Haibane.info

Month: April 2008

  • Thinkpad X300: insanely great

    That new X300 is the sexiest laptop on the planet. And you can actually use it to get work done. Sorry, Apple. You’re outclassed on this one.

  • The Cat Returns (Neko no Ongaeshi)

    I snagged this title off of Netflix for Daughter Otaku, though Baby Otaku has been rather entranced by it as well. In a nutshell, this is your standard Studio Ghibli – girl protagonist, who must learn to belkieve in herself, as she faces supernatural threats with the help of a heroic mentor. Directed by Hiroyuki Morita rather than Miyazaki himself, it’s not on the level of Totoro, but it’s close, in that it makes you smile while you watch it, and leaves you feeling unreasonably happy after it’s over. In fact the spirit of this film is probably epitomized by the catchy ending theme, which some enterprising otaku has put to video with scenes from the movie on YouTube:

    My daughter is rewinding the ending theme as we speak, repeatedly, trying to memorize the lyrics. In Japanese. (This is the same child who, as a toddler, overdosed on Totoro. Let it not be said that Studio Ghibli are not masters of their craft).

    Highly recommended. If you like Totoro, you will appreciate this. It’s not an equal, but it is a peer.

  • the future is now

    Well, better late than never – Blogger finally supports scheduled posts:

    We’ve often heard that sometimes you’d like to write a post now and have it automatically published at some time in the future. We listened, and are pleased to say that this feature is ready for you to try out on Blogger in draft.

    Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.

    Only works if you use the beta version of blogger, though, by logging into your blog via draft.blogger.com. Like Gmail, I wonder if Blogger will ever escape Beta status.

    I am still running my blogspot blogs with the old template system because I found that the new sidebar functionality was too complicated to hack. I really like the ItemPage / MainorArchivePage conditionals and am loath to give them up. Still, blogger just can’t compare to WordPress or other systems anymore for general use. I only stick with it for the pagerank that my blogs there have by virtue of their longevity.

  • Ranma season 3, 4

    I am halfway thru season 4. It got a LOT better. In retrospect season 3, while often repetitious and tiresome, was critical backstory for a lot of the secondary characters who really are all given their own chance to shine and even mature – even Kuno, and Happosai. There has only been one worthless episode thus far in season 4, and it’s no coincidence that a certain psychotic kawaii-obsessed figure skater made a return appearance therein.

    Unfortunately the discs I was watching, which were lent to me, only go 1/2way thru season 4. I also have the discs for the OAV and its pretty good (though i do like season 4 better). There *is* a discontinuity in Akane/Ranmas relationship between season 4 and the OAV, in that its clear that they are closer – for one thing, Akane gets hurt by Ranma’s insensitivity a lot more deeply than before. So clearly there was a lot of growth in between (season 5 – 7) that I have missed out on. I am going to have to download fansubs to continue.

    And Ryoga. Ranma is cool, but Ryoga at his best is who I want to be. Minus the pig part, that could be a bit problematic for me in particular. Unfortunately watching the OAV has dashed my hopes of an Ukyo-Ryoga matchup.

  • askTWIT

    I am running a little experiment on Twitter. I have created a new account called askTWIT. The purpose is to facilitate getting answers to questions by tapping into the Twitter hive-mind, by acting as a central point of reference where questioners and answerers can find each other. It works like this:

    If you have a question:

    1. Follow askTWIT.
    2. tweet your question in reply to @askTWIT (eg. “@askTWIT Is Twitter useful or a waste of time?”)
    3. watch for replies.

    To answer a question:

    1. Follow askTWIT.
    2. Look for questions you might be able to answer.
    3. Reply to the tweet with the answer (eg. “@azizhp yes it haz @Scobleizer duh iz useful”)
    4. bask in the warm glow of Karma, Zen, etc.

    If someone asks a good question it might develop a whole tree of responses which can be tracked on Quotably.

    The idea somewhat borrows from Scoble’s idea of autofollowing everyone who followed him – his follow list is probably the closest to a hive mind as you will see on Twitter, but anyone with a few thousand followers will see a similar depth of knowledge in their crowd (problogger uses this to extreme advantage for all sorts of cool projects). Let’s see if this model for tapping the TwitterMind can scale.

  • a tale of ef

    I gave it a try, trying the recommended fansubs and the latest VLC and everything, but just couldn’t get ef: a tale of memories to work past three or four episodes. So, my thoughts are incomplete, admittedly, and surely unfair, because in the episode just after the one I gave up on for technical difficulties, the story probably soared, all became clear, and hearts were duly wrenched. That said, my impressions of the part I did see were not, on the whole, good. And here is why, below the spoiler fold.

    (UPDATE: I also reply below to some points in Pete’s post)

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  • Planet Twitter: twittearth is our metaverse

    In Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash, the Metaverse appeared to its users as a single city strung along a road a hundred meters wide, spanning 200 km around the equator of an otherwise utterly featureless, black, spherical planet floating in electronic void.

