Speaking of furore in geekland, there was a certain amount of consternation when benchmarks of Intel's new* Conroe processor showed it handily outperforming AMD's top-of-the-line FX-60 for games, traditionally** the Athlon's strong point.

Some people criticised the benchmarks, but they have been redone independently, and while not especially painstaking or comprehensive, they do seem to be showing a real and very significant performance jump.

So how has Intel managed to suddenly leapfrog AMD with what is, basically, a souped-up Pentium Pro?

Easy.

For some time, both Intel and AMD have supported 128-bit short-vector instructions, performing two 64-bit or four 32-bit floating point operations at once. Except that neither one actually had a 128-bit FPU; both required two passes through a 64-bit unit.

So Intel fixed that, and as a result they are ahead of AMD. For as long as it takes AMD to double the width of their FPU, something that they were already working on anyway.

Lots of geeky details here.

* New as in not available for another six months.
** Traditionally as in for the past two or three years.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:44 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Persistent bastards.

go2url.be have now sent us more trackbacks than we have posts. And we have a lot of posts.

How's that spam thing working out for you, guys? Improved your Google ranking much?

Heh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:10 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I think I'll crawl into my shell and hibernate until spring.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:54 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Of course.

Pause.

Hey, there's no codeine in these things! I wuz robbed!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:17 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Nasty little rogue DNA strands have done me in. Posting will be light until I manage to crawl off to the chemist for some medication, after which posting will be light-headed. Assuming they'll sell me the good stuff.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:02 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

As you've never seen them before.

(You need to scroll down a little to get to the good stuff.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:59 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

IronPython

It's Python, so it's good, but it's Microsoft, so it's evil. I haven't determined the exact good/evil balance as yet but given that it's a one meg download, you can't go too far wrong.

Update: So, I can embed IronPython in my VB.NET application, which is great. But can I then access SQL databases from IronPython via the Python DB-API? Because then I can do... Uh, something that I would really like to do. I can do ADO.NET calls from IronPython, but that would mean I'd have to either write two versions of all the database queries or write a wrapper myself.

Okay, here's what I'm trying to achieve. Everyone knows I'm developing a blog/forum/wiki/portal/community application called Minx. What I haven't said much about - because I haven't gotten anywhere with it - is a client side application called Miko, which is supposed to let you easily manage your Minx sites. To do this properly, I need to embed parts of the Minx server engine. I hadn't found an easy way to do that previously short of writing the whole thing in Python, and I didn't want to do that because then there are problems with distributing the thing.

But if I can write it in VB and embed IronPython to handle the parts I've stolen from Minx, then I'm half-way there. But the Minx template system has SQL calls right inside it; it was designed to work with pretty much any SQL database but it doesn't have a separate storage API. And IronPython doesn't seem to have any way of using the Python DB-API. Still, writing a layer that translates to ADO.NET calls is probably a better way to spend my time than rewriting the template system in VB. (I'll just bundle it with SQLite for people who don't already have MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQL Server and DB2 installed.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:03 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

go2url.be: 156494.98

Great. Now piss off.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:54 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

There seems to be a certain furore going on over the latest delays in Windowsville. Since, as far as I can tell, every feature planned for Vista has been removed except for the new resource-sucking layer* I'm not sure I really care. Windows XP is a more-or less adequate operating system, as long as you're not trying to develop a flexible server application. Windows in general sucks beyond belief for that; any version of Linux or Unix or even something like VMS blows Windows into the weeds in that scenario.

But for desktop apps, and for developing desktop apps, it's not too sucky. Still sucky, yes, but at a level one can deal with while retaining some shreds of sanity and self-respect.

Except for the virtual memory system, which as far as I can tell has survived unchanged since the release of NT 3.1. Back then you were likely running with 16MB of memory; these days if you're doing anything remotely serious you have at least a gigabyte, even in a notebook. A virtual memory system tuned to work well with 16MB of memory is a festering pile of crap when you have a hundred times that amount.

