Haibane.info

Month: July 2008

  • Samurai Jack in the end

    This is a great mashup of the song “In the End” from Linkin Park. Really puts a tragic spin on Jack’s quest:

    In many ways it is a kind of pessimistic story – after all, Jack routinely fails to return to the past, despite epic heroism. He really does try hard, but in the end it doesn’t seem to matter, at least not to the billions enslaved by Aku throughout time. However Jack is making a difference to the people in the future who he liberates from Aku’s reign, so perhaps that is the true measure of his destiny.

  • Samurai Jack meets Wong Fei Hung

    just awesome.

  • Ranma and longevity

    I am about a third of the way through Ranma’s sixth season now and I think I’ve identified what keeps me interested in the series even though others find it repetitive. That is, that the fundamentals of the character relationships are why we watch, so changing them would by definition ruin it. Steven pointed out a while back that Ranma is enmeshed in a web of obligations, from which there is no escape, so ultimately Ranma simply avoids resolution and proceeds on his own path, which is to continue to master and innovate in martial arts. The entirety of the character evolution is not what the characters do, or changes in their lives, but in how they feel, and on that basis you can differentiate the characters:

    Primary characters: Ranma, Akane. The emotions towards each other do grow each season, though there is ultimately a plateau. There will never be public reciprocation of emotion from Ranma towards Akane as long as Ranma remains bound by his web of obligation, and Akane will never act on her (often transparent) feelings for Ranma due to her own sense of insecurity. Ultimately, they are both forced to wait. However we do see that they have evolved over time. I think by season 6 both are as far as they can go, which is fine because there’s still plenty for both to deal with.

    Major characters: Ryoga, Nabiki, Kasumi. All have had episodes where they are the focus, and they have to act out of type and be challenged in a way that they didn’t expect. They do return to their usual behavior afterwards, but those episdoes do demonstrate that they have depth when required.

    Minor characters: Genma, Tendo, Mousse, Happosai. All are one-note strings thus far, but it only takes one focus episode to graduate them to the Major status. Happosai did actually get a bit of treatment in season 5, but he is needed to play the eternal joker, so I don’t think he will ever escape. We have also had tantalizing hints of more from Moose, but thus far he hasn’t had his own breakout.

    What keeps the series going is that they have a large ensemble cast to gradually graduate from minor to major, and balance that out with incremental evolution of the primary characters. The continuity between seasons (slow rate of change) is probably why the series retained its longevity without ever jumping the shark – there’s a formula, and the show sticks to it, with the innovation not from the basic structure, but rather the details. One example of how the series keeps things new is in the varied forms of martial arts tha Ranma encounters: french cooking, calligraphy, chess, race kart driving, etc. Some of these warrant more episodes than others to explore (in particular the Pate Fois Gras arc, which was brilliantly demented).

    It’s interesting to see that the manga industry is worried about what happens when its audience in the US grows up. I think Ranma avoids this conundrum by simply staying the same, so that every new generation gets attracted to it for the same reasons. Whether or not you outgrow Ranma is immaterial; if you like it, you will probably keep on liking it.

  • 1.5 TB for the desk, SSD for the road

    it’s even got it’s own gravitational field:

    The new Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB HDD is 50 percent larger than the 1TB desktop drives available today, while the 500GB Momentus drives (available in 5400rpm and 7200rpm flavors) are 56 percent larger than the current high-capacity 320GB 2.5″ laptop drives.
    …
    The main difference between the new 1.5TB drive and the 1TB ST31000340AS already available is their platter density. Both disks are four-platter designs, but the 1TB drive uses four 250GB platters, while the new 1.5TB is apparently using four 375GB platters.
    …
    We could see modest increases through the end of the year, but 2TB before 2009 is a toss-up. 500GB platters are probably still a ways away, and while a 5x400GB platter configuration would do the trick, the first generation 1TB five platter drives tended to run hotter and noisier than the units that the followed.

