Between Linux and Anime

Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat

Page 10 of 20

Moving is in progress!

Guess who’s been trashed by his free hosting again and is finally coughing up?

EDIT: Somehow, I managed to lose my blog Theme, which I had spent hours customizing.

EDIT2: Oh well, let’s use this ancient theme for the time being.

Actually I kinda like this one. Maybe I’ll just pretty it up and smoothen the roughages and use it. Hmmmm

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Kara no Kyoukai, the Garden of Sinners – 01

(omg a new post!)

Alright here we go. First, a little on the series itself since it seemed to have garnered comparatively little attention – quite inexplicably. For Kara no Kyoukai is a masterpiece. It is a fantastic juxtaposition of all manner of dark subthemes trailing under an overarching grimly hopeful theme of Life. It is a 7-part animated film series that is also a 7-course audio-visual feast, with a phenomenal BGM score and stunningly detailed art that traverses the entire spectrum from the dark, twisted and bloody to the vividly, breathtakingly beautiful. It has some of the densest, richest story-weaving and character-crafting I’ve ever seen, and I’m still seeing new ideas surfacing to tantalizingly linger as I’m still rewatching. And if it doesn’t look like I’m gushing yet I am! All this to tell you first and foremost that you need to go and watch this stuff. And then you need to rewatch it. And then you can do a kind deed and come see me rant on it, if you want :)

Now on episode one…

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Hanasaku Iroha 01 ~ stylistics

Okay, so I’m just gonna pen in a quick word here on Hanasaku Iroha because, well, we all know that my inaugural Kara no Kyoukai post isn’t gonna surface in awhile >:

t3h budgetz!

I’m pretty sold on what I saw in episode one. This True-Tears-ish style I think is one that PA Works handles pretty well, so I was somewhat surprised at my namesake’s somewhat scathing review. It may have been nothing more than a brief, semi-untargetted rant of course, but having just had a swig of episode one and liked what I tasted, I feel a need to write a little in its defense.

My namesake called Hanasaku a CoA-SoL (a “coming of age, slice-of-life”) series – which isn’t quite off, with perhaps a slight stretch on the definition of slice of life. But that’s a huge category, and at least from the vibes episode one has been emitting, Hanasaku deserves the benefit of being considered part of a pretty specialized subgenre. Put simply, this is a drama – an extremely unabashed one. Really, boy confesses love then instantly leaves never to be seen again? Granny smacks the other girl for a transgression committed solely by the new girl? Realism isn’t too much of a concern here. The plot and characters are set up to create drama, and if you start getting picky on that you simply aren’t gonna enjoy this show.

How then does the show create appeal? Really, this show is so transparent it’s almost infuriating that it kind of works. It starts you on a relatively normal plane – girl with mum in high school – and then spins you into an enigmatic new environment by a series of inplausible events. And they put money into depicting that environment:

so it looks attractive and worth exploring. Then they run you smack into a large cast of unlikely and unusual people. In large part shows like these, in a style similar to visual novels, run on curiosity. On the who’s this quiet girl who’s takes her abuse quietly and always seems to lash out at me?’s and the why is my grandma like that?’s and the how did these other girls get here?’s. It may be a strategically cheap way of doing things, but with deft handling it could turn out quite beautifully. It’s not unlike a dance performance – the characters and plot events are caricaturized to accentuate the ideas the show wants to bring out and the ideas are juggled around into a flowing story. PA Works, I thought, handled itself pretty well in the opening episode. I was a little curious when Ohana first got to her grandma’s place. I was a little taken aback when quiet girl told Ohana to die and wondered why. I was a little surprised and angry when granny slapped quiet girl and then slapped Ohana twice. And I cringed a little at the brief tears at the end. Like a dance, I think you need to get into the flow of things. You need to be able to follow our protagonist around and wonder about the idea being presented and follow the way the protagonist reacts without worrying too much about the alternatives and the likelihood in an irl setting. Knowing it’s a stylized, deliberate world helps. Like a dance, you can find everything extremely contrived, or you can resonate and have a good time. For my part I didn’t feel a need to worry about where the show is going or how it might end, and am content to just flow along and see where we end up when we end up there. PA Works I think is off to a pretty good, skipping rhythm with Hanasaku Iroha. Skip along!

PS. Of course, Ito Kanae’s performance as Ohana certainly helps. And Ohana constantly reminding me of Lilo and Stitch, well, doesn’t ;)

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K4DirStat – KDirStat has a platform 4 port!

