate hadn't seen it! This is a revelation akin to discovering another friend of mine hadn't seen The Princess Bride. There's also a Princess Bride Game coming, although I'm a little concerned, after seeing the trailer.
And just in case you didn't twig, this post's title is of course related to revelations. I'm not harbingering the end of Bollywood...
Now, my Japanese is not exactly spectacular, and rikaichan proved unhelpful as well, but this appears to be to be a 3-month exercise cartridge for women to increase their 女ヂカラ. As the joke goes, you fuck just one goat...
(Japanese is my best non-native language, too. My knowledge of Modern Standard Chinese currently extends only to 你有好乳房 "You have excellent breasts" and 你的妹妹有十六歲嗎 "Is your sister 16?", although if pressed occasional other words, interspersed with Japanese and the occasional mumble will emerge. ^_^)
Now of course I need to go assert my masculinity by buying something like this: (The infamouswitch touching game)
Granted, I'd have bought this game whether Amazon was trying to make me buy girly things or not and I realise that my other purchases (Kakitorikun, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon DVDs, for example) may have given Amazon the impression that I was a female Japanese primary-school student, but seriously, who gives a credit card to an eight-year-old girl named Paul?
Of course, my last AmazonJP shipment went to a female friend who was in Japan, maybe they assume I've been pretending to be a foreigner all this time to avoid sales tax? (Which is the opposite of online games, where I usually claim to be from very very south Okinawa, on the grounds that they don't actually ask what country you're from, just which prefecture of Japan.... This isn't a problem, both because I am roughly south of Okinawa, and because Japanese MMOs lost their appeal to me once I realised that the Japanese seem to produce nothing but grinding MMOs.)
On that topic, I was disappointed to see that the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms MMO, at least from the two gameplayvideos posted on YouTube, looks like another grinder. A translation of a beta test announcement however suggests that some level of facitonality will enter into it. Shame, really. ROTK would have been an excellent setting for the MMO I've been dreaming of creating. And sadly, the link to Dynasty Warriors Wave on the Wii is still not actually a link, at the Koei site. They showed this at the Tokyo Games show in 2005. And after the wonder experience The Godfather turned out to be, I was so looking forward to uniting China under the kingdom of Wu with nought but a pair of chakrams, a Wiimote, and the sweat of my brow (and other body parts). I guess I'll just have to grab Dynasty Warriors DS: Fighter's Battle when it ships somewhere in English.
I just now finished watching Dexter, (Warning, Wikipedia article contains unmarked spoilers) which I enjoyed quite a lot. I have to say though, I'd have been frustrated to be watching it week by week. And the second half of the season involved me yelling at him a lot for being an idiot.
Oh, and I joined Mensa the other day. I've spent all week telling people I'm a card-carrying genius, which is a bit of an exaggeration, as I don't know if I get a card (I've been too busy to check my post office box.)
Just to reinforce my genius status, I tonight completed all the character writing and drills for the grade 1 of Kakitorikun. That's 80 kanji, and technically I've got an academic transcript that says I know several hundred, but... yeah. That's not as impressive when I write it down, it turns out my level of Japanese approaches that of an particularly uncommunicative six-year-old. But I have gotten a stamp for every day this month so far. ^_^
I get proud about completely the wrong things, sometimes.
In somewhat more age-appropriate educational news, I'm finally getting back to uni this coming semester, taking Morphology part-time. Work's pretty good about flexible hours and stuff, so this will hopefully only consume time from my life, rather than life from my veins, as per my previous attempts at part-time study. It helps that this time I'm not travelling interstate to work and further again to study. However, I think I'm going to have to withdraw from the ANUAS comittee, as I'm going to be even more pressed for time than I am now.
If anyone from the ANUAS exec is reading this, sorry. I'll prolly make an official announcement this week, although given the way things are going, that's about as reliable as everything else I've promised I'd do for the exec.
Assuming 8 equals 6, it takes the Milky way most of a day to travel as far as light does in a minute.
Just in case you were wondering...
Oh, and server upgrades mean the blog's back online and working. ^_^
I've recently become quite entertained by Nodame Cantabile, having been flicking through a donated volume of English-language manga and then quite co-incidentally seen the first episode of the anime at an ANUAS executive show-selection screening.
At this point unsurprisingly, but still very pleasingly, there turns out to be a live-action series too (predating the anime) which I'll be looking long and hard at including in next semester's ANUAS drama screenings.
I also bought SSX Blur for the Wii on the weekend, as well as borrowing the work copy of Need For Speed: Carbon. Both games are by EA, and both suffered the same control problem, namely that the nunchuck-rolling movement only registers properly if you hold the nunchuck with your wrist fully extended on top. (ie stick your thumb out as far as you can, and then make it parallel to your forearm, palm facing inwards. That sort of wrst position.) This of course works fine when you think about it, but it's not the natural position for the nunchuck, nor is it particularly comfortable.
That of course was not the only problem I hit. NFS: Carbon I found very very very frustrating to play, as the cars would tend to get stuck to a wall, and then come off only to hit the other side at an even sharper angle. Shifting into reverse with an auto gearbox also seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, leading to the situation where if I hit any wall on the course, I couldn't win. Granted, I'm not that good at driving games, so I wasn't exactly expecting the gaming experience of a lifetime, but even so I enjoyed NFS: Underground 2 on the Xbox a lot more.
SSX Blur, on the other hand, was a sharp disappointment. As well as the nunchuck issue, the other problem was that the Ubertricks seemed to be unwarrantedly difficult to pull off. I only managed to get the movement recognised in-game twice, and only once was I far enough off the ground by that point to actually be able to hit the button to end the trick and land. Seriously, this game element could have been saved by simply dimming the screen the button was held down, slowing time, and showing the player the movement the Wii was reporting, rather than continuing to hurtle downhill at breakneck pace while trying to draw Zs and love-hearts in the air.
