mark mazurek

My much-publicized move to raws met an insurmountable obstacle in ep.7, when the evil principal of Aikoh delivered her shpiel. And it’s not like her sentences were too long or anything… There was too much content. Fortunately, fansubs caught up a couple a days ago, so I was able to know what she was yapping about in detail. I had a rough idea before from the spoilers and a few words I was able to catch, but now I suddenly understood that during the speech, her computer was displaying Mikan’s blog, which is how she was informed about the personal relationship.

Honestly, the idea of transparent laptop screens is so retarded, I just can’t understand why anime creators even bother with it. Even if it were possible, privacy issues alone are enough to bury it!

The ep.7 was unusually dense with “things”, even by Manabi’s standards. It shows (roughly in that order):

• Bronzed Momo,
• The three-way fight (The push-kick and the uppercut. Kagura and Osaka are no match for these fine students.),
• Mei and the cicada. I thought they took the usual, beaten, tired cliche and the icon of the summer Tokyo, and suddenly have blown the new life into it when I saw the first snap. And then they did it again. It’s the high comedy of MKM and 2×2 Shinobuden seamlessly embedded into the best seinen since Azumanga. Ufotable is teh awesomest.
• Girls strewn on the grass from the front image at of Seioh Gakuen (the significance of this is that the image from ep.7 existed when the website was launched, and so it gives us the idea of lead times for a show),
• Mikan’s dream,
• Mikan giving Kaorin a tremendous kick in the pants (this goes with the notion of tuning character strength way up when compared with Azumanga — I’ll have to blog about it when the show is over.),
• The Manabi’s vision (see below),
• The speech I mentioned and the whole dark and sinister world of adults, with Taka-chan serving as a lightning rod between the worlds.
• Dance with fireworks (captured by Momo),
• Wet girls (Sorry to disappoint, but it’s not a wet T-shirt contest. However, the animation detail had to be ramped up 3 to 5 times by the count of line and shade changes. It’s amazing.).

The vision scene follows on the Ufotable’s habit of taking something that qualifies as a trope and executing it with perfection and a new twist. How many times have we seen the hair in the wind? I saw Akane Tendo doing it, I saw Aoi Sakuraba doing it. The twist here is how Takako Kakuzawa undergoes the awakening from the vision at the time. The wind gust washes away the dream.

Again, it’s something that was done before, but now it’s done right. Perhaps even perfectly. And the separate strand was a very nice touch.

A few folks gave Manabi its due at blogs (not AoMM though).

BigN: “Is “nothing happening” okay?” [],
“Manabi the last great visionary” []. BigN’s place is where I commented:

I think what really captured me in Manabi is how forcefuly the characters are painted in it. I thought that I liked how Azumanga treaded light on it, and thought that fine-tuning the exposure would be good. But this is out of all proportions, and it it’s the best. And another thing, I like girls not being psychotic and neurotic wrecks. Mei took her transformation so well, coming out of her dark room. Even the frail Mikan’s mind keeps it together. So out of the ordinary teen-angst pampering anime of yesteryear. Go Manabi!

And I wrote it even before I saw Mikan making compliments. Dibs on Azumanga comparisons!

If someone wants to make comparisons, compare Manabi to Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. I think Mohammad might be close.

Mohammad: “Politics has never been so good” []. There’s no content, but an awesome poster-like shot. Scowling Mikan is either cute or fearsome, I can’t decide.

Moe-Moe Lab: Ep.06 [], ep.07 []. Spoils a bit too much for my taste, but a good guide to the imagery.

From:  <gregkh@suse.de>
To: Oliver Neukum <oneukum@suse.de>
Cc: John <jhnlmn@yahoo.com>, Pete Zaitcev <zaitcev@redhat.com>,
    linux-usb-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [PATCH]correctly handling failed opens in usb-serial
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:18:01 -0700
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.14 (2007-02-12)

On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 08:13:20AM +0200, Oliver Neukum wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 29. M?rz 2007 23:29 schrieb Greg KH:
> > On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 10:15:00AM +0200, Oliver Neukum wrote:

> > > as recently discussed on lkml the tty layer does call close() if
> > > an open() fails. Usb-serial does not handle this correctly. It does
> > > handle the first open() failing by checking the open count, but if
> > > a second open() fails, the close() will free the resources associated
> > > with the first open.
> >
> > Why can't we just fix the tty layer instead?
>
> Do you want to audit every other serial driver to make sure cleanup isn't
> deferred to close?

