Yenya's World

Fri, 30 Mar 2007

The Best of 2006

OK, so the AnimeReactor Community Awards for 2006 have been announced. As I had expected, Haruhi won the most categories, and I hereby declare it the winner of my personal category The most overhyped anime of the year 2006. How does my own The best of 2006 look like?

The Best Overall
Definitely Eureka Seven (which has not even been nominated in this category by ARC awards jury). Altough I have not seen Mushishi yet.
Best Story
Maybe Higurashi no Naku koro ni, but I have seen only few episodes so far. Or Eureka Seven.
Best Character Development
Eureka Seven, altough Black Lagoon and Shuffle! are close enough.
Best Animation/Visual Effects
Maybe Eureka again, I usually do not pay attention to this aspect when watching anime. Eureka has wonderful and imaginative landscapes. Mai-Otome was also interesting from this point of view.
Best Soundtrack
Mai-Otome. Nothing can beat an OST from Yuuki Kajiura. The ARC winner - Eureka Seven - had some interesting songs too, but as a whole - Mai-Otome OST is at least one level above it.
Best Opening/Ending
As for the songs, probably Eureka Seven. Black Lagoon had an interesting opening, but the ending was boring. The same for Higurashi no Naku koro ni. Also Fate/stay night was close. As for the opening/ending animation, Fate/stay night and Eureka Seven win there.
Zero no
Tsukaima
Best Action/Martial Arts
I agree with both ARC Awards jury and AnimeReactor community that Black Lagoon is a clear winner there.
Best Adventure/Fantasy
Fate/stay night. I have to admit that Zero no tsukaima was also an interesting, yet different, fantasy.
Best Drama
I am not much to this genre, but maybe Shuffle! (esp. the last third of this series) can count as a drama?
Best Romance/Love story
I don't know what exactly is meant by this genre, but does Fate/stay night count as romance? If not, then I vote for Shuffle!.
Best Comedy
Zero no tsukaima.
Best Fanservice/Ecchi
Maybe Zero no tsukaima again.
Best Sci-Fi/Mecha
As for the later part, Eureka Seven. As for the former, maybe Noein (altough I have not seen all eps yet). I have also seen Starship Operators, which is excellent (and underappreciated), but it is older than 2006.
Best Thriller/Mystery/Horror
Higurashi looks promising so far, and I have not seen anything else from this genre.
Best Male Character
I would say Holland from Eureka Seven. Maybe Archer from Fate/stay night as well. Why often supporting characters are more interesting for me than the leading ones?
Best Female Character
Shinon fron Starship Operators, maybe Asa Shigure from Shuffle!. Whoa! Finally some leading characters there.
Best Villain
Nobody is more evil than lady Balalaika from Black Lagoon.

What interesting anime have you seen last year?

Section: /anime (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 0 writebacks

Thu, 29 Mar 2007

Order of the Stick

Order of the Stick Have you ever played a fantasy role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons[?] (or a local variant Dračí doupě)? And did you enjoy it? Then you may want to have a look at the Order of the Stick, a quite funy web comics, which takes place inside the RPG. The image is taken from the OotS cast page.

Section: /world (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 5 writebacks

Wed, 28 Mar 2007

Without Qmail

Two weeks ago I have moved linux.cz mailserver and listserver from Qmail and EZMLM to Postfix and Mailman. So far I have mixed impressions from this move: Mailman logo

On the positive side:

As you can see, the positives are mostly related to Postfix. On the other hand, the negatives are mostly related to EZMLM to Mailman move:

Maybe I am doing something wrong, because I don't think I have these problems with other Mailman-based lists I am member of. Need to get some sample settings which other list owners use somewhere.

Section: /computers (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 1 writebacks

Tue, 13 Mar 2007

Shipping Now!

I wanted to buy something at patro.cz (a local e-shop), and after placing an order I have received the acknowledgement mail, informing me which parts of my order are available immediately and which ones will be available later:

Následující zboží jsme schopni expedovat ihned:

in English:

We can ship the following parts immediately:

I have sent them a reply telling them it is OK to ship both fees now and the thing I ordered later :-)

Section: /personal (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 1 writebacks

Mon, 12 Mar 2007

Greylisting Statistics

The postmaster of the muni.cz domain has finally enabled greylisting on the central muni.cz relay. About two weeks ago for our faculty subdomain, fi.muni.cz, a week ago for the linux.cz domain as well.

greylisting stats

The above graph shows the number of open outgoing SMTP connections at linux.cz mailserver. It is nice to see it constantly decreasing in the last week (yes, qmail's delayed bounces are evil).

As for my personal mailbox, yestedays monthly rotate of the spambox revealed that I had slightly above 50 000 spams last month, which is a 50% drop from the previous month. Given the greylisting has been active for two weeks only (or a single week for linux.cz), the real number is somewhere around 75-80%. Not bad, isn't it?

Section: /computers (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 2 writebacks

Tue, 06 Mar 2007

Notify in Advance

For a long time we have planned to migrate our Faculty web server to Apache 2, getting rid of the aging Apache 1.3 + charset conversion module (do you still remember the time when browsers could handle just one character set - the one native on the system they ran under - and the web server had to recode the documents (and CGI script outputs and many other things) to match the expected charset of the client?).

Because of the new Apache, some configuration directives have changed (including the ones users use in their .htaccess files). So we first made the Apache 2 running in parallel with 1.3 (on a different port), so that users can test whether their pages would work even under the new Apache. Three weeks or so before the upgrade we have sent the in-advance notification to users, where we have pointed out the most common directives which are no longer valid in Apache 2, told the users that they can test their pages on the different port, and stated the expected date of a switchover.

Few days before the upgrade we have sent the similar notification again, and put an announce to the electronic noticeboard in our Information system. Last Thursday we have finally switched the webserver to Apache 2 as expected.

Guess what happened: even today, 6 days after the upgrade, users keep calling or mailing: "my web pages do not work, did you do something to the web server by chance?". When I point out that they got two e-mails from us, they are simply not aware of it (in one case I even grepped the user's mailbox for the appropriate Message-Id, and of course, the announcement message was still sitting in this user's mailbox). What should I do with users who do not even bother to read an e-mail from us and then complain? One would expect that users at Faculty of Informatics should not display the same levels of lameness as ordinary users...

Section: /computers (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 3 writebacks

Mon, 05 Mar 2007

Japanese Numbers and Times

The topic of recent Japanese lessons was dates, time, and numbers. I found that even though I can say the numbers properly, I am very slow with it, as I always have to count from 1 to the desired number to find the right word :-(. So I have decided to write computer-based selftests for Japanese numbers, dates, and time.

For a long time I wanted to get know the applications for self-tests in our Information system. Japanese selftests were a good excuse to learn this agenda. The tests are available for anyone logged in to the IS MU. Click to the green icon to the left of the ".qdesc" file, and choose "Click to work with ROPOT." ("Zodpovědět odpovědník" in Czech).

As a side effect, I put the code for converting integers to Kanji and Hiragana to a separate module, so when I get some time to package it, I will upload it to CPAN, probably as Numbers::Japanese or something similar.

Section: /personal (RSS feed) | Permanent link | 0 writebacks

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