Nevertheless, the performance differences I’ve encountered between Chrome and Firefox, namely JavaScript speeds and snappy responses at all times, led me to start using Chrome more and more. Which led to me where I am now, using Chrome for all casual browsing. Until recently, I’ve continued using Firefox as my default browser (as I’m paranoid, and feel that if some program were to try opening a window without me wanting it to, I’d rather it open in Firefox with no JavaScript and the chance of being blocked by WoT) and as my web development testing browser.

But now, I’ve found a few new eye openers which have led me to reconsider some of these choices. To my surprise a number of these are features built into Chrome that have avoided my noticing them.

• Inspect Element:  Right click on just about anything in Chrome and you have this option.  I’ve looked at it a few times, but apparently never actually examined how powerful of a tool this is.  Included behind this unassuming context menu option are many features I’ve been missing from my Firefox plugins, albeit its not quite a solid FireBug replacement.  The elements and scripts tabs will let you do JavaScript debugging, on-the-fly CSS and DOM editing, (irrespectively).  Also this rather versatile toolkit is included a resources tab.  I haven’t compared too much yet but this has thus far proved to be pretty consistent with the results I would get from Live HTTP Headers, and presents them with a graphical view of loading over time like FireBug does so well.
• As for the security extensions I’ve been missing, Chrome has an option for disallowing all JavaScript with an domain exception list.  This can be found under Options > Under the Hood > Content Settings > JavaScript.  It does require reloading a page after JavaScript is initially enabled, but if one is like I, this will only be a minor inconvenience as the number of web sites I tend to allow the use of JavaScript is rather low anyhow.  Last but not least, in regard to WoT, this option isn’t even an actual alternative from Firefox, as WoT it turns out is available for Chrome.

Of course, I’ve been tasting Firefox 4 beta builds, and thus far I have been rather pleased with what I have been seeing – so perhaps in a few months from now I may be trying to reacquaint myself with using Firefox as a primary web browser again, of course only time will tell this one.

After reading more than I think I really should have needed to for something as simple as this, I’ve finally found two ways which are somewhat convenient for accessing command with admin rights.

• Type the command into the Start menu’s search box and use [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Enter] to launch the program.
• Edit a shortcut file to run as an admin. On the shortcut tab’s advanced properties dialog, you have the option to run the specific shortcut as an administrator. Note that if you’re using a shortcut like this you can go as far as even pinning it to your taskbar and the admin setting will continue to work.

As for the time being the shortcut trick is my preferred method of accessing command prompt with admin rights. Of course if anyone wants to share an easier way I’d be glad to hear it…

Anyhow, I’ve stumbled upon SQLiteJDBC, and I think I will be giving this a try for my port. Wish me luck, and hints and tips are welcome!

Night of the Living Stove

Actually, it was Gangster Fun that got me interested in the ska genre to begin with by their humorous lyrics and crazy melodies.

Here’s some more of their songs to check out. First are some of their older songs.

Skarabia

Date with Density

And a newer song of theirs, Brown Paper Bag.

Check out one of their albums on Amazon.

I’ve never been much of one for liking sports anime for some reason.  I tried watching TeniPuri about a year ago and never managed to get past the first few episodes.  Not sure why even, I kinda liked the story and the animation was pretty nice, alas, I digress.

What starts out as two girls (well, really only one) that want to play that game they see the boys playing; baseball, that is. Of course, being the early 20th century in Japan, where tradition says its rude for a woman to even run, its not going to be an easy road to find girls who be allowed by parents to play baseball, let alone be interested in playing it.

By the second episode pretty much the whole team has been pulled together, and fortunately for them their homeroom teacher happens to be an American woman who also knows a thing or two about baseball.

Having now finished the series, I can safely say that in my opinion, this is an above average slice of life comedy series. And I also feel it received too little attention for what it was worth. Its nothing to be ranked up against Azumanga Daioh or the likes of Lucky Star, but its definitely a humorous story placed in a relatively unique setting that doesn’t try too hard to be cute, making this show a 7 out of 10 in my book.

Links: AniDB ANN

Houston-based ADV Films is officially closed; they have sold their assets to five other companies.

This leaves me asking, Sentai Filmworks was presently working on Clannad ~After Story~, as ADV Films was to be the distributor, as they were with the first season of Clannad.  Who will distrbute the new works? “Sentai Filmworks” itself is a bit of a ghost term which is hard to define. Who is Sentai Filmworks?  They have no official looking results that show up on Google, only news of their relations with distributers.

But really, its hard to say that I like this reimplementation of Haruhi. But I also can’t say that I dislike it.