There are two things that need to be fixed in Windows. One is the networking, which I thought they swiped from BSD, but doesn't act like it. Windows has the most thoroughly screwed up network behaviour of any operating system on the planet. Look, Bill, just go back to BSD and swipe their TCP stack again. Easy enough, surely.

The other thing they need to do is steal /proc/sys/vm/swappiness from the Linux 2.6 kernel, so I can set it to 0. Every time I copy a large file you swap my applications out. Stop it, you morons!

Two little things, guys. Then no-one will care if it takes a decade to push Vista out the door.

* Aero Glass

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:18 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Let's say you have inline comments on your blog. And your comment threads can easily run to more than a screenful, so when you get to the bottom of the thread, the post is now off the top of the screen.

Now, when you click on the "hide comments" link, what is the least irritating behaviour?

1. Just make the comments disappear, and pull all the text upwards to fill in the gap.


2. Make the comments disappear, and reposition the browser so that the bottom of the post is visible.


3. Make the comments disappear, and reposition the browser so that the top of the post is visible.


4. Make the comments disappear, and reposition the browser so that the bottom of the post is at the bottom of the page.*


5. Too hard. Just lose the hide comments link.


6. Other.

(The reason I'm asking is that Minx does as much as possible inline, including editing if you want that. But while popping something up in the middle of a web page is easy enough, taking it away again is fraught with irrits.)

* Note that I have no idea how to do this.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:04 PM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 I vote for #5. There's no need for a "hide comments" button. If I want to see the post, I'll scroll my browser.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 27, 2006 04:51 PM (+rSRq)

2 You can still hide comments by clicking on the Comments(n) link, because there's an obvious right way to handle that.

The hide comments link really should pull the text above the link downwards to fill in the gap - but as far as I know, you can't do that. So getting rid of it may indeed be the least annoying thing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 27, 2006 05:22 PM (LUBRF)

3 I've implemented options 1, 2, 3 and 5 so that people can experiment.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 27, 2006 05:31 PM (LUBRF)

4 I think we'll need more comments to test the options once it does get past a screenful.

At the moment, just hiding them seems to work fine, but I can imagine that just hiding them - when comments are more extensive - would leave you in the middle of something several posts down from where you started. Some variety of 2 might be better, then - leave the last 2-3 lines of the post up, just as if you'd scrolled past it.

Posted by: HC at March 27, 2006 05:36 PM (qmTWt)

5 Hiding them without jumping does seem to have issues once the comment thread gets long enough. My default behavior would be to read the post, read the comments, and then read the next post - so some variety of 2 is the most intuitive interface for me. If more people reread the post (again?) after reading the comments, then 3 might be better.

Alternatively, you could just leave all options up for a week and keep count of which gets the most usage.

Posted by: HC at March 27, 2006 05:43 PM (qmTWt)

6 That would be tricky. To move to the bottom of the post, I can just use an anchor tag in the template. To move to somewhere a few lines above the bottom of the post, I'd need to insert an anchor in the body of the post itself, which I'd rather not do.

I suppose I could auto-anchor the last paragraph tag...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 27, 2006 05:45 PM (LUBRF)

7 Its a nice to have. If you lost it, I'd never notice.

Clicking on the comments link is fine by me. All the screen jumpin annoys me as I need to figure out where I am in the page again.

Posted by: Andrew at March 27, 2006 11:33 PM (RWEVY)

8 Ideally, imo, clicking "hide comments" should return your browser screen to the exact display that it had when you clicked "show comments". No matter how much you've scrolled through a lengthy thread, hiding the comments should get ya back to where you began so's you can continue from where you left off.

Oh, and Blogermeister Pam still can't reach .mu.nu at all on her home 'puter, but she can get there from work. My own accessibility is pretty off and on. I wanna believe that it's a viral issue on our ends, but the prob is unique to Munuvia. Maybe some weird combination of obscure browser settings and new server specs? I dunno.

Like I said, I've eliminated that it's not a Firefox vs. IE issue. Debbye, the only other Munuvian that I know was having the same prob, hasn't posted in a while, but that's not unusual for her. Don't know if others are having probs.

