September 21, 2006

World

Here's To The United Nations!

Celebrating 61 years of preventing war between Germany and France.

(Actually, the party isn't until October 24th, but I'll forget the point by then.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:27 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

VMWare Server

Rocks.

It's not perfect - see my difficulties with the clock under CentOS, for example - but I expect that sort of thing will become less common as OS developers take up VMWare as an important target platform. Linux is Linux, though, so for now it's enough to know that Fedora 5 works fine.

I needed a new Windows PC at work, and I needed at least two servers to test Minx, and I needed a replacement for our ancient development box* and thanks to Intel and VMWare Server I have them all parked neatly under my desk.

I'd be happier if I had 8GB of memory rather than 4GB, but that's still a bit pricey at the moment - and opens up the 64-bit can of worms, which I didn't feel like doing just yet.

* A Pentium III 550.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:40 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Cool

She Turned Me Into A Monkey!

If you're not listening to Penn Radio every day - or at least, every Tuesday - you are really missing out.

I was laughing so hard this morning that the guy next to me on the train actually got up and moved.

Well, at least I assume it's because I was laughing.

P.S. Back episodes available for download here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:50 PM | Comments (30) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 20, 2006

Geek

IJITS!

Fedora Core 5 has lost the convenient option to install everything. You have to select the various categories, select the various sub-categories, and then open a pop-up window to select the optional sub-components.

I selected all of the basic things, and selected sub-components until I ran out of patience.

This installed 4.6 gigabytes of stuff. It did not install iostat. Or sar.

Update: Updating Fedora is abysmally slow, as always. And while the update is running - which looks set to take several hours - you can't install anything. Bleh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:53 PM | Comments (52) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Will That Be Daylight Savings or Non-Daylight Savings?

I installed another virtual machine, this time running Fedora Core 5. The clock seems to work (yay!) and Python 2.4.2 runs my benchmark in 1.8 seconds, about 60% faster the new munu servers. On the other hand, I installed Python 2.5 on the new servers and it is 10% slower than 2.4.3.

Meanwhile, my iPod has decided that my correct timezone is Abu Dhabi. I have no idea why.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:44 PM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 19, 2006

Geek

Minus La Change

I'm setting up Kyon as a template so that I can copy it to create Yuki and Mikuru. Having installed the operating system (CentOS 4.4), I'm now installing all the bits and pieces that Minx relies on. Such as Python 2.5RC2.

I downloaded and configured it, and then ran make:

real 0m54.730s
user 0m39.567s
sys 0m13.762s
I wondered how that would compare with the new munu servers:
real 1m48.209s
user 1m41.037s
sys 0m6.834s
What the fnord?! That's one heck of a difference, particularly when you realise that Kyon is running under VMware. Same version of GCC, by the way.

Old server:

real 2m12.971s
user 2m2.240s
sys 0m5.932s
About what I'd expect - the new servers are a little faster than the old ones.

But Kyon just zooms along - if what you want to do is compile Python. It's kind of a slug for desktop use. How does it go for other server-type stuff?

Let's see. I have a little Python benchmark. Nothing complicated, but it gives the interpreter a little test. Old server, Python 2.4.2:

real 0m3.373s
user 0m3.284s
sys 0m0.028s
New server, Python 2.4.3:
real 0m3.028s
user 0m3.008s
sys 0m0.004s
Okay, slightly faster, as expected.

Kyon, Python 2.3.4 (which is what CentOS 4.4 comes with, the slackers):

real 0m0.919s
user 0m0.909s
sys 0m0.009s
Um. That's a pretty significant improvement.

Just one small problem:

It's lying.

The timer is off... Apparently by a factor of two, though it varies a bit. I increased the loop count by a factor of ten and hand-timed it. Computer says 9 seconds, I say 18.

That's gonna really suck for my development work.

Python under Cygwin gives 1.5 seconds for my benchmark, and I confirmed that (roughly) with hand-timing, so the Core 2 really is a lot faster for Python code. Just not quite as fast as Kyon wants me to believe.

Update: A bit of digging came up with this, which doesn't help much, because I've set Kyon up as a dual-processor machine. But it at least explains what's going on.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:58 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

World

P.S.

Arrrr!

Me hearties!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:19 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Life

Brain Slugs R Us

I've had my brain slug removed.*

The thing that has eaten all my time for the past two months is done, dealt with, finished, over, forgotten, dead and buried at a crossroads at midnight with a wafer in its mouth and a stake through its heart.

Cough.

I'm back to working on Minx. Being paid to work on Minx. Not quite full time - under the agreement I worked out, I have to look after some other stuff as well - but it is the major focus of my day job. (As well as being a major focus of my free time.) Yay for that.

Right now I'm setting up Kyon, Yuki and Mikuru, the Minx development and test servers. Haruhi is running pretty well, by the way, though of course the super-duper Core 2 Duo with 4GB of memory is brought down to Earth on a regular basis by software, peripherals, and networks.

My iPod is still working. My notebook has started crashing randomly again.

And tomorrow I turn 40.

