Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

In Japan – Day 1 & 2

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

These are our longest yet shortest days. We left Minneapolis at around 3:00 PM. Of course, with everyone shuffling their carry-on bags like crazy, we never get to take off sn time. Then we stay in the air for 12 long hours. By the time we land, the clock has advanced 26 hours. We landed at around 5:00 PM the next day. This trip is now getting harder and harder. Aging sucks.

Our first destination is my grandmother’s. I’m writing this entry in a bit of a rush, not feeling completely comfortable operating someone else’s PC. I’m going to have some major catch-up writing to do soon.

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So close to take-off

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

It’s almost 9 hours to the flight time.  =)  Ittekimasu, everyone.

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Browser Wars is the wrong forcus

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

There once was a holy war between Netscape (Navigator) and Microsoft (Internet Explorer).  Opera was on the sideline, along with bunch of others.  Since then, Netscape has died, but other power house have come up.  The focus of the war has shifted this time.  The original war was fought on the basis of proprietary feature richness.  This time, it’s fought on JavaScript raw speed and Web Standard compatibility.  It is a great example of the competition creating very healthy environment for progress.

However.

There are significant number of users on the internet who are still using the ancient browser from Browser War I era, namely Internet Explorer 6.  I can’t discount the users of this blog—I checked out that IE6 can’t even display the text of this web site.  (I lol’ed)  Besides, there are less than 6% readers who use IE on this site—15% out of them being IE6.  Some of those are probably me checking this site.  But there are other sites I take care of, where there are much larger number of IE6 users.  And those are the sites that I can’t really push the use of more modern browser for various reasons.  In the business world, there are so many companies who are still hanging on to their good ol’ (ick) IE6 because of their legacy web apps compatibility.  The war needs to be fought on this front.

The tenacious survival of IE6 is making my life, and thousands upon thousands of web designers’ lives much harder than they need to be.  And here is my little push: I will not officially support IE6 (or any IE for now) on personal and semi personal sites I build.

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Happy birthday, Stravinsky

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

I just noticed that Google today had another Google Doodle.  What stands out the most is the Firebird.  This Firebird was one of three very first CDs I bought back in 1988.  I still like the piece a lot.

Speaking of classical music, I heard on the local news that my college senpai – a fellow graduate 10 years ahead of me – Dan Hege is coming back to the area as Music Director for Wichita Symphony, our local orchestra.  This is a pretty exciting news.  The college I graduated from is very small, never having student count of over 1000.  And I went to see him conduct Wichita Symphony as a guest conductor.  It was an awesome experience.  It sure helped that I was sitting on the second row, and they played a giant piece, Respighi’s Pines of Rome, which I also love.

Now, off to another topic.

My trip to Japan is formulating quite nicely so far.  In the itinerary, we added Enakyo area (including Enakyo Land) for a theme park and onsen hot springs, Gion Matsuri somewhat near our home, to see 2 hours of fireworks, and Adventure World to see Giant Panda, Red Panda, Emperor Penguin, etc.  That should also satisfy my daughter’s request to go to an aquarium while we are there.  If that doesn’t happen, I’m sure we’ll pay a visit to Nagoya Port Aquarium.

Whatever happens, it looks like we’ll be traveling quite a bit.

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When it rains, it pours – part duex

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Although I picked the same title as a post from last month, this one has nothing to do with making fansubbing blunder.  It’s all about Kansas weather.  When it rains here, it literally pours.  And very strong gusts.  Around here, when we have a very sudden evening shower, it often involve some tornadic activities.  In fact, there were several tornado warnings issued in the state this evening, but nothing near my place.

What we had was just very heavy rain, and serious wind.  The news report said up to 90 miles per hour (40 meters per second) of wind gust was unofficially recorded.  That’s a hurricane level wind gust.  That’s some serious wind.

The good thing is, it comes and goes pretty quickly.  The whole thing was over in about three hours or so.

I couldn’t go anywhere in this rain, so I did couple things at home tonight.  One, I worked some on Black Jack episode 50.  I will send this episode to quality check tomorrow.  Two, I made salsa from scratch.

P1010013sMy salsa recipe is very simple.

  • a whole bunch of tomatoes, finely diced/chopped
  • a bunch of cilantro
  • half of an white or yellow onion
  • a can of corn
  • some hot chili pepper to taste, finely chopped
  • a pinch of salt

Couple notes on that.  That’s the recipe I used tonight, but I forgot one ingredients.  I’m missing lime juice.  Yeah, I’m out of limes! Doh!  I sprinkled some red wine vinegar.  It gave a touch of sweetness, which actually went well with the chili pepper of choice for tonight – serrano pepper.  These tiny things have some serious fire.