Pam apparantly never saw yer message at Munuviana last week, so maybe drop her a line and ask her to give you some details? She can only post/browse .mu.nu from work, and I'd hate to see her get canned because of it.

In the meantime, can't you just go back to what you were doing before for a while?

Posted by: Tuning Spork at March 28, 2006 11:30 AM (LVz3N)

9 Actually, I spoke to Pam and cured her problem. I'll send you the details so you can be cured too. I can't go back to what we had before, because the old server no longer exists, but I will look at adding a third DNS server at a different hosting company using a cheap virtual server. I still don't know what the problem is, but that should fix it anyway.

Now, as for the hide comments, you are right; that is what it should do; but there is at present no way to get a browser to do that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 28, 2006 12:03 PM (LUBRF)

10 The close-and-do-nothing is ideal when the post hasn't scrolled off the screen.

The jump-to-top seems to be best when the post has scrolled off the screen but is itself less than a screenful.

The jump-to-bottom seems to suck in all cases.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 28, 2006 02:15 PM (LUBRF)

11 I like to close the comments after reading mostly because my mouse
scroll thingy doesn't work when the comments are displayed and I have
to use the arrow one on the side of the screen...

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Hide Comments | Add Comment

Any time you can turn a latency problem in a bandwidth problem, you can count that as a win.*

* Which is to say, I've inlined my comments.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:15 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blog of the day is the VirtualDub development blog.

No, really! VirtualDub is the program I use to create all those little anime clips (or almost all of them). It makes the process insanely easy; I can just mark the start and end of the piece of video I want, hit F7, and it gets saved into a file.

Without uncompressing and recompressing anything.

So instead of taking several minutes to create the typical file, it takes four or five seconds, limited by the speed of the disk. (Even faster on my desktop, which a SATA RAID array.)

But the blog? Well, Phaeron (the author) hates property grids, loves 68000 assembler, added asynchronous disk I/O to AMOS, wrote his own rational arithmetic library just to handle AVI frame rates properly... Okay, yes, it's only interesting if you're a geek, but if you're a geek, it's interesting. He's a programmer's programmer and seems to be a sensible guy in general.

Also, he notes that Microsoft have released the Express editions of their development tools as free downloads. Neat. I've hit the links for the ISOs, because download utilities? Bah! And I'm getting 1.3MB/second.

Earlier today I snarfed the free edition of DB2, which looks very nice indeed. I grabbed both the Windows and Linux versions, of course, and I'll be installing both on my notebook, since it runs both Windows and Linux, thanks to the free VMWare Player. I also grabbed a copy of Paint.NET, which is a pretty good little paint program - that is, about two orders of magnitude better than Microsoft Paint, but still considerably short of Photoshop. A great program though if you're on a budget and are seriously pissed off with Corel.

While I was at it I copied all my UFO Princess Valkyrie files onto my notebook as well, so that I could (a) watch them and (b) make little video clips to upload. Oh, and on Friday I copied my Minx development environment from Windows to Linux - all still on my notebook, of course - including the SQL dump of the munu blogs and forums that I'm using for testing.

Which is to say, I think I need a new notebook. One of these with two of these and one of... Okay, one of those 160GB Seagate 2.5" drives that nobody seems to sell. That should hold me for a year or so.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:12 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Never mind Sanada's gun, I want Chorus's notebook.

Holographic display? Gimme!

I'd probably put it to better use, too:

Hey! Even Raine has one! No fair!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:58 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

If you've been watching the anime clips I've been putting up (and downloading the individual files rather than the collections), you may find Democracy Player interesting.

Leaving aside the pretentious name, it's a video player with a built-in file manager, BitTorrent client, and RSS thingy. What this means is that you can grab various RSS feeds and have it automatically download the files via BitTorrent as they become available. Just add a channel, copy and paste the RSS link, and off you go.

