Between being swamped with work under very, very hot weather conditions and struggling with steadily worsening laptop screen problems (which, significantly, has the terrifying effect of depriving me of life-giving anime), my weakened will and battered spirit has succumbed to the demands of my greedier self.
I bought an LCD monitor today.
(doesn’t Plasma look gorgeous on it though?)
Yare yare… so my site went under for a day plus, and then resurfaced with some new PHP settings that were unfriendly to WordPress. I got sick of waiting for my host to fix the problem (yes I bugged them) so I rolled up my sleeves today and did some hacking, making minor modifications to the WordPress code and whacking my .htaccess with some workarounds. And we seem to be more or less back online!
Seem to be. I have no way of knowing for sure. If anything acts in a distastefully screwy way, please do let me know.
Back to my rant, I then discovered to my horror that Akismet has ceased to work (chi.. they must have cut off outgoing connections). Knowing full well that I’d be nose-deep in spam before I could say “God Dammit”, I irritably went to quick-shop for a stand-in spam filter. NoSpamNX is now in the house and working its craft, and has apparently already stopped “7 birdbrained Spambots” so far. Hopefully none of you are among the seven – if you are, email me rite nao so that I may unleash wrath and hell! (see comment form below for my email add)
Anyway, if I were a little less pissed I might have been somewhat pleased with this exercise – some of the counter-spam solutions I saw employ techniques which I found very clever and intriguing.
But since I have just spent the last 2 hours on this while procrastinating on that mountain of work I must now return to, I’m in no mood to be indulgent.
Come to think of it, if Akismet doesn’t work, pingbacks probably won’t either. And I’m a big fan of pingbacks -.- Ugh.
The recent disturbances had better be caused by some massive doomsday DDoS attack and not just some badly planned server upgrade. Think I’ll give this host one more week (oh magnanimous I~!) to get their act back together, failing which I’m gonna hostswap. AGAIN!
Whew! Been bogged down with work thanks to my making the age-old mistake of overpopulating my todo list just because it’s holidays. I gotta remember that my work efficiency actually decreases during Chinese New Year due to all the customary hometown visiting and what not. And then there’s that insane, unspeakably hot weather.
So anyway, while I sort through my own stuff and strive to deal with the remaining work (as well as squish the backlogs that have taken the opportunity to pull a full-fledged resurrection), here is an anisong for you in the meantime!
Kannagi’s Musuhi no Toki had been somewhat overshadowed during the show’s broadcast by the really catchy OP as well as the general hilarity and win-barrage that defined the series, but I think it is really quite the lovely, soothing song. It can be nice to listen to songs like these every now and then, to sort of slow us down a little, and perhaps increase our relish for life :)
So! Without further ado, here is Musuhi no Toki, ED to Kannagi, and, as I just found out, performed by Haruka Tomatsu herself! As always, hit F8 to play the song while it’s up, and hit the jump for a pic, lyrics, and translations. Enjoy!
Today being the day it is I should start with wishing all my fellow chinks out there a very happy and prosperous Chinese New Year. And then to the rest of the world, Happy Valentines Day! While I’m at it let me also congratulate KDE on a stellar 4.4 software compilation release, thank the openSUSE folks for a pretty darn good upgrade-experience, and of course, last but certainly not least, congratulate Plasmate, the lovable Plasma add-on creation tool, on our recent first ever alpha release!
You cannot imagine how excited I am about this :)
Unfortunately I don’t have much to add to the other posts who have already previously announced the news, so I decided to do a brief showcase screencast instead. It’s a simple one where I demonstrate creating a simple Python plasmoid from scratch in Plasmate, which would hopefully hint at the workflow we are aiming to create as well as demonstrate the salient features that made it into the alpha1 release. Here it is:
I had to make do with slow-internet while doing this one so kindly excuse the slow loading on the documentation widget :) There is also unfortunately no sound.
As noted in the other posts, brave souls wishing to give this alpha release a spin could acquire the source tarball here, or check it out of svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/tags/plasmate/0.1-alpha1. As with all alpha software this release is incomplete and may contain bugs so be warned. We’ll of course appreciate bug reports, which should be submitted under plasmate to b.k.o.
Have a lot of fun!
