Saber Revoltech figure

I’m back from holidays, and when I got back I found the Saber Revoltech figure I had preordered in May (!) in the mail. This is the package when I pulled it out from the box it came in (apologies for the image quality, I only had my mobile phone to take it):

August 2, 2007

Holidays

I haven’t been able to post much recently, mostly because I’ve been quite busy regarding my thesis and work and because I’m preparing everything for the holidays. I’ll be leaving on August 3rd for Rome, and after a week’s stay, I’ll go to the sea until August 26th. Unfortunately I’ll have to bring my work with me to do something as I’m a little behind in writing the thesis. Due to the holidays, I won’t be able to update here regularly (if any), however I’ll try to post one last entry before leaving.

July 27, 2007

Nanoha StrikerS DVD 1

[![Nanhoa StrikerS DVD cover]({{ site.url }}/images/2007/07/strikers_dvd_1_cover.thumbnail.png)]({{ site.url }}/images/2007/07/strikers_dvd_1_cover.png)

Today I got the first Maho Shojo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS R2 DVD in the mail. Even though I haven’t watched it properly yet (I plan on doing so tomorrow) I can say I’m already impressed. Usually Japanese DVDs are little more than improved video tapes: they provide just the bare minimum (and not for a cheap price). However, this is not the case with Nanoha StrikerS.

July 21, 2007

Why KDE?

The title comes from some random thoughts I had while reading aseigo’s latest entry on Plasma. I was thinking about the line “who uses KDE for his/her day job, and why?”, but related perhaps to people who don’t code for a living. Here I will illustrate my point of view on why I chose KDE as my day to day desktop environment.

July 20, 2007

Who said Windows works better?

The reason for this post is the time I wasted this afternoon to enable DMA for a DVD burner in Windows, in order to burn a backup DVD at a decent speed. Apparently, the two optical drives are IDE while the HD is on a SATA controller. For no reason, DMA got turned off on the DVD burner (but not on the other drive). Of course I tried everything I could, of course.

July 15, 2007

New details on WoTG

The FFXI Encyclopedia has an interview with the Final Fantasy XI developers with regards to the upcoming expansion, Wings of the Goddess. Skimming through the lines, they give a lot of hints but no definitive answers. Sadly, there will be no barriers for missions, and no one asked about their length: Treasures of Aht Urghan had very short missions, often ridicolously easy, so I’d like a better challenge this time.

July 12, 2007

Full speed ahead

After giving in the summary of my thesis today, I also started writing the actual thing. Of course this is not something I will finish in a few days. It’s a long journey that will go on until I deliver it. Aside that, I’ve been having some problems with R, a language which I really don’t like and I hope to use as less as possible. I was obtaining a list of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) out of some data files with SAM, and of course I had to supply a matrix with expression values for every gene.

July 8, 2007

/ borked (again)

Looks like my laptop doesn’t really want to keep its data in stable form. Like [I have blogged previously]({{ site.url }}/2007/05/31/borked/), the bus-reset issue apparently trashed my root partition again. I do not know the cause as it seemed a normal shutdown… but the moment I rebooted I had lost a lot of files (thankfully not on /home: I’m glad I keep data separated from the rest). Reinstalling proved less difficult, thanks to a Kubuntu DVD I burnt with my other computer.

July 4, 2007

Command line scanning

Recently, I had to do a few scans with my old but trusty BenQ 640BU. Given that I could not use any GUI due to a long-standing Feisty bug, I tried to settle for command line scanning with the scanimage command from SANE. The main problem is that scanimage only saves images in PNM or TIFF formats. I wanted to use JPEG or PNG, but apparently that looked impossible to do.

June 30, 2007

Nanoha licensed for the USA

According to the Anime News Network, Geneon Entertainment has bought the license for distributing Maho Shojo Lyrical Nanoha and Nanoha A’s in the United States. Fans rejoice? I think not. Being outside of the USA market, I view things with a different approach. The companies here in Italy have all their problems, but to a certain degree they care about delivering to the user something more than just the episodes. Extras that can also be an incentive over downloading (illegally) over the Internet.