IT’S MORE likely than you think …

Despite the meme-like nature of this post’s title, this is an incredibly serious topic. The prospect of China getting a functional FOIA bill is the kind of news that could give pundits employed by US corporate media an aneurysm.

For readers not in the know about media, the US Freedom of Information Act is what lets reporters get access to city spending records, arraignments, mug shots and everything you ever wanted to know about L. Ron Hubbard.

Now that I have your attention, might I mention the bill is already passed? It was signed into law last year by Wen Jiabao and took effect this May 1. Now that in itself is nothing special. China passes tons of bills on a variety of topics every year: most of them are lip service.

Continue reading FOIAs? In my China?

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THIS NEW site design does not work in Internet Explorer 6. It does not work in that browser at all. It might work in Internet Explorer 7, but I have neither it nor a Microsoft Windows install with which to test.

For those not familiar with Interweb history, the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 browser was release in mid-2001. The browser contained few updates except light touch-ups to the CSS core of Internet Explorer 5, which was released in early 1999.

Think about that for a moment.

Continue reading May your Internet Explorer burn in hell

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IAPOLOGIZE for the lack of updates lately: the queue of things to get up is growing disgusting.

Just to give you and idea what is coming:

• Review of C&E’s Fengshen Bang game for the Famicom, complete with a personally tagged NSFE set.
• Several packages of PCF fonts for Linux, each including BDF descriptors. Includes over 100 fonts from DOS font TSR programs, video games and BIOS rips of old PC hardware. Perfect for an xterm font on an EeePC.
• A couple short stories not at all based on real life events … One is written and needs editing, the other is in my head and needs writing.
• A Python version of WineLocale with a better GUI. The package builder is already confirmed as working and will add all fonts and locales needed to your machine straight from apt — meaning no more dependency on Vera Sans YuanTi!
• An updated version of DerEditor with all the latest data ElSallia.com user Markliujy kindly helped track down. This includes class changes and class graphics, spell stats, terrain bonuses and penalties for each class and the ability to edit item prices. Also a new wide GUI layout to make sure the bottom is not cut off in low resolutions.

Continue reading Delays, delays …

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WE WENT out the last week of April to a chain of old neighborhoods east of Qianmen that are scheduled for demolition. Some of the homes are just common homes; some of them were the residence of relatives of Qing Dynasty nobles; all of them are coming down.

It took several days to pick through the 4GB of shots, clean them up and get them up on deviantART, but I finished the effort on Monday. I am pretty happy with the series, an it is the first time I have primarily photographed city life, and also the first time I have done so much free-hand work with my new Nikon.

Thumbnails of the series follow the jump. For full resolution photos, check the gallery on Flickr.

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IHAVE compiled and released a patch acpi-cpufreq.ko module for Hardy Heron kernel 2.6.24-17, which is currently in the repository for proposed updates. You still need to install any Linux-PHC initialization scripts, but this will help any fresh Gutsy to Hardy upgraders or Hardy installers who accidentally grabbed the proposed kernel and found their PHC dead.

You can grab the patched module from this Ubuntu Forums post. The same thread also has a module for kernel 2.6.24-16.

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APPARENTLY THE good people at PlayGeneration have taken it upon themselves to help with distributing Sonic Eraser. They are also selling the King Colossus, Pulseman and Battle Mania 2 translations by MIJET, as well as Neverending (NE) Soft Team’s Shuihu Fengyun Zhuan (水浒风云传).

While I am flattered my translation of such a shitty game would ever appear on cart, a complimentary copy would have been nice.

It would be a real shame if someone were to e-mail SEGA of Japan about two of pirate versions of its games being sold at most likely what appears to be without license.

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THOSE WHO have been stalking me might remember Manufactured the “album” byuu and I made back in the earlier part of this decade. After six years of being unavailable on the Internet in any form, I have decided to re-release our monstrosity.

Last year when the Der Langrisser translation project drew to a close, byuu and I talked about revisiting the concept and doing better songs. At the time, we were really just screwing around. The album is incredibly unbalanced, and you can figure out precisely how we learned to put this together if you listen from the first track to the last.

At the moment, the script we used to generate the songs is missing in action, but I will try to explain what we did below.

Continue reading The best music in the universe

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AFTER CONSIDERABLE trials, I finally have a new lens for my Nikon. This gets me past the limits of the Nikkor 18-55mm kit lens it came with and puts me up to the 210mm range, meaning it almost equals the 10x optical zoom of my old Sony Mavica CD-1000.

The Mavica’s optical zoom was near legendary as point-and-shoot cameras go, and I’m glad to have something that can get me into that range again since I enjoy dabbling in macro photography.

Endless thanks go out to scorpio5361, the best Taobao seller ever and a really good guy in general. It’s hard to imagine a seller going to the lengths this guy did to make us happy.

Continue reading New lens is a Sigma

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IF YOU have been watching the torrent sites, you may have seen a “Windows XP for Asus EEE PC” floating around. Its first edition came out in January, but a new “2.0″ was released this week. For those reluctant to sail over to a certain bay of pirates, I will summarize.

The “EeeXP” carries a 45MB RAM footprint one booted and requires only 289MB of disk space, bringing it into the range of Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. Not only that, but it promises boot times so fast that the XP splash screen can only scroll its blue loading bar once before displaying the desktop.

Seeking to reinstall my cluttered Windows XP virtual disk that was up to a whopping 5GB, I decided to give this one a whirl using innotek’s VirtualBox on my clunky old Gateway laptop. The results are staggering.

Continue reading Howto: Use EeePC XP in VirtualBox

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IRETIRED my Sony Mavica CD-1000 this month — just in case I had not told you already. The Mavica was my camera from 2000 to early this year, and it was really showing its age.

While it did take some great pictures over the years, it was very limited. Manual focus did not really work, and auto-focus always chose the wrong subject for every image. My first three years with the camera were spent learning how to trick it into doing what it should have been smart enough to do.

Still, it had some incredible mileage. I filled more than 40 CDs with its images, and still have a spindle of an extra 30 Mavica CDs left over. Unfortunately, since the advent of SD and CF cards, those CDs are increasingly difficult to find, and lugging around a camera with a built-in CD burner just shows what a relic the device was.

Continue reading Retiring the old Mavica

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