Still alive, seasonal commentary

Do you know the #1 sign of a dying blog? Yes, posting post like this. Hahahah.

Er, in meantime, Nanoha Movie 1st has been released. Go watch it if you haven’t yet. I haven’t myself(!) but it is awesome.

I’ve been catching up with my shitload of unread manga today so I didn’t watch enough today. Add the fact that my connection is kind of broken or whatever to the point I had to work around it (which turned out well but late).

On other news, this season will be ended in 4 weeks or so. It’s, IMO, one of the best season, especially for moefags. It’s killing me though, with lots of series broadcasted (or available) at Friday-Sunday – which means I have to download many things using this crappy internet.

Skimming on next season’s titles, looks like I’ll be following at least Madoka Magica, Gosick and another (or all) moeblob series as usual and whatever I find amusing.

…owait, it’s easier to list series I probably not going to follow:

  • Kimi ni Todoke 2nd: haven’t watched 1st season
  • Wolverine: no, thanks. Maybe if I’ve completed all other series or if someone recommends(!) it
  • Precure nth season: haven’t watched all other seasons

(and look! Mirai Nikki OVA/OAD at December 9! Hahahahah)

Chart here.

MM! – HAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Based on the first 5 episodes, I thereby from now on call this series as “just about right fanservice anime”.

[Ryuumaru] MM! - 05 [D8CD4B38].mkv_snapshot_12.03_[2010.11.01_22.00.16]

Owait, it’s more like “MOE OVERLOAD ANIME -HNNNNNNNGH

*dies*

Squid Girl – lol de geso

[FFFpeeps] Squid Girl - 02 [720p].mkv_snapshot_24.14_[2010.10.13_20.22.37]

This one is quite good. I heard it’s like Keroro Gunsou but since I don’t watch/read that, I couldn’t :care: less. And then again, I’m relatively easy to amuse so YMMV.

The cosplay-loving, Squid-chan stalker introduced in episode 2 is quite lulz win,  btw.

The best thing about Sparky drama

Is the fact that there is no such line in episode 1. Additionally, according to someone, Touma never actually used that nickname anymore after his memory loss.

That says a lot about your typical anime watchers.

Oh and the second best thing is the fact that there are people who actually raged because of /a/.

Well, this whole drama is just plain stupid. It is barely funny anymore. I myself consider anime (or any video) as the easiest form of media to translate (I mean, edit). The translator can basically put anything (as long it’s accurate) and people who can understand/appreciate the nuances (dialects, nicknames, quirks, etc) will still be able to get it because there’s no loss of original form (voice). Compare that to translating manga, (visual) novel and such where the original texts are lost which means any competent translator and editor will have to think harder to be able to keep them in the translation.

Sora no Woto episode 13 – O yay

[pwq]_Sora_no_Woto_-_13_[BD]_[AB1000E2].mkv_snapshot_23.09_[2010.10.02_08.32.32]

Apparently I captured the images at different resolutions. Bare with it.

Started three seasons ago, finally ended. The first anime series from Anime no Chikara (lolspeak: Animu Powa), a joint project between Aniplex and TV Tokyo. Dubbed by many as K-ON! ripoff when first started. Of course, instead of drunken-Yui songs, we get Kalafina instead for opening. Surely still one of my favorite (the songs and the series) even now.

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Nyotai-ka – what is this I don’t even

<No pics since everything I find rather amusing were kinda NSFW>

So, um, I don’t really know what to say. This manga is basically a more mature version of Kampfer with much less control over when to switch gender and the “hero” actually defaulted as a “her”.

I don’t remember why I actually downloaded this series in the first place. Probably when I saw the cover picture and the description when getting my weekly fix of Sanzenin Nagi. Apparently the word gender bender and some other words sparked my interest or whatever. In the end, I ended up downloading all the releases from Manga Traders (before some of its servers went down around 1900), read them and quite amused by overall story.

The series is still ongoing but apparently there are at least three higher-level relationship and at least one of them is “fixed”.

It contains various things like, pseudo-yuri, pseudo-yaoi, pseudo-normal, and heck, futanari. Overall art is quite nice and relatively consistent. The wtf hero(ine) may make you scratch your head or just go rage etc. Extra story about the one behind it all is quite amusing though.

…whatever, go read it now. @_@/

Kaichu! – brain automated denial activated

[DATS] Kaichu! - 01 [0C7CD2E1].mkv_snapshot_01.10_[2010.08.29_01.15.51]

"Hi guys, thanks for calling me cute. And I hope you're surefine with me being a guy."

Kaichu! – a manga adaptation ONA, which was broadcasted few days/weeks ago. I always has something with archery-themed stories. This one is quite lulz though…

…it’s got a trap.