Well, to fix such a broken thing, yes, I do.

Hey, I have a 12 hour plane ride coming up, I wonder how long my laptop
battery will last  

Now that’s what I call a commitment to code quality! On one had I want to cheer for him, but on the other hand, what if this makes him go postal?

From :

The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340, which was travelling between Santiago, Chile, and Auckland, New Zealand, notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane about 10pm last night.

According to a plane spotter, who was tuning into a high frequency radio broadcast at the time, the pilot “reported that the rumbling noise from the space debris could be heard over the noise of the aircraft.

5nm separation meant that it was too early to pee pants. ALso, if you see angular motion, the object is not aiming at you. But it’s unclear just how big is the area the pieces of sweep (I think that’s what it was), and how reliable the distance estimate was.

The Space Review reviewes Cowboy Bebop []. What’s next? How about Red Hat Magazine reviewing (Remember “Red Hot Linux”? I have a screenshot saved somewhere.)? Or perhaps discussing the vision of future aircraft in Yukikaze (”Stealth, what stealth?”)?

My old company’s Latitude D610 had an unreliable ALPS Duo, which would lose bytes sometimes and desync. This generated bogus events while the X11’s mouse and kernel’s driver resynched. I got weird habits of moving the cursor avoiding GUI buttons in case a stray click happened. For a long time I thought it was a software bug somewhere. When I understood that the pad was defective, it was too late to bother doing anything. I didn’t want to sit without a laptop while it was RMA-ed.

The new Inspiron 1501 has a Synaptics which works fine, hardware-wise, but sofware seems a shade buggy. If I use that newfanged upstart “synaptics” in X11, it seems to lose the “up” event from time to time. The effect is mostly of scrollbars suddenly starting moving on their own after a click. Reading anything long, like Advogato’s recentlog quickly became a serious pain. Unfortunately, this looks like a bug in X11, so for now I filed an entry for Kristian and switched to old style “mouse” [].

To my extreme amazement, the tried and true configuration fails too. If I lift a finger and place it elsewhere, there’s a good chance that the pointer warps across the screen. This is because the kernel’s synaptics driver reports absolute events into the input layer (unlike the ALPS’ driver), and evidently this wasn’t tested well. One simple fix later everything seems to work, but hmmm… Things like this are not supposed to happen [].

I have to face the obvious and announce the abandonment of Crescent Love (Yoake Mae Yori Ruri Iro Na). The show was formally “suspended” after ep.7 since mid-February.

This is unfortunate, because I didn’t see a character as interesting as Feena, the female lead, since Reki in Haibane Renmei, if that. Creators cut an unusual and lucky balance with her. Feena is a crown princess of a moon kingdom, and she had a good rearing. She is smart like Valerie Hanson, beautiful like… perhaps Liv Tyler, tough like Margaret Thatcher. Still, she is not an all around Mary Sue. For example, she’s not as inhumanly strong as anime girls too often are. Although she’s skilled with a sword (re. the demonstration in ep.3), her self-proclaimed “fiance” easily bests her. Her biggest fault is that she becomes indecisive under pressure (and her men tend to use it). But that only humanizes her. To top it off, she’s nice. Maybe I’m tired of tsunderes and hungry for a genuinely likeable character.

Because of Feena, I didn’t want to drop this show. And I do not agree with vicious reviewers. It was a death by the thousand cuts.

The wasn’t as bad as everyone makes it out, but it looked cheap. Actually, it was very puzzling and I researched quite a bit, the line and shadow count, eyebrows, backgrounds, everything. In Azumanga Daioh they often use the same number of lines, yet the result is lively and attractive. I have to note though, while Azumanga is virtually defect-free, I saw several gross layering errors in just two episodes of Crescent Love. At the time I lost count, it started really piss me off, more than flat shading and weak color key.

