Tag: english

Puberty points of Ubuntu 11.04

April 30, 2011
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A whole new GUI, Unity: +1

The total unusability of said GUI: -5

GUI animations in Gnome got very choppy: -3

Firefox 4: +2

Reinstalled all the default Ubuntu apps i removed (like Evolution, Empathy) and set them as default without asking anything: -1

Reset my custom keyboard layout: -2

Aegisub 2.1.8 crashes right after launch: -4

Suffer with building Aegisub from SVN for hours: -3

Actually get it working: +2

Doesn’t recognize a working PPPoE connection: -1

Current total of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal’s puberty points: -14

Do not want.

L’Arc~en~Ciel is not visual kei

April 27, 2011
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As i learnt on friday.

We had a club dinner and many of the new first-years were there too. One of them mentioned that he likes L’Arc~en~Ciel and asked me if i knew it. (Yeah, every japanese is surprised when i reveal that i actually do know a bit of the japanese music scene, even if it’s really just a bit. Of course they are first and foremost surprised by the fact that i can communicate in japanese without destroying all cultural conventions. Or at all, for that matter.) I was like, sure, i’ve heard about it, and probably heard a few songs, but i’m not really into visual kei…

I assumed that L’Arc was kind of visual kei from the fact that most of my acquaintances who like the band are into viskei bands a bit too creepy for my tastes.

The face of the first-year in question showed his thoughts. First: “did he really just say that?”, then “did he really intend to say that?”, then “how am i supposed to tell a scary gaijin senpai that he’s stupid?”. Then another guy told me, “L’Arc fans get mad when told that”…

Thus i learnt that L’Arc~en~Ciel is not visual kei. The hard way. Okay.

Madoka is over

April 26, 2011
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Didn’t mention it before, but thursday i translated the last two episodes of Madoka. It’s over. You can join the Church if you want, i’ll pass on that.

If you don’t know what this is about, you missed the anime of the winter season or possibly even of the year.

Also, yfw dat end.

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Real Drive

April 25, 2011
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A while ago somewhere i read the anime title “Real Drive”, and it sounded interesting, so i checked it out. Let me sum it up in one word: no.

It is exactly what you can see on this picture. Fat girls and old people. Okay, there might be quite long and quite boring dialogs too, and some nice tech ideas, but other than that it’s pretty much unwatchable.

Drop after two episodes. I think this is a new record.

Eureka Seven

April 23, 2011
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A while ago i saw a certain pic on /a/, one featuring a boy standing in front of a mecha. I liked the art style so i asked, and it turned out to be from Eureka Seven. Then during the netless days of early april, i decided to start watching it, then i just couldn’t stop. Watched the first 25 episodes in a day, then the other 25 in the matter of another few days. Then for days i was rewatching the last few episodes over and over again.

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Solutions

April 23, 2011
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I solved those problems. I was googling hard, i read dozens of bug tickets and launchpad threads, and though i couldn’t really find anything that exactly matched the problems i had, the intersection of the suggestions always included using pppoeconf, so i gave it a try, ran it, then rebooted and now everything works fine and smooth. I still have no idea what the true nature of the problem was, but it’s fixed so i can’t really care anymore.

Problems

April 19, 2011
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So, i got my internet connection back up, but however much i’d love to say “all right”, that wouldn’t be true. I have some problems with it. I’ve to note that i didn’t test every possible combination thoroughly.

The problem is: under Ubuntu, some websites time out. They are not related to each other in any way, not geographically nor based on content. Then, some secure websites load without stylesheets and scripts in Chrome, but load all right in Firefox. Some websites load if i proxy through Tor. Also, Filezilla (and gftp too) is unable to transfer files to/from certain ftp hosts – while some other hosts work all right. Again, no geographic or any such relation between the hosts.

The tricky part is, it all works fine on Windows (at least the problems with Chrome and secure websites and ftp transfers do), so i guess it’s some kind of configuration problem, but i tried all i could find and i couldn’t figure what could be causing it.

On Windows (7) i have the default settings with the username and password for the DSL connection (PPoE). On Ubuntu, i also have the default settings, but i tried changing them, because who knows, it might be some cutting edge tech not yet supported by the servers, but to no effect.

Any and all help would be appreciated.

The maniac fansubber

April 15, 2011
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Imagine that you love translating anime. Now imagine that you hate to compete with instant semi-official releases. Imagine that because of that, all but one of the anime you are left with to translate are on the same night.

This is my current situation.

As of now, i am translating C and Aria for gg, Denpa Onna for Commie and Hen Zemi for WhyNot? (not counting hungarian stuff and Digimon), and except for Hen Zemi these are all thursday night.

Also, next week the remaining two episodes of Madoka will air then too. Now i hope no one expects me to translate five episodes of anime in one night. It’s tough to do even if i have a whole day for it, and especially with Denpa Onna’s insane script (nonsense sentences and loads of references) it’s tough to do three one night.

I’ll have to figure out how to schedule them on normal weeks (next week is exceptional)… Guess it’ll go something like: start C while it airs, switch to Aria when it starts, finish Aria before Denpa Onna starts, do as much of Denpa Onna as possible then finish C. Madoka messes it all up next week.

Starbucks Tribute blend

April 4, 2011
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I got this pack of coffee way back in March, but among all the moving and related troubles, i didn’t really have a chance to write about it. I have to note that the clever assistant at the shop ground it not to the size for espresso machines but for coffee press, which is very rough and gives off a very different feel.

Starbucks Tribute blend is sweet. It might not be apparent at first, but a while after drinking a cup of it, i started wondering what might be this sweet taste in my mouth. The coffee. It fits very well with yoghurt.

It also has a bitterish taste that reminds me of a familiar office, where the ladies are sipping drip coffee at their desks, a fan is turning slowly on the shelf and every now and then a paper slides out of the printer.

As a multi-region blend, having a complex and interesting taste is just natural. A fitting tribute for those 40 years.

Hash auth

March 23, 2011
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Until now i was planning the blog authorization (which would by the way be used only for the admin area, as no user registration will be left) to be something like the user (that is, myself, considering probably no one else would use the admin area) logs in, i give the user a cookie, everyone’s happy. Usual, isn’t it?

The thing is the content of the cookie. I was thinking that just hashing the login creditentials (that is, what’s stored in the database, eg the email address and the hash of the password) would suffice for authentication, but today a plurk about wireshark made me realize it wouldn’t. So the new method is to hash the ip address of the user in the cookie as well. This way, unless the attacker can somehow get behind the same ip as the original login, even if they had the contents of the cookie, they couldn’t impersonate the logged in user.

Or could they?