[DATS] Kaichu! - 01 [0C7CD2E1].mkv_snapshot_03.09_[2010.08.29_01.16.10]

Thank god I've got enough immunities for things like this.

Apparently the ONA has a quite different story compared to its manga (at least the description on mangaupdates doesn’t match how the anime went at all).

[DATS] Kaichu! - 02 [D04FA15B].mkv_snapshot_02.43_[2010.08.29_01.11.26]

Whee, moment of awesomeness.

Too bad the anime is only two episodes. It’d be even more lulz if it’s got tv series… XD

[DATS] Kaichu! - 02 [D04FA15B].mkv_snapshot_04.32_[2010.08.29_01.16.36]

(protip: pictured above is a guy)

With regard to picture above, would you:

  1. HELL YEA
  2. NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOO

? 😀

Look, it’s August already

…and I still haven’t done anything apart of this.

It turned out I actually did not do anything for this (something resembling) blog. Well, I was lazy. I’m not saying I’m not lazy anymore though – it’s just I’ve become less lazy than last month since I have passed my own deadline and haven’t done anything – something must be done to fix this.

And here it is. Freshly installed WordPress. Cleanly re-imported from old one. I actually have to replicate my entire setup on my local system since importing 3 MB data over PHP exceeded this host’s limit and caused massive failure. Etc.

Now the end result:

  • myconan.net now actually hosts something – the main site for this entire *.myconan.net blogs (other blogs TBA).
  • blog.myconan.net is now renamed to Blog.myconan to simplify things,
  • and Blog.myconan is specifically an modern visual culture (mvc) blog from now on – no more computer- and life-related posts here. Purity ftw.
  • Other blogs are TBA sometime later this month. Or next month – depends on how fast I can write things.

I’ll still be fixing things and hopefully this will be the last non-mvc post in this blog.

B Gata H Kei – Final Impression

Finally! Never I had this much difficulty watching an anime. It’s almost a torture o_o Even though I’ve seen many other even more mediocre than this series, I’ve never paused this much.

For starter, it’s doomed as a cockblocker anime. It can’t get more obvious even just from reading the summary. Thinking otherwise is an attempt in futility. Yukarin fans are going to be delightfully excited and anyone else will probably went “meh.” Too bad I’m in the latter category. I’ve never a big fan of Yukarin (even though she’s the one voiced Nanoha, I I’ve always preferred Fate from the beginning).

[CoalGuys] B Gata H Kei - 10 [A3ACCDA3].mkv_snapshot_18.47_[2010.06.10_21.46.13]

Thanks to CoalGuys, this title is more bearable than it would be. Seriously, even though the meaning is more or less the same, the edit is overly liberal at some places. I wish I could do the same :/

Last episode is much better though, if only for this:

[CoalGuys] B Gata H Kei - 12 [0017B6C5].mkv_snapshot_01.22_[2010.06.20_14.40.24]

Noto-sama o/

Just as Yukarin fans which delighted by Yukarin’s indecent dialogues, Noto-sama fans are also going to be delighted by lines by Noto-sama this episode XD (and right, I’m one of them :p )

[CoalGuys] B Gata H Kei - 12 [0017B6C5].mkv_snapshot_07.28_[2010.06.20_14.40.46]

Ahaha~

I would probably raged at this series if not for this particular scene.

Lesson of the story: Mamiko Noto >>> Tamura Yukari.

Tech news moved

In attempt to re-focus my blog (err, actually in attempt to focus as it’s never focused to begin with), I’ve created a sub-blog using WordPress’ newest, greatest version’s new feature: Multisite. Basically it merged functionality of WPMU into WordPress. The url will be posted later after I finished cleaning up whatever I need to clean up. Mainly how the url should be.

In other note, .htaccess sucks.

Source repository mirroring primer

Lately I’ve been mirroring some repositories for no reason. Or at least I haven’t used most of them for now. The repositories I mean here are the ones using one of open source VCS: CVS, Subversion, Git or Mercurial. I haven’t tried for other open source VCS (svk, darcs, bazaar, fossil, etc) since I haven’t encountered any repositories I’m mirroring using them.

Without further ado, here be the guides.

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Hidamari Sketch (1/n)




New character

Originally uploaded by edogawaconan

Few weeks ago I finished all Hidamari Sketch series in… few weeks. Totally late, yes. For some reason, when I initially watched this series few years ago, I didn’t quite ‘get’ it. Probably because I still unaware of this studio called ‘Shaft’. Hahahah. Sure I’ve ‘improved’ :/

Well, my general comment on this series is: perfect match for Shaft. Art students story with artsy (what) type Shaft animation feel just ‘right’ (?). Or should I say the weirdness doubled thanks to it? Whatever, lol. Overall, if you like watching slice-of-life type anime, you have to ensure that this series is (already) in your list.