However, the biggest gameplay disappointment in SSX Blur (Compared to the last one I played, SSX Tricky, against on the Xbox) is the loss of the character chat. It was a great gaping hole in the game that I could no longer enjoy the continuous mutterings of the character (Kaori, in my case, who used to chatter away in Japanese) and was in fact hearing nothing but the sound of board on snow and the inane pseudo-surfer sound of the DJ.
Also, the DJ was very annoying. >_<
The other major loss in SSX Blur was the rider customisation options. In SSX Tricky, I worked repeatedly over the various competitions and challenges, trying to save up enough money to buy the many many many neat, cool and downright weird rider outfit components available. There was something about unlocking peaks and whatnot, but seriously, I don't care that much about snowboarding that I'd take the game as its own reward.
Fast-forward to SSX Blur, and after winning three races and one 1 on 1 challenge, I was first on the leaderboard, and had unlocked the second of 25 sets of skis/boards and 0 extra outfits. That's 0 extra, I still had the one I started with. Out of four! Seriously. Four outfits? And they were whole outfits, not the mix-and-match fun of SSX Tricky.
I will concede that snowballs were an interesting new feature in SSX Blur. But there's only so many snowballs you can throw at your opponents before you miss the ability to board into the shop and buy a cuter and fluffier backpack.
Speaking of video games, a friend of mine will be in Japan next month, so I'll be taking the opportunity to score some NDS games to help with my Japanese.
I've attached AmazonJP links to the DS games I'm considering... I'd love to hear some thoughts and feedback on these or other suggestions... I'm particularly keen on some kind of fairly simple kanji learning/memorisation game, and something I can scribble kanji into and get dictionary lookups from.
I'll be modchipping my Wii soon, so any suggestions on Japanese-released Wii games that'll be playable with my remarkably poor command of the language would be appreicated too. ^_^
Posted in Debian, Japanese at 12:34 am by TBBle (Visited 132 times)
Just a quick note, Reviewing the Kanji uses a little flash applet for testing/reviewing flashcards. I'm pleased to announce that it works fine with Gnash 0.7.2 on my Debian/unstable PowerPC laptop. ^_^
Well, now that I'm back on the 'net fairly reliably, I can post on what I've been doing for the past few days.
Firstly, I was off the Internet because I was flat-out busy on Saturday, in transit on Sunday, and wireless did not arrive at International House until about 11pm Monday night. That time I did spend on the 'net today, at the conference, was spent in a combination of processing CBIT emails since Friday, and wrestling with my wireless network card.
My local build of the d80211 version of the bcm43xx driver got signal, would even get traffic through, but when it tried to reassociate to a different AP (all the APs here are running on channel 11... Although I was sitting next to someone who saw one on channel 1, which I'm guessing was rouge... I also saw some IBSS networks on the same SSID....) it would corrupt something nasty, kick the screen brightness up to full and oops with slab errors in short order.
The 2.6.18 (2.6.18-3-powerpc Debian build) bcm43xx softmac driver didn't crash or anything, but generally performed worse, and when the Debian miniconf's theatre (Mathews A) was full, my connection suffered or would completely fail to dhcp. >_<
On the plus side, the presentations were great. AJ gave us a rundown of debian-devel (ie 12 months of flamewars) and other significant Debian going-ons. Keith Packard produced a whole bunch of neat X things slated for X.org 7.3 (input hotplugging, dynamic output selection and modesetting, which is exactly what I need to get the projectors I keep plugging into to work better than 640x480...). Russell Coker talked about the various security gaps still remaining in Linux.
In non-conference goings on, I was talking to someone on IRC who's gotten Second Life Viewer building under Linux/PowerPC (a previously unsupported platform) and I'm going to see if we can get a .deb built. I've already created an ELFIO package, and have the OpenJPEG source to try packaging tomorrow. I've also sent off an email to the person who ITP'd secondlife-client for Debian already, to see if he wants to co-operate, or if I'm just tooling about.
Speaking of tooling about, I decided it'd be a good idea to upgrade my bcm43xx-d80211 build to something more recent than mid December, but it seems the 2.6.20 workqueue changes mean I can't compile it against 2.6.19 anymore. The rt2x00 d80211 stack has backwards compatibility macros for the workqueue stuff, but I don't really feel like hacking those into bcm43xx, it's already a large and unsteady beast.
BTW, cogito's update could handle resuming better. Although it happily detected it was resuming a failed update, it had to keep refetching the packs. I eventually realised it would eventually time-out a fetch if I didn't ^c it and happily try again, presuming I had in the meantime walked outside or reloaded the driver.
Anyway, so I've decided tonight (while I was still off the wireless) that I'd finally bite the bullet and build myself a custom dscape.git kernel, to see if the pain I keep suffering from the bcm43xx-d80211 driver is just my cheap-ass backport. That was still building when the wireless came up, and then barfed because KConfig happily let me include both the PCI and SoC versions of the OHCI USB host driver, which provide the same symbols. I must remember to file a bug report about that, or at least check linus's git tree in case it's already fixed. (Both drivers recommended yes, but are patently incompatible as they require different endianness of the host interface). I've restarted the make-kpkg, hopefully that'll build overnight and I can try it in the morning.
I also put some time into my Remembering the Kanji book. I was going to do an hour, but after about a half-hour (with a break to configure and fire the kernel build off) I was yawning, and figured I'd prolly left the imaginative-memory zone. I was going to watch some Gokusen but thought I'd take a last wander over to the IH whiteboard to see if the wireless was up. Bizarrely, it was.
So I wandered onto the 'net, checked email, volunteered myself to package Thousand Parsec for Debian, added the Kanji I studied to Reviewing the Kanji (a web site for reviewing the stuff you learn in Remembering the Kanji) and updated my blog.
Well, it's nearly LCA time again. This is just a quick post mainly to see if my syndication at Planet Linux.conf.au 2007 is working yet.
