Are you a fan of SBS Insight in Australia? Their Big Sell episode on internet shopping just went to air, and they're asking for your input into what you've bought online.
I checked "electronic goods", "books", "music" and "other". Was surprised "services" wasn't an option.
For those in Singapore, I'm not referring to the transport company.
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The first double digit episode of Gurren Lagann and progress seems to have stalled in solving some issues. At least they kicked arse again, quite literally this time.
Plot: Having rescued Nia from her cryogenic chamber thingy, Simon slumps back into depression given he feels personally responsible for his brother's passing. They're confronted by Adiane, one of the Spiral King's generals, but a combination of stalling tactics and ultimately getting their Dai-Gurren ship working enough again leads them to temporary victory. Not that it matters much to Simon.
Art: Lots of really nice clouds. I love clouds, it's why Sola was such an enjoyable (though sad) anime, and why I've always wanted a super wide angle Tokina lens for my D60. I heart clouds, and they provided some really beautiful backdrops.
Relationships: Strained. Despite seemingly having a crush on her in the previous episode, Simon's resurgent cold and distant emotional state renders him largely oblivious to her. Yoko's anger at what she sees as a talking down by Nia when she tries to apply logic to an emotional state only makes things more frosty.
Tactics: A gigantic Gunmen ship's best weapon isn't its artillery arsenal (or Manchester United), but the feet it walks on and their ability to kick. Not roundhouse kick though, that's a Chuck Norris trademark. Was the Chuck Norris Facts meme around in 2008? It was, wasn't it? UPDATE: Seems as early as 2007 according to this post I wrote which features FreeBSD, Mikuru and Chuck Norris. Really.
Technology: Despite being an advanced piece of technology, Dai-Gurren can seemingly be disabled and kick started by having a spaghetti bundle of power cords plugged in again. Reminds me of my DIY Sim Lim Square machine.
Secondary Characters: Coco is a good cook. Coco is awesome :).
Backfire: Despite realising she's a princess and daughter of their sworn enemy, her interrogation at the dinner table ends up being more of a language lesson for the relatively innocent Nia, and a comedic break from this otherwise heavy episode. We learn more when she confronts Adiane on the deck of Dai-Gurren.
Explanations: The reason she was in a cryogenic status pod thing was what we probably all expected – she was abandoned. As such, we can only assume the Spiral King will continue to hunt them down again.
Pride: Kamina never stood down from a fight, and seemingly the Spiral King's cronies, pawns, generals or whoever they are… are no different.
Conclusions: Simon is still understandably upset, but so much so that his fleeting interest in Nia has seemingly disappeared. The rest of the crew of Dai-Gurren seem to have warmed to her though, owing to the applause and happy faces after the retreat of their enemies.
Hope Simon can forgive himself soon.
So now OpenOffice.org has been donated to Apache, what now?
First, I like to think I admit when I'm wrong. When Oracle bought Sun Microsystsms, I wrote what it could mean for OpenOffice.org (OOo) in 2009:
OpenOffice.org is a real wildcard. One could potentially see Oracle leverage OOo against Microsoft, or perhaps they could pull a Novell and instead fork it into an independent stream and an Oracle branded product that could use groupware Oracle develops. The possibilities are extremely intriguing.
Obviously I misjudged Larry Ellison's priorities. It's pretty clear now Oracle only really bought Sun for Java and Solaris. As I said on my post about Singapore's president, unsurprising though disappointing that they let OOo stall.
The news of OOo donation wouldn't necessarily be interesting in and of itself, but last year many (possibly most) of the OOo team left Oracle after feeling unease in the direction and future of the project under new management, and formed the Document Foundation to develop their own fork in the form of LibreOffice (LO).
LO has come a long way in these intervening months. The core applications have received cosmetic tweaks, and under the covers performance has been drastically improved. I speak from experience, my ThinkPad X40 could barely load the later versions of OOo, but LO not only runs but runs surprisingly fast. They deserve a huge amount of credit for this.
Well it seems Ellison or the powers-that-be at Oracle called their bluff. Taking to hear their concerns about freedom, not only have they released OOo from their corporate control, but have gone one step further and released it to the Apache Foundation who's licence is more permissive than the GPL LO adopted.
It's hard to see how this will pan out. While LO has most of the talent and has replaced OOo in bleeding edge distributions such as Fedora and Arch, I'd wager an overpriced licence for Microsoft Office that most large installation bases with more conservative CTOs are still on OOo.
Ultimately what it'll come down to is how well New OOo is maintained, and whether they'll be able to capture back some of that lost mindshare. LO are already organising conferences, and have removed most of the OOo branding from their apps. Wait, I'd better say applications or Apple will sue me ;).
I know I'll be sticking with LO for now; I philosophically prefer the Apache, BSD and MIT licences to the GPL, but they have the better product and some real momentum that has been lacking in this otherwise stagnant and uninteresting field of software.
