Fred is a Moose, he hangs out on the IRC channel so much that anyone would think he is a hikki. He is prone to somewhat disjoint statements.

Www.manga.org is almost certanly always stoned but is trying out the lead-weighted box of biscuits all right. I got them on the wikipedia page for years.

Another winning ejaculation from Fred was:

One needs not justify ones assertions! One simply cries “beer!” and it is okay

As you can see, it is very hard to argue with such logic.

Element Client

Perfect World is actually a Chinese game,, and while reasonably pretty, the client program is a mess. Porting to Japanese was also half-assed, for example, the uninstaller has Chinese messages in, the game uses Chinese fonts and the compass has the Chinese character for East rather than the Japanese one.

It also displays some of the usual Chinese quality, it crashes for no reason. The crash report thing tries to post bugs to the Chinese site too, Oops!

Dangerous Places.

458,346 for some reason, flying over this will crash your game. In my case, I was probably flying around 60 and it just vanished. Instantly and irrevocably, restarting would die on joining the world. Only completely re-installing the game cured it. Awesome!

Somewhere between clip 30 and the finish, near clip 13, same thing, but that isn’t usually permanent, just an annoying restart.

PW Japan support.

Don’t get me started. Their “otoiawase” web page is borderline useless. You can’t follow up on a reply, it drops your post randomly meaning you have to retype it, and all the replies come out of tin.
But that’s OK because their support department is also useless. When you feed them a line like “My character crashes on TWO different machines running different OSes.” They tell you to try again but reduce all the graphics quality to a minimum. Rinse and repeat, then check the files. Then they blame the OS and tell you to run DXDiag. At no time do they actually read the complaint.

After wasting 3 days with their idiot support, who fortunately dare not put their name to their replies, it turns out that downloading a new client (5 minutes) and completely uninstalling the old one (with Chinese errors!) re-installing the new client, re-patching it solves whatever problem the “check ALL the files” clearly misses.

Atogaki.

Now, will re-installing solve the problem of the mutant skellybones?

サン電子 Rooster G8.0 (SC-RS810G)

rooster G8 home page
IOS used is RS810G-3.00, May 29 2009 17:01:51

We bought one of these to run some gear in a shop. A moderately large supermarket. We actually have a number of their earlier model deployed
and for people considering a wireless (as in HSDPA) router, here is a quick review.

One word summary “don’t.” Unfortunately, the choice for HSDPA routers is very limited and so sometimes you have to buy these things. For one machine, an HSDPA card in a pcmcia/usb adaptor is a much better bet.

If I find a better HSDPA router, as in one that works. The roosters will be jumped on.

Nice things about it.

Amazingly enough, they actuall mention that there might be some GNU stuff in there, a grand total of 1 paragraph on page 1. This is a big improvement.

Well, the box is nice, it’s brown and made of cardboard. The manual is small and unedifying in that unique way that manuals are, where you read it and arrive at the end wondering who the main characters were and if Hollywood will make a movie out of it.

The actual router manages to avoid being a shapeless piece of ugly black plastic by being roughly betamax shape with some blinkenlights on the ugly black plastic. And unlike its predecessor, it doesnt crash when you eject the pcmcia card!

Not so nice things about it.

Where to start? It would be unfair to compare it to a Yamaha RT router since Yamaha routers cost less, work longer, harder, better, are not unstackable shapeless lumps of ugly black plastic, have a better interface, (telnet/ssh in English as well) different colour plastic and a feature set far in excess of the rooster (bgp/ospf/radius/firewall and so on). If they supported wireless cards, we’d have 200 of them instead of roosters. No, that would be unfair.

So that’s what we will do. Fair is for losers.