I've been working at MF (Milestones just seem to come at you faster than the calender would otherwise suggest) and particularly in the last couple of weeks getting a good vector-math workout.
I've also been working at picking off RC bugs to try and help Etch along a bit, since kind of hoped to be upgrading to it in the half of January that's just passed.
I've also been looking for a CMS for the ANU Anime Society to try and resolve the fact that our web admins never seem to last as long as we'd like. At the moment, Joomla! is top of my list for trialling, as I'm familiar with PHP and looks to have the relevant modules (forum, calendar, eventing system that'll need modification to work for screening scheduling). However, I'm open to other suggestions, and will see if anyone at LCA has any useful suggestions.
And of course, by adding Planet LCA 2007, I've had to read it. And I came across ThreatNet, which is a distributed compromised computer identification system. It's actually really simple, you do something to identify a certain IP as a threat (the sample code scans postfix logs for "REJECT: noqueue" which usually comes from "no such user" although I noticed it also comes from greylister at CBIT) and sends that IP address to a nominated IRC channel. I dunno what's next, actually. Presumably, sites can block that IP address as they see fit, and if the responsible parties for the machine become aware of it, they can take action. I'll be adding this to my ever-growing list of things I need to consider implementation of at CBIT.
On the plus side, I recently installed Debian on a Slug with a 512MB USB flash stick, and I'm going to see how Nagios performs on it. If it's up to scratch, I'll prolly shoehorn in a wireless card and see if I can monitor two disparate networks effectively.
I, Paul Hampson, hereby confess that I too earnt money for doing Debian work, specifically packaging FreeRADIUS and getting it sponsored into the archive in time for Sarge to ship.
Mind you, I didn't earn much money, since Bandwidth Unlimited (for it was they) went bust without paying me much, but they did pay me. And you might argue that I'd been looking for a package to help out with in Debian for nearly three years at that point, and I would have worked on it for free, and that when I was being paid serious money to administer an ISP, I didn't do much FreeRADIUS work at all.
To which I'd say that I'd never have picked FreeRADIUS were I not running an ISP, and I would not have been running an ISP had I not planned to become rich and buy the world's largest chocolate bar from the experience. And I didn't get a lot of my job functions done when I was running an ISP, so lower-priority things (like FreeRADIUS, cleaning my desk, a full night's sleep) were often pushed aside.
I have to say that until I recently became a professional, regularly paid, programmer, I was highly envious of people who get paid to work on Open Source stuff, let alone Debian stuff. Now I'm just envious, although that'll prolly upgrade back to highly envious after linux.conf.au 2007 (or as I like to think of it now, clitoris.conf.au)
This whole thing puts me in mind of my experience at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I was one of the IT volunteers, and we basically picked up the less-interesting jobs the IBM-paid staffers gave us. At the time I felt a bit put out that I was there volunteering, and these guys were being paid to be there doing nothing that I couldn't have handled. Obviously that was decidedly unfair, and from my days of "I'm as good as or better than anyone else at computers" phase. But the unfairness of my attitude isn't actually the issue, the issue was that I really wanted to be paid to do that sort of thing, and didn't see why others should get paid but me not be.
Now of course I want two things: To get paid, and to do the things I love. I've finally reached the point where I can combine them, and I no longer begrudge those who, through luck, skill or otherwise, get paid more to do the same things, or get access to cooler toys to do them on. I'm envious, obviously. How do you not envy someone who gets to bring up Linux on a 128-way Power5 machine on the quiet? But that doesn't make me unhappy, it just makes me want to strive more, and work harder. One day I'll be the one submitting a paper to Linux.conf.au on some stupendously cool thing I've done. ^_^
Anyway, my short-medium term goal is to leverage the experience of the current MicroForté work, plus finishing my Japanese studies, to go work for a games company in Japan, combining my two favorite pipe-dreams into one, and making it reachable in a little as two years. Maybe I'll be lucky and MicroForté will open a Japanese office or something, or I'll luck out and end up working on a Japanese MMORPG with a Linux client and a measurable dose of serious cool. Or somehow end up programming at Nintendo.... Oh, sparkley eyes! *_*
And a by-the-by, it's two and a half months in, and I'm still totally thrilled to be working at a video games company. I mean, seriously, I'm like all, wow. I thought it was cool when I was working at TransACT, and my testing procedure involved firing up a video stream, and watching it on a TV. I had a TV on my desk, for work purposes, and that was the high-point of my career. Now I don't have a TV on my desk, but when I'm hacking on combat-handling code, part of my procedure involves firing up a game server, and playing.
I'm learning to take my time with things a bit more. I'm now much less worried that I won't speak six asian languages, play the piano, have my name someone in the Linux kernel that doesn't share a sentence with "blame", have invented an entirely new way of interacting with computers, master four different styles of martial art, earn my first dan in three different Japanese weapon styles, hold two masters degrees in disparate subject areas, earn infamy in the Debian community or even the admiration of my peers by 30. Or 40. I'll be pushing it to get there by 50. But the advantage of youth is that you get it when you're young, and only lose it if you let it go.
I guess on reflection, my goal has become to be a polymath ronin... For those familiar with anime, I think I want to be Kintaro Oe when I grow up...
Side-note: I'm now the secretary of the ANU Anime Society. Two days before the AGM, I wrote in an email to the then-executive committee that secretary was the one position I'd never take. Time makes fools of us all. ^_^ Congratulations to Cathy Ring on stepping up to the presidency, and to the other executives, old and new, for stepping up to what I expect (knowing Cathy) to be a hard-driven and successful year coming.
Oh, and someone asked this week about getting the GTO Live Action box set. So here's my AmazonJP links...
For those who don't read Japanese and can't puzzle it out (it's up the top, above “ＷｉｉTM”) it'll ship on 2nd December 2006 for ￥25 000. It also says that schedule and pricing for foreign countries will come in the next few days.