    I am fully aware that in five years someone will link to this post and guffaw at what a rube we all were for being impressed by this. I think Ars is being conservative here – someone is sure to roll out a 2TB drive (on 5 platters) before the end of the year. If not Seagate, then Hitachi.

    While the desktop drive is noteworthy for its sheer size, the laptop drive doesn’t impress me at all, however. The future of laptop drives is SSD and SSD alone (I say this without irony, even though I just bought a 250 GB drive for my own laptop a few months ago). The far more important news on that front is that Samsung is opening the flood gates of volume production:

    Seoul, Korea – July 9, 2008: Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing 1.8- and 2.5-inch multi-level cell (MLC)-based solid state drives (SSD) with a 128 Gigabyte (GB) storage capacity. Mass production of the Samsung MLC-based 64GB SSD also began this month.
    …
    Power consumption for the Samsung SSD is exceptionally low in standby mode at approximately 0.2 watts and in active mode at 0.5 watts. The Samsung MLC-based SSD has a write speed of 70MB/s and a read speed of 90MB/s.

    Somehow I don’t think SSDs will ever supplant 3.5″ on the desktop, though I do think that eventually 2.5″ will become desktop standard. So the progress by Seagate on pushing the envelope on the notebook drive capacity is still relevant.

  • the paper-user

    Is it just wrong that the first thing I thought of when I saw this was Read or Die?

    Gandhi

    Since Gandhi was a lawyer, you might argue that Gandhi did literally have to read, or die, for freedom.

  • epic fail? 12 Kingdoms vs Escaflowne

    Pete rags a bit on 12 Kingdoms (not entirely undeservedly). He notes that the system of rule (divine powers enforcing a strict and literal connection to the rulers of each kingdom) is a giant straight-jacket, but that’s entirely the point and in fact the only logical outcome of taking the Chinese theology literally. When you blur the lines between heaven and earth, then heaven’s decrees become part of daily life – and by their very nature, divine will means law. None of that pussyfooting around with interpretations, ijtihad, or whatnot.

    In a nutshell, 12 Kingdoms is an attempt to create a “perfect” system of governance, wherein the rulers of a kingdom are held directly accountable not to the masses, but to the higher powers from which they derive their authority. He that giveth also taketh away.

    As far as being too-epic-y, I think that 12 Kingdoms is less guilty of trying too hard than Escaflowne (which after my initial disenchantment with, I am now 3 discs in and thoroughly enjoying). The epic layers of 12K get added slowly, as Youko’s horizons slowly expand with her travels. In Escaflowne, Hitomi is dropped right into the thick of things and the first disc is like a firehose of information about Gaea. Hitomi hooks up with the movers and shakers of the new world right away and is at the literal center of action, whereas Youko ascends gradually, from pawn to player. In a lot of ways I am more free to enjoy Escaflowne because having seen the atrocious movie, I know much of the backstory already, and so am not floundering trying to get my bearings (a problem that never went away with Serial Experiments Lain. Now there’s a series that might benefit from a movie treatment…).

  • used anime bleg

    If anyone out there has the following series that they are no longer watching or using, I am interested in buying your copy:

    – Kino’s Journeys
    – Bottle Fairy
    – Someday’s Dreamers (esp volume 2)
    – any Miyazaki
    – anything else you think might be suitable for young girls.

    Kino is for me, everything else is for Mini Otaku and Baby Otaku. Please let me know!

  • bit.ly and folksonomy

    I noticed a few links on Twitter using bit.ly for url shortening rather than the old standby tinyurl and was intrigued. RWW raved about the service as well, mainly because it makes an attempt to categorize links using semantic algorithms. I took a look and have to admit that one other feature of bit.ly stands out – the ability to define your own link code. In one sense this is kind of a bad thing, because it is Yet Another Namespace that everyone with a brand or trademark would do well to rush to grab (assuming the service does take off, which I am still a bit skeptical about). For example, bit.ly/blog and bit.ly/islam are now taken, pointing to various blogs of mine as an experiment (I note with satisfaction that the Obama campaign already is on top of this and has grabbed bit.ly/obama).