Most reviewers were horrified by the nose-pinching. But I thought it was great! Maybe clumsily executed, but a great idea. As it turned out later, the ham-fisted execution is the hallmark of the show. My notebook had a few examples, but I think the most striking one was when Mai (the imouto) turns over her chair in ep.7. Even references were mostly dull. I mean, Mission Impossible? Please! Survivor? Kitsch! Indiana Jones? Overdone! The only one which worked at all was Iron Chef.

I had a few scenes saved for a write-up, like the Sad Feena In Snow above. But there’s really no sense. It’s the same pattern everywhere. If Feena acts, she overpowers bad plot, bad writing, and bad animation, but only for a short while. I didn’t have the strength to cross the barren earth between these oasises.

So, there we have it. Oh, and OP song was pure magic. The tempo changes were very pleasing, and the “we are not alone” theme sounds nice (unlike the anime itself, where they drill it into our skulls like Caltrans workers with pneumatic tools).

Liked: Not really, although Feena FTW and uber alles.
Rewatch: Naah.

The little userland thing which I call “usbmon(8)” badly needed a tender care, so spent Friday getting it into shape. I also applied a first-ever patch from someone else (Harry McNally). Unfortunately, I had to fold the tent at about midnight before everything was ready, so in the end I uploaded version 4 with an obsolete man page. It’s a good thing Steven den Beste does not use usbmon, or he’d put my feet to fire for that, I’m sure.

This was not the “oh, crap” though. As soon as I updated to webpage to say, “don’t use this”, I found that added the usbmon to , using the old patch of mine. Unfortunately, now I am beginning to think that the integration with usbutils was a mistake. The common theme about usbutils is the use of libusb, which usbmon does not use.

I didn’t expect anyone actually using the test appication, because libpcap provides all the necessary support to tcpdump and Wireshark. But I sort of can see the point… For one thing usbmon does not need debugfs mounted, or even enabled in kernel. Also, the way libpcap maps usbmon events into a stream of packets may be confusing (I think we already victimized Jon Smirl by this). I guess I have to accelerate proper packaging and release now, before distros start shipping usbmon in earnest. Oh, brother.

On the other hand, it’s a golden opportunity to learn to write decent RPM specs. I wanted to do it for years.

It’s fairly common for anime fans to make lists of series they have seen, with brief comments. It’s often quite useful, because it’s impossible to keep everything on the top of the head. Now Ubu has made a list too [].

My own list is located at ANN [], as an experiment in Web 2.0. While sort of neat due to the ANN database plug-in, the arrangement possesses the disadvantages of utility computing. Specifically, the data is located god knows where and is a subject to whims of the utility provider.

The next step seems obvious to me: A Google spreadsheet. Maybe we can even agree on a common format for anime lists. Uh-oh, I’m becoming an architecture astronaut.

At LCA, came up to me and expressed his displeasure in the overall tone of my blog and specifically the criticisms aimed at Gstreamer. I was surprised, knowing how many opportunities to say nasty things about Gstreamer I skipped, considering that the damn framework fails to work for years. I mean years literally: I started tinkering with it in version 0.6, before Totem existed. And it consistently failed to work all this time. Sometimes, by an inhuman effort, I was able to create a pile of plugins which worked for a day or two and then it always came crashing down. So he really should have bought me a lunch in gratitude for my admirable restraint instead of complaining.

At the time of our meeting, however, my good hacker instincts took over. Instead of grabbing his lapel and yelling, “Where is my DVD playback you jerk?!”, I agreed that perhaps my testing was obsolete, or I configured something wrong, and that I would give the dynamic duo of Totem and Gstreamer another chance. Promises are to be kept, and today I assembled this hodge-podge of packages again and gave it a whirl.

The result is in the screenshot.

VLC may cause Steven den Beste’s ire, but at least it works. I find it a key advantage.

Steven often talks trash about open source, and I mostly manage to ignore him. But is just too juicy.

In case anyone wonders how to configure the directory to save screenshots in VLC, the above screenshot should be a good guide. Yes, it’s taken on Linux, but a) VLC is a cross-platform application, and b) just move to Linux already.