Tag: english

Hacker boy

November 17, 2010
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I need help. Every week i have an english class i shouldn’t be having, and i finally got fed up with it. We have computers in class, but as expected, they all have every possible inspection app installed so that the teacher could check what we were doing. And i don’t want that.

Today i had my first try with an Ubuntu live cd, but it didn’t work. To be exact, it worked, i could boot up, but on the one hand, i had no network connection, and on the other, the teacher could see (on some feedback app) that my computer was on but not Windows. I guess that’s from the network login of the boot agent…

So i have to figure out a way how to use that computer freely without the teacher realising. The computer is Windows Vista, and can boot from cd as well. It had a bunch of programs running, but these seemed the most relevant: CaLabo EX (the main “school” app) and its MovieTeleco; Symantec Endpoint Protection, cmeye.exe (there’s a camera attached to the computer, luckily it can be turned away), evalclient.exe and atrans.exe (Audio Transfer). These are what i could see without having admin privileges, but i guess there’s more hidden.

I’d welcome and suggestions as to how could i run apps and browse the net without the teacher getting a report about it?

Japanese font size

November 10, 2010
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When i was playing around making various designs (votes still appreciated), there was one problem i had to face in every single one: how to make japanese fonts readable. If i set a global font size (even if it’s in ems), either the latin font will appear huge, or the kanji in the japanese one will be so small no one could read it conveniently.

I tried all i could think of, even the new css3 font-size-adjust property, but that couldn’t help either. The only thing that worked was giving a separate class for posts tagged with “日本語”, but that doesn’t solve the problem of japanese text embedded in mostly latin lettered posts, like the one just now. Not to mention, it’s an ugly hack.

I even considered editing the font file i want to use (Epson 教科書体) so that its default font size would be somewhat bigger, but i guess that was a futile attempt (ended up temporarily removing all my 1400-something fonts from the system).

I’d really appreciate any ideas how to do this.

Starbucks Café Estima blend

November 9, 2010
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Café Estima is one of the blends i wanted to try for a while now, mostly because the packaging sports a very visible “fair trade” badge on it. Still, it didn’t cost more than any other coffee i tried so far. Although it’s “just” bold, not extra bold, the ground beans have a really characteristic aroma to them. It’s somewhat sweetish, as if there was cocoa or something in it. The fresh brew is first of all hot–my aching tongue reminds me of that right now. And it tastes sweet. It’s bitter of course, just as a coffee should be, but it has a sweet taste to it (you can smell it as well, not just taste it), like honey. But that’s just a quick first impression (a good one of those though), after that it’s the tropical coffee taste.

However, this mix of strength and flavour makes it a good choice, not to mention it’s fair trade.

API fun

November 9, 2010
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For the coming blog upgrade, i’m planning to integrate some community services as well. Which means that when i write a post, it’ll automatically post a status on plurk and twitter, and a link on Facebook.

Plurk is by far the easiest to work with, it’s very plain and simple.

Twitter needs a bit more tweaking when it comes to retrieving responses to the ping tweet – i couldn’t figure a way to fetch a response chain, so i’ll have to fetch all the responses to my tweets and iterate through them looking for relevant responses with local javascript. Not to mention there are limitations as well so i’m not even sure it’ll work flawlessly for ever.

And Facebook, well Facebook is a nightmare. I’ve been reading the API documentation for an hour now and i still couldn’t figure out how to do something elementary as fetching comments and likes count on a link.

Of course i was hoping i could do all this on server-side with php, but considering how long these requests could take i’d rather not. Which means, no javascript, no community. Tough life.

Going down (for maintenance)

November 6, 2010
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I wish. Yesterday after the last class we had to move a lot of stuff for today’s university festival live, so i was dead tired already when i got home. But i still had to do the quality check for this week’s Shippuuden, so it was almost two am by the time i got to bed. And i had to wake up way earlier than i would’ve wanted to (though later than i was supposed to), because of the aforementioned live performance. Where actually i’m not even performing (neither are most of the other first-years)… And tomorrow it continues. From morning till dusk, then we have to pack everything back, and then we’ll go partying japanese style, which stands for eating and drinking as much as we can. Mostly the former, though, considering i don’t think they could handle me if i got wasted.

But before that all, even though i’m (as expected) dead tired, i still have to do a Bleach quality check as well. And considering the circumstances, it will take a while and not to mention piss me off.