• Telnet interface speaks SJIS and only SJIS. (Yamaha is euc/sjis/ascii!)
• Firewall features are awesome. (Yamaha firewall is merely excellent.)
• Mail account settings are useless. (Yamaha mail notification works.)
• Logging, it claims syslog but you can’t set the facility.
• The awesome firewall features.
• Virtual servers cannot route to different ports. (No such limitation.)
• Reboot for even the most insignificant changes. (Yamaha is a real router!)
• Dynamic dns support. (netvolante DNS.)
• VPN …

Admitted, Yamaha firewall/nat/masquerade doesn’t like bit-torrent and skype but
that can be fixed by blocking those annoyances. If you have to use bit-torrent to download those american tv shows, it may run out of nat slots and melt.

In theory, the virtual server lameness is dealable with, most of the 400 plus places only have 1 machine and thus doing things like port 10000 to port 3389 on machine A, port 10001 to port 3389 on machine B, is unnessary. But the best solution is a pcmcia adaptor and an HSDPA card per box. That’s how good the roosters are.

To clarify the awesome firewall. More often than not, the rooster will decide that return packets such as responses to HTTP requests, DNS queries, are evil hackers and block them. The solution is to reboot or disable the firewall completely.

Sorry, but there actually is one nice thing about them.

The hardware watchdog works.

Afterword.

Zoolook.

If this gives the impression that the writer doesn’t like Rooster routers, that is entirely intentional.

All USB Flash are created different. But some are more different than others.

USB flash comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, SLC, MLC dual and quad channel. But it’s all much of a muchness when trying to do stuff. What bothers me is the erroneous speed claims.

Since I boot off USB a lot (windows xp embedded) it helps to have blazingly fast flash or a really slow brain. A particular tool I like is the
Flash Drive Tester
which will write all over your flash and tell you how fast it did it.

Sony Pocketbit USM16GLX.

No silly plastic cap to lose, which is a plus. However, its speed claims appear to be… shall we say optimistic. The blurb sheet that comes with the flash says.

Survey says, write 13, read 25.

Fortunately, for this particular usage, the capacity (windows PE SDI tools are dumb and cant do smart filesystem copies.) is what counts. The performance is mediocre. The TDK (insert packaging rage) writes at 15~17 and reads around 22~24. but it runs clonezilla and that does do smart filesystem copies.

I went on business day. Not that many maids.
Here is a brief run of things, while I remember.

• Cat Shit One. – Only set in the 90’s in Afghanistan (Camels this time) Anima
• Eden of the East. – On Noitamina. Juiz
• Valkyrie Chronicles. – BS11 April 11, Saturday 2300~ (Based on the Sega game).
• Queens’ Blade. – Tits out for the lads. Zeppelin Tits with swords, the anime.
• Shangri-la. – Girl with boomerang. April start.
• Hanasakeru Seishonen. – NHK BS2. Naive girl “Kajika” has to choose a husband.
• Redline. – Loud, insane racing with huge explosions. Quite silly.
• Chrome Shelled Regios. – “Grab the sword of glory!” As the Kadokawa flyer says.
• Natsu no Arashi. (School Rumble author.) Time travelling girls, chaos, the usual.
• Kobato. (CLAMP) NHK 2009 Autumn. Levels of cuteness that will make you ill. Just think, CLAMP have been together for 20 years now.
• Summer Wars. – Madhouse. The heroine in her onepiece looks a bit like Rin Ogawa from another of their titles, Rideback. Looks like fun.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 1st. – Just goes to prove that magical girls didn’t die out with Pretty Sammy.
• Zamd – why pay the playstation store when you can watch it on tv from april.
• Eureka Seven movie. Pocket full of rainbows April 25
  h2. Cat Shit One.

Motofumi Kobayashi writes what you might call military fiction. 5 volumes so far.
The trailer they showed was more of a 90’s desert storm one, but the original comics address ‘Nam. Featuring animals instead of humans.

Sogovision.

No goggles 3D. It’s pretty freaky as you walk past the screen and Sakura jumps out at you.

Other.

• There was a gainax stand. I didn’t pay any attention to it except to note the absence of that eternal re-write. Evangelion.
• Satellite completely deny that “Valerian” (Time Jam, whatever) existed at all. Their new chew-toy is “Basquash”. Wherein we begin to wonder if Kawamori has lost his mind.
• Gintama still rocks.