I'm not going to have a mid-life crisis. I'm too busy dealing with actual crises, thank you very much.

*"Poor little guy starved to death."

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:13 PM | Comments (429) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 15, 2006

Geek

Praising With Faint Damns

Found on a customer review page for a memory card:

Cons: No built-in street-level GPS. No host-device-accessible cold fusion power unit. No antigravity or timetravel capabilities. That's pretty much it.
Also, Sandisk have announced a 4GB mini-SD card. That's a lot. And here's a 2GB micro-SD card. Now they're just being silly.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:56 AM | Comments (684) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 14, 2006

Life

Lights, Action, Camera!

I'm in the market for a new camera.

I have a Sony DSC-S85, which is quite a good camera, but it's rather slow (really bad for action shots), has only a modest zoom range, and only supports Memory Stick cards up to 128MB.

I'm not a professional photographer, or even close, and for the most part I'm planning on taking outdoor photos for web use. I need a camera that is fast, easy to use, not overly bulky, not overly expensive, has a good zoom lens, and can take a decent sized memory card.

I'm thinking of getting the Panasonic FZ50. It's not a pocket camera by any means (it's bigger than my S85), but 10 megapixels and a stabilised 12x Leica lens? Works for me.

Yes, a digital SLR would be better. But a digital SLR with a couple of decent lenses would run twice the price of the FZ50. And I'm not going to be producing A3 prints of my photos; I'm going to be scaling them down, if anything.

Thoughts, anyone?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:54 PM | Comments (56) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 13, 2006

Anime

Ah

This Ugly Yet Beautiful World? Where did that come from? I've never even heard of it.

Google...

Oh, KonoMini. Right. Never mind then. I couldn't even be bothered to watch the fansubs.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:56 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

Meh

One cost of living in Australia: With one fifteenth the population of America, and effectively one anime distributor, we don't get sales like this. I could order it from Robert, but by the time I take into account shipping, customs fees, and Australian sales tax, it ain't so cheap any more.

Plus, I already have the Ah! My Goddess movie, Ai Yori Aoshi, Armitage, El Hazard, Lain, all of Mahoromatic, Read or Die, Sol Bianca, Sugar, Tenchi Muyo, Trigun... And two copies of Haibane Renmei.* There's Stellvia - I have the fansub, but haven't watched it - but apart from that the most I'd be doing is replacing VHS tapes (or in some cases laserdiscs) with DVDs.

Now, if it was $5 per DVD from a store here in Sydney I'd be right there.

* I did say I'd spent a lot on anime.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:53 AM | Comments (81) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 12, 2006

Geek

Architecture Wars

Seen yesterday:

ARM 86K
Guy can't make up his mind.

And today:

AWW 88K
Hate to tell him that it was discontinued in the early 90s.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:49 PM | Comments (843) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Anime

When Maniax Attack

Pete Zaitcev doesn't like Media Factory. He's not alone there, but I have to disagree with his reasons.

Media Factory was the first, and so far the only, anime studio to take any action against the fansub community. They didn't sue anyone, but they did request that people remove any fansubs or links to fansubs of Media Factory properties. Which is certainly their legal right, but does break with the idea that fansubs are tacitly accepted - as long as the fansubs are withdrawn from distribution once a series is licensed outside Japan. (AnimeSuki in particular is very good about this.)

Now, you can understand why studios might be willing to accept this. Their major market is Japan. A show airs on TV, they get paid, and if it's a success they stand to make the big bucks on DVD sales and plushies. Getting licensed outside Japan is always a bonus, and it helps a lot if there's a fan base outside Japan. The American anime distributors keep an eye on what the fans are talking about when they decide what to license. (Usually. Sometimes they seem to be thinking of something else entirely.)

And fansubs drive that base.

So what happened to change Media Factory's mind? Well, they had something of a hit with a TV series called Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. Which I really really hate, but that's beside the point. They followed it up with a DVD release called Akane Maniax.

And it was on the fansub sites practically the day it hit the stores in Japan. Including "raws" - direct rips of the DVDs.

One might understandably get a little upset at that.

I love my fansubs, and I sometimes don't worry too much if I decide not to buy the DVDs afterwards because I've spent, um, a lot of money on anime over the past decade. (Including at least 15 Media Factory titles, just going from memory.) And I have fansubbed some episodes of the original Dirty Pair series myself*, and might even get back to completing the task one day.

But if the studio asked me not to, I would think no less of them for that.

* From someone else's script. I just edited it and fixed the timing and stuff.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:56 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Cool

Science Forges Ahead

One slime at a time:

A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot.
Cool.

What's for lunch?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:23 PM | Comments (61) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 11, 2006

World

Five Years

I remember September 12 2001. I awoke unaware of what had happened overnight, had breakfast, dressed, headed off to work.

And as I passed the newsagent, I saw the headline:

WORLD TRADE CENTER COLLAPSES
And I thought, no, that's wrong, they mean "world trade talks collapse". Something like that. How could they make such an error on the front page?

Then the pictures, and the video.

It was not only America that was attacked that day; it was all of civilisation. We must never forget that.

