Moosey fate! Say moosey fate!

Pixy Is Currently Watching...

K-On Goes To War, a.k.a. Sora no Woto.

Not bad so far.

Update: I wasn't expecting that (ep 6) but truthfully, it's the only thing in the show so far that survives the refrigerator test.  Of course there'd be something like that.

Update: Odd little show, very uneven, but worth a look.  What is with that clock, though?

Update: Only two episodes left to go?  That might work out just right.

Update: I haven't found the original that they modeled the clock on, but:



Yeah, it's real.  Yeesh, the places people choose to live.

(Courtesy AnimeSuki and Wikipedia.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:51 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ow Owwie Ow!

Okay, my auditory frequency response isn't shot.  I can still hear up to about 17.5kHz, which is not much short of the 19kHz or so I could hear as a teenager.

Next time I test my hearing, though, I'll turn the volume down first.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:25 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Kimi Ni Todoskwee

It's made of aww and winsome.

Update: One of the great things about being caught up with Kimi ni Todoke is that I can also catch up on That's absurdly awesome episode-by-episode reviews.  DO NOT READ BEFORE WATCHING RELEVANT EPISODES.  If you have watched relevant episodes, start here.  If you have not watched relevant episodes, watch relevant episodes, then start here.  The fact that they refer to SPOILER as Vichy-tan is perfection.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:11 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Damn Zombies!

Asus almost make a really brilliant little server motherboard, the P7F-E.

I say almost, because it's full of zombies.

See that third ethernet port on the back?  It's for remote management - KVM-over-IP.  Except that it doesn't actually work unless you add a KVM-over-IP card.

Those eight extra SATA ports?  Brilliant!  Except that they don't actually work unless you add an eight-port RAID controller.  Which, coincidentally, costs more than the motherboard.

Zombie I/O ports.  I hate zombie I/O ports.

Update: The same goes for the Z8PE-12DX, which I was going to order for my day job.  Now I'll need to budget for a RAID controller as well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:10 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Lian-Li, Lian-Li, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

They've stopped making the PC-V600, the best small computer case I've ever used.  All four of my desktop machines (Haruhi, Yurie, Nagi and Tanarotte) are in these cases, silver for the Windows boxes, black for Linux.

I ordered another two of them while they're still in stock, one of each colour.  If I ever end up with more than six desktop machines running, I'll have worse problems to deal with than mismatching cases...

I discovered the discontinuation while shopping around for a decent midi-tower server case, something that seems to be almost extinct.  Why the hell do manufactures manufacture cases with 7 5.25" bays and 2 3.5"?  Who actually uses 7 DVD drives at once?  I'm looking at colocating a small server at a budget colo facility, and it's cheaper and easier to build a tower box than a rack mount one, and costs no more to host.

I did find one case that suits my needs - the Fractal Design Define R2.  It has eight 3.5" drive bays behind two 120mm fans (which is far more than the V600's 3 bays, with another 3 via an optional converter that fits 3x3.5" drives into 2x5.25" bays) and room for another 5 120mm fans in various locations.  And it's available in three colours.  In case I want to run yet another operating system, I guess.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:53 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Toshiba Australia, You Still Suck, Though Objectively, At Least, Not As Much As You Did Last Month

Subjectively, however, I'm even more annoyed than before.

There's now a model of their neat little T110 notebook available in Australia for $699, much more in line with pricing elsewhere in the world.  It has an AMD rather than an Intel chip, but I'm fine with that.

But it's the single core model.  The dual core model available elsewhere is only slightly more expensive, has only slightly shorter batter life - and is twice as powerful.

But we don't get that one.

Grrr.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:02 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Three Minutes And Fifty Three Seconds Of My Life That I'll Never Get Back

And for once I'm totally fine with that.



