Review: Angelic Layer

January 18, 2009 by · Comment
Filed under: Anime 
Misaki and Hotoko with Hikaru and Suzuku

Hotoko with Suzuka and Misaki with Hikaru

I recall seeing a description of this anime somewhere a few years ago and nothing jumped out at me as something I would enjoy (in fact, I thought it sounded kind of strange at the time), so I passed over it.  Looking back on it now, I think the description I saw just might not have been written well.  Recently, Crunchyroll picked up a license to stream it in North America, and the description jumped out at me a little bit more.  Since it was free, I figured I’d watch the first episode and see what it was like.  It hooked me, and I ended up watching the entire series over the following four days.  Although what Crunchyroll is streaming is Japanese audio with English subtitles, I noticed that all the credits were in English, and they had an English vocal cast listed in the credits in addition to the Japanese vocal cast.  This series really jumped out at me as something my kids would probably enjoy as well, so going on the clue from the credits that there must have been an English version, I checked out amazon.com and sure enough, found a box set of the series in English.

The premise of the series revolves around a game in which the participants buy high tech electronic doll kits, design the dolls (called “angels”) and outfits for them, and then fight them against each other on a playing field (called “the layer”) which allows the player to control their angel via a headset that transmits their thoughts to their angel.  You win the game by having the most remaining points at the end of the 10 minute time limit, taking away all of your opponent’s remaining points, or by getting a “layer out” by knocking your opponent off the layer.  The game tables are expensive, so most people don’t own their own, but rent time at a table in local establishments resembling cyber cafes to practice or have games with each other.  If the technology really existed to do this, it would be incredibly fun to participate, I think.  The actual fights seem pretty similar in concept to the “net battles” in Mega Man NT Warrior (but no weapons, it’s all hand-to-hand combat), which my kids really enjoyed, and was why I figured they’d enjoy this, too.  The dolls only work when on the table used for the playing field, and it reminded me of the “dimensional area” concept in Mega Man NT Warrior that allows the net navis to come into the real world, but only within the dimensional area.

The series opens with the main character, Misaki, moving to Tokyo to live with her aunt Shoko.  Her father died when she was a baby, and her mother left to go to Tokyo to work when she was 5, and never came back, leaving her with her grandparents in the country for the last 7 years.  The directions she gets from her aunt for how to find her house have her changing trains at Tokyo Station, getting off the regional bullet train onto the subway to get further into town.  But she gets lost inside the station and accidentally leaves the station instead of going to the transfer area, meaning she would have to pay for a new ticket to get back in.  In the square in front of the station, an Angelic Layer game is playing on the TV above the square.  The eventual winner of game is a small white angelic-looking doll, who comes from behind to win against a larger opponent.  Misaki, being fairly small herself, becomes very enthralled with this, that someone smaller could beat a larger opponent.  It’s then that a man in a white lab coat (who had actually followed her out of the station) approaches her and offers to show her how to get involved.  She eventually makes it to her aunt’s house, but not before spending all her money buying an Angelic Layer doll and accessories.  Having no money left to buy a new train ticket, and the guy in the lab coat having disappeared (he had gotten detained by the store security because of a misunderstanding with a store worker) she ends up walking all the way to her aunt’s house.

Over the next few days, Misaki (with some random help from Icchan, the lab coat guy) more or less accidentally ends up in some matches with people at the local store, and turns out to be really good at it.  Icchan takes the liberty of entering her in the local tournament without her permission, and she reluctantly agrees to participate.  The series follows Misaki’s adventures (and also the adventures of her mother, as some of her co-workers and Aunt Shoko attempt to convice her to go back to her daughter) as she progresses through the local, regional, and national tournaments as the “Miracle Rookie.”

The following paragraph describes some of the plot points revealed later in the series which helped to define the series and created much of the drama and tear-jerking moments in the series that won me over.  Since they’re crucial plot developments, I’ve marked it with spoiler tags to avoid spoiling the show for anyone who wants to discover them on their own.

