blueZhift Blog

Ok ok, this is the last I’ll say about ACEN 2005…I think I’ve turned into a real karaoke fan. I waited hours to get my chance to belt out my rendition of All The Way, the opening theme to Kino’s Journey. But it wasn’t wasted time, as I really enjoyed watching all of the other performers ahead of me. It was really cool, and in a sense it was a way to give something back to the convention because we were providing entertainment for all of the people passing through the con lounge in addition to having a good time ourselves. I almost got WillowBrow to sing, but alas no dice. At this point I don’t think I’ll ever get her up on stage. She’s just too darn proud to take a chance on goofing up, even though on her worst day she’d sound a lot better than me on my best! Oh well…

And while on the subject of karaoke, some sadists at Konami have decided to combine DDR and Karaoke Revolution into Karaoke Revolution Party. Yes, that’s right you sing and dance! Let the nightmares begin! Here’s Ernie’s (little. yellow. different.) encounter with Dance Dance Humiliation at E3 and comments. This all reminds me that I’ve got to get a better mike!

It’s a whole week since Anime Central ended and I’m still looking back fondly on  how much fun it was. The volunteer staff was great and really helped my rather large crew get through some sticky situations with badge pickup. Props to the staff!

There are too many things going on to see everything, so it just turned out that this year our focus was on music. I ended up seeing pretty much all of the major musical performances. We saw the Pillows, Swek, Kumiko Kato, and the Penny Lane Allstars. Oh, and I also want to recognize the two guys with the keyboard who played anime and game tunes virtually nonstop the whole convention. I love passion like that!

Cosplay, cosplay, cosplay! There seemed to be more people cosplaying than ever before. It looked like close to half of the attendees were in costume. And those costumes were very very good this year. I was very impressed by the amount and level of detail that so many put into their costumes. I took a lot of pictures this year that you can see via the following link.

Anime Central 2005 Cosplay Pictures

Well the ol’ clock on the wall says that it’s time to go to work, so I’ll write more a bit later. Needless to say, I’m already looking forward to ACEN 2006. And I’m planning a costume!

I find it hard to believe that in this era of overseas outsourcing of IT jobs, companies like IBM now have the nerve to complain that there aren’t enough smart students majoring in computer science in college and grad school in the U.S.. This Herald Sun article describes just that, without even mentioning the reason this is happening! That many of the smartest students already know that career prospects in IT are pretty bad in the U.S.. How can they compete with the far cheaper labor pool in India or China? And many companies won’t think twice about shipping IT jobs overseas showing little loyalty to their employees or their country. IBM should not expect smart people to behave foolishly for their benefit.

Square Enix has announced that my favorite MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI is coming to Xbox 360. I started playing FFXI when the Playstation 2 version had its U.S. launch last spring because at the time it would have cost more and been a big hassle to upgrade my computer to play the game. Since that time various events such as the death of the hard drive in the kid’s computer along with a motherboard problem in WillowBrow’s, gave me the "opportunity" to upgrade my rig to something more potent. Since I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, I decided to go with an Athlon based board. It’s been pretty good, the only problem being that the CPU tends to overheat which (especially since installing FFXI) has forced me to run my PC with the cover off (topless PC…mmmm…).

FFXI runs very well on the PS2, but I started considering running it on the PC for a couple of reasons. One, I can’t always get access to the TV to play when I want to, and two, Square Enix slashed the price of the PC version and expansions to $19.99 each. So I didn’t have to spend a lot to add the convenience of being able to play on my own PC whenever I want to. I also bought a Logitech Dual Action game controller, also $19.99, because the game was designed to be played with a game pad which is how I’m accustomed to playing it. Well after a long installation and update process, the game is up and runs okay. My only complaint is the occasional hiccup in the background music. I was able to load up the game pad default settings and jump right in. The higher resolution on the PC is very welcome because a lot less of the screen is taken up by the menu boxes and everything looks so much better.

I’m still planning to play on my PS2 sometimes, but now I feel better set for the future of the series. Even with an Xbox 360 version coming out, I suspect that the series has a permanent home on the PC which will probably see enhanced features first. I would guess that the PS2 version will be supported until a year or two after the Xbox 360 and the very likely PS3 versions come out. Then I suppose I’ll recycle the PS2 hard drive for use in the kids PC, looks like a standard IDE drive.

Well kudos to Microsoft for working out a deal with Square Enix to get FFXI on Xbox 360. In another story, I read that Square had originally intended to publish FFXI on the first Xbox, but could not come to an agreement with Microsoft to allow them to use PlayOnline to login rather than Xbox Live. Microsoft’s intent to bring the later cancelled True Fantasy Online to Xbox may have had something to do with the trouble as well.

This year’s E3 is rolling! Let the wet dreams begin! If there is any doubt, I think this year is the year of the hardware designer. The success that Apple has had with the iPod and latest Macs with respect to design I think has had a profound influence on the consumer electronics industry. I would even speculate that ultimately, the Japanese culture of kawaii (the very cute) is the source of this.

Anyway, would would have guessed that the new Xbox 360 would have a concave design that appears to fit neatly together with the convex design of the Playstation 3? It’s like Yin to Yang! Is this some cosmic sign of things to come? Who knows? In any case, I think they are both really sweet designs. So while I won’t be buying on day 1, I will be looking, and salivating!

