Boy, am I boring. It just occurred to me that I could have captured 24 images of big ugly men and used them in the top rotation for April 1, but it's too late now. Maybe next year.

UPDATE: Or I could have done "24 hours of akanbe".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:55 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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1 And we will now spend the next 365 days trying desperately to purge that idea from your head..

Posted by: David at March 31, 2009 11:02 PM (n/RK7)

2 Or 365 days spent gathering pictures. 

Posted by: metaphysician at April 01, 2009 06:36 AM (h4nEy)

3 Well, the current top is rather hideous (from Negima).

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 01, 2009 09:47 AM (/ppBw)

4 It's a frame from an action sequence. She's rapid-punching an enemy.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 01, 2009 10:54 AM (+rSRq)

5

This is the image Pete was referring to:

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 01, 2009 11:04 AM (+rSRq)

6 Odd, I thought he was talking about the one before that, which looked. . . unfinished and flat.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 01, 2009 11:05 AM (h4nEy)

7 I meant the one with the collage glass in the background.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 01, 2009 11:06 AM (/ppBw)

8

Not one of the best pictures of Evangeline in the series, I must confess.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 01, 2009 11:11 AM (+rSRq)

9 Yes, that's the one. The effect reminds me of this:
 http://ani-nouto.animeblogger.net/wp-images/2009/20090311-02-07.jpg

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 01, 2009 11:22 AM (/ppBw)

10 Yeah, I can see it.  Is that other picture from a notably older anime?

Posted by: metaphysician at April 01, 2009 11:53 AM (h4nEy)

11 I think Pete's picture is from Midori no Hibi, which was about 2004 IIRC.

Posted by: DiGiKerot at April 01, 2009 12:03 PM (M2nPy)

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Sorry for the general dearth of posting around here lately. There just hasn't really been very much to talk about.

My life is not a major source of excitement even at the best of times. And as to anime, I've pretty much run the lot. (Ohnoes! I've reached the end of otakuhood!) I've got the first half of Ouran High School Host Club sitting unopened and unwatched, and I've got the full season of Mushishi likewise unopened and unwatched.

Neither of them are really calling out to me.

The only significant title that's upcoming that I'm looking forward to is Gakuen Alice, and that's scheduled for June 30. (At least we have a date now.)

I've been doing a bit of pacing-in-place by linking to stuff I've seen that was at least mildly interesting, but I don't have anything in the way of original material now. So my apologies, but I fear it's going to keep going like this for a while.

UPDATE: Actually, I'm also looking forward to Ikki Tousen: Dragon Destiny, but we don't have a date on that one yet, either.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:58 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I finally got off my butt tonight and updated the top rotation. Here's the stats:

So the cycle time is 30 days, 15 hours. And I hope you don't get tired of Nanoha, Negima!?, and Ai Yori Aoshi, because between them they're about half of it.

UPDATE: About two months ago, when I embarked on this effort, I got the following email:

Just read you're updating the rotation and wanted to ask as a regular reader if you'd post the titles in a bit higher contrast color to the backgrounds of the pics.  My eyes aren't as good now as in the past and sometimes the titles of the source videos are very difficult to make out.  Thanks and keep up the great writing.

I know that sometimes the show names are very hard to make out, but it isn't really something I want to fix.

I add those captions using Paint Shop Pro 8.1, with a script. The script is all set up to place the caption in the right location, so I edit it (they're stored in text) to change the caption text, and then run it as a batch job to label all the images for a particular show (e.g. all 120 for Ai Yori Aoshi this time). When I came up with this, I did some experimenting with the choices available, and finally decided that my best choice was one which causes each pixel of the text to be set to the inverse of the background:

It worked better than, for instance, a single solid color but it still has the problem of being hard to see if the background is neutral gray or close to it. But it has the great virtue of not requiring me to manually label each image.

Using this approach, plus other automated processing methods I've worked out, I was able to scale and label the entire update this evening in about 3 hours. But if I had to manually label over 600 images, it would have taken forever.

(Um, and don't even think about suggesting other ways of doing it, OK?)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:14 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Curiousity has got the better of me, and I just signed up for Site Meter. On the main page it shows up on the side bar, in the space Pixy provided. On the individual post pages I got rid of the side bar long since, so it's at the very bottom just below the comment entry box.

