Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • HD-DVD is not region-free

    in teh great battle of nextgen DVD formats, one piece of information seems to be conventional wisdom: that HD-DVD, unlike Blu-ray, will not have region-coding. At AICN, Massawyrm cites being region-free as one of his main motivations for choosing HD-DVD, for example. But it’s been known for over a year that despite initial reports that HD-DVD would not restrict by region, it has since succumbed to the pressure and will likely have “some form” of region coding eventually. As Ars Technica noted 18 months ago, there’s a chance that this will affect the early adopters (including anyone who buys an HD-DVD this holiday season, it should be noted):

    If RPC is ultimately approved and incorporated into the HD DVD format, it is unclear how the players that have already been sold will handle it. The most logical solution would be to allow the current handful of HD DVD players already on the market to play any HD DVD. Unfortunately, history tell us that logic is not one of the entertainment industry’s strong suits, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that region-coded HD DVDs will cause problems for some early adopters.

    Note that Blu-ray’s region coding scheme compresses the number of regions down from seven to three – and that includes lumping Japan and the United States into one region, which will definitely turn the economics of the anime industry upside down.

    I still personally lean towards HD-DVD for the simple reason of cost. The Toshiba HD-A3 is selling at the $200 price point on Amazon, which is just a fantastic deal (esp if you have or are planning to buy an HD-TV). And there’s $100 players at Walmart, too (though not the name brand). I don’t think the worst case scenario is likely to come to pass because to be honest I don’t see either BD or HD-DVD going away anytime soon – both have years to go before they are a sizable fraction of traditional DVD sales. And there’s always standard DVD formats or the Internet download for the occasional movie I must watch but isn’t available on my format of choice. All of these physical media formats are going to be obsolete eventually anyway.

    UPDATE: Anime R1 DVD sales peaked in 2003 and have been declining ever since. I speculate without evidence that 2003 was when fansubbing really started as an industry in its own right – and was a response almost entirely due to region coding alone. It’s also telling that the major players in the industry don’t even mention region coding as they discuss the state of the US market.

  • guidelines on ad (and content) placement

    Darren at ProBlogger has a great roundup of advice on ideal ad placement to maximize click throughs when using Google Adsense. Probably the single most important point he makes is that content placement is just as critical as ad placement. After all, if you design your site around your ads, you won’t have many readers. The content is why people read your blog; the ads should be visible but not the main focus.

    I’ve learned a few things about ad placement by experimentation. Of course your mileage may vary, but here’s what works for me.

    1. Image ads convert better than text.

    An image has something to show, and is easier to see. Whereas text ads must be read, visual ads present themselves more naturally to the eye. They are also colorful, and often animated. In addition, the entire image area is clickable, unlike the relatively small region on text ads (a change made by Google to reduce click fraud).

    2. Trust the algorithm, don’t blacklist.

    It’s tempting to cull certain ads from appearing if you think they are way off-topic (or outright annoying). But there’s method to the madness. I’ve found that if I start excluding URLs for certain advertisers too aggressively, my CTR drops pretty dramatically. The adsense algorithm learns over time, so you need to let it learn what ads work and which don’t. That requires patience. The longer you have ads on your site, the better the matching will be.

    3. Bigger is better.

    This is a fairly obvious one. A banner (768×90), wide skyscraper (160×600) or medium rectangle (300×250) is always going to attract more attention. It’s also worth mentioning that these larger formats are the ones with more color, animation, and even video and user interactivity, all of which get the reader’s attention.

    4. Complementary, not competitive location

    This is one of the more important (and subtle) issues. I go against the grain in that I believe it’s unwise to put ad units within a block of content. There are several distinct regions or “content elements” within a post: the post itself, the comments, header, footer, navigation, etc. It is easier on the reader when ads are placed interstitially between these content elements. The placement of ads should complement the reader’s visual flow, being visible but not smack-dab in the middle of the natural path that the visitor’s eyes follow.

    I am also skeptical of heat maps that purport to tell you where a user’s attention is drawn first, or lingers, because I think that what matters more is the reading trajectory over the page. It’s critical to keep content elements along that reading trajectory, and any ad units on the page should be adjacent to that trajectory, providing an easy “on-off” side-trip from the main path. I think of this as rest stops on an interstate – the best ones are the ones where it’s easy to exit the highway, take a break, and then get back on easily – that way there is minimal interference to the journey. A reader visiting the site is a traveler in much the same way.