Remember that it is BitTorrent, so it will use your upstream bandwidth to share the videos while you have it open. It uses the standard BitTorrent ports too, and in the current version there seems to be no way to change that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:45 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

They sure build them big and bouncy on Planet Valhalla, don't they?

(Okay, in Raine's case, small and bouncy.)

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leading male psychological researchers at Yale deliberately looked
at photographs of breasts every day for two years, at the end of
which they concluded that they had failed to take any notes.

"We forgot," they said. "We'll have to do it again."

— Dave Barry

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:03 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

There's one meaning of Engineer's Disease which concerns specialists in one field assuming that they can speak with authority in another, but that's not what I'm talking about today.

What I'm talking about is the inability to turn your brain off. An engineer is someone who comes out of The Matrix and says "That part about humans being used as batteries was really stupid. Humans are net consumers of energy. Now, if they'd said that human brains were being used as computation and memory units by the robots..."

(As an aside, there's a tendency to diagnose engineers, or rather engineers-to-be, as having high-function autism, or Asperger's Syndrome, or PDD-NOS, or whatever this weeks fashionable term is. To which I say, piss off you over-socialised wankers!)

Uh, where was I. Oh yeah. So, an engineer who happens to like, just to pick an example at random, silly little anime shows, will tend to over-analyse them, assuming (or hoping) that said silly little show will fully address the implications of the situations in which it has placed its characters.

Now, when you're dealing with something like The Matrix, or more contemporarily V for Vendetta, you know that this sort of analysis is almost certainly a waste of time. You're dealing with late 20th / early 21st century Hollywood, the place where dreams go to die.

But the Japanese are different. The less seriously they take themselves, the more likely they are to tackle complex ideas and deal with them well. (Maybe not so different as all that; one of the biggest problems Hollywood has these days is that it takes itself far too seriously.) We saw that with Popotan; a sillier, littler series you would be hard pressed to find, and yet the last few episodes are amazing.

And so we come to UFO Princess Valkyrie. The show has a gun that turns women into cat-girls, for crying out loud. And yet...

STEVEN, DO NOT CLICK HERE!!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:54 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Either this is a short-form shaggy dog story, or the link is a bit off.

Posted by: HC at March 26, 2006 02:45 PM (qmTWt)

2 Hmm. It should work. Don't open it in a new window or tab, just click on it.
Screws up the comments editor, though. Sigh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 26, 2006 02:50 PM (vlH1M)

3 Well, the comments editor works fine for me - but the hidden part doesn't, at least in Firefox. IE seems to work, though.
Is there supposed to be a picture with the 'And a Cure' post?
Anyway - point taken, and perhaps I'll look up UPW after all. Otherwise, enjoy the cream of NWN.

Posted by: HC at March 26, 2006 03:58 PM (qmTWt)

4 Hmm. Works for me in Firefox, and now it isn't messing up the editor. Maybe I'm just going crazy. Yes, that seems likely.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 26, 2006 05:10 PM (vlH1M)

5 Okay, the editor problem only happens in Firefox 1.07 or older. So that was easily fixed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 26, 2006 05:22 PM (vlH1M)

6 I've updated the "And a cure" article with a link to my video clips and an appropriate quote. No pictures, because (a) they're up at Chizumatic already and (b) the fansub I have isn't nearly as good a transfer as the DVD. I may well buy the DVD once it's available as a reasonably-priced box set.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 26, 2006 08:23 PM (vlH1M)

7 I tend to be very scared of Hollywood making adaptions of my favourite books and comics. I've heard mixed things about V For Vendetta. I had the entire run of Warrior magazines that originally published Miracleman and V For Vendetta. Unfortunately they got water damaged. Sob.

Alan Moores desparate attempts to distance himself from movie adaptions is equal parts understandable given the horrendous track record (I still haven't seen League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and can't bring myself to) and partly bloody minded.

I find it endlessly amusing that DC drop wads of cash on the poor man and he's constantly forcing them to give it to anyone but him. Philosophically I understand what he's getting at but still its a situation I wouldn't mind.