Along with 15 other launch titles, and another 11 titles by the end of the year.
Oh, dude, yay!
Oh, and the second thing...
17:01 <@usotsuki> Debian's definition of "stable" is different from what most people call "stable"
17:01 <@usotsuki> that's good and bad
17:02 < TBBle> Nope, it's pretty much what everyone except computer users mean by "stable". Think about it in the geological sense, for example. Or the chemical sense.
17:02 <@usotsuki> lol
17:02 < TBBle> ie "If you don't touch it, it won't randomly explode"
Edit: Found the Wii software lineup page, and so fixed my video listing above.
Wow. "Later this week" certainly took longer than I expected.
As of July 31st, I'm a (junior, for now) programmer at Micro Forté's Canberra studio. Two weeks in, and it's the best job I've had so far. ^_^ My first task involved trying out installation of the BigWorld MMOG server system as a new user so we could see what state the documentation was in, and for those who know how pedantic I am, a four-page file called whinge.txt is actually a positive sign.
It's an approximately eighteen-month contract, so I guess Japan and University will have to be put off at least that much longer. Still, I've pretty much wanted to write video games since I was six, learning Applesoft BASIC on the family //c, so no regrets. ^_^
I'm no longer working full-time at CBIT Internet, although I am still maintaining the ISP's servers there.
This, plus the request of a nice young lady whom I only seem to face-to-face once every twelve months or so that I install Skype, got me playing with Skype again. Sadly, the 10 euros of credit I bought in 2004 and was unable to use (due to their system failing to transmit voice to the US at the time) have "expired", which annoyed me enough that I was boycotting them. The boycott ended the moment someone asked me to actually use it, mind you. ^_^
On the actual open-source side, I've been playing with SIP stuff again. I've had a SIP-based Asterisk server running here (You can try to call me via SIP although I don't always have a SIP client running) for a while now, and I recently got a chance to test it with some overseas friends, but due to poor codec choice, it quality sucked.
On codecs, I have to say that Speex is great and iLBC is awful. Both in voice quality, and for the fact that Speex is free open-source, while iLBC comes with a "no-commercial use" license.
Anyway, with a webcam, I've been toying with video-supporting SIP clients. For windows, the only free one appears to be X-Lite 3 which doesn't do Speex (although its commerical version, eyeBeam 1.5 does) but for my purposes (LAN to the Asterisk Box) I can do G.711 and let Asterisk do the Speex transcoding for me.
Under linux, Linphone has video support (although the 1.35 Debian package is compiled without, and the build-deps to build it wanted to remove texlive in favour of tetex...) which I've not tried yet, but which a brief glance at the source suggests supports H.263-1998. Ekiga, the successor to GnomeMeeting, also supports video, via opal, but only H.261. There's H.263 code there, but relies on FFMpeg 0.4.7 patched to support RFC2190 for its video support. (It's actually FFMpeg's libavcodec that's being used, but very few people make the distinction it seems)
A brief aside on the video codecs at play here. H.261 is the older ITU-T video standard for ISDN, while H.263 was a newer standard which drew from H.261 as well as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and which was the default video standard for H.323 computer video conferencing, thanks to things like Microsoft's NetMeeting and the open-source GnomeMeeting. However, along with MPEG technology comes murky and ill-defined MPEGLA patent issues. There's also H.263-1998, aka H.263p or H.263+, which adds some annexes to H.263 to support some more encoding features. For moving H.263 over RTPRFC 2190 was written. However, the stream format defined in RFC2190 couldn't support the data stream from H.263-1998, so RFC 2429 was published. Both H.263 and H.263-1998 can be carried in the RFC 2429 stream format, so in theory everyone should be using RFC 2429 streams, and we'd all be happy. Apparently, NetMeeting only support RFC 2190 and H.263 however, so that's the version that they implemented in Ekiga too (since Opal is a refactoring of the OpenH323 library's media interface, and Gnomemeeting's built on OpenH323. And the OpenH323 H.263 code was submitted by the same person who did the FFMpeg patch mentioned above.) Meanwhile, X-Lite supports H.263, H.263plus, and (according to my SIP debug logs on Asterisk) RFC 2429 streaming.
I spent most of today weighing up forwardporting the RFC2190 patch to FFMpeg, or updating libopal to support RFC2429. I didn't achieve much, but I weighed it up a lot. The final answer was wait for the current libopal refactoring (they've moved the video codec support out into plugins, and rewrote the H.263 code such that it's much easier to _add_ RFC2429 support) to reach my via Debian in some way, and then have a poke at it, if they haven't done it already. If it's not already done, I'm sure that submitted the code to make it work would make me an Open-source Telephony Hero
So to bring us back to the story, I've got a nice little Windows-based SIP client which does video but not Speex and needs to register with someone, a Linux-based client that does speex but which I haven't compiled the video for yet (Linphone), and a both linux- and win32-based client which claims to do Speex but barfs (Ekiga...) and which can't do the current video codec with the current video stream format, and depends on a slight fork of another library to do current video with the old format.
I can see why Skype's so popular...>_<
Incidentally, if you want a non-registrar-requiring Speex-supporting free but-without-video SIP client for Windows, I found PhonerLite seemed to work well. And frankly, if you're going to call me without warning at home, you might not want the webcam to show you whatever my current state of dress or undress is. ^_^
Talking to Chris Smart (of Kororaa) at CLUG's PSIG meeting last Thursday about webcams, Ekiga and kopete inevitably led onto the GPL and the Linux Kernel (he loves to talk about it, really! ^_^) and Chris pointed me at Greg K-H's take on Linux and Binary-only modules, which manages to draw the line between legal and illegal way way back there compared to where we all through we were. (On a sidenote, OLS looks like it would have been tremendous fun. I can hardly wait until I'm a jetsetting conference-attending Linux Kernel Hero.)