    I’m no expert by any means (and I make about $.25 a day from Adsense, because none of my blogs are highly-trafficked). However I do want to mention my own blogs as examples of the guidelines above in action: City of Brass and Nation-Building, both hosted on Blogspot. As you can see, they have a wide column of 300×250 medium rectangle ads down the right side. There is also a 768 banner at the bottom of the page. I may experiment with a half-banner in the upper right corner as well, but the main idea is that the ads are large and to one side, leaving the content area almost entirely whole.

    Another point to make is that I use the old template system on these blogs, not the new blogger version, because I find that it affords me more control. Most of the sidebar widgets available on the new beta system are useless for my purposes and would only eat into available ad space on the sidebar. It’s really just an ad-bar attached to a single-column layout, not a genuine sidebar – some of the content like links to my archives, etc that would normally go into the sidebar are now actually at the bottom of the page.

  • makes for a more boring movie…

    …but it turns out that flying a modified space shuttle of square-jawed expert miners to implant a big nuclear bomb is not the best way to deflect an asteroid. Instead, use “mirror bees”:

    The best method, called “mirror bees,” entails sending a group of small satellites equipped with mirrors 30 to 100 feet wide into space to “swarm” around an asteroid and trail it, Vasile explains. The mirrors would be tilted to reflect sunlight onto the asteroid, vaporizing one spot and releasing a stream of gases that would slowly move it off course. Vasile says this method is especially appealing because it could be scaled easily: 25 to 5,000 satellites could be used, depending on the size of the rock.

    Maybe this could be the sequel to WALL-E?

  • utopian dreams

    attention Fake Steve Jobs, you owe me a new Starbucks. This made me snort my venti sugarfree gingerbread latte:

    Al Gore meets Klingon ambassador

    Well it was a momentous occasion as Al was lauded by the United Federation of Planets for his work to save planet Earth. He’s shown here with the Klingon ambassador Lord Koloth.

    If only it were true.

  • the year of the SSD

    Solid-state disks (SSDs) are already trickling out from various manufacturers, and you can even order them as an option on some laptop systems (notably, the Asus EEE comes standard with one!). The advantages over traditional hard drives are obvious: speed and power consumption, though of course the former is somewhat limited by the system bottlenecks. Capacity remains the major hurdle, though – state of the art is presently 128 GB (which admittedly is 50% larger than the hard drive on the laptop I am writing on now). And of course cost – which probably scales as the fourth power of capacity (call that Fledge’s Law).

  • open thread!

    I’m just looking for an excuse to test out my new toy. Plus, open threads are truly open now, thanks to Peter’s plugin (and Pete’s critique). I’m actually 10 episodes into ROD and am enjoying it, though was taken aback at the totally unexpected fan service in episode 9. And you all were right, the OAV was a goofy James Bond prequel that I am glad I watched for backstory but has little bearing on the story thus far. Oh, and I need to add Tekkon Kinkreet to my watchlist. I’ve added that one to my queue on Netflix.

  • WP_MonsterID: automatic, unique avatars

    Recently, the Gravatar service was bought out by the founders of WordPress. The immediate result was to move Gravatar over to their servers which resulted in a significant speed boost, and also accelerate gravatar support into the WordPress core. The major advantage of this is that it fosters a sense of community among your commenters, because the visual icon really accentuates everyone’s identity in a way that mere text can’t. I wasn’t motivated to actually sign up for a gravatar myself, however, until Shamus installed it on his blog over the weekend. However, there are two major disadvantages to the service: 1. your users have to actually sign up, and 2. it really slows down the page load.

    Instead of Gravatars, I decided to go with MonsterID. This is built on Identicon technology which creates a custom hash based on the user’s email address. MonsterID takes this a step further, using that hash as an input to create a custom, unique “monster” graphic for each user.

    I’ve installed the plugin here and on my geekblog, Haibane.info, and you can see it in action on this post about anime which has a healthy discussion thread. I am quite pleased with the result, especially since there is no real impact on page load since all the action is happening locally.

  • a coincidence, yeah sure

    Via my feedreader, an article preview at Ars Technica:

    Top US government research labs infiltrated by hackers
    from Ars Technica by segphault@arstechnica.com (Ryan Paul)

    Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, two of the leading military research facilities in the United States, were recently infiltrated by hackers.