I'm going to defend the Matrix. (Ducking for cover from the brickbats) The first is actually pretty good. The Wachowskis' combined a fun mess of stylish kickin' and explodin' with just enough science fiction / cyberpunk. In what other movie can Keanu Reeve's deadpan acting skills be a positive ? Except for maybe Point Break. Gotta love surfin' cops. Or maybe not.

The battery thing was just an excuse for some cool and scarey visuals by Geof Darrow. It wasn't enough to knock my "suspension of disbelief" though.

You can't say that anime and manga are low on the "suspension of disbelief" scale either. I'm as much into anime and manga as a good hollywood flick. And I do agree that Hollywood takes itself far too seriously.

The Matrix series was at least an attempt at a solid movie series which delivered action and something to think about afterwards. Instead of the usual poor Philip K Dick premise hiding a standard action flick.

Having said that, Richard Linklater's Scanner Darkly does look interesting.

Here's hoping I can square some time to see V For Vendetta. I think the Wachowskis' kinda understand it. Even if they botched the central premise of anarchy versus fascism to liberal versus conservative.

Posted by: Andrew at March 26, 2006 11:09 PM (0585Z)

8 You can't say that anime and manga are low on the "suspension of disbelief" scale either.
What, you mean you have a hard time swallowing the premise of, say, Midori No Hibi or Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi? Puh-leeze.
The Matrix was a good flick. The battery stuff was a stumble, an unncessary one, but one that really only irritates engineer-types.
As for Alan Moore... I like about half his work. He can be very good indeed, but sometimes it all gets a bit pretentious. (I haven't seen League of Extraordinary Gentlemen so I can't comment on his disagreements with Hollywood.)

Gah.
Note to self: Do not enter HTML into new WYSIWG comment editor. Does not work.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 27, 2006 12:20 AM (vlH1M)

9 Whaddye mean "Don't click"? You expect someone with Engineer's disease to resist that?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 27, 2006 06:57 AM (+rSRq)

10 Heh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 27, 2006 07:50 AM (vlH1M)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

We have a new contender in the heavyweight trackback spam championship: In just a few short hours, go2url.be has rocketed to second place. Do they have the stamina to make it to the top of the charts? Keep watching!

(That ranking doesn't mean they've sent us 32880 trackbacks [or whatever the number is when you see it]; it's subject to geometric decay, and they've been at it for hours, so it means they've sent us considerably more than 32880 trackbacks. Dickheads.)

(And what is it with Belgium and evil rat-bastard trackback spammers?)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:43 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Steven Den Beste has discovered the cat-girl gun from UFO Princess Valkyrie.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:33 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

For four decades, from their invention until about 1997, the capacity (or more properly, the density) of hard disk drives doubled roughly every 18 months. In 1997, improvements in manufacturing techniques, drive head technology, and digital signal processing shifted this growth curve to doubling every year, until, in early 2002, I was able to buy a 200GB 3.5 inch drive.

Then the entire storage industry ran head first into a wall.*

For perspective, if that growth rate had continued until now, you would be able to buy a 3.2 terabyte disk right now. It would cost $500, but you could buy it. The largest disks actually on the market today are only 500 gigabytes.

At roughly the same time that the rotating rust makers hit the wall, though, flash memory was taking off. Since 2001, flash memory densities have doubled every year, with a 16 gigabit chip from Samsung due to hit the market later this year. 16 billion transistors on one chip.

If they continue at this pace, the capacity curves (though not the price curves) will intersect next year. Samsung has already announced a 32GB solid-state 1.8 inch drive; the largest 1.8 inch disk currently available is 60GB, not quite twice as large. And despite the promises of perpendicular recording, disk drive capacities have been growing at a glacial pace - relative to the expectations of the computer industry, anyway.

What this means is that within a few years, there will be no more scrik scrik scrik scrik, no more whirrrrrr-PAKLUNK, no more The disk in drive C: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?

And not a minute too soon, I say. Not a minute too soon.