I've also been poking at the DeviceScape 802.11 stack for Linux. As well as happily running my laptop's Apple Airport Extreme2 card for the past few months, its software-based Access Point support appears to have progressed to the point at which I can start poking at it for Nintendo DS Wirelss Multi-boot infrastructure, which will bypass all the card-specific hacking people're having to do, as well as let it work on things that aren't RT25xx cards. It seems in the six months or so since I've looked hard at Nifi, a dude called masscat has picked up the ball and run with it, so I've almost 10 pages of forum thread, and then whatever code he's published, to catch up on. I'm pleasantly surprised, I thought with the advent of Wifi support for Nintendo DS Homebrew code interest in WMBing over Nifi would die. So here's my chance to get the dscape port done, and become an NDS Homebrew Hero.
I'm currently reading Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and it's reinvigorating my love of Perl. ^_^ Shame MicroForté is a C++ and Python shop... Still, it's a nice change from reading The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Edition which I was reading for the six weeks between my first job interview and pretty much the weekend before I started at MicroForté. Of course, this means I'm tempted to spend my free time ignoring all the above ideas, and tooling about with Perl 6 and Parrot Especially with sheer coolness like Z-Code support in Parrot.
And for one final note, the real-estate agent is coming around next Saturday to inspect my flat, so I had to clean up. Luckily, it was mainly a case of emptying all the bins, although I need to run a quick vacuum around the place, it's a bit dusty in parts. I expect this inspection is because my lease expires in the next couple of weeks, and they want to know if they should kick me out or not. Given that I'm not working days in Watson with occasional evenings in Belconnen, I'm looking at moving anyway. Anyone know of a cheap one-bedroomer or two-bedroomer in Watson or adjoining suburbs? I'd like to be able to walk or bicycle to work. ^_^
Storyline patents -- Everytime I think the world has dug itself to rock-bottom, someone hits me on the back of the head with a shovel.
Educational
Kotodama, a video game research prototype for teaching Japanese to anime fans -- Now this is where I'd like to be taking my university education... I wonder where the project's going, and how I can get onboard... And of course, this led me to Julius, a speech-recognition system that I wish I had time to play with.
Thanks to Hellblazer via Slashdot for the heads-up on the patent.
Slashdot is prolly also the viaduct via which I got the Kotodama link, as well as a reminder about the Linux-based GP2X portable gaming doodad, and AnoNet, like FreeNet but built from VPN and SSH tunnels which leave you in control of your own machine's actions. I guess the difference is that on AnoNet, if someone does work out who you are and they seize your equipment, you don't have the I didn't know that was on there defense you get from FreeNet. There's also the issue that, if you do something heinous enough, such that international authorities can co-operate on it, then you can be tracked down.
One of the things AnoNet's Wikipedia entry suggests would be a good thing to protect on AnoNet is bnetd, the Battle.net Server that Blizzard Entertainment had shutdown in the US. Mind you, even on the regular Internet finding bnetd source was as easy as following the link from the bnetd Wikipedia entry, once again demonstrating how the Internet routes around damage. ^_^
・I went to relatives at Saitama's home.☆ My second cousin was just born! Already inevitably really really cute.*^_^* I hope I too soon get married and have a child.♪♪(smile)
This is actually not the regular weekly update, hence no date in Mew's post... Also, the rest of the site needs updating... The Schedule and Works pages don't list Gachi Baka! nor the 2006 calendar.
Posted in Mew at 9:08 pm by TBBle (Visited 687 times)
CAPS LOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY FANGIRLY JOY
Yes, I know I used it less than an hour ago regarding Web 2.0. Seriously, it's true again. Not only did Mew's new TV series start last Thursday (I reckon they posted it late to her site. I'm sure I visited it last Saturday!), but a fansub of the first episode is already doing the rounds, with episode two not even available as a RAW yet.
「ガチバカ！」's official website is of course in Japanese, but JDorama.com have of course launched their own reference page for Gachi Baka!. JDorama's cast list looks kinda short, compared to both the cast and character lists on the official website.
Mew's character is named 牛島理恵, and there's an interview and some character background there, again in Japanese. I'll add it to my pile of Mew-related stuff that needs translating. ^_^
So to all those naysayers who said Mew wouldn't do any more acting (this includes Mew herself, as I recall)... Yay Mew!
Edit: How could I forget to include a picture?
Edit: And then the alt tag?? My fangirly joy must have flooded my HTML neurons.
Lunch: Spent so much time editing the morning's post, didn't get to eat, and then went to two wrong theatres and missed the start of the 32/64 comparison with x86 and Power by Olof Johansson. And they were out of pies so I bought sushi instead...
The 32/64 bit presentation was interesting. I'd seen discussion on Debian-Devel along the lines that PPC64 is slower than PPC, and therefore a pure 64-bit Debian port (ala. AMD64 port) was a poor idea (as opposed to AMD64). Olof presented benchmarks (which supported this) as well as a discussion of the way the both x86 and PPC's ABI's differ between 32 and 64 bits. It seems that the PPC64 ABI has actually added more overhead to function calls, and hasn't taken advantage of an ABI change to improve existing issues, while x86_64 has actually used the ABI change to make more use of CPU registers to improve function calls significantly.
An audience member mentioned that newer toolchains than those tested use a different function-call structure or something and should be more efficient. So maybe PPC64's problems aren't insurmountable. Mind you, PPC64 does seem to be mainly targetted at specific applications, rather than overall system support ala x86_64... I wonder how MacOS X on G5 does it? I presume its a 32-bit userland from this...
Following on neatly there's a PPC presentation on next from Paul Mackerras... I wonder if this issue will be addressed then too?