If anyone notices any problems, please let me know.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:29 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Why not Google Analytics?

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 21, 2009 09:50 PM (/ppBw)

2

Because I didn't know about it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 21, 2009 10:48 PM (+rSRq)

3 I'm going to be providing Urchin 6 on the new servers, at least to select users.  That's Google Analytics (Google bought Urchin), but runs on our own server.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 21, 2009 10:55 PM (PiXy!)

4 Hey, teacher! Please select me!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 21, 2009 11:16 PM (+rSRq)

5 Okey dokey.

It's only $5 a month for a 1000-site license, which is really good value.

I'm not sure if I can get it for virtual machines; if so, then I can easily offer it to everyone.  Otherwise it's 1000 sites per machine, first-come, first-served.  (We don't have 1000 active sites yet, so there's no rush.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 21, 2009 11:19 PM (PiXy!)

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I just ran through Indian Summer looking for top rotation frame grabs. There were some obviously marvelous scenes I couldn't use (e.g. bathhouse) but there are some I'm tempted to use which seem borderline. So below the fold there are six, and I'd like to know whether you think they're too ecchi to be used in the top rotation.

Potentially NSFW, of course.

UPDATE: A commenter over at Don's noted that the images he'd grabbed from my top rotation were heavy on the hooters, as it were. She wondered if that was the norm for anime, or an indication of my tastes. My answer:

Um, both, really.

Over the years my top rotation has varied quite a lot, and there was one period when it had a lot of prepubescent girls in it (Card Captor Sakura, Sugar, Petite Princess Yucie) and I found that watching it made me uncomfortable. If you’re not into anime, you may not know the term “lolicon”, but anyway, it seemed to imply that I was a lolicon.

So the last couple three times I’ve updated the top rotation I’ve tried to stick with frame grabs of characters who were definitely women, not girls.

But it’s also the case that in general women in anime are built rather better (as it were) than real humans nearly ever are. Especially in the kinds of shows I tend to watch, and thus have available for taking frame grabs.

She got me to thinking. The current top rotation has a lot of pictures of Rushuna from Grenadier and Nene from Kirameki Project, and they skew the average, I think. But I'm the one who chose them.

Have I been overcompensating with the hooter shots in the top rotation?

UPDATE: For the next round it's going to be a mix. I've got pictures of Nanoha and Fate from MSLN and A's, and of Pyun and Potaro (who are just too wonderful to leave out) from Punie-chan. And most of the girls from Negima!? are not top heavy.

On the other hand, there's also a lot of pictures of Tina and Taeko from Ai Yori Aoshi, Nerloid Girl from Dokkoida, and Matsuri from Rocket Girls. And most of the girls from Ah, my Buddha are top heavy.

UPDATE: Also Miu, from Kenichi. How could I forget her?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 04:02 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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My net connection went out again, and I had a sneaking suspicion, so I went out on my deck, and there were two Comcast guys messing with the box.

And just like the last two times, they were from the "Home" side of the company, and their records didn't show me having any service, so they disconnected my cable. I told them I had a commercial account but not a home account. They called in, and the #$@$%@$ IDIOTS couldn't find my account.

They had called in to the home company, who couldn't locate my account on the business side. Eventually, after I started getting irate, the guy called the business company directly, who confirmed that I was a customer.

So my connection was out for maybe 20 minutes, and that's why the top rotation picture didn't load.

I have in mind a way to change the site format so that there will be a placeholder there in case access to my server is out. On the other hand, I'm terrified of messing with it, for fear of totally fouling up everything. (bloody CSS...)

Anyway, right now I'm sitting here seething. This stupid business/home bifurcation at Comcast is a pain in the butt, and this is the third time that techs from the Home side have disconnected me because they didn't realize I had a commercial account.

Maybe I'll give Verizon a call and see just how much it would cost me to activate that fiber they dropped in here last year, and see if they'll allow me to run a server. Or at least I could snoop around on their web site for it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:16 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Based on something Ace posted a couple of days ago I gather that one of Pixy's three servers bit the big one, and Pixy has had to shift users onto the other two.