Status report

November 5, 2010
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Lately i’ve been doing a lot of coding, naturally on the blog engine. If all goes well, i hope to get it finished this month, now that i’m really getting the hang of it. True, even if the engine will be complete, migrating all the posts so far will take another nice while considering it has to be done manually. Before anyone cries out, it’s intentional: the categories as they are now will be gone, replaced by more content-oriented tagging. Also, for japanese posts the url-safe conversion of the title has to be done by hand as well, since it’s pretty much impossible to expect a computer to be able to figure out the correct reading for an arbitrary japanese phrase. Not to mention i like to make my own words every now and then.

For example, lately i have to write the kanji 定 quite a lot, and i started writing it in a more… flowing way (rough representation).

Also, ever since it’s been getting colder, my hands were drying just like leaves. I was sure that it’s about the humidity, because in the summer my skin was all right, but i didn’t really test it. Then, today after the preparations for tomorrow’s university festival, we went to eat dinner together and five minutes after we entered the place my fingers weren’t dry anymore. So as soon as i got home i put a liter of water on to boil, and it works. Hell yeah.

Still a Shippuuden qc to go for today.

Dream of the otaku

November 2, 2010
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Gaiman’s Sweeper of Dreams should either do his job properly and sweep it all out or let me remember it long enough so that i can write it down properly. Remembering the fact that i had a cool dream and nothing else is plain torture.

What i remember is that you’d get something like my dream tonight if you took the kanshu of World Embryo, Nagato Yuki from the SOS Brigade, Kobasen from the Law of Ueki and the style of Fairy Tail all in reality. I wasn’t there in body, just as “the camera”. There was this little girl who has powers, i don’t know exactly what, but at least in certain places she could trigger something like a closed space that Haruhi so loved to create. There was also the Nagato-style girl, who the other girl fought and defeated earlier and couldn’t speak. There was (i think) a guy too, much like Ueki’s Mr. K.

I only remember the very last part of the dream, in the night on some abandoned mountainside parking lot. It was the very same place where the girls fought long before. The girl prepared for the “swipe”, the Nagato-girl clang on her arm so she asked “do you want to come along too?” The next is a full-fledged battle between the girl and something that looked as if the D-Reaper infested a kanshu and took Nagato as an example for body.

Then i woke up.

To code

November 1, 2010
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Lately i really feel the urge to finally complete the new blog engine, but during the day i just can’t get myself to concentrate and code. That’s why i thought it was strange that yesterday after doing nothing all day in the night suddenly i started to code like crazy (rewriting the user class from scratch and stuff). So today i decided to test it, and the first experiment proved successful already: although all day i didn’t feel like coding (i tried) and was watching Fairy Tail all the time instead, now that it’s past eleven pm, suddenly my will and energy to fight code.

So i start. (The only problem is, tomorrow i’ll have to get up a bit earlier than usual so that i can get back from Kyoto on time for the afternoon japanese class…)

Things i learnt today

November 1, 2010
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First: no Western Union in Japan. Okay, that’s a bit of over-exaggerating, because it’s available in Japan, just only around Tokyo and Keihanshin (京阪神: Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe), not in the countryside like Hikone. Or Nagoya. This is somewhat surprising considering that in my hometown of less than thirty thousand you can find a WU agent without problem.

Second: oranges are durable. I had three oranges in my fridge for over half a year, and they were still edible, except for one being paper dry. Made my breakfast (i forgot to buy cereal yesterday and didn’t feel like eating sandwiches).

Third: related to the first, a new word: 国際送金サービス. I had to explain somehow what WU was supposed to be to people who never even heard of it.

Fourth: working out for an hour with only two oranges and water in your stomach is fun.

Thanks for your attention.

Law of Ueki and Fairy Tail first impressions

October 31, 2010
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I needed something to watch. I need the mood to watch Tudors, i need time to watch Hustle, and everything else is just one episode a week—not to mention Bleach and Naruto are more of “professional interest” than of entertainment… I stopped watching them both ages ago, now i only quality check our hungarian fansubs for them…

So i looked around and started watching two series that seemed interesting. First is the Law of Ueki. Back when it was running i suggested that we sub it, but yet i didn’t get to watch it. The green hair of Ueki and his power to make trees out of trash seemed very interesting. Too bad so far (after six episodes) the series is simply dumb. Ueki is pretty much the only normal character, everyone else is either frickin’ annoying (see Mori Ai, which is a nice name (Forest Love) by the way for the “manager” of a tree technique user) or way too dumb to be funny. I’ll go on watching, but if it will be this stupid all the way, Ueki’s story will be the first series i actually drop…

On the other hand, Fairy Tail rules. I’m not reading the manga (yet), so don’t come at me with how it’s different or better or whatever. The anime rocks for sure.