Everything that doesn’t fit into any other category.
A touching documentary about how an inspirational home-room teacher teaches his grade 4 primary school class to be happy:
I find it fairly difficult to remember what it was like to be a child. All of my childhood memories feel like a distant dream. I can remember the feelings, but very few of the details.
via JapanProbe.
This is probably my favourite salad:
I just had it, and it was tops! Maybe I should have taken a picture, but by that time it was gone.
I haven’t posted much recently as I’ve been busy with various things including helping to organise the next Let’s Make Games event and looking into buying a house (at some point).
In other news, it looks like I’ll be moving to Albany for 6 months from around February next year…
Hopefully I’ll be able to work on my second independent title during my time there, and I’ll be able to make it back to Perth for major Let’s Make Games events. đ
Exciting times!
Like swine flu, it’s catchy!:
But I’m not sure that I want to catch it!
I seems that almost all otaku groups in Perth (PAniC, UWAnime, POWA, JAFWA and AniCu) are working together to run a videogames competition this weekend.
Here’s the flyer posted over at PAniC’s website:
It looks like Let’s Make Games will be helping out with some of the retrogaming action. (Phil from JAFWA asked if we could lend a hand and we’re very happy to! The more games events in Perth the better!)
Being an independent software developer is an interesting business. If working on products that you intend to bring to market (eg. rather than contract work), it’s best to reach as wide an audience as possible. That means being fairly pragmatic regarding which platforms you develop for.
I have a strong preference for GNU/Linux for personal use, but it’s important to be able to develop and test under Windows. I’ve also been thinking about getting an Apple computer for cross-platform testing and possible iPhone development.
I’ve previously kept work and personal computer usage very separate. While at work, I would never check personal email, use social networking sites, post to my blog, or browse the Internet. I would just check my personal email and my newsreader when I was at home. This was great as it helped me maintain some distance between my professional and personal relationships and forced my to divide my time appropriately. I would use my Windows work laptop for work and my Ubuntu home desktop for everything else.
I resigned from my position at Interzone Entertainment a few months ago, and I’m finding it fairly impractical to maintain seperate work and personal computers when I’m working for myself and I need to develop across multiple platforms. I ran into the following problems:
I figured that it’s probably better to have my main work machine be the laptop since I could take it with me anywhere. Since I greatly prefer Ubuntu, I installed it on the laptop as half of a clunky dual-boot setup before finally just wiping the machine and installing Ubuntu standalone (with Windows Vista running in a VirtualBox VM). Unfortunately this still wasn’t the answer: even with Ubuntu installed there was a lot to setup, especially if I wanted data synchronisation with my desktop machine (which is more comfortable to use).
At this point it really hit home how much of a mess account/data management and cross-platform development/usage are. There are so many kludges (desktop password keyrings, virtual machines, meta-accounts, etc.) to try and make it work, and no practical ways for people to really manage all their own data on their own machines, and still engage in all the Internet has to offer (especially social networking).
I started trying to determine how best to consolidate my various accounts and data (spread across multiple email address, IM accounts, social networks etc.) and I’ve come to the fairly disappointing realisation that the only practical way to have single sign-on access to easy-to-administer services accessible whenever/whereever I want it… is to use integrated, externally-hosted, proprietary services (such as those offered by Google).
Now there are heaps of open-source programs that I can use to run my own web, mail, chat, and other services. However, they don’t provide everything I need and there are a lot of deal-breakers:
It’s great to see Google’s utilisation of open standards (IMAP, XMPP, Jingle, etc.) and provision of them as well (OpenSocial, GoogleWave), but it’s distressing that we’re still very far from competative FOSS web services that could take on Google/Yahoo/Microsoft and popular social networking sites. There are many fantastic standalone projects (Apache, courier, ejabberd, laconi.ca, WordPress, etc.), but no cohesive solution. Moreover, it seems that people are far less fervent about it (I get the impression that a lot of people who will run nothing buy FOSS on their home machine will happily use youtube, facebook, and twitter).
When Windows was the closed system on every desktop, Linux offered a valid FOSS alternative (and packaged distributions made it accessible). When everyone is using closed remote services, I hope that there are comparable packaged open source alternative: a standards-based, federated, web-services option that you can host wherever you want (on a remote host or on your own server).
In the meantime, I’m probably going to use Google services and some sort of social networking aggregator while trying out (and maybe helping to develop) promising alternatives.
I changed my dual-boot (Ubuntu 8.10, Windows Vista Ultimate) Dell XPS M1330 laptop to a single boot machine running Ubuntu 9.04 with Windows Vista in a VirtualBox 3.0.0 VM (using 1GB RAM and 40GB of HDD space).
After installing Guest Additions I have Vista running well at fullscreen. (I tried Integrated mode, but it feels a little messy to me.) As expected, the early Direct3D support is rather slow, but I’m not too concerned. I’m mostly interested in running different browsers and FlashDevelop without the kludge of dual-booting.
I came across this fantastic acoustic cover of “Hybrid Rainbow” by The Pillows:
There are a whole bunch of pillow covers (har har) on YouTube. Many are in response to their latest promotion/competition, described on their English website as:
Celebrating âthe pillows 20th Anniversary Yearâ titled âLATE BLOOMER SERIESâ and the live at Budoukan, we will be holding the Copy Band Event to be aimed at the pillowsâ fans in all over the world!!
Basically, they posted a video to YouTube letting people know that the best covers posted as a response will be featured at an upcoming live concert to which the cover group will also win tickets (and some travels costs).
They are known internationally (mostly due to their music being featured on FLCL), so I wonder if there will be many entries from outside of Japan.
Is anyone planning on going to the Supanova Pop Culture Expo this weekend?
I went last time and quite enjoyed the cosplay competition. It’s about people wanting to share something they love, and passionately working to do so. Even if their costumes don’t quite turn out, there’s a supportive crowd that appreciates their participation and recognises their accomplishments.
Update: Didn’t end up going. Too busy.