Whatever might be happening, I know that I've been having trouble loading the site today. I'm sure Pixy is on the case, so let's all be patient and understanding.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:36 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I just found this in my refers. My first thought was that it was referer spam, and then I thought maybe it was a search engine.

Actually it's some sort of aggregation site, kind of, and specifically it's a post by someone who knew me in college.

Ah, the PDP-12! Them was the good old days. 4096 12-bit words of core! Linc-tapes! A graphics display! And no hard disc! And the best part of all was that we could use it as much as we wanted, for free.

I did do a version of Pong for it, but I was more proud of my space war program. Our PDP-12 also had 16 analog inputs and 8 of those were hooked to pots. Each player could use two of the pots to control a space ship respectively representing X and Y acceleration. There were 6 rocker switches on the console, and each player got three of them.

One player ran a Klingon ship and the other ran the Enterprise. One rocker switch fired the phasers, another fired a photon torpedo, and the third dropped a mine, which would activate after two seconds. Once activated it would destroy anything that came within range, friend or foe. (Which meant that if you were moving too slowly when you laid a mine field, you could be destroyed by it.)

A lot of people spent a lot of time playing that game, and I learned a lot by writing it. Thinking back on it, I'm still astounded how much I managed to fit into just 4K.

I wonder who made that post? After 35 years, I wonder if I'd even remember the name if I did see it? (Probably not; my memory has been going bad recently.)

UPDATE: I also wrote a cut-down version of TECO for the 12 which I called PIE ("Programmable Interactive Editor"). After it became mature, one of the upper classmen suggested I show it to a professor. After he saw it he gave me 3 hours of credit for it. Which was pretty cool.

Thinking back on it, I'll be damned if I know how I fit all that into 4K.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 03:49 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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1 Was that 4k of program-size, or 4k of system memory for editor plus document?

Posted by: karrde at March 02, 2009 07:07 PM (aF0WK)

2 Never laid eyes on the PDP-12, but it makes me think of ALGOL for some damn reason?? Brain fart I guess.

Posted by: toadold at March 02, 2009 08:31 PM (zcbXo)

3 I'm quite fortunate to be born late enough to start in the PDP-11 age.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 02, 2009 09:38 PM (/ppBw)

4 That was 4K of everything. The editor obviously couldn't hold it all at once, and it worked by swapping in and out of the tape.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 02, 2009 10:02 PM (+rSRq)

5 By the way, y'all do know what "core" is, don't you? I wasn't speaking figuratively; the 12 used real core memory.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 02, 2009 10:09 PM (+rSRq)

6 When I started at UNSW, one of our PDP-11/70's still had core memory.  2 megabytes of it.  It must have had most of a rack just stuffed with memory boards; I'm amazed it worked at all.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 03, 2009 01:31 AM (PiXy!)

7 I started with a Soviet clone of 11/20 (approximately). It had 32 or 64KB of core as shipped, but it was quickly swapped out with DRAM. I spent quite some time cutting out and replacing bad DRAM chips in it. Zelenograd silicon was always like that.

In college, we had a Hungarian copy of Bull Mitra-15, which had 64KB of core. It supported stop and restart over the power failure by saving registers. In contrast, PDP-11 clones typically didn't have the right power-fail interrupts. Core rings on the Mitra were about 1.5mm wide -- much smaller than Soviet core, and the quality was excellent.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 03, 2009 07:31 AM (/ppBw)

8

That's right...the "core" memory was a set of small ferro-magnetic metal cores on a wire grid. Kind of like this, right?

Posted by: karrde at March 03, 2009 09:31 AM (EaCUv)

9 That's the stuff.  Tell kids today that we used to make memory out of tiny ferrite donuts strung onto a wire mesh they and they won't believe you.

Not sure I do, for that matter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 03, 2009 06:32 PM (PiXy!)

10

That's the stuff.  Tell kids today that we used to make memory out of tiny ferrite donuts strung onto a wire mesh they and they won't believe you.

Was that back when a computer network really was just "a bunch of tubes"?  

You all are making me feel like a youngster - I can remember seeing punch cards when I was a kid, and in the Air Force I saw a punch card reader in the corner of a storage room once.  I can understand memory limits - I started programming on a HP41CV calculator and my brother in-law's TRS-80.  But having to program around winding and rewinding tapes for storage?  I just can't grasp that...