Interestingly enough, in the wake of the recent spark of talk on “missing” KDE 3 apps that never made it to platform 4, I’ve discovered that an app I had always assumed was “missing” (or at least late-to-the-party-and-we’re-still-waiting) is in fact, not. Well, not really.

KDirStat is this really great disk usage analyser that I’ve used all the way since I was on Gnome in my early Linux days. An extremely handy utility for figuring out what is using how much of your disk during hard disk spring cleaning operations, and one that is so good at its job that I haven’t been able to find a replacement. And it’s a KDE 3 app. One of those awesome KDE 3 apps (actually, by now, the only one remaining) that I use and still use even though I have never run KDE 3 (and even though KDE 3 apps look even worse than gtk apps on the Plasma Desktop these days). So imagine my surprise when I discovered that KDirStat, in spite of its “in progress” status in the KDE 3 Application Porting Status page, actually has a KDE platform 4 port called K4DirStat:

And indeed not one that is buried in the danger-fraught lands of developer previews, but one that has apparently been packaged and released by Fedora since Fedora 13, which likely means it does not in fact eat babies and is deemed suitable for general consumption.

The catch, of course, is that it is only currently packaged for Fedora, to the best of my knowledge.

A shame really! It’d be great to get this reviewed and eventually integrated into upstream KDE, since it doesn’t look like the original developers or anyone else is presently working on a port (are they?). This doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen anytime soon though, considering it hasn’t happened in the whole year since the port became available, and considering how the last post on the author’s blog is dated early August last year. I wonder how much of the KDE community is even aware that this port exists. That last at least should hopefully be fixed now :P

Well, some voices and hands will probably be needed to make things happen. Of course, those voices and hands could be mine, but I’m a little tied down at the moment. We’ll see =/

Oh, in the meantime interested users on non-Fedora platforms can just build it on your own. Quoting instructions from the author’s blog:

The source is being tracked with git. You can get an up-to-date copy with the command

git clone http://grumpypenguin.org/~josh/kdirstat.git

To install, simply run:

cd kdirstat
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
sudo make install

OpenSUSE users can also add this repo to install it via Yast.

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Ubunchu 07 ~ Installfest!

Tada! Ubunchu as it turns out is still alive and kicking! Albeit in the same somewhat constipated way my own blog ekes its existence. It looks from the mailing list like the terrible beast called real life has also been wreaking havoc and slowing things down over there, and so in the long time that I had been too busy to check back, only one new chapter has been released. And it’s chapter 7 instead of 6 too! Apparently the author wanted to put some extra touches on 6, and so released 7, which was ready, first. Grab it here if you haven’t.

Nom nom nom

Anyway in this chapter our awkward trio of Sysadmin club members decided to hold an installfest, which as the name suggests is essentially an event where people get together to help each other (in particular new adopters) with setting up their Linux boxes.

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Update on the ‘otaku’ tag, and stuff

You may (or may not) have noticed that my ‘otaku’ tag has been looking somewhat forlorn and abandoned for awhile now. And this isn’t even the first time. Unfortunately when things start getting hectic, recreational activities that require a positive input of effort and concentration, like anime blogging and KDE hacking, tend to be the first things shoved into the backseat.

I’ve recently settled into a job as a Research Assistant at my university where I’m continuing some of the work I’ve been doing during my final year project while contemplating on whether or not I’d like to do grad school. The work influx on assuming duty has been quite torrential, thus the recent general lack of blog posts. However, I think I’m starting to settle into the rhythm now, somewhat, and I’m currently in the process of working my recreational activities back into my life. I’ve rebuilt KDE from the new git repositories and have started doing some little bit of bug fixing (just pushed a patch for bug 209962 couple of days ago), and I’m now looking into once again penning posts to my lonely otaku tag.

Along those lines, I’ve decided to make some changes to my anime-blogging routine. I’ve decided that I’ll forget about making an effort to spotlight the current broadcasting season, since my attempts at this in the past has been mediocre at best and.. well really just all round abysmal. I’ve decided instead to be time-agnostic with the anime I decide to write about, so this lets me worry less about thinking up things to say about the shows that everyone else is already talking about anyways and actually select blogging material in a more meritocratic way. Hopefully then I’ll actually, finally, start to thin down the list of really-great shows on my to-blog that I’ve been perma-procrastinating on.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I’ll never say anything about the current season. But I’ll only say something if I really have something I want to say. So I’ll in short be attempting to move towards a more editorial blogging style. In all likelihood, a side-effect of this would be that I post less frequently than I used to, but with hopefully more substance in each post.

