And Linux has now officially taken over my new laptop :) I decided to try out installing the OpenSUSE-based KDE Four Live image (downloadable here), and it looks great so far! More importantly, I bought this laptop (HP G42 or something) well-knowing that it didn’t have Linux-friendly hardware. Well, it was relatively cheap and had great CPU and graphical specs (damn you Starcraft 2), plus the chaps manning the store were really nice.. Anyway, so I rolled my sleeves and set out to set myself up a Linux installation today expecting to spend some gruelling hours wrestling the inevitable issues – and was pleasantly surprised to have now apparently resolved everything quite cleanly and painlessly. Awesome :) And with that, I’m gonna pen me some trusty ol howto posts – the first ones in quite awhile I believe.
Page 11 of 20
In other words, “Random Post on Decidedly Unrelated Things”. Basically when I haven’t blogged in a long while I end up with a little growing pile of things-I-could-blog up somewhere in my brain, and at some point I get the lazy-man’s urge to just make a simple brain-dump post and write a summary of the entire pile and call it a day.
I have only partly succumbed to temptation here. Some stalwart part of me has successfully convinced the whole to hold back on talking about the current season’s anime offerings in inevitable haphazard fashion and instead save them for, hopefully, full posts. So let’s cross our fingers and hope for an eventual post each for OreImo, IkaMusume, and To Love Ru (yes, you can tell the state of my brain over the past semester from the anime I picked) – when I finish getting my new computer set up.
Yes. I got a new computer. Let me show you my desktop.
If you can taste this surging discovery
This moment that ends this journey
Perhaps you wouldn’t destroy, perhaps you wouldn’t
Perhaps you’d tread more gently
If you can feel this breathless touch
Tremulous, trembling, exultant
Perhaps you wouldn’t destroy, perhaps you wouldn’t
Perhaps you’d be more reverent.
If you can know the triumph of a soul
An instant in time, an age
If you can fathom magic momentary
From your disinterested vantage
If you can see how one can adore
A simple thing like never before
Perhaps you wouldn’t destroy, perhaps you wouldn’t
Perhaps you’d care a little more.
Yes, I watched it. Not quite in a cinema, but close enough – in a little theater-ish place with a pretty large screen and great sofas.
My thoughts on it? Let me refer you to this post.
I can now die happy. And I now have very little desire to watch the stuff currently airing.
Sigh. Think about the inexorable, uplifting feeling that comes from the realization that you have just seen something beautiful; now think about the clenching feeling you get when you look forward and have no idea when you’ll see something quite like it again. Now imagine me letting all that out in that last sigh.
Okay, enough ranting. When Blurays/DVD’s are out I may do a proper post on it. But for now, if you happen to be in Singapore, it’s not too late. The show still screens for the next four days in a cozy though somewhat obscure place called Sinema. See here.
Wow, you don’t come across Miku-chan singing a Chinese song all the time. Probably not at all in fact, given the drama that accompanied this one. But I really, really like this piece. It’s a beautiful song, very poetic, very melodically emotive, and very Chinese. I also really like the simple but effective video that accompanies it, but what surprised me most was how amazingly well Miku sang it. Her voice and tone quality was nearly perfect – just that right balance of detachment and engagement to bring out the song’s sighing, gently wistful quality. Damn, I think she did this song better than just about every Japanese song I’ve ever heard her do, though I admittedly haven’t heard many.
This piece does have a somewhat tragic story though. Apparently the author put it up on NicoNico and got flamed into eventually removing it by a horde of anti-Chinese NicoNico users. Seems like there are Japanese out there who hate the Chinese as much as some Chinese hate the Japanese, at least in NicoNico. If you have a NicoNico account you can drop by the now defunct video page here to have a peek at the carnage. Frankly, I think it’s plain ridiculous. As a chink myself I’m aware of the Sino-Japan history of conflict, and if people want to take that seriously, fine. But where is the rationale in getting hostile over a musical work – a good one at that – just because it is written in the Chinese language and performed by a Japan-invented Vocaloid?