Oh, and if you happen to meet an editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, please punch them in the face for me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:58 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Repod

My iPod croaked again. But:

1. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
2. Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.
Worked.

I think I must have done that by accident last time. When in doubt, mash the buttons.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:53 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 07, 2006

Anime

Poit

Oops. My brain just melted.

Little kitties set to music from My Neighbour Totoro:

Really little kitties set to music from Kiki's Delivery Service:

Warning! That second one is dangerously cute.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:08 PM | Comments (383) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 06, 2006

Life

To A Tea

I was trying a new iced tea today (Tetley Peach and Orange, very nice) and noted that it contained even more sugar than the Lipton tea I normally drink. After consuming an entire 1.25 litre bottle of it, of course.*

And then I wondered just how sweet they could make it.

The answer is roughly ten times as sweet.

I don't think that even I could drink that. It would be like drinking honey, something I hardly ever do.

And you know how honey never spoils?** Plasmolysis. Makes sense; I was wondering where this magical natural antibiotic effect came from. It's nothing fancy, it just dehydrates the little buggers.

* A 1.25 litre bottle of this from the minimart downstairs from the food court I usually go to costs only slightly more than a 500ml bottle bought in the food court. The only problem is that I then tend to drink the whole thing over the course of the afternoon.

** Well, now you do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:35 PM | Comments (1159) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Geek

Meh

You may have a Core 2 Duo E6600; you may have 4GB of memory and a brand-new 320GB SATA-2 disk drive; but if you are running Windows XP you are running with memory management algorithms that don't appear to have been tuned since the release of NT 3.1.

Linux (2.6 kernel) has /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. For workstations, you really want this set to zero. Probably not for servers, but for workstations with plenty of memory, it's great.

Does anyone know if there is anything like that in XP?

Update: Jonathan Tappan says in comments:

My Computer
Advanced Tab
Performance Settings
Advanced Tab
Virtual Memory Change
Select "No Paging File"
Yep, that'll do it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:08 PM | Comments (27) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

September 04, 2006

Anime

Cute Is As Cute Does

Just unwinding with some Ichigo Mashimaro after a hard day of mmph mph mmmph mph.*

Steven wrote:

The theme song to Ichigo Mashimaro ("Strawberry Marshmallow") begins, "You mustn't call us cute!"
But the fansub I have** has the line as "something like cuteness cannot be expressed in words".

Which I find interesting, because the distinction is subtle but significant. No way is my Japanese good enough to tell which one is more accurate - after all this time I'm still at the pick-up-words-and-occasional-phrases level - so I'll throw this one to the peanut gallery... If I still have a peanut gallery after my enforced absence of late.

kawaii nante sonna koto iccha dame desu says the subtitle.

Well, I can see the "cute" part anyway. And "nante", "sonna", "dame", and of course "desu" are familiar enough. But I looked up "iccha" and it doesn't even seem to be a word.

Update: Strawberry Pocky! Yeah!

* Which is made even more enjoyable by the fact that I am not allowed to talk about it.
** I am years behind in watching my fansubs. I keep right on downloading them, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:09 PM | Comments (46) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 29, 2006

Geek

Nearly Almost

My new office PC has moved from "parts allocation" to "invoicing". They had to swap the memory as well as the motherboard to make it work, but now they've done a 72-hour burn-in with all 4GB and it's working.

So I'm sitting here trying to get it to move to "shipped" by sheer force of will.

Doesn't seem to be working.

Update: Just needed to concentrate a bit harder. Eet hes sheeped!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:13 PM | Comments (1760) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 28, 2006

Geek

Percussive Maintenance

I was fussing around with my iPod, and ended up just giving it a ding over the head and plugging it into the Firewire cable.

And the light came on, and then the Apple logo, and then the infamous DO NOT DISCONNECT message. The battery is completely flat, in spite of being plugged in for several hours the other day.

Windows can see it as a disk. iTunes doesn't seem to want to know, though. I'll see if I can sort that out.

In other news, I got a delayed write error on my external disk drive... But that's on the same Firewire card that I was plugging and unplugging the iPod on, so might just be a glitch. Yeah, I'm sure it's just a glitch.

Update: Swapped the iPod to my other Firewire card, and dinged iTunes over the head, and now that's working. And I got a whole bunch more delayed write errors on the external drive, so I swapped that to USB, and now that's working too.

Hmm.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:17 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

August 26, 2006

Blog

Coolness!

Minx just got its first Instalanche.

Hmm. Problem. If you are using Firefox, the comment editor doesn't work until Sitemeter has loaded. Sitemeter is playing up right now, so you have to wait for it to either load or time out before the comment box works.

Doesn't happen in IE7.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:31 AM | Comments (46) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Cool

With Subtitles For The Thinking Impaired

Zoe Brain explaining to a lefty that missiles do not punch neat little holes in the roofs of ambulances:

This is what a 2000lb laser guided bomb does. Hopefully you can agree that an ambulance with one of those through the roof would look distinctly second-hand.
Quote: That's a big-ass hole.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:41 AM | Comments (41) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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