Anyways, she’s my favorite character in the third series. Stolen first position from Sae in my personal ranking.

On another note, I’ve been meaning to post this few weeks ago, right after finishing this series but WordPress was feeling like crap by failing to resize the uploaded images. That’s also the reason I started using flickr for uploading images.

CVSweb with nginx

Whoever using FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD must’ve at least once opened their respective online source repository browser – CVSweb. CVSweb is basically CVS version of hgwebdir and co – a web application to give CVS repository(ies) a web interface where one can browse the content of a CVS repository remotely without using command line. You can see CVSweb in action here (OpenBSD), here (NetBSD), and here (FreeBSD).

One day, I wanted to install CVSweb on one of my virtual machine. Instead of using Apache, I decided to try installing it using nginx. The obvious problem on installing CVSweb over nginx is nginx’s non-existent support for cgi. Well, for starter, cgi is considered slow, etc but it doesn’t help in this case.

Then we have fcgiwrap. Simply put, it’s a program which can be run to provide cgi support under fastcgi which nginx supports. Installing it is relatively easy and to run it you’ll need either the sample launcher provided in its website, spawn-fcgi, or supervisord. Note that under FreeBSD (and most likely anything other than Linux) you have to be, um, kind of creative – it uses autoconf and the configure will fail when searching for fastcgi library. There is a way to skip autoconf usage at all though. Simply fetch the fcgiwrap.c and compile it using this command:

cc -Wall -Werror -O2 fcgiwrap.c -o fcgiwrap -lfcgi -L/my/fcgi/lib -I/my/fcgi/include -static

The static option will allow you to remove fastcgi library from the system and still able to run fcgiwrap. Copy the compiled fcgiwrap somewhere you like and configure your fastcgi launcher. It looks like this under supervisord:

[fcgi-program:fcgiwrap]
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
command=/Applications/fcgiwrap/bin/fcgiwrap
socket=unix:///tmp/%(program_name)s.sock
socket_mode=0777
numprocs=3
autorestart=true
user=fcgiwrap

Adjust the paths, etc. Make sure not to run it under user root – you don’t want to take any risk.

Once the fcgiwrap set up correctly, you then need to install CVSweb. I’m not going to pretend anything here: I only know how to install it using (FreeBSD’s) ports. Manual install involves fulfilling dependencies which is not quite easy to do. It is available on Ubuntu and probably some other distros. After installation, locate and copy the cvsweb.cgi and the static data somewhere you like (I usually use /srv/http/cgi/cvsweb, btw). It goes something like this:

  • cvsweb.cgi (and its config – cvsweb.conf): /srv/http/cgi/cvsweb/root
  • css, icons: /srv/http/cgi/cvsweb/public

Before continuing to nginx config, please rename and move cvsweb.cgi to wherever and whatever name you want relative to the CVSweb path you want for the address. Examples:

  • https://myconan.net/cvsweb: rename to cvsweb
  • https://myconan.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi: put cvsweb.cgi in /srv/http/cgi/cvsweb/root/cgi-bin/
  • https://myconan.net/some/where: rename cvsweb.cgi to where and put in /srv/http/cgi/cvsweb/root/some/

You get the idea.

After that, it’s relatively simple in nginx:

  location = /cvsweb {
    rewrite ^ /cvsweb/ permanent;
  }
  location /cvsweb/ {
    alias /srv/http/cgi/cvsweb/public/;
    try_files $uri @cvsweb;
  }
  location @cvsweb {
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/fcgiwrap.sock;
    root /srv/http/cgi/cvsweb/root;
  }

And done.

Or better, use ViewVC instead of CVSweb and proxy nginx to its standalone server.

Windows 7 Timeline

I think it went like this:

  • Windows 98 released: 95 successor, isn’t really useful until Second Edition. Relatively unstable.
  • Windows 2000 released: NT4 successor, targeted for workstation use (not general use). Some hardware support from NT4 (not quite smooth). Driver (and application) problem solved as time goes on.
  • Windows ME released: adds some features, too bad still based on 98. Even more unstable than 98.
  • Windows XP released: can use most drivers from 2000 (guess why it’s easier to be accepted), and actually targeted for general use. Highly preferred since ME was crashier than ever and 98 is getting old – and XP is much stabler as it’s from NT line. And repeating, it enjoys drivers availability from 2000.
  • …few years went on without any new Windows version release:
    • Most programs available assumed everyone is administrator
  • Windows Vista released: architectural change. Most drivers broken, most applications assuming “user is administrator” broken in unfunny way (including WinRAR, Foxit Reader, etc).
  • Most people stayed on Windows XP but most new applications are actually fixed to stop assuming “user is administrator”. Drivers for Vista kept coming up.
  • Windows 7 released: most applications are fixed, drivers from Vista are usable. “It’s much better than Vista”. Everyone is happy.