Although I haven’t heard many Vocaloid songs I really like the Vocaloid idea and find the effects of its adoption into popular culture very interesting. And I’m very impressed at how surprisingly well a Vocaloid programmed to only pronounce Japanese syllables is able to perform a Chinese song. Of course, she doesn’t pronounce very well, but I won’t expect a regular Japanese singer to be able to do better. I’d really like to see more such experimentation with the Vocaloids. So Mr Author if you’re anywhere out there, I hope you don’t get too discouraged. And to the folks who flamed this video out of NicoNico, random kittens explode in violent despair whenever you do inexplicably unintelligent things like that. THINK OF THE KITTIES!!
Btw, yes, I haven’t walked off a cliff. I’m still battling my Final Year Project for my life and sanity though, but assuming I don’t get slain in the next one or two weeks, I have a couple of posts I’d like to write, so yeah, this blog isn’t quite dead yet :) For anyone non-chinese who might be interested, the name of the song translated is “Moon. Xi River“. I’ve contemplated translating the lyrics too, but decided against it. Poetic lyrics like these are nigh impossible to translate without completely mangling it in the process, not without some decidedly ingenious (and likely inaccurate) ad-libing anyway.
PS: yes, I do think she did this song better than Jay Chou did comparable songs.
Or “Looking for a Lost Child”. As promised, this is Nanami’s song at the end of Katanagatari’s episode 7. Expectedly, the seemingly idyllic melody hides sorrowful lyrics, of death-seeking and final release. Very beautiful, very lonely song by Mai Nakahara, and the only song I heard this season that had a real chance against K-ON’s “No, Thank You”.
Anyway, it seems like official lyrics for the song has not been released yet, and the transcriptions I’ve found from fishing around vary slightly. I have chosen to use the one from here, which is the one my ear seems to agree with the most.
So here we go. As usual, hit F8 to hear the song while it’s up, and hit the jump for Romaji lyrics and translations – plus the usual bonus picture of course ;)
I probably shouldn’t be, but I’m a little surprised at the direction K-ON took entering its final quarter, partly I suppose because I heard that the source manga has just ended like within the last week or so, so I didn’t anticipate the anime to simultaneously gear shift towards an actual conclusion, much less a sappy one.
I had to Google hard for this – twice, because I was too busy to blog this when I solved it the first time. Anyway, people not accustomed to sysadmin-ing on Fedora will find themselves quickly acquainted with this rather unfriendly beast called SELinux, which firmly prevents you from doing a bunch of stuff – sometimes quietly.
Anyway, it turns out that although sendmail is installed and working on Fedora by default, SELinux will by default prevent httpd (and thus your PHP scripts) from using it to send email. To fix this, simply tell SELinux to don’t do that, like so:
$ restorecon /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail
$ setsebool -P httpd_can_sendmail 1
Or, if you prefer, look for the httpd_can_sendmail boolean in the SELinux configuration GUI and tick it off. Restart httpd after that:
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
I put my Kate Session Applets at the corners of my programming-related activities, and they are usually little. So it always annoyed me that the three default items that I cared little about were at the top and had to stay at the top, forcing me to scroll to load the kate sessions I’m actually regularly interested in.
Well, I recently scratched that itch:
All items in the applet, including the default three, can now be hidden by unchecking it in the new configuration interface. And what’s more, different applet instances can hide and show different items too.
For those of you folks out there who, like me, carry around an Ubuntu-based live CD/USB as a friendly and handy system recovery companion, you might be surprised and shocked (as I was) to discover that LVM partitions that some Fedora systems are apparently installed on are unsupported by stock Ubuntu live systems. Ie – you cannot mount these partitions or do anything with them except delete/format them.
Fortunately it turns out that there is a quick remedy – install that support. Make sure that you have internet access, then simply do:
sudo apt-get install lvm2
You should now be able to mount and read the partition.
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