* Not long after that, the CPU industry also ran into a wall, but that's another rant for another day. And besides, the CPU guys are working their butts off to go around, or over, or under the wall, with notable success; I don't doubt that the disk drive engineers are also hard at work, but they have less to show for it.

Incidentally, the 1.2GHz Athlons mentioned in that post ended up at the office as my development machines. One good thing about the lack of improvement in processors is that a five year old machine is still useful.**

** Five year old memory with a cascade of single bit errors is much less useful.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:45 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I've just been catching up on what was released of this series before it was licensed by Geneon. The DVDs are supposed to start coming out in June, though there have been no official announcements that I know of.

Kamichu is the story of Yurie, a middle-school girl who discovers one day that she is a god (kami-sama). The stories are very simple, focusing on various developments and difficulties in Yurie's adaptation to divinity while still trying to keep her family and school life somewhat normal.

One of the charming things about the series is that this is not a secret. Everyone knows that Yurie is a god, and treats it entirely matter-of-factly. But apart from the story itself, what makes the show special is the character design, artwork, and animation. It's not quite Miyazaki, but if you like his work, you'll love Kamichu.

The opening is already available in my torrent directory; I'll put the ending up as a separate file now. This particular clip was a cow to produce because it is encoded at a different frame rate to the rest of the video file. In fact, the encoders of the various Kamichu! fansubs seem to be rather erratic; I've yet to find a program that will play back all the files correctly. I just spent an hour fussing with VLC so that I could watch episode 6 in the proper (16:9) aspect ratio. BSPlayer crashes. WinAmp won't even open the file. VLC plays it, but screws up the subtitles. WMP gets the subtitles right, but squashes everything. Sigh.

By the way, I'd appreciate it if you'd give the torrents a try and let me know how they go. The current version of the software doesn't give me a lot of feedback, but it looks as though someone has been downloading the fils but very slowly. Either they have a dial-up connection, or something is wrong on my end.

Feel free to play with the comment editor as well. I think it needs a bit more hacking before it's ready for prime time, and your, um, comments, would be useful.

Ack. And because there's a bug in the layout of Broadcast Machine if you have 3n-1 files in a channel (for n>1), I've uploaded the closing credits for Ichigo 100% as well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:46 PM | Comments (23) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 I just downloaded three of the smaller torrents at speeds of 20 to 40 K/s -- not super-fast, perhaps, but reasonable.



Concerning the comments: they don't work in Safari (I'm on a Mac
running OS X 10.3.9). I can edit the name, email and url fields, but
the comments field remains inactive and I can't enter text there. It doesn't matter whether I click inside the box or try to get there by cycling through the tabs. (They do work in Firefox, fortunately.)

Posted by: Don at March 24, 2006 03:32 AM (Flqth)

2 Thanks. I'll add some Javascript to disable the edior except on known-good borwsers (IE and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 08:16 AM (VZZ5N)

3 And that sounds about right for the torrent speed. With only me seeding them, they're not going to be all that fast.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 08:17 AM (VZZ5N)

4 Have you rolled your own editor widget Pixy ?

There are a number available but are quite heavy. Wordpress 2 uses MCE (I think) which is a neat editor but its got the footprint of an elephant.

Played with it for awhile but the performance was driving me nuts. Especially when editing an existing entry, it displays the pure text and then rerenders in html. V-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.

Ended up turning it off.

Posted by: Andrew at March 24, 2006 09:14 AM (RWEVY)

5 No, I actually went out and bought one. It's Innova Editor, and it's about the same size as MCE but has lots more features (I disabled most of them for the comments box). Unfortunately, it only works perfectly in IE; it has a really nasty layout-breaking bug in Firefox.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 10:14 AM (7X4Bl)

6 Okay. The bug just stopped happening. I don't know what it's doing, but if it keeps it up I'm gonna kill it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 10:14 AM (7X4Bl)

7 Although "everyone" seems to be aware, it appears that Yurie's parents are entirely clueless about their daughter's divinity. As a result, she has to sneak out of house to perform god's work. I find it really strange, to say the least. Inconsistent, even.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 24, 2006 10:31 AM (6uek6)

8 I'm getting a total of 70k/s over the two kamichu torrents. They're so small, I might as well leave a seed up for each indefinitely.