    Read More…

    clicking the link for more, however, brings you to a blank page. I’m sure it’s just a technical difficulty. ahem.

    in related news, we rented Live Free and Die Hard last week. It was a fun movie, and the hacker kid was a great sidekick. But what’s with replacing “yippee-ki-yay mother-[obscenity]er” with “Whoo!”!? It’s not like the rest of the movie was kid-friendly for language. And the villain was just bleh. Oooh, scary, I’ll delete your 401k! Is that a threat? The shadow of Hans Gruber looms large.

    so, anyway, <rumor>Ars Technica has been hacked!</rumor> Hopefully now I will be linked by Valleywag.

  • How to find a Nintendo Wii

    (I was tempted to title this post “Wii don’t need a Guitar Hero” but figured it was too off-topic. Besides, who even recognizes Tina Turner nowadays?)

    Here’s your problem in a nutshell. You’ve been reading about the Wii (and suffering the puns) for about a year. You’ve played it at someone’s house, and you’re hooked – your kids love it, your parents love it, and the graphics aren’t that bad (and not really even the point). And you haven’t even dipped your toe into the wonderful nostalgia of the Virtual Console yet! So it’s decided. You want a Wii. Wii welcome you!

    Now all you have to do is find one.

    Don’t despair. True, the task seems positively Sisyphean: even though Nintendo is manufacturing 2 million Wiis a month, with 350,000 Wiis sold the week after thanksgiving alone, even the President of Nintendo of America couldn’t score one. The Wii is the hottest item on everyone’s wishlist this Christmas. So what chance do you have?

    Two words: persistence, and vigilance.

    First, scope out every retail venue that sells the Wii in your neighborhood. These Wiitailers have to be within a 15-20 minute drive of your home. The usual suspects: Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Toys R Us, Gamestop. There may be smaller fry in your area too – make a comprehensive list of every single possible outlet. Get their phone numbers and figure out the phone menu on each to get connected straight to the electronics/gaming desk. Write all that contact info down in one place for easy reference.

    Next, visit each one. Talk to the staff behind the desk and get an idea of when their shipments usually come in. It will vary, though the big box retailers usually get them on Saturday night. You will hear qualifiers like “well, it’s hard to say exactly when…” but be persistent and get them to give you a rough idea, or at least when the last few shipments were so you can extrapolate. Usually the dudes at the desk are more than willing to help you score a Wii and will give you as much info as they can. Make a point of stopping by at night the day you predict a shipment to arrive, and chat up the staff to see if your hunch is right.

    Third, keep an eye on the Sunday paper. A sure fire bet that a given Wiitailer has Wiis in stock that week is that they will advertise the Wii for Sunday. If you can get ahold of the sunday advertisement inserts for the retailers ahead of time, that’s even better – for example you might look for the Sunday paper at your local grocery store on late Saturday evening, or go hunting online at forums like Cheap Ass Gamer.

    With all this info in hand, your strategy then is simply to try to anticipate which stores have the Wii and then make the rounds. Sunday morning, as soon as the stores open, go down your list and call every retailer, starting with the ones who have the Wii advertised in their Sunday circular. The conversation should be quick: “Hi any Nintendo Wiis in stock?” The answer will usually be no, the psychotic hard core dudes waiting in line since 4am probably beat you to it. So move on, and keep calling. However, once in a while you will hear the magic words: “Yes, we still have a couple in stock.” That’s when you drop the phone, jump in the car, and go. This might happen once every ten calls; and four out of five times in that case, by the time you get there they will be sold out. But it only takes one lucky roll of the dice.

    This sounds like a lot of work, and it is. It took me six weeks to score my Wii last winter. But understand that there are millions more Wiis in the retail channel this year than back then, so your odds are actually substantially better of scoring a Wii this holiday season than pretty much at any time before. You just have to be vigilant, do your due diligence, and then be persistent. Follow this plan of action to the letter and you have a very good chance of finding your Wii by Christmas.

    Or, just go for the Vii instead. Who can tell the difference?

  • CompUSA closing

    Looks like CompUSA is closing its doors for good. The good news is that they will be having massive sales to get rid of inventory during the holiday season, so if you can find one near you, run, don’t walk, and stock up.