Posted by: Siergen at March 03, 2009 07:30 PM (BIB5p)

11 Hmm.  The US Army was still using punched cards for logistical information as late as 1990.  (That's the last time that I remember seeing it.)

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at March 03, 2009 08:46 PM (i9fDQ)

12 This reminds me a propaganda book "Frontine of Secret War" that breathlessly proclaimed how "Pentagon keeps an archive of more than a million of perforated cards!"  It also had pictures of all the cool stuff Gary Powers carried with him, like a silent pistol. The book was published in 1970 or about that.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 03, 2009 09:03 PM (/ppBw)

13

I programmed using punch cards when I was in college. This was 1972-1975, and the main computer for student class usage was a CDC-3300. We submitted our programs as punch-card decks and got our result as a printout. Turnaround could be as good as 15 minutes (sometimes even less!) or much much worse, as a function of how many people were doing how much.

Gad, that was terrible!

About the time I started going there, the school was proud to acquire a CDC-6400 which they put in the same computer center. But that was for research; we students didn't get to use it. (I think the Oceanography department was a big source of funds for that acquisition.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 03, 2009 10:02 PM (+rSRq)

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So how much progress am I making on an update to the top rotation? Not very much, sadly. The problem is that most of the stuff I've bought in the last year doesn't offer much I can use. So far I've got:

Aika R16 -- 15
Blue Dragon -- 5
Dokkoida -- 27
Familiar of Zero -- 28
Nanoha -- 33
Nanoha A's -- 67
Please Twins -- 11
Puniechan -- 32
Rocket Girls -- 19

for a total of 237. And I won't even be able to use all those; that's just the count of the raw frame grabs, and I always end up tossing a few. Since I shoot for somewhere in the range of 750 images total, that wouldn't even be a third new. Not enough.

Then, today, it hit me: I never scanned Ai Yori Aoshi for frame grabs. I bought the whole series, 8 DVDs, and only watched the first one,but I can grab images from all of them, and should be able to come up with 100 without too much eye fatigue.

And I've never taken frame grabs from Kaleido Stage. For that matter, if I'm just looking for eye candy, Daphne in the Brilliant Blue has a lot of it. (But it might be too ecchi, as in NSFW for all you people who visit me when you should be working. So maybe I can't use that one.)

Anyway, I'm going to start scanning Ai Yori Aoshi this evening.

UPDATE: Whoops! I missed the 70 frames I took from the first Aria series. That brings me up to 307, which is still not enough after all this time.

UPDATE:

Yeah, I think I can use this. I only got about four grabs from the first DVD, but it'll pick up once more of the girls from the harem enter the show.

UPDATE: OK, about 30 from the first three DVDs. That's more like it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:34 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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(enable "more in sorrow than in anger" voice)

Anyone who's tried to really run a blog will know that it can be a lot of work, especially if you try to do a lot of posting. The only real reason for doing it is because it's fun. And it can be.

It can also be a pain in the ass.

If comments are enabled, then to some extent it becomes a group activity. But it's my blog, not our blog. You're guests, not partners. You are welcome, but you're not owners. I'm the owner.

If that gives me any privilege at all, at the very least it should permit me to decide what gets talked about. Doesn't that make sense? There are a million interactive web sites available; a thousand places to talk about anything you feel like talking about. If you come here and want to talk, it should be about what you find me posting about.

That's why I close threads which are subject to serious topic drift. It doesn't happen very often, but I'm applying the "broken window" principle here and I pounce on them fast. Because if I don't, soon this will cease to be a web site that I myself feel like visiting. Which, since it's mine, really would be unfortunate.

Case in point: I posted about sunspots. In a startlingly small number of steps, the discussion mutated to be about China and the American trade deficit. Or something. Whatever it was, it wasn't about sunspots. So I closed it.

How do I want people to behave? When you feel like posting a comment, ask yourself if it's something you think I'll be glad to read? If not, please resist the urge. You're a guest here; not a co-proprietor. Please act like one. Don't abuse my hospitality. Don't make me miserable.

China and the American trade deficit are legitimate subjects for discussion. But why do you have to talk about them here, when it's obvious I don't want to participate in such a discussion? Can't you find somewhere else to do it?

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