Tegami Bachi

Tegami Bachi takes place in a very strange world known as Amberground. It has no sun but there is a geostationary artificial light source above the capital, which means that it is darker further away from the capital. The capital is a mysterious place that is never seen in the series.

Amberground is mostly a wilderness that is dotted with communities that somehow eek out an existence with so little light. The only communications between the communities is via a hand delivered postal system that is run by the Tegami Bachi (Letter Bees). Unsurprisingly, many people have some animosity toward the capital, and the Letter Bees take the brunt of it as the only public representatives the government. Why the government shields itself behind postmen is another mystery.

The wilderness is a dangerous place inhabited by by powerful bug like monsters. The postmen have a technique which uses their life force, that is able to kill the creatures. The ability depends on a gem stone which is embedded in a weapon that focuses the attack. Why only the Letter Bees have this ability, is never explained.

Each Bee has an companion called a dingo which is usually an animal but not always. The main character, Lag Seeing, has a dingo, Niche, that looks a little girl but seriously is not even close. Niche is described several times as "a child of Maka" but who or what exactly a Maka is, is yet another mystery.

The story revolves around Lag searching for clues about another Bee, Gauche Suede, who has disappeared. Gauche delivered a very young Lag to his grandmother, and is the reason Lag became a Bee. Most of the series develops the characters and background, and we only find what happened to Gauche in the final episode, which actually raises many more questions than it answers. Yes, it's another mystery.

There's a very good reason why the series ends with so many unexplained mysteries. There's a second season. ^_^

The Internet Age

In the Internet age, why is the most successful Internet business model, one that was created over 200 hundred years ago? Google, Facebook, MySpace, and soon Twitter, all depend on advertising. The Internet age does add a few bonuses, though. It's much easier to keep track people who view your adds. Advertisers can even get the names of the people who view the ads.

Er, wait, that's doesn't sound right. Unfortunately, it has already happened. Sharing subscriber information with advertisers is nothing new (e.g., Airmiles), but there was a line which nobody dared to cross. The Internet age is an advertisers' wet dream and some have decided that anything goes. Unless you get caught.

Yet Another Codec

Google announced that it would open the VP8 codec as the WebM project. VP8 is reputed to be as good as H.264 for video quality. The real surprise is that so many web browser vendors, including Microsoft, have pledged support for WebM. The only exception was Apple who has invested heavily in H.264 and likely wouldn't want abandon it so easily.

I must be getting jaded. After reading about the announcement, my first thought was, "Oh great! Yet another codec!"

Python Programming Toolbox

At this month's PyGTA meeting, we discussed what's in people's Python programming toolboxes. One surprise was that more than half the group did not use an IDE for development. Another surprise was that almost half the group used vim, making it the most common editor. It was a small group though so I wouldn't read too much into that statistic.

I found that my toolbox was not as full featured as some of the others. For example, I don't use tools to generate documentation from the code, whereas this seemed to be a common practice among the other programmers. It was an interesting discussion and I picked up a few ideas that might be worth exploring to see if they fit with my programing style.

F1 2010 Monaco

Another dominating display by Redbull and Mark Webber who had back to back polls and wins. Webber's qualifying lap was a massive .3 seconds faster than Kubica, who beat Vettel into the second grid slot. Kubica and Renault's performance was quite surprising as they beat all the main contenders, except Redbull. The other teams should be a getting a little worried. Redbull's car is good on any kind of circuit and they have two drivers who are capable of winning the championship.

Webber lead the race from start to finish despite four safety cars wiping out the gap he had built up. Vettel passed Kubica in the first corner to take second, place but was never able to close on Webber. In fact, Vettel came under pressure from Kubica later in the race. Vettel must be wondering what went wrong while Webber now has a psychological advantage of his team mate. Should be interesting to see how Vettel fights back in the next race.

Alonso destroyed his car in Saturday morning practice and it could not be rebuilt in time for qualifying. As a result Alonso started form the pit lane and had to duel with all the drivers from the slower teams as he charged through the field. Alonso quickly found out that most of them were not going to jump out the way. It was reasonable as they were fighting for position, but Alonso was definitely losing his cool. Watching Di Grassi throw his Virgin Racing car around in front of Alonso was both scary and impressive.

Schumacher got a six place penalty for passing Alonso while under the safety car on last lap. The wording of that rule is very bad which is likely what caused the different interpretation between the teams.

The Laser

50 years ago the first working laser was developed and the military have been of dreaming of laser weapons ever since. While most of the experimental weapons have been duds, and even though there have been some interesting successes like the THEL, they are still a very long way from a battle field ready blaster. And when the generals do eventually get their practical laser weapons, I'm sure someone will want to attached them to some sharks. ^_^

Chromium

The Chromium browser finally entered Debian sid a few days ago and I've been using it as my primary browser. So far I have no major complaints. Chromium feels faster than Google Chrome for some reason, although I suspect it is just just my imagination as I haven't use Google Chrome all that much. The one thing that I am not imagining, is how ridiculously faster Chromium is than Firefox 3.5.

Chromium has a built in flash player which is enabled with command line switch. The flash player is the only thing that causes Chromium to use a lot of CPU. Since the flash player is still quite new, I'll avoid making any judgements. Poking fun at flash performance is all too easy any way.

I installed some basic extensions, an advert blocker and a flash blocker. There's no extension similar to Firefox's NoScript yet so I've disabled javascript and only enable it for specific sites. This works well for now, but doesn't have the fine control of NoScript, so you can't block specific scripts on a site. It's all or nothing.

A couple of web sites that I use, require a personal certificate for indentification. Chromium currently does not provide a user interface to manage certificates on Linux. You need to use a install a separate command line utility that is detailed here.

After using Firefox for so long, it feels a little strange to be switching browsers. The folks at Mozilla re fighting back so it we'll definitely have another browser war. For now, I'll stick with Chromium.