Either way, it was a quick session, and happily I was _just_ able to follow the stuff that was going on and the following audience discussion... ^_^
And the short session meant I got to eat my sushi before the next presentation
Paul Mackerras (Paulus)'s presentation on Recent Developments in PowerPC
Merging 32-bit ppc and 64-bit ppc64 architectures in the Linux kernel: Lots of duplicate code, ensures both architectures benefit from features, cleanups, bugfixes and drivers etc. So instead, there's one architecture powerpc which is now the default arch.
This explains why recently building kernel modules on my PowerBook G4 failed, unless I prefixed the make with ARCH=ppc... >_< I noticed rene's bcm43xx packages did the same thing in debian/rules, so it's not just me.
Interestingly, Paul said that powermacs are no longer supported in ARCH=ppc as of 10th January. So 2.6.16 I guess...
It's been a fairly fast project, having been agreed to last July, first hit the tree on 29th August, and by 19th November the PPC64 stuff was completely gone.
During a question from Dave Miller about the PPC handing of OpenFirmware VS Sparc64's handling I was passed a card to sign for Paul Mackerras's birthday. I can't imagine how the people sitting directly in front of him signed it without him seeing...
Further discussion of memory layouts (64kb hardware page support means lots and lots of addressable memory!) followed by a quick round of Happy Birthday rounded out the rather technical session nicely.
I spent the interlude before the PHP5 presentation (ie while everyone else was off getting afternoon tea) finishing the morning's posting, and jealously guarding my powerpoint.
Rasmus Lerdorfs's PHP5 talk was quite technical, fast and codery in nature, so I'll just be noting the cool points I wasn't previously aware of. The version posted on his site right now is slightly older (marked 2006-01-25) than the one he's displaying on the screen (marked 2006-01-26).
PHP's main aspects: Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Be Lazy. The greatest efficiencies come from solving problems you will never have.
Rasmus said that PHP has the unix philosophy of solving one small problem and solving it well. It's not a framework, or the complete solution, but it does what it does very well.
AJAX makes this even better because the layout stuff gets moved to the local browser side, meaning that PHP only really needs to serve up the data in a format like JSON or XML, and the client-side UI code is actually run on the client site.
AJAX appears (now that I've seen it on the code-side) to simply be javascript in the web browser sending requests to the server with updates and whatnot and dynamically changing the UI without refreshing the entire page. This is good stuff, and I probably would have understood it earlier if I had actually listened to anyone whom I'd talked to about it before now. I wonder if we'll be talking about this at the Perl BOF tomorrow...
I now also know what MVC means, and why it's not actually sensible for web applications. But we use AJAX to do something similar, seperating presentation and data (oooh, like XHTML!).
Oooh! A very very useful thing in PHP is the <<< construct. Like the << shell function, and it expands PHP variables that appear inline.
Coming soon from Yahoo!, some kind of useful library thing for AJAX and stuff. ^_^
Hmm. JSON is apparently a Javascript self-extracting object. Neat. And I didn't even know Javascript had an eval() function...
Man, the CBIT Internet customer manager interface is gonna be sooo cool when I'm done with it. ^_^
PDO is a new PECL extension for PHP5, and part of PHP5.1 which looks a lot like Perl's DBI. It lets you bind parameters which will also save a whackload of crappy coding on my part... Mind you, I didn't use the binding stuff in Perl5, but I should be doing so.
Things in PHP5 that make it good for AJAX stuff: XML uses libxml2 and dom now. This gets us XPath and XSL... and SimpleXML! This gives a PHP native object from the XML file....
Huzzah. Two instruction RSS aggregator... I can't imagine why Planet takes so much code... ^_^
And with the demonstration of http://buzz.progphp.com/ and unsafe search (I wasn't quick enough on the URL, and the only thing Google will find is an old version of it, Rasmus's one had images. Images!) it was obvious that this is the future of the web.
OMG! I'm a Web 2.0 convert. CAPS LOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY FANGIRLY JOY.
Boy've I've been looking for a place to use that last one. I can't find the website I saw it on, but as soon as I saw it, I know I had to write it somewhere. ^_^
And then just to finish off (and whet our appetites for tomorrow's "Fast and Secure websites" presentation) Rasmus pointed us to APC, a PHP Opcode Cache which Yahoo! is happily running on their servers. One server he pulled up has taken 87 million hits in the past few hours, with 20k cache misses. O_O
And then there's the XHTML problem which I really need to sit down and unblithe my pages about...
BOFs... VoIP. I visited PowerPC, but on consideration this one's actually more important to me.
Interesting things pulled off Planet LCA2006: Gumstix - Small, small small computers; CryoPID - Freezes processes so they can be migrated across ttys and even machines. CryoPID was actually described at the lightning talks at LCA05, and received many oohs and aahs at the time at the idea of screening processes after they'd been started.
After the BOF, went to do my LPI 101 exam. As mentioned, I've been studying from LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2, which the LPI's Books page describes as ...the most up-to-date publication reflecting recent changes in LPI exam objectives.. Mind you, it fails to mention that they've since (as of October 1st 2005) merged the DEB and RPM exams... Mind you, I hadn't checked the errata since I was actually only going along to ask a question about the exam proceedure. Having since checked the errata, there's six pages of corrections, and there's still some whoppers missing. The above change to the exams, and the fact that Linux doesn't have an "Archive" bit...
Either way, it took 20 minutes of the 90 allotted, and I feel really good about it. Still worried about the second exam, will prolly put that off until Saturday and push hard to finish the book first.
And another episode of S.O.S watched, as this site was being slow for some reason... It's so wrenchingly painful to watch, but I can't possibly stop until I know what happens...
Either way, an excellent day topped off with way too much Japanese food. ^_^
Oh yes. If I get a chance, I must ask Dave Miller at the presenter's panel about the IEEE 802.11 stacks...
Overnight interlude: Talked to rene, he didn't seem enthused about a dscape package, so I'll do it myself (based on his code. ^_^). Also, halfway through S.O.S. I really just want to hit Irie-san with something... Gah!