Not all of this Gurren Lagann episode was a downer!
Plot: Team DAI-GURREN are understandably mopey and upset after losing Kamina, but especially Simon who blames himself for his death. Understandably, despite their comfortable new home morale isn't terribly high. Still, a series of severe malfunctions (presumably caused by his mood) lead Simon to make a discovery that you can tell will be pivotal to the course of the series.
Science fiction: The series further morphs into science fiction now the primary setting is their new ship. They have a full crew. The layout of the bridge, the crew quarters, the shuttle bay (or would it be the Gunmen bay?), even the whoosh sounds of the doors are all eerily Star Trek-esque. Only the round portholes and the external views of the turret guns look turn-of-the-century.
Settings: Their new ship (itself a Gunmen, as almost everything is), but we also get a glimpse into The Enemy Lair of the Spiral King, complete with drill-shaped chandeliers and mood lighting. When his minions leave and he's left to ponder his next move, the ground turns transparent revealing a gigantic fortress. Or maybe they're buildings. Or maybe they're part of an even larger ship or Gunmen, don't know yet.
Perspective: For people used to living underground in drilled out holes, the idea of having proper furniture and rooms would be pretty amazing. Yoko mentioned it was pouring with rain outside, yet she was still able to perform target practice in the ship's firing range, and have a hot meal. Still, none of this luxury really means anything if you're not in a positive mood to appreciate it.
Relationships: Simon is understandably upset and feels personally responsible, though he isn't the only one. Tensions are running high, and barbs are thrown. Surprisingly I thought, Yoko does little to console him; perhaps she resents him as well?
Acquaintances: The one shining, happy moment comes when Simon unlocks and frees a potential new friend, Nia. Assuming their visuals represent the same ideas as Star Trek or most other science fiction, we can assume the box she came from was a cryogenic freezer that kept her in suspended animation, though we don't know why. Who is she?
Rain metaphor: Just as horror films have to be shot at night, episodes where emotions are running high because of personal loss must be set in depressing weather, to be magically lifted when moods change and when someone special arrives in your life who makes it all better.
Love interest: Well, maybe just a crush at this point, though it was developed quickly enough that he was willing to defend her with his life. And for someone who was clearly interested in someone else, Yoko's reaction was surprising ;).
Team colours: Much as Gurren Lagann adopted their signature red and yellow, so too did their captured Dai-Gurren ship. Much nicer than the grey, I have to say.
Heart tugging: When my mum moved on, the last thing I wanted was to be told things by people, even if they meant well. Rossiu sees Simon and wants to help, but Yoko tells him to stay away. It was… refreshing. If this were a Western series, no doubt there would have been an intervention with many people saying its important to express feelings over and over again.
Conclusion: In the Gurren Lagann universe a week had past since Kamina's passing, though everyone is still understandably shaken and sad, which was a bit of a downer to watch. Still, the way they introduced Nia's to Simon towards the end after all he'd been through was so sweet, and her ability to block a sudden attack was a hell of a cliffhanger, so they've got me hooked for the next episode!
I don't suppose anyone makes Nia figures, do they? ^^;
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Dr Tony Tan has been voted Singapore’s seventh president, in a race that had just 7,269 votes separating him and runner-up Dr Tan Cheng Bock. [..] 35.2% of 2.1 million voters threw their support behind the former deputy prime minister. ~ Straits Times
Disappointing, if unsurprising.
The photo is a random one from a memory card I found in a drawer. Singapore in 2010.
Starting our second week of Gurren Lagann with an episode I couldn't summarise any more than this… any less wouldn't do it justice.
Plot: After setting themselves up for something seemingly even more impossible than anything they'd attempted before, they go right ahead and do it.
Design: We see into the bridge of the Arc-Gurren battleship in more detail this episode. As a boy brought up on Star Trek, Firefly fascinated me with its dystopian, retro-new designs for the ships and bridges, and Gurren Lagann (the series) takes this to an extreme. They really do appear turn-of-the-century inside with bulkheads and hull plates that look as though they've been lifted from old submarines, along with high tech computer equipment. I'm a nerd, I admit this is one aspect of the series I'm really, really enjoying!
Art: Some of the most beautiful of the series so far. The night and early morning scenes with the lights amongst the greenery with the wild desert and volcanoes in the background was a powerful image, and this coming from someone who's knows diddly squat about design, art and cinematography. It pains me they haven't released this series on HD media!
Tactics: A confident, goofy tongue wag is essential for putting enemies on notice. Also makes a snappy comeback to a less than snappy comeback, and adds an air of sophistication to your dialogue!
Explanations: Anger and despair are powerful enough emotions that a Gunmen consisting of a tiny head and little else can merge with and commander the largest Gunmen they'd ever seen.