So, tonight, I had pouring rain outside, and fire in my mouth for a while.  The salsa is still delicious.

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Chrome on Linux

Friday, June 12th, 2009

I’m writing this post using Chrome on Linux.  Not the CrossOver office product, which was simply a packaged version of Windows Chrome on Wine.  I missed the news a week ago that Google released Mac and Linux version of Chrome preview.  This particular copy is running on Ubuntu Jaunty running on Sun VirtualBox.  And Chrome is pretty responsive even in the virtual environment.  So, this is yet another browser I need to keep up with.

I picked up another busy work last night.  After getting excited about css based font loading, I started building my own hand writing font.  It’s pretty fun, but very time consuming.  When I get a chance, I should share how I’m doing that.  Eventually, I want to use that font on this blog.  New FireFox, Opera, and Safari users will be able to see the fun stuff.  I’ve also read that Chrome 2 supports it too.  Chrome 3 beta isn’t supporting the feature—I wonder what’s going on?

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Threaded comments

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

I spent the past 3 hours to threaded comment enabled.  I ended up rewriting the entire comments section of the current theme, while reading the documentation on how to make it happen.  The base theme I was using, Starkers, wasn’t compatible with this yet. The author says “full 2.7 compatibility coming soon,” so maybe I won’t have to go through this pain in the future.

In the mean time, this threaded comment rewrite caused a lot of hassle on to the WYSIWYG comment editor I just installed, so I decided to disable it for now.  You can still use some of the basic HTML tags to format the comments, including bold, italics, underline, links, etc.

Now, I should go apply the same changes to the frostii site.  It’s going to be more hours of pain…

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Too many exciting news, I can't keep up

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Fiat 500 is really coming to US.  Yeah, I’m excited.  I hope Chrysler will bring that car untouched.  I want a car like Lupin’s, not Chrysler 500.

Then, I wasn’t expecting Firefox to release this latest beta.  This one is exciting too.  With this kind of version number (3.5 beta99), I suppose this would be their release candidate candidate.  Their new font support is really exciting to me.  Just like we get to have fun with fonts in our subtitles, we can now have fun with fonts on the web pages.  Ugh, this is really going to show the lack of test my creativity.

Yesterday, I got to help a guy set up the xdccparser plugin for wordpress that I whipped up a while ago.  For one thing, it’ll be fun to see someone else use it too.  Second, it made me realize I need to clean up a lot of the code in it.  Third, I need to build the admin section to that thing, so we can control the whole thing from within wordpress.  I’m hoping to make this available for download soon.

I got behind on my translation again this week. I finally submitted my latest Ippo translation this morning (translation log #733).

A post from couple of days ago generated lots of comments. The content of the comments aside, I saw some opportunities to improve the formatting of the comments section. Also, I saw an opportunity for a plug in I haven’t tried before. I just installed a WYSIWYG editor for the comments. Enjoy. Other changes I’m hoping to put includes:

  • Define a specific formatting for a block quote
  • Make the comment section threaded, including a plugin that enables replies to specific comments, like what I see on this page.

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From Coltrane to Chet

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

OMG.  There are some good jazz fans among WordPress development team.

If WordPress 2.7 was all the fireworks and freshness of John Coltrane, 2.8 is on more cooler, smoother ride, in keeping of the late jazz legend, Chet Baker, making your blogging experience more hassle free every step of the way.

That’s from the video cast that came with the release of the latest version of WordPress, codename Baker.  Yes, the last version was codenamed Coltrane.  Only now did I go back the history, and find out that all of WordPress’ codenames are after the jazz legends, like Ella (Ella Fitzgerals), Miles (Miles Davis), Mingus (Charles Mingus), etc.  It’s pretty exciting to see more jazz loving geeks out there.

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More upgrades

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

I’m seeing some software updates coming up in near future, or just happened.

Opera 10 beta.  I went there, started the download… er, no. “Oops! Bandwidth limit exceeded.” error popped up when I tried the default server picked for me.  No sweat, that’s what the mirrors are for.  I might play around with it if I get any desire for it.  Afterall, there are more Opera users than IE users on this site.

Then, there is the second release candidate of NetBeans, only a week after the first RC.  That’s really getting close to the final release, and I’m pretty excited about that.

Also, WordPress released version 2.8 release candidate over the weekend.  And they said that that will become the final release version if there’s no bugs.  Now, that’s what I’d call a Release Candidate.  Compare that with some high number RC in fansub this year, like RC12  >_<

And one bummer – the latest 3.5 branch nightly build of Firefox isn’t compatible with WordPress.  Ouch.

P.S. (updated 10:10 PM)
I totally missed that Apple announced the official release of Safari 4.  I’m sure I’ll be writing more about it some day.

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