Damn, I’ve got so many things I should have written and posted but Chinese New Year stuff keeps getting in the way and unexpected problems keep cropping up. I just solved the latest one (unexpected problem), and I think this solution needs to be posted, so bear with me :)
If recordmydesktop gives you ridiculously slow frame-rate in it’s output video, you may be a victim of the “libtheora above v1.1.0” problem. Try the following for a quick-fix:
Add --v_bitrate 2000000 to the options you pass to recordmydesktop. If you use a frontend (like gtk-recordmydesktop or qt-recordmydesktop), look in your configuration for an “Extra Options” section and paste --v_bitrate 2000000 into it.
Worked like a charm for me. Source.
Especially the ‘slide’ desktop switching effect? It may be because of oxygen’s new animations. These animations (like active-window glows that fade smoothly in and out of existence and window buttons that push in and out smoothly) are really awesome, but can be rather costly in terms of performance. So if you are feeling lag in kwin’s effects, try disabling them:
The problem solution would be to go to systemsettings, go to appearance and click configure on oxygen style, then uncheck “enable animations”, click ok, and then apply. The second thing which would give even better performance boost is to disable animated windec active/inactive transistions. Just unhide folders in dolphin ( alt+. ), go to .kde4 > share > config and open oxygenrc file. Find the “[Windeco]” line, and below it type: UseAnimations=false . Save file and then restart kwin by opening krunner (alt+f2) and typing “kwin -replace”. After that your effects will be smoother
Since the animations are really subtle, you don’t lose much in terms of user experience/aesthetic if you lose them. They are really quite pretty though (Nuno and co spent a lot of effort on them :) ) so keep and enjoy them if you can!
What does bug me is the fact that you can’t disable the window decoration animations via the configuration gui. I’ve filed a bug on it here.
(EDIT: For the uninitiated, Ubunchu is a free-licensed manga series thematically centered around Ubuntu Linux, and this is a review of the fourth chapter of said series cum my musings on the viability of free licenses when applied to artwork. I apologize if I have previously confused anyone by leaving out this introduction :( )
(EDIT: I can’t believe I forgot the link to the manga again!! You can find every translated chapter of the free-licensed Ubuntu-oriented manga here)
With every chapter so far thematically alluding to one Ubuntu / free software related idea or another, Ubunchu is starting to feel somewhat like a documentary. Reminds me of one of those “Manga guide to Databases” things. And that’s not a bad thing by the way :P
So this is actually a (late) response to Dustin’s post “The Treacherous Sunset (Durarara!! 4)“, born after I decided that a monster comment I had be writing to it would be better off made into a post in itself. I’ll try to make this post readable on it’s own, but I recommend that you check out Dustin’s post and what his commenters had to say before proceeding.
For most people this song probably needs no introduction :) This is a piece I have fond memories of. I watched the entirety of the first Darker than Black late at night, and the silky, swaying tune of Tsukiakari, accompanied by the soothing image of a quiet, star-gazing Yin amongst the white flowers, invariably proved to be an apt and comfortable curtain-fall.
I don’t know if it’s the lyrics, the tune, the accompanying visuals, or the fact that it is always late at night when the song played, but I’ve come to really associate this song with moonlight. Every now and then in the apartment room I currently sleep in, a bright moon would cast it’s rays straight through the window onto my bed, and invariably as I sink into the covers bathed in that glow this song would start playing in the back of my head.
Moonlight is a strange thing. Even knowing full well that it is nothing but unremarkable sunlight reflected back at us by an inanimate celestial body, I can’t help feeling it draw a shower of mysticism over me. Of course, being highly sleepy at the time helps :)
Anyway, enough random banter! Without further ado, I give you Tsukiakari (that’s “Moonlight” by the way), the ending theme to the first season of Darker than Black. As usual, hit f8 to play the song, and hit the jump for a pic, romaji lyrics, and translations. Enjoy :)
Katanagatari 01 isn’t completely brilliant, but it definitely has me intrigued. In fact I was already half convinced that I want to watch this 5 minutes into the first episode. The obvious thematic elements – swords, martial arts, romance in the medieval orient – already evoked thrilling recollections of the Kenshin OVA I watched so long ago (which definitely deserves a good post one fine day). And while the episode itself didn’t really go anywhere (yet), it already has a good number of colourful, potentially promising groundwork laid out. This could be quite a fun ride!
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