Chinese Internet

It would seem that the Chinese internet is more of a reality than ever with Beijing announcing the creation of Chinese top level domain names. This frees Chinese internet from the international standard set by ICANN; but this is definitely the wrong course of action. Could this be the end of the internet as we know it? Probably not... Seriously, when was the last time you surfed a Chinese website?

People's Daily

6 Version Vista

Microsoft comfirms 6 separate editions of Windows Vista to reach stores later this year. A quick breakdown:

Vista Business
Vista Enterprise
Vista Home Basic
Vista Home Premium
Vista Ultimate
Vista Starter

Full Story @ BBC

300

三 ひやく ポスト おめでとうございます！

Honey & Clover Chapter F

Memento has a preview of the second Honey & Clover special episode Chapter F. I can't wait to see it, お楽しみ です！

Memento

The Best of 2.0

Design Technica is running an article on the best of the best of web 2.0. Sounds like something TechCrunch would do.

Read it here

Strawberry Fate the Death of ARIA

Two more manga titles upcoming and lookin good are Strawberry Panic and FateStay Night. Also, ARIA the Animation has come to a quiet end. It shall be missed... (a moment of silence). Chao!

Seed Special

Bandai announces a new Gundam Seed OVA series that consists of 4 volumes and will be aired in Japan towards the end of may.

Source: ANN

Touring the Sailor Strip

From ANN, Genvid L.L.C announces a "reality" based Sailor Moon tour around Tokyo to visit the places where moonlight miracles occured! You mean to say, I can finally be atop the Toyko Tower with Darian? Ara ara, daisuki-kamo...

ANN Source

Tainted Charcoal

So,,, (that's my syntax for the Brendan Moran Sooo....) I was watching Bincho-tan episode three and who do I see make a cameo? None other than the Furher! WTF.

The Berkeley Utilities

Here are a collection of 40 Unix like DOS utilities that run natively on a win32 machine. I'm not saying that all of them work well; but, there you are.

Get them here

Tor 0.1.0.17

The latest stable version of Tor: 0.1.0.17 has been released by the good people at EFF.

Download it here

Yahoo! Ban on Allah

Apparently, on Yahoo! web services the string allah is banned throughout. More interesting, however, is the list of strings allowed.
Yahoo! Do's and Do Not's

RahXephon: Tagen Hensoukyoku OST

Revisiting an old classic anime, some may remember RahXephon as the anime that couldn't quite become Evangelion. That's not true. RahXephon is a very good anime in its' own regard the music of which I dare say is better than the scores of Evangelion. Naturally, we're only counting original music; not to tread on the notes of the great classical masters. Anyway, pick up Tangen Hensoukyoku if you're looking for some good lounge music.

Manga Menagerie

So with the recent lack of new anime in the winter season of 2006, BOAS thought that some manga would fill the gap in all our lives. Three titles right now have caught my attention
1. Minami-ke みなみけ: The normal lives of three sisters. A real down-to-earth manga experience that is gentle and cute.
2. Kashimashi かしまし: I've said enough about his already...
3. Lunar Legend Tsukihime 月姫： I just found this one recently and it's really good. A compelling and unique storyline given wonderful artstyle really give Tsukihime a nice feel and pace.

Free Online Anime!

Keiichi Anime is offering free episodes of many anime titles free and streaming through their website. The implementation is really quite impressive and the quality is adequate! You've got to check it out.

Keiichi Anime Forever

pget v1.1

An update to BOAS pget application is available at
LaFlaga::[N e t S l u m] Programming. Version 1.1 introduces a much more flexable calling algorithm which removes the need to specify the picture filename length argument.

Download it here

Azureus 2.4

Aelitis Azureus 2.4 has been released with some improvements and new features. Update through your installed copy or download if you don't have a previous version.
Here

Valentines

Today being valentines day BOAS feels that he should say something. That's quite something that I actually remembered, since I've been having this chronic problem of writing the wrong date. And I don't mean by a few days; but more like the wrong month or year... Anyway,
桜 咲く
真白 の 恋
彼女 も 愛して ね
just what that meant? I dunno, that's valentines day!

Here's a BBC article on Japanese valentines. Seriously don't complain, it's tradition to receive 3 times the value on white day.

Magnetic Processors

Researchers at Notre Dame have built a magnet based CPU which holds promise to break through the Moore barrier.
Full Story

Algorithms Allure

Do you like sorting algorithms? I know I do! Here are some of the best with C implementations
http://linux.wku.edu/~lamonml/algor/sort/sort.html
The only thing missing is the O(n!) sorting algorithm, just kidding ;D

FFVII Advent Children Cast

According the 1up.com the English cast for Advent Children is confirmed an the official release date is April 25, 2006. Go to 1up.com for the specific details