LCA2006 conference opening this morning. As I'd gleaned from the Rough Guide to New Zealand, it is unexpectedly hot. This place looks more and more tempting, although the Internet link (NZ - Spiritual home of IP over Carrier Pigeon according to one wag) scares me.
QT4 tutorial this morning. Not a lot to say, lots of concentrating on slides. However, I did observe a serious problem that I was not expecting... They've not supplied a single power board, and the powerpoints in Castle 1 are even more dearth than at the ANU. Castle 2 (where the Debian miniconf was) is excellently appointed for powerpoints, on the other hand. On the gripping hand, this was my main contribution to the pre-LCA network survery they undertook... Oh well, I'll see if I can go make noise on IRC or something...
Well, maybe I'll say something about QT4. I've not done any GUI programming before, so it's both interesting, and looks like a lot of work. Much as I can read and understand C++, I think I'd be more comfortable doing it in perl or similar. Also, the presenter moved quite quickly, so I suspect this was aimed slightly over my head (although I could follow what was going on, I certainly couldn't be aping him as we went. I guess I was spoilt by Rusty and Robert's kernel module tutorial last year... Maybe it's like The Princess Bride in that it's a beloved movie, but for many people watching it years later pales in comparison to their fond memories... Although neither the kernel module tutorial nor The Princess Bride have paled in my memory yet.
Oh yeah. And I had to keep stopping to apt-get install things during the tutorial. We were told we'd need qt4 w/sqlite support (qt4-dev and qt4-sql), nothing was mentioned of the Assistant (qt4-doc qt4-dev-tools) Designer (qt4-designer) nor the SQLite client (sqlite3) and admittedly the first and last are optional. I guess the presenter assumed we'd be fetching qt4.1 from source and installing it...
Morning tea: Rene's online, and _is_ working on a dscape packageset. ^_^ And in completely unrelated seen-on-IRC news: OpenJazz Jazz Jackrabbit 1 reimplementation (uses original tilesets etc)...Someone's started porting it to the Nintendo DS. More on this after I find cookies or something.
Also during morning tea, I was roped into coming to the Perl BOF on Thursday afternoon. Although there's several BOFs on I'm interested in, the perl6 talk from Monday has me all Perl-enthused right now. Especially if it means I can sensibly resurrect my SOAP server for CBIT, and send out my auto-emails without the evils of perl5's format code. (This modules implements Exegesis 7, although I think what Damian described on Monday was slightly different. There's no Synopsis 7 yet either. -_-
More QT4. I18n support's there and easy to use programatically, although they apparently expect literals in UTF-16... The suggestion is to work in latin1 and just provide a translation for the target language to start with. This is prolly a quite sensible idea in general, as it allows your documentation writers to rewrite the text in the interface as needed, and lets the programming team leave the messages in the untranslated version in a format and phrasing useful to them, which as everybody knows is rather different from the way users work. Who is General Protection and why did his mistake crash my program?
This reminds me of a neat thing an IRC friend of mine once showed me that she was working on for a games company. She'd managed to independently re-implement po (in fact, it looked more like the QT4 i18n does, now I've seen it) for Visual Studio programs, while extending it to not just text, but all kinds of resources, drop-in-able with DLLs. So graphics with embedded text, video, audio and country-specific non-language things were all trivially handleable by their l10n teams. I bet it was doing encryption too, from my experience with Japanese games' text resources.
Wow, haven't seen or heard from her since the fall of #pgsm to TVNihon... One of the sadly few IRC friends I have who get my programming stuff, my linux stuff, my anime stuff, my random Japanese stuff, and was still genki in the morning. ^_^
Lunch: Seen on Planet linux.conf.au 2006: Splashpower, an induction-charger for mobile devices. According to Arjen Lentz they're in discussions with distributors. Amusingly, each submenu on their site has a picture at the top of someone who stuck the little metal strip to their foot and then walked across the pad. Possibly this could supplant firewalking as a harmless but dangerous-looking power-activity (or would that be extreme walking?) of the future.
Also lunch: I finally understand why the power-point cable on my PowerBook's adaptor comes off. You can replace it with a plug, which is almost as neat a solution as the retractable version I was talking to Jez about last week. I wonder if that's something I need to poke my boss about, or if it's an optional extra...
My first international trip started inauspiciously, as I came down with Tonsilitis on Thursday night. On reflection, going to see Underworld Evolution instead of finiding a late-night medical clinic was a poor choice, but happily Queanbeyan Hospital's emergency department was not busy. So I left Canberra at 2am with a prescription for a week's penicilin and some throat lozenges.
Got to Julia's place by 6am, and left her with my car. Met up with nearly a dozen LCA people on the same flight in the departure lounge, and had more time together than I expected because the plane was 20 minutes late taking off. I managed to sleep through most of the flight, and in fact only realised we were on the east coast of New Zealand when I realised there was ocean in front of us.
Dunedin's nice. I stayed at the Kiwi's Nest on Friday and Saturday nights, basically bummed about and was social with some of the other people staying there. This is probably the biggest improvement over last year, where my socialisation was largely limited to IRC since I was driving in and out from home, so wasn't really getting involved in the extra-curricular bits.
On the downside, I've been largely off the Internet since Thursday night. I did go to an Internet cafe for an hour on Saturday, which was enough time to check my email. Nothing seemed to have horribly caught fire at work, so I'm relaxed. ^_^ Also, the girl on the desk was _very_ cute.
Dunedin is frankly the sort of place I'd love to flee to if Australia's legal situation goes much further evilright. It's pleasantly cool (ie. a fan in summer would be sufficient), sufficiently focused (ie. One long main drag of shops) and has a cute girl at the desk of the Internet cafe. What more could I ask for? (Also, a large and apparently quite successful university, and lots of pubs.)