    At RWW, Marshall says that bit.ly’s semantic classification of links makes it the tool of the future:

    Bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters! Calais is something we’ve written about extensively here. Bit.ly will use Calais to determine the general category and specific subjects of all the pages its users create shortcuts to. That information will be freely available to the developer community using XML and JSON APIs as well.

    I can’t share in Marshall’s enthusiasm however because I don’t see the semantic categorization as innately useful. I’ve blogged before about why folksonomies are the key to web 3.0, and all bit.ly is doing is generating a taxonomy for its links, not levarging the power of folksonomy. In a sense, by letting users define their own link code, bit.ly is sitting on top of an intrinsic mechanism for folksonomy already, by simply treating the codes that users assign to their links as folksonomic tags. I hope that they recognize the value of those custom codes, and not get too enamoured of and distracted by the magic word “semantic”.

    Whether bit.ly gains traction is of course not going to be driven by fringe features such as geotagging and semantics (ie, metadata), but rather by how easy it is to integrate teh service into other tools that users actually, well, use. TinyURL rode the Twitter wave to prominence, since it is the default url-shortener service (automatically invoked when you tweet, with no user intervention required). Similar services like is.gd, which have a much simpler API and are theoretically more robust in their namespaces, still haven’t broken into the market much yet, even though they also have teh requisite bookmarklets and firefox extensions already. If bit.ly wants to make inroads it needs to become the default URL service for a hot web app like Friendfeed, or even contract with twitter itself to become a user-specified alternative to tinyurl. I think that it would make sense to try for partnership with friendfeed, actually, because then the link history can be integrated into the user’s profile and browsed like any other service. If bit.ly doesn’t support RSS feeds of its user’s linkages, they should.)

    Overall, there are plenty of services out there but the thing to remember is that none shoudl be thought of as genuinely archival. A shortened URL should be a tool of convenience, but don’t expect that link to work forever. In one sense its better for there to be many such services rather than one to rule them all, which is why I am glad to see another competitor to TinyURL emerge. The rest is just icing on the cake (and hopefully a spur towards further innovation).

  • Enter the GPS

    This is our second week in Madison and already one difference between here and Marshfield is readiy apparent: this place takes more than 5 minutes to drive across. It’s been particularly difficult for my wife who has to drive to several different clinics across town for her resident duties, so we finally decided to buy a GPS unit in lieu of having her call me throughout the day for quick Google Maps consultations. We picked up a Garmin Nuvi 260 at WalMart (mainly because they had a no-restock-fee return policy) to evaluate and I have to admit it’s been pretty useful thus far. For her, it’s handy because it helps her get to where she needs to go, when she doesn’t know how to get there. For me, it’s let me attempt an unfamiliar route to a place I do know how to get to already. I confess to having been skeptical at first, but I can see the value-add even though I largely pride myself on my independent sense of direction. To be honest, the GPS hasn’t actually given me any new information in terms of a better route anywhere, but it was still nice to have just in case.

    Garmin nüvi 360    I am planning to return the Nuvi 260 to WalMart though – for the price, we can get a much better deal on a Nuvi 360 at Amazon, which adds mp3 playback and bluetooth for hands-free dialing. I think that this will be very useful later on in the year when we take various trips such as to Indianapolis for a conference, or elsewhere. My main concern was that I don’t become dependent on it and let my own navigating skills atrophy, but now that we’ve played with the 260 a bit I can see that this won’t happen. It’s an information multiplier, not a crutch.

  • for great justice

    Steve Gillmor celebrates Independence Day by heralding the arrival of the Enterprise iPhone (or ePhone) by Apple. I guess I was wrong, the Singularity and Transhumanism really are here after all.