mark mazurek

I’m so excited about Manabi Straight, that I have switched to raws from ep.06 onwards. I can’t wait for fansubbers to do their thing. I foresee 5K en DVDs in my future… Apparently the debacle of Kamichu have taught me nothing.

They finally shown how the Manabi OLPC is attached to the student. Also, it became clear that I was wrong about the holster. It’s not a holster, but a leather colored skin, similar to a cellphone skin.

When girls visited a sister school, the similar arrangement hurt my sense of fashion, because the students in the other school wear blazers. It wasn’t animated very well, but a) it just looks wrong, and b) blazer is bound to wrinkle where it goes above the OLPC’s clip. Not sure what the solution is though. Giving girls ouside belts would give them evil, militaristic look. Japanese liberals can’t have that. Putting the fantasy OLPCs under the blazer would create an instance of dreadful concealed carry, and we know that it turns sweet girls into ruthless baby killers. Liberals can’t have that either.

Another thing which I saw in ep.6 was an Internationalized Domain Name. I hate it, because it makes remote tech support a hell on a stick (well, more so than it is already). Can you read the domain in question? I can only read “-gakuen matsuri” (without -ri), which means “-academy festival” [*]. What if your input method cannot enter it? The inventor of this abomination really has to be tarred and quartered. And I’m afraid that there’s no way back now, the geenie is out of the bottle.

[*] It does not take a Newton to guess that the domain is: , or “Seiyoh Gakuen Matsu(ri)”, but only if you remember the school’s name. It’s a domain registered to promote the school festival. Be careful, the site is overloaded with Flash.

I do not follow it closely, but I gather that Dell attempted to gauge interest in Linux on laptops recently. Matt Domsch wrote something on this blog []. I clicked in a couple of random places, and was somewhat disappointed with the commentary. For example, a few people cannot understand why No-OS (bare) systems cost more than pre-loaded ones.

When commenters second-guess Dell about this, they tend to forget that while Linux stands for freedom, it is not free of charge. More specifically, there must be a certain level of support provided by the manufacturer, which costs money. Dell are trying to split the issues here by offering a hardware-only support, so they won’t help an idiot like Eric S. Raymond who deleted critical files in his /lib (true story, evidently). Instead, they ask a user to run Dell Diagnostics CD. Still, Dell are very sensitive to the cost of calls. If Linux systems generate more calls than Windows systems, they cost Dell more, and that cost is looped back into the price. The issue here is, Dell have to guess at pricing time how much call load Linux users will generate. They ship Red Hat preinstalled on servers for years, but that exeperience does not necesserily carry over to laptops in home market.

Over the years, this family turned into a Dell monoculture, due to the combination of price, quality, and friendliness to Linux (they fix BIOS bugs which Linux triggers). Currently, we have a company’s Lattitude D600 (runs Fedora Linux), company’s SC430 (has RHEL 3, RHEL 4 Xen, Fedora installed), P4550 (XP Home), a beater box of Inspiron 5250 (Fedora Rawhide), Inspiron 1100 (XP Home SP2), and some kind of new shiny widescreen Inspiron that my daughter has got (XP Home SP2). The last one was $548 or some such ridiculously low price for a 512MB/80GB/1440×900 laptop. The only unconquered remnant is my VIA M6000 with a 800MHz C3 and 128MB, the main server which runs torrents.

It all started when we bought the 4550. I opened it and was stunned by the quality of design and workmanship. It was nothing like the Dells of the 90s. The airflow was well laid out, all cables organized, components easily removable. Clearly an engineer thought about it. And of course it was cheap.

So, I will deny any misplaced brand loyalty strongly, but I am quite open to an idea of getting another Dell laptop for work, as long as it satisfies requirements. If it comes with Linux, it’s all to the better. But only the final price is important. If a system with Windows is priced below an identical system with Linux, of course I’ll buy the one with Windows.

When was the last time an anime had a custom animation, with no stock reuse, for each episode’s ED? Out of 4 episodes seen so far, 2 had a traditional musical ED, done to a video of doll animation, a-la 2×2 Shinobuden, and 2 had a per-episode animation, done to a production standard. Now that’s lavish.

I think Manabi must be mandatory to watch in Brian Stevens / Chris Blizzard’s organization (and not just ep.4). OLPC has truly found its spiritual sibling in this anime.

I am having too much fun at work, so I wasn’t watching anything for a week. I am yet to see Manabi Straight ep.4! For example, did anyone notice that if you log out of X and flip your KVM to another blade, your server is likely to oops? Apparently, /dev/input/mice has no locking whatsoever. And it would be easy to rectify with one static mutex if the input layer weren’t such a maze of little methods, all alike. You can never tell when it’s going to loop around and bite you with a nice recursive lock-taking (177044).

So, living vicariously through blogs, I am the last island of sanity in the sea of Kanon fanboyism. OK, maybe next to last: here’s what I saw at a place called “”.

Kanon (Condensed Version)

“Doctor, Doctor! What’s wrong with Shiori? Will she be all right?”

“I’m sorry Kaori, but your sister is not going to live past her next birthday. More specifically, she’s going to look fine until the exact day of her birthday, then she’s going to drop dead.”

“How awful! How is that possible?”

“Shiori is suffering from Anime Disease. It is similar to Movie Disease, but even worse. Remember she is very weak, so keep her out of school, but let her wander around in the snow and eat all the ice cream she wants.”