Here's the cast ｷｬｽﾄ
Cloud Strife: Steve Burton
Tifa Lockhart: Rachael Leigh Cook
Kadaj: Steve Staley
Rufus Shinra: Wally Wingert
Reno: Quinton Flynn
Rude: Crispin Freeman
Yazoo: Dave Wittenberg
Loz: Fred Tatasciore
Vincent Valentine: Steve Blum
Barett Wallace: Beau Billingslea
Cid Highwind: Chris Edgerly
Yuffie Kisaragi: Christy Romano
Cait Sith: Gregg Ellis
Red XIII: Liam O'Brien
Reeve: Jamieson Price
Tseng: Ryun Yu
Elena: Bettina Bush
Marlene: Wallace Grace Rolek
Denzel: Benjamin Bryan
Girl: Andrea Bowen
Zack: Rick Gomez
Aerith Gainsborough: Mena Suvari
Sephiroth: George Newbern

KOF: Another Day

I forgot to mention this, since it's been out for a while but you can watch the animated series King of Fighters Another Day online.
Watch here (Japanese)

Tor 0.1.0.16

An update to the all so good Tor SOCKS proxy client.
Get it here

FMA Movie OST

Like all the FMA OSTs this one's still sounds like the "best of" classical music compliation but there are notible exceptions. The movie OST definitely has a more down-to-earth feel to it with salsa to mix it up. Quite enjoyable.

Open Source Matlab

Is anyone else out there annoyed that companies like Wolfram have almost a complete monopoly on the mathematical software out there? Well, I decided to do a google and found there are a lot of Matlab clones out there but there was also an open source alternative called FreeMat on SourceForge. But if I were writing an open source Matlab I'd call it Fatlab except it'll be spelt with a 'p' so it'll actually be called Phatlab... Maybe not... O.O

.Hack//Roots

New .Hack Anime (2006-02-08 15:32:16)
On Monday there was an official press conferance announcing the April broadcast of .hack//Roots, a new TV series entry in the .hack universe. Animation will again be handled by Bee Train and Yuki Kajiura's FictionJunction YUUKA will provide the opening theme.

Source: AnimeNewsNetwork

LaFlaga::[M a c A n u]::Galleries Update

New Mahoromatic gallery uploaded to
[M a c A n u] @ LaFlaga

Songbird

The open source iTunes killer has officially released preview version 0.1 today. The Songbird site is already overloaded but Boing Boing provides some alternative mirrors.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/08/songbird_the_open_so.html

Songbird Official Site

2/9/2006, first impressions update:
So I've had an opportunity to try out Sonbird and I have some mixed opinions. First off, once you get it installed and take a look at the install directory you immediately notice that it is indeed Mozilla based! That's really cool. I mean from a technical standpoint the programming of Songbird is really quite a feat and is a really good step and contribution for the Mozilla camp.
Sadly, once I started using Songbird some issues immediately came to mind. The most crippling is ofcourse the speed of importing music. It's deeeaaddd.... slow. It's not that the music imports slowly, only that the metafile information such as music tags take the longest time. That really sucks for people with a lot of music that needs to be searched through. And if you don't have a lot of music then WinAmp is probably a better alternative. Another problem was the utter chaos of the GUI which is really just a web browser. There are a ton of online music services that you can't even remove from the GUI. I like to think these options are good for average users who sport an iPod and jog on sundays but for us early adopters who see little of the light of day these services are useless. I think the ball was really dropped on the simplicity portion.
The best part of Songbird isn't what it offers now but what will happen hopefully soon and that's Linux support. By and far this will be the best music type-manager for the linux OS and that'll be what I'll be using it for.

Princess Kiko With Child

You know I just thought I had to put this here for some reason.

BBC

Indie Glory

The charts for 2005 best Indie games are in at gametunnel.com; check them out.

here

China v. Japan, Again...

Well it seems like the stage is set for another round of talks between China and Japan over god-knows-what this time. For those of us with so little time these days, here's their argument personified:

MOMMMMM, China's touching ME!!!
But Japan started it!
Did not.
Did tooo.
I'm not talking to YOU!
WHATEVER!
(and so forth...)

Bincho-tan

As everyone (should) know, Bincho-tan is the mascot for Alchemist, you know that company that always appears in "This Program was brought to you by...". Anyway, she finally has her own little series of shorts and it is SO SO SO SO CUTE! KAWAII

かわいい！

The official website here

pget

So I've been into the manga recently therefore I've also been into the wget recently. The problem was that there was no way to download a batch with wget in DOS with its' lack of shell scripting capability. Anyway, BOAS has written a small C++ program to somewhat solve this problem for picture filenames up to 999.

Get pget.exe

China bans Geisha

Well it was only a matter of time, China has banned screenings of Memoirs of a Geisha because... well because it's China, what'd you expect? Honestly, I don't think anyone would have went to see it even if it wasn't banned but maybe now pirated DVDs of it will sell like hot-cakes!

BBC article

Online Renkinjitsu

This is a good site that allows you to read Full Metal Alchemist manga scans along with some other titles. Check it out, here

Tora-uma-mend?! Traumend

BOAS wants it be known that he doesn't want to know what happened in episode 11 of Rozen Maiden Traumend. Iknows it's when the dolls go at each other and doesn't need to see that. Apparently "I'm not man enough to watch other men play with dolls either?!"

Flagasphere Updates

1. New To Heart gallery pictures uploaded on
LaFlaga::[M a c A n u]
2. flickr html 32 updated which fixed two bugs

IE 7 Public Beta

Internet Explorer 7 is now released for public beta testing. Currently it only runs on XP S2. Get it here