    TwitterEarth is cooler:

    Plenty of others have reviewed Twittearth already (and plenty more have twitterred about it). But what strikes me about it the most, apart from the sheer novelty, is how in a way it really underscores the way that Twitter functions as a universe unto itself. This is Planet Twitter. It’s self-referential, a global conversation focused as often as not upon its own navel.

    We aren’t used to thinking about the internet communities we inhabit in a geographical sense. Usually our friends and networks exist as linear scrolling boxes of text. Twittearth takes that line and turns it into a sphere, one we can relate to strongly and intuitively. There’s something utterly captivating about watching that globe spin and tiny avatars spout their profundities in 140 characters or less – it’s real, more tangible, in a way that can’t be felt through the browser window or client app.

    There’s a lesson here that the internet tools we use and social networks we inhabit are very much artificial in their presentation. If someone figured out a way to represent, for example, Facebook as a virtual planet, with friends, photos, video, etc all rooted solidly in a where rather than a when. Imagine all social networks, Facebook and mySpace and Google’s Open Social alike, existing on the same world. I think we are further along the path to the metaverse than we realize.

    And I have to admit I am very pleased that my avatar turned out to be Domo-kun.

  • “Do you smell something burning?”

    well done

    The search started with the strange smell of burning plastic as we sat on the sofa. It took a few minutes to pinpoint the source as not being in the current room and not from the cellar, which only left upstairs. I ran my hand to the back of the tower case and felt the fan of the power supply still going strong, but when I opened up the side of the case it was obvious where the problem was.

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  • Ranmathon

    Starting season 4. Season 3 was a lot of one-off episodes, but season 4 is beginning an arc again and it’s really much improved. The Akane-Ranma relationship still doesn’t seem stuck in neutral, it’s clear that it is proceeding, but even more interesting is the evolution of almost everyone else. Ryoga and Ukyo still are my favorites, though.

    And this arc in season 4, with the Blast of the Heavenly Dragon, is truly suspenseful. I wish the art would catch up to the writers, but I’ve seen some clips from seasons ahead so I know it gets better. Patience, grasshopper!

    obligatory Youtube remix of Kung Fu Fighting:

    and this one seems drawn from the OVA, set to the tune of Mortal Kombat. It has me quite eager to get through the slog of these intermediate seasons because it is clear that Shampoo, Mousse, even Kuno have a lot more evolution ahead.

  • BlogIt doesn’t cut it

    BlogIt is a new application by SixApart for Facebook – the idea is to let you post to your blogs hosted at various services (WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad, Twitter, etc) from within a single interface integrated into your FB account. The idea is a good one but there are serious flaws in the implementation.

    For one thing, the tool does not support tags or categories. This means that you will have to log into your blog via the usual Dashboard/admin panel to add these anyway. The omission of tags and cats is practically a deal-breaker all by itself, though the lack of categories is more surprising given that these (unlike tags) are at least supported by the metaweblog API.

    The blog post editor interface is also too spartan. No auto-save, quicktags, or draft support. This means if you make any errors, or your browser crashes, or any of a number of things, you lose all your work. It also means that you have to type in all your html links and formatting by hand. These kinds of goodies are what we take for granted nowadays with modern blog software. Admittedly, draft support might be complex, but auto-save and quicktags should be low-hanging fruit.

    However, the biggest problem with BlogIt is that it’s a one-way function. The essential functionality for this to be a true blogger’s killer facebook app would be the ability to post all blog entries, not just those created with BlogIt, to the user’s mini-feed. BlogIt does add a Posted Item to your minifeed, for those posts authored in BlogIt only. For posts you write outside of BlogIt, you still need to manually post that entry to your minifeed.

    This is a more serious limitation than it appears. The basic value of a blog app in facebook is to leverage the audience of your social contacts into readers of your blog. Posting your blog items to your minifeed is the main problem of convenience that a blogger needs to solve if they want to tap into that audience and make reader conversions. The now-defunct app BlogFriends was an excellent tools for this, slurping the RSS feed from any blog you specify. There are other apps that do similar things, though none as well as BlogFriends did. These apps were of course also one-way functions, but the direction (blog -> facebook) was more useful than the direction that BlogIt offers (facebook -> blog). And even in that regard, BlogIt is suboptimal (see above). Where then is the value proposition in using it?

    BlogIt has great potential. In my ideal world, Six Apart would buy BlogFriends and revive that functionality as a part of BlogIt. Adding a simple quicktags toolbar (bold, italic, blockquote, link, etc) and an auto-save are the bare minimum for routine usability. And in addition to categories (which is a no-brainer), if Ecto can support tags, why not the software ninjas at SixApart? Were BlogIt to improve in these ways, it really would be indispensable.