click to reveal spoilers
We eventually learn that her mother (Shuko) really has multiple sclerosis, and has lost the use of her legs.  The real reason she left home was to participate in research to try to help her walk again, and she’s embarrassed to be seen by Misaki in a wheelchair.  She and one of the doctors (Icchan) had been working on neural transmitters to allow a user to control prosthetic legs in a natural way so that they would behave like normal ones.  The research was promising, but not promising enough for the bosses at the medical equipment company Icchan works for, and the funding had been cut.  Not wanting to give up, Shuko and Icchan turn to merchandising the small dolls they had been using to test the transmitters as a game in order to make money to continue the research on their own, and thus, Angelic Layer is born.  It took off way faster than they anticipated, and much of the research ended up getting channeled towards improving the game.  Shuko is the one who controlled the small white doll Misaki had seen on TV at the train station.  The man in the lab coat who found Misaki at the train station turns out to have been Icchan.  He had been sent there to make sure Misaki changed trains correctly, but failed to make contact in the station and lost track of her until after she’d already gone out the front gates.  Seeing her interest in Angelic Layer in the square in front of the station, he had decided it might be a good way to get the mother and the daughter to meet, since Shuko was still too paranoid to let Misaki see her in a wheelchair.  Icchan and Shuko’s sister Shoko (who Misaki is now living with) try many times to convince her to go see Misaki, but she never gets up the courage to do so until the end of the semifinal match at the national tournament, with Misaki not even knowing that her mother is involved with Angelic Layer at all (let alone the co-creator of it and current national champion) the entire time.  After a tear-jerking reunion before the final match, Shuko and Misaki get to battle each other for the national title.
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Throughout the 26-episode series, we learn a lot about the background stories of several of the other players, and many of them become good friends with Misaki as a result of their interactions in the games.  There’s even a touch of romance thrown in.  The end of the series is really touching, and if you’re the empathetic or emotional type, I guarantee you’ll come out of episode 25 shedding at least a few tears.

I said at the top that I found DVDs with English audio on them.  I did order them but they haven’t arrived yet as I type this.  I made the mistake (if you want to call it that) of letting my son (he’s 10) watch the first episode in Japanese with subtitles online, and sure enough, he got hooked too.  He may have the entire thing watched in Japanese before the DVDs show up for him to be able to see it in English.

Bottom line, my son and I both really enjoyed this series.  The intended target audience is probably kids about my son’s age (upper elementary).  You can watch it online for free at Crunchyroll if you are connecting from within North America (in Japanese with English subtitles).  Paid subscribers get full DVD quality (480p), non-subscribers will get a lower-resolution (but still perfectly watchable) version.  The DVDs (with English audio) are available at Amazon.com (and probably other places).

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Serving AppleShare from RHEL5 with Netatalk 2.0.3

January 13, 2009 by · 4 Comments
Filed under: Personal, Work 

So I was recently trying to set up a fileshare in one of our offices and trying to get it visible to the filesharing stuff in Mac OS X, since several people in the office have Mac laptops.  The original thought (since it’s supposedly better-supported on Linux) was to set up Samba, but our authentication in the office is all LDAP based, and I gave up trying to get Samba to work with our LDAP server after a few days.  Samba seems to want complete control over your LDAP server, and won’t deal with a read-only one that just happens to have all the Samba auth info in it already.  This seems wrong, and I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but I sure couldn’t find any documentation to tell me how.

So then I thought maybe I’d try Netatalk.  None of the usual packaging repos seemed to carry a netatalk RPM, but I did find one for Netatalk 2.0.3 in Fedora 8.  I took the SRPM from that and rebuilt it on my RHEL5 server.  Then I went about trying to configure it.  Turns out the documentation for Netatalk SUCKS ROCKS.  Everything I could find was written in 1998 and last touched in 2002 or so, and there’s been several new versions of Netatalk since then.  When all was said and done, the configuration part turned out to be really easy, you just couldn’t figure it out from the docs.

I did find a tutorial for setting up Netatalk for TimeMachine on Ubuntu, which turned out to be incredibly helpful.  So my main reason for blogging about this is to help that tutorial get some more pagerank, since it wasn’t nearly high enough in the search results on Google. :)

So without further ado, here’s the Netatalk How-to for Ubuntu that I found.

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What American accent do I use?

December 17, 2008 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Personal 
What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Inland North

You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

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Bugzilla news feed now available

December 7, 2008 by · Comment
Filed under: Bugzilla 

So, thanks to Fowl’s comment in my previous entry, I tried out setting up the Google news/blogsearch keyword feeds for Bugzilla in Google Reader, and then individually sharing each of the entries that were actually about Bugzilla, and then using the shared items feed from Google Reader as the newsfeed.  It turns out to work quite well.