In summary: without Windows 2000, Windows XP probably won’t succeed. In same spirit, without Windows Vista, Windows 7 probably won’t succeed. The latter would be much worse if it actually happens, though. And if you look closely, 2000 -> XP is 5.0 -> 5.1 and Vista -> 7 is 6.0 -> 6.1. See a pattern there?

In other news, Compiz’ alt-tab (and the switcher, etc) is still crappy as ever. Who cares about fancy animation. Give me non-crappy alt-tab please!

Hayate no Gotoku ch. 272

Fanservice chapter.

The following page: “Just take the entire dresser!!” LOL

And there’s this one gem “But, whatever it’s like, I’ll be fine with it as long as it has an internet connection.”

I noticed though that Maria is using something resembling Xperia X10. Technology sure advances much faster in HnG world.

On Seagate’s 3 TB

So, Seagate confirmed a 3 TB disk. It would be able to store a lot of stuff.

Or few video.

Well, IMO, the only benefit of this is that the price of lower capacity disks would go downfall. I probably won’t get any of it anytime soon. No. None.

Why? It’s really simple: dangerous thing to do. You see, having 3 TB of data in one freaking disk, without backup, is not good for one’s health. Yes really, you don’t want to do that. Just imagine when it becomes inaccessible because of reaching MTBF or bad luck (it will). If you store all of your data in there, I can see you crying.

Now if you put it in a RAID 1 (mirror), it’d take as soon as 9 hours to complete resilvering on restore. Assuming no disk access and full 80 MiB/s, that is. Good thing USB 3 is getting common (no, it isn’t yet here – in fact I’ve never seen one).

Got them covered? Now imagine the one time one of your file silently corrupted. Especially on case accidental power down. Or just bad sector. How would you find the bad file? Scan each one of them? All 3 TB? Ha.

The only possible case can think of is for personal NAS. The one with (Open)Solaris, Nexenta, or FreeBSD (or NetBSD once it’s ready). Oh and probably Linux with its Btrfs which probably going to be ready just before Hurd becomes usable. Even then I wouldn’t use it unless it’s got RAID-6 like mode. Nevermind, I probably wouldn’t trust anything other than ZFS anytime soon. Which filesystem are you going to use for it on Windows? NTFS? Lol.

In fact, I hoped resources used for either:

  • improvement on disk access time, especially on random and parallel read/write operation,
  • smaller physical disk size, or
  • Cheaper and bigger SSD,

not on some “hey look we’ve created the biggest disk ever!”

At the bright side, though – lower capacity disks will be cheaper thanks to the new higher capacity disk.

</random whatever>

On waix.dl.sourceforge.net

I’m placing permanent ban on waix.dl.sourceforge.net – from now on, on EVERY SINGLE SYSTEMS I’m managing I’ll put this one magic line to hosts (/etc/hosts on *nix, %WINDIR%System32driversetchosts on Windows):

127.0.0.1 waix.dl.sourceforge.net

That one mirror has been giving me headaches – it’s a completely irrelevant mirror for anyone not using waix’s connection which is ONLY AVAILABLE IN AUSTRALIA. Everyone else will get crappy speed – even on my crappy connection (something like 4 KB/s). Why sourceforge still gives it to everyone else is a mystery for me. Their solution is not feasible for me. Seriously, changing mirror to other server by visiting their site for every single machines? Why the heck can’t they just disable that fail mirror for everyone outside Australia? Or better, why don’t they just remove waix from list of mirrors – public mirrors are supposed to have good connection to everyone – not just some small area in a corner of the world.

Oh, in case I’m not being clear enough, in summary, I’m saying:

FUCK YOU WAIX

Epic Bad Luck

Not the quality, but the quantity – the amount of fails happened today and yesterday.

  • The FreeBSD and ZFS on external hard disk is a disaster combination: it likes to break itself. Crashed/kernel panic twice in 18 hours.
  • I got “caught” when infiltrating certain place. Worse, I have to report to certain person about the “incident”.
  • My attempt to renew my driving license turned to be a failure due to my lateness – note that the place I tried is supposed to still open for 6 hours but the form is not available anymore.
  • I forgot to order certain device to enable me doing online banking. The pickup place on the area where I’m currently working is a little bit out of my reach.
  • It turns out my academic transcript in English which I ordered 6 months ago is still not available due to incomplete data I provided. And there I assumed it’s been done months ago.
  • My professor forgot to give certain document I needed (ASAP) to administration dept.
  • And the last one, my printer’s ink ran out and I can’t print document I must print.

Great.