Click on it and go to YouTube for versions up to 1080p.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:51 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Essence of Cute

In which I reiterate my statements about the closing credits of Hanamaru Kindergarten.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:42 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Fractal Wrongness In A Programming Language

I have 800 arrays of about 5000 integers each that I need to combine into an array of about 4 million integers.  I don't care about the order or anything, I just want one big array.

PHP had used 8 minutes of CPU time and 1.2GB of RAM when I shot it through the head.

Solution: Don't use PHP.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:15 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Essence Of Cool

The closing credits of Hanamaru Kindergarten might win the nod for the best anime of the season.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Hate Sauerkraut!

Also crazed starving weasels.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:24 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Move Over Mendeleev

Now with added mouseoverness.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:00 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Periodicity



The Grand Unified Minx Theory


The mee.nu User Domains


The Minx Components

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Gamma Lama

Naturally I had to try this...

100%


50%


Oops!

Now, that's a deliberately constructed corner case, but there is a problem there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Bitzenpieces

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:44 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Where's Pixy?

I'm in here:


(Click for full screenshot.  Thanks go to Steam and GOG's insane holiday sales.)

Actually, I'm not; I'm doing work for my day job, making some progress with Pita, reorganising Meta, and have finally come to a design decision on Miko (all parts of the Minx project for those who haven't been paying attention), redoing the documentation in Sphinx - which will itself be supported in an upcoming version of Meta - and planning for this year's server upgrade.*  I did play a bit of Dragon Age over the holidays, but games are taking a back seat for a while.**  Despite the fact that I have 224 of them currently installed.

* If things go right we'll be moving from a lowly 8-processor (16-thread) 2.26GHz server with 24GB of RAM to a spiffy new 12-processor (24-thread) 2.66GHz server with 48GB of RAM.  That's at least partly to prepare for the move to Pita, which loves to store stuff in memory.  Because I can just copy the OpenVZ virtual machines across, the move should be quick and painless.

** Apart from Billy vs. SNAKEMAN!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:16 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Hoshimittsu

Hidamari Sketch continues to exist in its own little universe, and all is right with the world.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:12 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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If I Don't Lesnerize, The Feegs Can't Get Me

In SQL* you say select sum(sales) from accounts where state="NY".  In Pita, the way to do this is:

results = accounts.aggregate(state='NY')**

which will calculate for you the count, length, sum, minimum and maximum, as appropriate, for all the fields in the table at once, so the value you need is results.sales.sum.  Since the table scan is typically slower than any calculations you're likely to be doing, this seems a reasonable approach.

In addition, I've added a

results = accounts.stats()

which provides all those, plus mean,*** median, mode, standard deviation, and geometric and harmonic means.   Aaaaand standard error, coefficient of variation, sample and population variance, skewness and kurtosis.  I even sort of know what kurtosis is.

I'm working on two more functions now, group and break, though I may need to come up with another name for the latter because break is a Python keyword.  This:

for result in accounts.group('state', country='US'): ...

would give you the aggregate sales figures for each state in the US, sensibly enough.  And this:

for result in accounts.break('state', country='US'): ...

would give you the individual sales figures, and then automatically provide totals after the last sales record for each state.

As long as I don't come down with kurtosis...

Update: Kang and jag.  Or rather, agg and tab.  For aggregate and tabulate. 

for line in accounts.aggregate('state', country='US'): ...

will give you one summary line for each state, where

for line in accounts.tabulate('state', country='US'): ...

would give you both detail and summary lines.  I need to put subtotal and total flags on the records for tabulate.  Have to watch the keywords, there.  And keep my closet doors closed.

* Boo, hiss!

** Or indeed

results = accounts(state='NY').aggregate()

Either way should perform the same and produce the same results.  I think...

*** Which should come out the same as the average; just one I'm calculating myself and the other I'm pulling out of a stats module.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:14 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Just Trying Something...



Okay, yeah, they needed that sharpening filter.  That's Minx's built-in upscaling.  Quality is not so hot, as it turns out.  I'll check on what filter it's using; normally it's only used for downscaling, which works great:

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:35 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Want One!