The built-in RSS widget that ships with WordPress completely chokes on Google Reader’s shared items feed though, and I ended up installing the SimplePie plugin for WordPress to handle the feed parsing (thanks to srikat on #wordpress for suggesting that).  SimplePie turns out to have a much more flexible template system, and it looks pretty good.  If you’re viewing this on my website, the results are over there on the right.

The feed icon in the title is linked to the source feed, so you can use that as a subscription URL if you want to subscribe to my sanitized Bugzilla news feed.  Now you can keep up on all the Bugzilla mentions in the news and blogosphere without having to wade through all the exterminator jokes, monster VW Beetles, and mentions of bug reports in every project’s bugzilla site.

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Bugzilla in the news

December 1, 2008 by · 6 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla 

Dear LazyWeb…   :)

I like to know how Bugzilla’s being talked about out in the world, so I subscribe to Google’s handy news and blog alert services where you can put in keywords and they’ll send you an email every time a new blog or news article shows up containing that/those keywords.  This works really well, except that you also get a bunch of crap with it.  People who post to message boards with “Bugzilla” as a username.  Message posts on insect websites about this huge bug someone found.  Articles about modified VW Beetles that have been turned into monster trucks.  Every mention in anyone’s blog about bug reports for any number of major projects that use Bugzilla for their bug trackers.  Etc Etc Etc.

I’ve long desired to create an RSS feed where I could collect that and republish all those links without all the cruft in it, i.e. just the stuff that was actually about Bugzilla as a product/project.  I really like Jon Gruber’s feed, where he puts the link and the title and a small blurb of his own comments about it.  Note that the linked title goes to the article being talked about, not an entry on his blog, which is the key feature I’m looking for (and what makes it different than just creating a category for it in the blog).  Something just like that would be awesome if there were a plugin for WordPress that would do it.  I’ve searched on and off and never found anything that would do this.  If anyone knows of one, please let me know in the comments here.

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Finally, DRM-free anime from Toei

October 27, 2008 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Anime 

If you’ve read any of my previous blog posts about Anime stuff, you’ll probably know that I’m a big fan of the Pretty Cure series.

Stuff like this makes my day.

Toei publishing Anime (even Pretty Cure) in North America with English subtitles is nothing new.  They’ve had it up on Direct2Drive for a while now.  What’s new is the episodes that will be posted on Crunchyroll will be available DRM-free!  Starting this Wednesday, you can either watch a stream online for free (with commercials) or purchase the uninterrupted episodes to download for US$1.99 each, in XVid, iPod, or PSP formats, with NO DRM.

I am so going to buy every episode they post.  Not only just to express my appreciation for creating this awesome series (now that they’re giving me a way to do so) but also to show my support for finally distributing it in a way that doesn’t require me to sell my soul to Microsoft to be able to watch it.

Thank you Toei for finally understanding the Internet!

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bugzilla.mozilla.org update

September 2, 2008 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla, Work 

On Friday, I pushed a small update to bugzilla.mozilla.org that fixed bug 452799, where users who didn’t have ‘canconfirm’ privs in Bugzilla were posting bugs that had a status of NEW rather than UNCONFIRMED.

This morning, I pushed an update to bugzilla.mozilla.org containing a plethora of additional fixes to address concerns raised since the Bugzilla upgrade.  This morning, we’ve picked up fixes for:

  • Bug 452793: (The other half of the issue which was fixed Friday) The default status selected when you file a new bug and do have ‘canconfirm’ privs is now NEW instead of UNCONFIRMED.
  • Bug 452810: The wording surrounding the checkbox to add youself to the CC now says “Add me to the CC list” when you aren’t on it, instead of just “myself.”
  • Bug 452734: The keyword chooser has been replaced with keyword autocomplete.  NOTE: If you installed the greasemonkey script to remove the keyword chooser, you’ll probably have to remove that script to get the autocomplete, since it hooks on the same event listener.
  • Bug 452798: The CC list is now visible again by default, and as a bonus, it’s now searchable via Firefox’s find-as-you-type feature.
  • Bug 452733: The [Classification] is no longer shown in front of the bug summary.
  • Bug 452746: The link to the bug in the header no longer contains an extra space.
  • Bug 452891: The “visually jarring” dashed border next to the line numbers in the Diff Viewer has been removed.
  • Bug 452749: The midair page once again specifies who you midaired with.
  • Bug 344559: Add a Commit button near the form fields at the top of the show_bug page so you don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the comments if you’re only changing a field at the top.