Posted by: Chris C. at March 24, 2006 10:54 AM (HaLuG)

9 Chris - cool.



I have everything seeded from home - I have about 900kbps upstream, so
this is no hardship. I also have server seeds running, limited to
20kBps each, but each one requres its own Python script, so I'm not
going to do that once I have all the individual clips up.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 11:00 AM (RbYVY)

10 Pete - weeeeelll...



Her parents do know she's a
god; they can't not know. Particularly once you see, say, episode
7. But she's still their little girl, and she can't just go out
by herself late at night (episode 6) even if it's to attend her divine
inauguration.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 11:02 AM (RbYVY)

11 Hmm. The editor is fine if you only have one line of text.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 11:03 AM (RbYVY)

12 No? Not even then?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 11:04 AM (RbYVY)

13 Well, let's see how it goes in IE.

mada mada: not yet

zen-zen: not at all

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 11:06 AM (RbYVY)

14 Yeesh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 24, 2006 11:07 AM (RbYVY)

15 As far as a player for them all: Try MPlayer for windows. MPlayer really is a swiss army knife for file formats. I've got this work computer that I can't install anything on due to no admin rights (And why is it that a codec has to be treated like a device driver?) but MPlayer works just fine. I haven't found anything yet that it can't play.

The fun thing is that there doesn't seem to be a GUI for it, so you have to run MPlayer for Windows in the command line...

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The Xbox 360 launced in Australia today, three weeks later than originally planned.

Except that the seem to have forgotten to release any games.

There's not many console games that I've really found worth playing. Final Fantasy X, sure, and X-2 was kind of fun as well. I spent some time playing Sudeki. And then there's Dead or Alive and Rumble Roses. Racing games, sports games, general fighting games without hot babes, I could care less. Shooting games I got enough of with the orginal Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem.

And what are they launching with?

Ghost Recon 3 - a shooter.
Burnout: Revenge - racing.
Condemned - some sort of horror thing, another category in which I have no interest.
Fight Night Round 3 - a boxing game. No babes.
Kameo: Elements of Power - an RPG which actually looks interesting.
Project Gotham Racing - the name speaks for itself. Nice graphics, boring as hell.
Perfect Dark Zero - a shooter. A shooter with a babe, but still a shooter.
Amped - a snowboarding game. Yeesh.
Madden NFL 2006 - ick.
Quake 4 - see above.
Ridge Racer 6 - more racing. Yay.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006 - even more boring than the real thing!
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion - yes, it's an RPG, but based on the two hours I spent playing Morrowind, it's an RPG that I don't need to play.

Meh. And a number of those seem to be US imports, and not local releases. Either that, or they are just horribly overpriced.

Score Sheet

Must haves: 0
Might be okay: 1
Crap: 12
Number of consoles sold to Pixy: 0

On the other hand, there's another Sims 2 expansion pack out next month. And I don't even have Open For Business yet...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:09 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Today we have the openings of Karin, the Blood-Giving Vampire, Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge (both versions), and by special request, the ending of Happy Lesson TV.

Torrents here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:13 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

ai

1. (abbr) Artificial intelligence.
2. (Portugese) A bradypus, or three-toed sloth.
3. The country code for Anguilla.
4. (Japanese) Love.

See also mu, nu.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:23 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

My anime torrents have a new address now: ai.mu.nu/bm

I've upgraded from Blog Torrent, which worked (mostly) but was orphaned, to Broadcast Machine, which is nicer, works (mostly), and isn't orphaned.

It uses the same helper app for creating torrents, though, and it is evil.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:59 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

To the big two. Any minute now, the 2,000,000th trackback will bounce off the munu spam filter.

That's since November.

Spammers suck. But they suck less with Snark™.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:24 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)