TI Blaze.  Screw the iPad.  This is the future.

On the one hand, it's a huge clunky thing.



On the other hand, it's a development platform, not a consumer device; it has two 800x480 touchscreens, HDMI out, and a built-in DLP projector; it has two five-megapixel cameras at front and a twelve-megapixel camera at rear; a dual-core 1.2GHz Arm Cortex A9 (superscalar out-of-order SMP); accelerometer, compass, ambient light, proximity, barometric and temperature sensors; Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS; and easy and open access to all the electronics, networking, and software.

Tech's slate (from the Accountancy story further down) isn't that much more advanced than this beastie.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Free At Last!

EA have just earned themselves brownie points with millions of gamers by re-releasing three of the older Command and Conquer games - Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, and Tiberian Sun - free.

Get downloading!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Oodles Of Noodles

I have a working base storage class for Pita.  Unfortunately, most of my weekend was eaten up by my day job and other miscellanea, but it does work.

I'll post the full code later in the week once I have a derived class or two that does something more useful, in the meantime, here's the test code to give you an example of how it's used:

def oodle_test():
  # Create a base view
  pets = Oodle()
 
  # Create some pets
  log('Creating pets')
 
  # Create a dog, and save it
  pet = pets.new()
  pet.animal = 'dog'
  pet.sound = 'woof'
  pet.save()
  log('Dog saved, %s pets' % pets.count(),1)
 
  # Create a cat from a dict, and save it
  pet = pets.new({'animal': 'cat', 'sound': 'meow'})
  pet.save()
  log('Cat saved, %s pets' % pets.count(),1)
 
  # Append an aardvark
  pet = pets.append({'animal': 'aardvark', 'sound': 'snorf'})
  log('Aardvark appended, %s pets' % pets.count(),1)
 
  # Append a hippopotamus too
  pet = pets.append(animal = 'hippopotamus', sound = 'hrooonk')
  log('Hippopotamus appended, %s pets' % pets.count(),1)
 
  # What pets do I have?
  log('Selecting all pets')
  for pet in pets.select():
    log('My %s says %s' % (pet.animal, pet.sound),1)
   
  # Select and find on fields
  log('Selecting specific pets')
  # What does my dog say?
  for pet in pets.select(animal = 'dog'):
    log('Selected my %s; it says %s' % (pet.animal, pet.sound),1)
   
  # Can I find my cat?
  pet = pets.find(animal = 'cat')
  log('Found my %s; it says %s' % (pet.animal, pet.sound),1)
   
  return pets.count() == 4

The base view class, which has no indexes, no persistence, and no support for sorting, is called an Oodle.

The results of the test?

Creating pets
  Dog saved, 1 pets
  Cat saved, 2 pets
  Aardvark appended, 3 pets
  Hippopotamus appended, 4 pets
Selecting all pets
  My dog says woof
  My cat says meow
  My aardvark says snorf
  My hippopotamus says hrooonk
Selecting specific pets
  Selected my dog; it says woof
  Found my cat; it says meow
Oodle OK

Update: We've hit version 0.02 wih a successful hash-table implementation.  Next up is persistence...  And deletes.

Update: 0.03!  I deleted my pet hippopotamus!

Update: 0.04!  The idiom for pet in pets now works.  You can't slice it or select within it yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:34 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Stuff







Come to think of it, I need to redo them to insert Jy and Pi.  So there may be another colour shift coming.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:49 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Can't Sleep, Brain Busy

Idea popped into my head for a story set in the Mina Smith universe.  Mina's a customs agent, but this time our protagonist is an accountant.  As much an accountant as Mina is a customs agent, anyway.

Just a snippet that I'll likely never finish, but anyway...
more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:38 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dear Dell Australia

I can't configure a server on your site with more than 4GB of RAM or SATA drives bigger than 250GB.  Last time I checked it was not 2002, so could you please FIX IT?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:15 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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