Anyway, on Sunday I moved onto campus, into "Unicol". It's nice, but the network wasn't working last night, so I still managed to not be on the Internet until now. Registration went well, and after a Subway dinner I spent the evening in a pub with some people who're here hanging around with a friend who's come to linux.conf.au, discussing politics, sport, comics and animation, Japanese culture, and whatever else seemed appropriate. I stayed sober the whole time due to the aforementioned penicilin. ^_^
I've also started watching Stawberry on the shortcake, at long last. It's been on my hard disk for two or three months, and I suspected it would be a heavy-going drama. Instead it turns out to be a hilarious at times, sad as hell at times (I think it's going to end sadly, if I've guessed the ending correctly. Only seen to episode 3) but both excellent and fascinating drama. It's really interfering with my LPIC reading... ^_^
Anyway, time to head over to the Debian Miniconf where someone's suggested to me that we don't have wireless, so I'll sign off here.
Saw "The Legend of Zorro" tonight with Bek and Sean. It was... interesting. A few fairly good fight scenes, with some nonsense in between to bulk out the movie. Bek and Sean commented that the movie could have done with some cutting, although really it was obvious that it had already had a fair bit of scissor-work taken to it. Particularly when one character says to another "As you said, 'You never see the one you love, you only see what you wish to see'" or words to that effect. Either I dozed off, or they cut the scene where the character in question actually says that. Maybe the actors decided the script was too long and coherent, and decided to adlib a bit. Who knows? It'll prolly be put back for the DVD, mind you. Then again, they _could_ decide to explore this particular editing path further on the DVD...
Spoiler Alert
The Legend Of Zorro: Zorro rides again in this blockbuster movie! Can Zorro defend the poor, downtrodden Spanish peasants of California from the evil French Count and his soap? Or will the Frenchman's wine prove too much for our hero?
Previews of Aeon Flux (it looks cool, it had better be cool, or there'll be much crying and gnashing of teeth), Just Friends (Depressing, given my history... >_<) and Casanova (Looks amusing, but I'd rather watch the BBC miniseries I think. I'm sorry I missed it on the ABC late last year... I don't suppose anyone taped it?)
In other news, I got to the interview stage for the JET program. I'm not sure why they sent the notice to my mother's house, but there it is. Interview sometime in February, they're gonna call.
I got a phonecall from Melbourne yesterday afternoon... If that was JET, I'm confused as to why they called from Melbourne. If that's someone reading this, call again. I got no voice mail and my phone's phonebook didn't recognise the number. ^_^
I have to get the international roaming activated for my phone, on that topic. I'd die without a mobile in New Zealand. I'll prolly die when I see the phone bill. History suggests I make long phonecalls back to Canberra whenever I travel. On the plus side, calling me costs me 26c flat rate, so I'm as contactable as alays.
I'm all excited about the New Zealand trip. I've got all the accomodation worked out now, staying in Kiwi's Nest about three blocks from the university on the Friday and Saturday night, and at the university for the rest of the trip. I am also worried what CBIT will do without me, as the promised webadmin interface is not ready. Maybe I'll have a nice productive programming day tomorrow? The fact that I'm working on my blog at 1am suggests not...
On a side note, I think I've discovered Smilex... I can eat any one of sardines, tomatoes, tomato sauce, onion, curry powder, chillis, and noodles, but combine then together into a dish, the name of which escapes me (It looks like red sludge with noodles mixed in) and I have an upset stomach the next day. A friend pointed out that he's allergic to tomatoes, so I wonder if I am too... They're c
Wow. I sneeze, a few months pass, and life turns upside down...
Firstly, obviously no The Other Day's Mews posted. I've got backlogs ahoihoi (although I'm missing about a month from October 3rd through November 11th) which I might have to start cherry-picking just to get them up.
Still, I got my 2006 Mew Calendar from AmazonJP. It was too expensive to ship by itself (shipping was significantly more than the calendar. >_<) but then I decided to buy myself an LPIC I book, and found a friend who wanted some stuff, so it came out quite cheaply. (Pictures and links at bottom of post)
I need the LPIC I book because I'm going to linux.conf.au 2006 in New Zealand later this month, and will be sitting two LPI level 1 exams there. I'm really looking forward to it, I had soo much fun last year. And I've never been overseas before (over strait, technically), so I've now got my first ever passport.
The passport was surprisingly quick to get. I had most of the paperwork already, and put the application in on the 23rd of December, and when I got back from Queensland, it came by registered mail on the 6th of January. And my mother was worried that I'd be hard-pressed to get it before I left for New Zealand if I put it in in December. There's an online tracking system, but I never got to try it, because I was in Queensland, as I mentioned.
I was in Queensland from the 30th of December until the 5th of January. I went up with my mum, step-father and sister for my youngest uncle's wedding. It was a nice wedding (outdoors, on a jetty-type thing the name of which escapes me) at a golf resort near the Gold Coast. And I use "near" loosely. For Queenslanders, it's near. For a Canberran like me, it was half-way to Sydney. It was also very hot, and very humid. I basically did two things in Queensland apart from the wedding, play video games and sweat. I also saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (good!) and Fun With Dick and Jane (also good!). Many of our family members (now numbering 33 in Lyall the clan) had t-shirts and such made up with "I got Lyalled at the Wedding of the Century" and "Lyallfest 05/06" on them. They were very cool, and slightly silly. Which seems appropriate somehow. It was an idea that came up after a little too much booze at the Lyall Christmas Party.
Christmas was fun, visited cousin's new place on Christmas Eve, spent night at Mum's place, visited Dad and grandparents in the morning, backto Mum's for lunch. Roast, of course. ^_^ A nice relaxing time after the hectic chaos of the preceeding two months, and my new job.
Yup, I've gained another new job. I also got rid of two, so I'm actually not doing too badly for a change. At the end of October, Bandwidth Unlimited folded, much to my shock, despair and disappointment. CBIT (note the