Since its intended to be taken as their new episodes flowing seamlessly with the old episodes, the first thing that bugs me is that the style of artwork is different. I fell in love with the style of the original Haruhi, seriously, the style of the artwork is something I raved about quite a bit to people that had yet to see it after I first watched it.

I’ll be honest, I got about 8 new episodes worth of content of Haruhi after getting my hopes up for fourteen episodes. I don’t guess that’s too bad, it beats not having any new episodes at all. The author of the Haruhi Suzumiya short stories, Nagaru Tanigawa, has yet to finish the series. Not to mention, the anime has far from covered all the material in the novels. I’d really like to see more Haruhi books made as anime. Do I want to be disappointed again by Kyoto Animation? No, not really.

I don’t know what Kyoto animation was thinking, maybe ignoring significant arcs from the books (and repeating an episode eight times) is their ploy to leave material for them to cover in a third season?

A bit surprising; the graphics were pretty good, but I think I might have been expecting a bit more. And then the demo reminded me of something I’d forgotten about being one of its features, it also has a (subscription-based) MMO mode in addition to regular offline play. An MMO city simulator; and that’s what the demo showcases. Servers are called planets, and cities on planets trade resources as some places make somethings better than others (like some places make food, some make water, some make fuel, etc) and then depending on what types of economy a player focuses on (although in the limited demo it seemed kinda difficult to try specializing, maybe its a quirk of being limited to only small towns) their town will develop different more complex resources (abstracts like office, manufacturing, heavy industry, etc).

This type of economic depth possibilities is something we only dreamed about back in the days of SC3k when I did city journaling (city simulator meets role playing games through “conventional” Internet means like BBSes).

Not too surprising, there’s still a few quirks in the game. I’d have thought that this game was developed from scratch but some of these are the same quirks I specifically remember having in Monte Cristo’s City Life, such as glitchy menus (handling mouse events more times than it should [i]id est[/i] multiple sound effects for a single click, opening and closing a menu at the same time) and iffy support for Windows XP Media Center Edition (my operating system).

In the city sim fan community this game as been heralded as the successor to SimCity 4 (since EA’s own attempt at it was a flop to just about any fan of the original series; albeit it is a very beautiful game, SC Societies has no gameplay depth, maybe even to the point of not even calling it a game, but more of a type of Paint, nay, KidPix, for designing cityscapes).

I myself have been wanting to play this game for a long time, and by that I mean since the first day news of it made it to the SimCity fan communities. Actually, it was hearing of their work on this game is what made me interested in trying out Monte Cristo’s earlier city simulator work, City Life. Funny that [b]the[/b] city simulator series ended up more like City Life and now Monte Cristo intends to make a game more like the original series.

As a longtime SimCity fan, I’d say that Cities XL definitely looks like its got some definite potential, especially with the MMO mode giving it a whole uncharted realm for city simulators. However, from my limited experience with a limited demo of a game that’s not even released yet (enough disclaimers yet?), I think SimCity 4 is still going to be the diehard hardcore city simulator game; particularly in the wide range of customizations SimCity 4 allows and with its huge assortment of plugins and customs already out on the net. Maybe I’m just a Will Wright fanboy, but that’s my $.02.

I finally managed to get into the book a little today. The first that came to mind from reading the thoughts of Hank Rearden is that he reminds me of Shinji Ikari. He is struggling with understanding the Hank Rearden’s from the minds of others. Rearden himself acknowledges this about himself, and his thought flow often includes him thinking about what the people around him want from him.  He believes that he has no tie to be with these people around him except that they want to be by him. He shares with them what he finds to be the most “amazing,” or more closely to as Rand put it, the thinks for which he believes he should be loved, and they return their own concerns for him.  Concerns which he finds misplaced.

He ponders what it is they like about him, only understanding relationships in terms of business.  In terms of business, the very things which he holds important about himself are more likely to be the things which the third party finds to be a valuable quality. But the close interpersonal relationships (be they one or not, in the case of Rearden) of the people around is harder to understand.  Understanding these relations would require him to acknowledge that his view of himself is not the only one. And that others may take value in qualities of him that he himself does not value,  or even recognize.  Neon Genesis leads us to believe that Shinji learns to conciliate the images he has of himself and the images other have of him. Now I suppose only continuing the book will tell me if Hank Rearden will do the same.

Placing value in what others think of you. Sounds like an egotist right? But wouldn’t the realization that the image others hold of one’s self is as important in the world perspective as one’s own self-image, if not more so, be the downfall of an egotist?

So lets entertain the thought that Rearden’s denial of those around isn’t egotism as Rearden’s mother tries to play it, but a case of hedgehog’s dilemma, as it is in the case of Shinji Ikari.

Or would it be better to compare Rearden to Asuka Langley Soryu, who is constantly seeking others to admire her accomplishments?