Relationships: Still feeling insecure enough about his abilities, coupled with an event he witnessed that's preoccupying his mind, Simon is incapable of performing his part of their plan. Reassuring words from his blood brother gave him the courage to do it… eventually.
Unexpected: Kamina's apparent death understandably drove Simon to the brink, before overhearing his reassuring voice on the comm. They make one last final stand in Gurren Lagann and kick some serious evil guy arse, to afford ourselves the use of relevant terminology. Needless to say, we're lead into a sense of security.
Love interest: After much innuendo in the first week of episodes, a love triangle develops and the result of said is immediately used as a primary plot device. To be honest, it felt a little tacked on and rushed as a result, meaning the impact at the end was blunted (okay, only a little). Still, their embrace was extremely sweet, even if the character I relate to didn't feel the same.
Heart tugging: The lifeblood, the fire, the passion of the Gurren Lagann team is extinguished, and a potential love is lost. When the episode finished, I had to turn the screen off and go for a walk. I've lost real loved ones (as we all have), and I've been moved this much from an… anime? Nuts to those who've criticised this series.
Quotes: "Don't believe in the you who believes in me. Don't believe in the me who believes in you. Believe in the you who believes in yourself".
Conclusion: They have their movable fortress which only six episodes ago was the distant, menacing spawning point for all the Gunmen that terrorised our heroes in their home towns underground. Now they really are ready to take on the world, in the memory of their fallen comrade. Peace.
After several years of self-imposed KDE exile, I'm back and loving it :).
KDE and I go a long way back. When I first started using Red Hat Linux 5.0 in primary school I was fascinated by the concept of having multiple installable graphical environments instead of just one, and used Anaconda to install Gnome and KDE at the same time. I quickly settled on KDE because I thought the UI was the nicest, and it felt the most feature complete.
In 2006 (above) when I started experimenting with FreeBSD on the desktop as well as on headless servers, I blogged about my experience with getting those maddening xorg.conf files working , and installing KDE from the ports system. I was living in Malaysia at the time and we were all obsessed with The Melancholoy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which naturally made its way into everything I was blogging about at the time!
In 2008 I also briefly ran KDE with Openbox, this time when I was obsessed with Clannad:
That’s why I love having a blog compared to anything else, you can go back in time and see what you were doing all those years ago. ^_^
At the same time I was also trying Xfce however, and with the release of KDE 4.0 which was more unstable than the Windows OSs I’d left behind, I gradually moved over to it, then to Gnome. I justified my decision by claiming most of my software was GTK+, and it made sense using a DE that was too.
Fast forward to 2011, and something fateful happened. Walking into my first class for a semester, I noticed our tutor was running KDE 4.6 on a ThinkPad X60, the next model up from my X40. Not only that, it was running fast!
That night, I went home and installed the KDE spin of Fedora onto my venerable ThinkPad X40. I knew Fedora had a (in my opinion an undeserved) reputation for treating KDE as a second class citizen, but it’s the distribution I was most comfortable with and love how easily it can be configured with SELinux and whole drive encryption.
In an O'Reilly Nutshell (see what I did there?), I was blown away. KDE only took marginally longer to boot than Xfce, and included all the graphical bells and whistles. I was reaKquainted with Konqueror, Konsole, Kate, KNews, amaroK and the venerable KDEGames. I installed KDevelop and instantly remembered why I thought it was the finest F/OSS IDE. I was able to install VLC and Opera without worrying about dependencies!
Other than performance, perhaps most surprising still was just how well my GTK apps like Firefox, the Gimp, Inkscape and LibreOffice (with a little tweaking) looked with the Oxygen-GTK theme. Aside from the lack of subtle gradient in their title bars and a few other minor visual tells, they were otherwise indistinguishable.
A lot of things have changed since the time I used KDE 3.x, but I’m gradually getting my bearings back. No doubt you’ll be seeing plenty of posts on the subject in the coming weeks.
Ah Qt, how I missed you :’)
What a month. We had HP retiring their PC and Palm hardware divisions, Michael Dell being smug about it, Steve Jobs retiring as CEO of Apple, a tutor from my technology uni saying broadband in Australia is fast enough, and now we learn that CmdrTaco is leaving Slashdot?
I started Slashdotting relatively late in the game (though I did get one of the last 6 digit UIDs!), but it's been an essential part of my mornings ever since. In a sea of rigged, inflated, ego driven news aggregation sites that are as fleeting as they are difficult to read without your brains turning to mush, Slashdot has been a pleasant, mildly ego driven news aggregation site with some fascinating conversations over the years.
Apple will live on without Steve, HP will survive without their PC division, and Slashdot will still be churning out stories without CmdrTaco. Whether it'll ever be the same is another question.
Thanks for all the hard work Rob. Hope we gave you enough fish.