“I understand. Well, I guess it’s time for me to get all moody and unsupportive…”

A satire, but so true, it tingles.

Also, is it ? Please be gentle in comments. Jeff is one of my favourite animebloggers.

Thanks to Jesse’s help, VOLK has moved to , where I can finally start updating it regularly. Bumping against quota at people.redhat.com was too much of a pain. Also, git push only pushes what was updated, and this makes updates go much faster.

Pre-built RPMs are still in question, but since I want to focus on patch management, my users have to rebuild anyhow… We’ll see if it’s going to matter.

To continue the honorable tradition of posting mindless trite on my blog, I am here to report that I upgraded my main server from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6, with yum. It was the slickest upgrade yet. I just said “yum clean all”, “rpm -UvH http://download.fedora.redhat.com/……/fedora-release*.rpm”, and “yum upgrade”. That’s it. No fuss, no nuthin… My old Sun’s Java and Azureus continue to work, and it seems that the security was not breached by new configs.

I only have two concerns now. First, the ease of upgrade makes it tempting to relax procedures. Before, I always did a tar|tar to a spare partition, but this time I was too lazy. I thought, “I can always PXE boot this and recover. It won’t run mke2fs, will it? What can go wrong?” Second, the upgrade process barely fits into 128MB of RAM. In fact, it does not - RSS was 84MB, size 134MB, and it pushed 100MB of garbage out into swap (after I killed everything except syslog, getties, and sshd).

I think was the proverbal straw, and so I’m watching Manabi Straight now. The impression after 2 episodes is that of Pani Poni Dash, only with sympathetic characters replacing the PPD’s cast of repulsive jerkfaces.

Also, Don :

There were a few laughs in the first episode of Manabi Straight, but the second resorted to dull slapstick and I lost interest. It didn’t help that all the girls are drawn way too young for their ages; the effect is creepy, not cute.

This is so contrary to my impression that I have to wonder if we’re watching the same thing. The essense of Manabi (so far) is the owerpowering sweetness.

Just like Azumanga Daioh, it is not a comedy. They are different, of course. Azumanga is primarily wistful in tone, Manabi is sweet and cute. It’s a school full of Chiyo-chans (so far).

One prominent feature of Manabi world is the IT running amok. Every girl carries a school-issued OLPC with a Japanese bend.

The real OLPC is constrained by the realities of contemporary manufacturing and distribution, and it uses very clever design and engineering to break with the trends. In contrast, Manabi’s fantastic OLPC is an extension of current trends which uses an unreal manufacturing base and a setting where price is not an object. Still, I think that comparing the two may be curious…

It’s neat how Shamus at Technorati, and a testament to the popularity of . It’s a magnificent achievement for a non-political blog. However, Technorati is something best taken with a grain of salt. For example, my own rating is , while ’s is . ’s rank is 2,700,000 as well; seems like a standard number for a J-blog. Now, what do you think is more popular, DMoTR or Yotsubato? OK, I see what’s going on. If Yotsubato were posted online… So, DMoTR is more popular on the Net. Shamus rules, not doubt. But how about this: Pete Zaitcev vs. Kiyohiko Azuma? I still p4wn Azuma-sensei like a bug, and it’s really screwed. Which is why I do not pay much attention to Technorati.

Liferea crashed on me a minute ago, and left the feedlist.opml truncated, very near the start. There’s no backup anywere in sight (the last one which I did was in November 2005). So, now I have to remember all my feeds and resubscribe. Bloody open source programmers. Just what kind of idiot writes into a live configuration file instead of using a rename?

Unfortunately, according to my research, there’s no other RSS reader anywhere near Liferea in convenience, so let it be a lesson in importance of a backup policy for dot-files.

{Update: Latest RSS files are saved in cache/feeds, so perhaps I can regenerate a list from that.}

I received my Stellvia v.8 from RACS a few days ago, and I could not resist celebrating the occasion by watching it raw and getting subtitle-free screencaps.

I understand that the shock was enormous for Chiaki and all, but the situation is undoubtedly comical. I laughed.

Shipon was such as cutie little pie before the fate of the solar system was thrust on her shoulders…

I saw a lot of Gravion screencaps in the top rotation at recently, and it always amazed me how similar the character designs were. Obviously, it’s the handiwork of . I see similarities often, but in the case of Stellvia and Gravion it’s far more pronounced than usual.

I can’t help but assume that someone who animated Akira in this scene expressed his sense of humor. Just look at that butt! Oh and naturally, Akira holds Jojo’s hand and not the other way around.

This is somewhat difficult to explain without an animated gif, but where do you think Ayaka is looking? In fact, she moved her eyes when Ren displaced her from the center of the screen.

There’s a lot of such fast and lose handling going on. For example, there’s no gravity control in a Keity, but tears stream down. However, unsecured items float around the cockpit.

When you set out to save the world, make sure to take your favourite oversized stuffed bunny with you.

Eyecatches are special in Stellvia. Most of them are 3D renderings, but made so tastefuly that I accept them easily. But the final one appears to be an ad for the merch! The nerve. And it’s so cute that it made me to want a patch. Heck, I’d want the Great Mission patch and Genesis Mission patch, too. That’d woo some chicks, I’m sure… I am pocking the fun at the here a bit, but only so much.

Liked: Yes (well, except the lesbians… but gotta take the good with the bad.)
Rewatch: Hell yes.