Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • The Fellowship of the Card

    An intrepid band of adventurers strike out on an epic quest to reclaim a mystical item from antiquity. It ends well.

  • blog CMS infrastructure

    Moveable Type is making a play for WordPress users to “upgrade”, with Anil Dash firing a broadshot across Automattic’s port side. Dash makes some good points but fails to articulate a compelling reason to switch, primarily because the basic premise is flawed, that WordPress is hard to upgrade and that its architecture is an impediment to ordinary users who seek to extend its functionality or implement their own style and design.

    Probably the single biggest reason for WP’s success is the one-click install and one-click upgrade offered by Dreamhost and other web host companies. I can literally setup a WP blog for anyone in less than 3 minutes. Most of that time is post-install customization, as well. The plugin ecosystem is far more vibrant on the WP side than MT, and the proliferation of styles and themes means that the end user need only choose from a bounty of available options if they don’t want to tinker on their own – but tinkering is also very, very easy since the various files can be edited directly from within the online administration pages.

    Where MT should focus its poaching efforts is as a competitor to WordPress MU. Thus far, WP-MU remains a complex and daunting installation and maintenance is not simple. However, MU is still attractive, especially because of the new Buddypress functionality that will turn all MU users on a given install into an instant social network. What MT needs to do to grow is not to try and convince the end users with their own WP blogs, but try to create a full fledged blog ecosystem like WordPress.com, and attract users to their platform there. Typepad, built on the previous iteration of MT3, is simply inadequate as a competitor to WordPress.com-hosted free blogs. By providing a new umbrella site for free blogs, MT can build the user base to the critical mass required for increased power user adoption. As things stand, I simply have no incentive to try MT4, and Anil’s PR attempt falls flat since frankly he’s attacking a straw man of WordPress rather than the reality which I deal with every day.

    In a few days, I will log into my Dreamhost panel and upgrade my blogs to WordPress 2.5. WP is a moving target. MT4 needs to catch up and then stay abreast. Until it’s as easy for me to install and upgrade MT as it is WP, they aren’t even close.

  • are fansubbers pirates?

    Shamus has a three part series on PC game piracy in which he makes some concrete recommendations to the game industry. Part of Shamus’ premise is simply that video game piracy is a problem partly driven by the industry itself, with ever-increasing paranoid reliance on clumsy copy protection and authentication schemes that treat ordinary users like criminals and which do nothing to deter the thieves. He argues that the industry should accept a baseline level of piracy and attempt to incentivize users to buy the product rather than attempt to forestall it completely. His specific recommendations are:

    1. Make sure the pirates can’t offer a superior product
    2. Get closer to the community
    3. Offer a demo
    4. Entice them with valuable updates
    5. Clean House

    How does this apply to anime? It occurs to me that the rationale for the fansub industry is quite similar to game piracy. Region-encoding, release schedules, and unequal pricing seem to be the methods by which the anime industry attempts to control their product and which has created the vacuum which fansubbers have rushed to fill.

    Do Shamus’ recommendations apply? It makes for an interesting thought experiment.

  • The Ultimate Answer

    On a whim, I searched my RSS reader for any instances of 42. The result was disturbing. I think, just for a sense of completeness, I’m going to blog every reference of 42 I can find. Note that the politics-content of Haibane.info is still intended to remain zero. I instead request that commentary on these items be restricted to the larger and more important issue of how the occurrence of 42 in the story at hand might lend clues towards divining the Ultimate Question.

    Let’s get started. Today’s 42ism comes from the UK, appropriately enough.

    Gordon Brown is facing the threat of his first defeat in the Commons since taking over as prime minister, after a Guardian survey found strong – and growing – opposition among Labour MPs to the government’s plans to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days.

    (followed by lots of blah blah about governmental something or other)

    Intriguing. This suggests that 42, manifesting as a number of days for incarceration, is a proxy for the balance between the principles of human rights versus society’s need for security. Perhaps more broadly we might say that here 42 is a stand-in between the forces of chaor and order, where chaos is the expressive element of the Universe and order is the emergent structure that arises from it.

  • Gygaxed

    gygax rip xkcd

    Rest in peace, DM.

    (original)

  • Dennou Coil 12: A Space Odyssey

    This episode was largely tangential, but it was a blast. I mean that literally:

    denno coil 12

    In a nutshell, Yasako becomes a God, literally. She communicates to her People, but they do not understand…

    denno coil 12denno coil 12

    and they reject her counsel and engage in ultimate folly:

    denno coil 12

    But ultimately they realize the error of their ways and embark upon a new age of enlightenment:

    denno coil 12

    This episode paid homage to grand epic science fiction and philosophical themes rather than trying to actively explore them in any depth. It was a lot of fun as an interlude – not much in way of the larger plot was advanced. I just had a big goofy grin on my face the entire time.