Regarding the current anime season, I’m not actually following very closely, and I’m not actually liking too much of the available repertoire. So I probably won’t be saying much about it. I plan instead to get started on blogging this 7-part animated film series that I’ve wanted to write about for some while now. It’s called “Kara no Kyoukai – the Garden of Sinners”. So there’s a heads-up for you in case you haven’t watched it. Watch it. This stuff is A+ material :)

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Dual/Multi-head Monitors on Linux – the Xorg Hurdle

Okay, I’m gonna post this in here once and for all, if for nothing more than my own recording purposes. So the somewhat sticky problem of multiple-monitor configuration is getting very nice and shiny new GUI’s in Linuxland nowadays. KDE Plasma 4.6, for example, has something like this:

Very lovely. The vexing thing however is that it doesn’t have “full control” so to speak. It’s likely a xrandr frontend, and that’s all nice and good except that if your Xorg config isn’t set up right, no configuration actually works, except for cloning, which clearly isn’t the most useful set up around. It turns out that you need to set the maximum virtual screen size to a value larger than required for your set up. For example if you’re configuring a 1280×800 desktop and a 1440×900 desktop side-by-side, you’ll need a virtual screen size of at least 2720(1280 + 1440)x900, and if they’re stacked vertically you need at least 1440×1700(900+800). How do you set the virtual screen size? Open /etc/X11/xorg.conf in your favorite editor as root:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And under the “Display” subsection of the “Screen” section, add a “Virtual” line with your desired virtual screen dimensions as arguments. Example:

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "aticonfig-Screen[0]-0"
	Device     "aticonfig-Device[0]-0"
	Monitor    "aticonfig-Monitor[0]-0"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
		Virtual		3000 3000 # <-- ADD THIS LINE!
	EndSubSection
EndSection

And you should now be able to configure your multi-head set up with xrandr or with your preferred graphical frontend (in KDE Plasma 4.6 the frontend is at System Settings > Display and Monitor > Size and Orientation).

You know what the worst thing is? Software updates sometimes rebuild your Xorg.conf, overwriting your changes, which means that you may need to repeat the above again after certain updates. That’s what just happened to me, so I’d keep this page (or whatever other page on this problem you find) bookmarked.

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Connecting to Hidden Wireless Networks using KDE’s Networkmanager

It is not without some surprise and.. disappointment.. that I discovered that KDE’s networkmanager frontend appears to be still having trouble with hidden wireless networks. It used to be so when we used KNetworkManager, and now that we’ve moved on to the shiny new plasmoid, the problem… stayed. Oh well, the common advice that hidden SSID’s are not useful and that one should be setting up WPA encryption for true security is likely sound, but for folks like me who happen live under already-configured hidden networks, we’ll need to use a workaround for now.

To allow the networkmanagement plasmoid to detect and connect to a hidden wireless network called, say, “hiddennetwork”, open a terminal and type the following command:

sudo iwlist wlan0 scanning essid hiddennetwork

Note that you need to replace wlan0 with your wireless interface. This is usually either wlan0 or eth1. You can use the iwconfig command to find out what your wireless interface is called. Of course, also replace “hiddennetwork” with your desired hidden network.

If all goes well, your hidden network should now appear in the networkmanagement plasmoid, and you should now be able to connect to it like any other network.

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The Rise of Plasma Activities and What it can do for You

So having been kept away from KDE-land for some while, I innocently but excitedly pushed the upgrade button when I saw that 4.6 was out, and ran immediately smack into the huge forward leap that plasma activities has made this release. I have always been a big fan of activities and this is really exciting stuff for me, so I made a quick visit down to Chani’s blog for a quick-tour of what’s new and what’s good, but while I personally found her screencasts illuminating, a quick skim through the blog comments quickly revealed that many people remain more perplexed about activities than ever.

I’m gonna spend some hours on the keyboard here and see if I can fix some of that :)

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Fixing Funny Image Colors in Firefox on OpenSUSE 11.3

Actually I don’t know if this affects other Linux systems or even other operating systems, apparently it has something to do with the way newer Firefoxes handle colors. Anyway, what happens is that Firefox renders some images properly, but renders some others with incorrect colors. This behaviour can be fixed by changing some of Firefox’s config values. Instructions as follows:

  1. Get into the config interface by opening a tab in Firefox and keying in “about:config” into the address bar. Read the warning and continue.
  2. Look for gfx.color_management.mode and set its value to 0, and then look for gfx.color_management.rendering_intent and set its value to -1.
  3. Restart Firefox

Source.

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