Xbox 360: Yin?

PS3: Yang?

I’m not at all sure where the Nintendo Revolution fits into this scheme. It looks like the Game Cube successor is just a squashed update of itself. At least Nintendo is getting onboard now with movie and online capabilities. Pretty or not, I expect the Revolution to be a real contender this round. In particular, I’m looking forward to what Nintendo does in the online arena with their plans for free global (or at least ubiquitous) Wi-Fi connectivity to the DS.

Revolution: WTF?

Ooh, so it seems that Microsoft has really been studying hard afterall! They have announced their intention to make Xbox 360 compatible with the current generation of Xbox games. This will be a lot of work for them as the new architechture is quite different from the old which probably means they’ll have to write an emulator to play the old games. Still, backwards compatibility will remove an important psychological barrier to people buying the new Xbox. I still won’t be out there buying an Xbox 360 on launch day, but I’ll certainly be paying attention.

This is what waiting for Christmas used to be like when I was a kid! But at last the wait is over, it’s time for another Anime Central! For me this is only my second ACEN, but after last year’s experiences I think this one will be even more fun. For one thing, I’m planning to take my crew out to the hotel tonight to pick up our registration badges early and hopefully get tickets to the Pillows concert on Friday night.

On Friday, I’m planning to be at the opening ceremonies with the lovely WillowBrow while the kids are in school. WillowBrow isn’t a big anime or manga fan (she’s into cooking, wuxia novels and classical music), but she’s being a good sport for letting me drag her to these orgies of pop culture, Japanese pop culture no less! Still, I wish she could get as excited about it as I and the kids are. This year I’m hoping to get a song or two out her since she sounds a lot better doing Emerald Green or Shizukana Yoru ni, than I do!

File this under wild speculation, but following the money can lead to interesting conclusions. Yesterday, news came out that Dell founder Michael Dell had invested $100 Million of his own money in Red Hat. Today Cnet reports that executives from Microsoft and Red Hat are having a nice chat together. Well, $100M is not small potatoes, and if Microsoft were to make a bid for Red Hat, Mr. Dell would make a pretty handy profit. At the very least, that investment gives Mr. Dell a seat to view the game.

So, I’m not saying that this means anything at all. But Microsoft buying Red Hat would certainly affect the Linux landscape with tsunami-like force. Would it be the end of the open software movement? No, of course not! But it would instantly make MS a big player on the Linux scene and would allow them to play both sides of the street if they chose to do so. Regardless of what their true motives are, it certainly makes one wonder.

I don’t get to play my video games nearly as much as I’d like to, but then again, who does? I had a fairly long session running about Vana’diel last night trying to find the nomad moogle as part of the latest in game event. I finally found the little bugger right back where I had started. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t there when I started, still I felt like I’d wasted a lot of time on my extended tour. By this time, I was tired and had a bit of motion sickness, so I went to bed. All was well, or so I thought…

Through the night I kept waking up and at one point was awaken by this incredibly painful stiffness in my right wrist. So I guess 2+ hours of gaming was coming back to punish me! It’s okay now, but as gaming becomes more mainstream and more immersive, these kinds of injuries will probably become more common. This RedNova News article entitled "Video Game Victims", may be a good read for anyone who has spent maybe a bit too much time with the controller. Though I don’t think "victim" is the term I would use to describe the people suffering the injuries any more than I would use it to describe people getting injuries while playing any other recreational sport. Heh! We were all willing participants. In fact, I’m going back in right now.

At last we have gotten a decent spring day in Chicago! As a result I really enjoyed my lunch time walk and all of the sites to take in along the way, heh! But besides the weather, much of the brightness came from some great successes at work. There are few things more thrilling to me than making a plan, following the plan, and having it all work out!

And my lovely wife is going to be in Working Mother magazine! They’re publishing a letter she wrote and contacted her for a photograph and some other information. I shot a group of photos for them this morning. The photos are okay, but I really wish I had more time to work on them to make them even better because there are little things that most people will probably miss, but stick out to me like sore thumbs. She still looks great though! Who knows, maybe she’ll make the cover someday.:)

This one is under the heading of upgrade blues. I usually don’t upgrade until there is something I need and in this case, I’m hoping to improve the screening of comment and trackback spam, so I decided to upgrade. Here is what I found out.

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After a lot of trial and error I discovered that
in order to run Nucleus CMS on Yahoo! Webhosting, you must replace the
variable $MYSQL_HOST with something else like $MYSQL_HOST_LOCAL. On
Yahoo! Webhosting (and probably some others), the variable $MYSQL_HOST
is already set and cannot be overidden if you want a working
installation because the system value is different from the value that
users must use to connect to the MySQL database.

Once I replaced $MYSQL_HOST with $MYSQL_HOST_LOCAL in

config.php

$MYSQL_HOST_LOCAL = ‘mysql’; //The host must be mysql on Yahoo! Webhosting

and

nucleus/libs/globalfunctions.php

My newly upgraded Nucleus 3.2 installation started working. Before
I made the change I kept getting the ‘Sorry and error has occurred’
message. This message is generated by checkVars in globalfunctions.php.

The replacement may be needed in other places, such as plugin files, but I haven’t checked that out yet.

I also posted this on the Nucleus Support Forum

http://forum.nucleuscms.org/viewtopic.php?t=6938