  • the most important droplet

    With all the talk of the cloud, it’s worth noting that for every user, the single most important droplet therein will always be their own PC. Cloudware is still far from feature-rich as software running on your own machine, and of course all the important user data still resides on the home node (and is unlikely to significantly shift online in a world where external USB hard drives approach the terabyte-capacity and $100 price point equally fast). And it should be noted that the home node will also have the raw speed and performance edge over the cloud in any mainstream computing scenario. Thus, cloudware that leverages the power of the home node will be the killer apps of the future, not purely-cloud run apps.

    To get there, however, we need to tap the power of the home node va the browser, which remains the nexus of where cloud computing and flex computing intersect. Here’s how we get there:

    Javascript creator and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich has revealed a new project called IronMonkey that will eventually make it possible for web developers to use IronPython and IronRuby alongside Javascript for interactive web scripting.

    The IronMonkey project aims to add multilanguage functionality to Tamarin, a high-performance ECMAScript 4 virtual machine which is being developed in collaboration with Adobe and is intended for inclusion in future versions of Firefox. The IronMonkey project will leverage the source code of Microsoft’s open source .NET implementations of Python and Ruby, but will not require a .NET runtime. The goal is to map IronPython and IronRuby directly to Tamarin using bytecode translation.

    A plugin for IE will also be developed. The upshot of this is that Python and Ruby programming will become available to web applications run through the browser, on the client side. Look at how much amazing functionality we already enjoy in our web browsers thanks to Web 2.0 technology, which is AJAX-driven (ie, javascript). Could anyone back in 1996 imagine Google Maps? Hard-core programming geeks who understand this stuff better than I do should check out Jim Hugunin’s blog at Microsoft about what they have in mind; it’s heady stuff. But fundamentally what we are looking at is a future where apps are served to you just like data is, and your web browser becomes the operating system in which they run. I can’t even speculate about what this liberation from the deskbound OS model will mean, but it’s not a minor change.

    Still, this all is going to run on the home node, and not in the cloud. That’s the key. There’s only so much you can do, and will be able to do, on vaporware 🙂

  • Star Wars, as told by a little girl

    I loved the part with the Pokeball.

  • WP 2.5 has built-in gravatar support

    Seems that WordPress v2.5 (which will be out this month) will include support for Gravatars by default:

    default avatarTheme Authors: Adding Gravatars to Your Theme

    The function to add Gravatars to your theme is called: get_avatar. The function returns a complete tag of the Avatar.

    The function get_avatar is setup as follows:

    function get_avatar( $id_or_email, $size = '64', $default = '' )

    * id_or_email: The author’s User ID (an integer or string) or an E-mail Address (a string)
    * size: The size of the Avatar to display (max is 80).
    * default: The absolute location of the default Avatar.

    That’s the default avatar icon up there. Ugh. I am really not interested in gravatars, I am a fan of Monster ID and Wavatars. I hope Scott and Shamus can update their plugins to hook into the native 2.5 functionality as that would be a lot simpler. Adding a dropdown to the Admin panel to let you select between different icon sets is probably the best approach.

    UPDATE: Ryan Boren says that any avatar service can be invoked, not just Gravatar:

    Gravatar is the service used by default. get_avatar() is completely pluggable, however, so any service can be used. get_avatar() is built-in so that themes will have some fixed API on which they can rely, regardless of whatever avatar service is being used behind-the-scenes.

  • 9 inch EEE

    The big news yesterday was the release of the 9-inch screen version of the Asus EEE PC, here shown alongside its little brother:

    eee pc 9incheee pc 9inch

    As you can see, the screen displaces the speakers that surrounded the screen on the original. I wonder how that affects sound quality – I’ve been surprised by how good the speakers are on the EEE thus far. Also, the new model is slightly larger, with a heavier hinge and deeper footprint. It also comes in your choice of the Linux or XP OS, though there still isn’t any word on US pricing.

    The screen resolution is 1024×600, with the same pixel density as the 7-inch version. That is really appealing, but price remains the key – I wouldn’t want to pay more than $500 for an EEE because then I lose the value proposition over a regular laptop. I assume that ASUS will follow the Apple model and drop prices on the low end models as new ones come out. My expectation is that the new 9-inch will be in the 600 range, which is just too expensive for my usage model, but would still be appealing to a traveling business type.