Fixes for admins:

  • Bug 452898: Milestones can once again be marked inactive.
  • Bug 452914: Multiple problems were fixed in the flag editor related to the “fixed in version” field not being dealt with correctly on a product change.

Hopefully this fixes up some of the more major concerns people had.  There’s still more to come.  At this point I’m plannng on daily pushes to production as the fixes become available.

UPDATE: Some people are reporting broken CSS and things looking strange…  hold the Shift key and hit Reload if that’s you.  Your browser is probably caching the old CSS.

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Please don’t shoot the Bugzilla devs

August 29, 2008 by · 5 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla, Work 

So bugzilla.mozilla.org got upgraded to Bugzilla 3.2 last night.  Since the upgrade, there’s been a lot of complaints about the new UI.

First off, given the differences in the way Mozilla uses Bugzilla compared to a lot of other places, some of these complaints are valid.  But, please try to be polite and state exactly why you think you have issues and suggest ways for improvement.  Don’t just run around saying it sucks or file bugs stating that you’re ticked off at the world because we broke your workflow.

One of the primary complaints Bugzilla as a product has received over the years is how the UI is ugly and hard to manage.  The last year or so the Bugzilla developers have been spending a lot of effort to fix that problem, with the assistance of professional UI designers.  Some of them are taking personal offense to some of the feedback we’ve gotten so far this morning about the UI changes because it makes them feel like all the work over the last year was for nothing if everyone just wants the old UI back.

Yes, in some cases, maybe you just have to suck it up and learn a new way to do things.  In others, there’s probably a lot of room for us to still clean things up.  In either case, please don’t burn the Bugzilla devs in effigy or anything. :)   Be kind on the bugs you file (but do file them).  Be constructive.  Don’t say “This and this are bad they way they are now, please put them back how they were.”  Do tell us “this is my usage case and what I need to do with Bugzilla, and here’s why the old way helped me be efficient doing this. Let’s come up with a way for it to be easy for me to do this again.”  In all honesty, I bet there’s use cases that weren’t thought of in the current design, and maybe it was just overlooked.  Give them the benefit of the doubt, and let us work with you to get something set up that makes your life easy again (maybe we’ll come up with something even better than both the old way and the current way, who knows?)

The major upgrade to 3.2 is done.  All the schema changes that took hours to run are in place.  Deploying changes to the UI at this point is just be the flip of a switch and it’ll just be live with no downtime at all, in most cases, so we can continue to tweak as we go over the next few weeks.  But please try not to get pissed at us and let us help fix it.  We really weren’t intentionally trying to break your world, you know. :)

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What do you want to see while you wait?

August 28, 2008 by · 9 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla, Work 

On bugzilla.mozilla.org, when you run a search, if your browser supports “server push,” Bugzilla will show you an interim page while the search runs.  Currently it shows an animated dino head (left) chomping on bugs, and the text “Please wait while your bugs are munched retrieved.”  It’s cute and all, but it’s kind of getting old.  And being that the page is entirely a cosmetic thing designed to entertain you while you wait, we should change it out once in a while anyway.  We’re planning to upgrade Bugzilla tomorrow night, and it’s the perfect opportunity to spice it up a little.

Gerv’s got a few ideas over on bug 438362… a neat javascript backed game where you click on the ants or somesuch.  If you like it or think you’d hate it, comment here (go try the mockups on the bug first).

If you have other ideas, or can implement one of the existing ones, feel free to post them on the bug.  I have a couple ideas, but no artistic skills to implement them…

  • A Mozilla dino standing there waiting for bugs – Buggie walks over to him carrying a basket of critters and hands it to him.
  • Buggie standing there with his hand shielding his eyes from the sun, turning his head back and forth like he’s looking for something…

Maybe if we have several of these things, it could randomly pick one each time.

Buggie poses for you, courtesy of Dave Shea.

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Bugzilla: 10 years ago today

August 25, 2008 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla 

On April 7, 1998, Terry Weissman announced the creation of bugzilla.mozilla.org, a new bug tracking system for keeping track of bugs in the Mozilla code base.

Bugzilla is here.  She’s very young, and fragile.  But if you treat her kindly, she’ll remember your bug reports for you.  When she grows up a little, she’ll become invaluable in helping track what is actually being done to the codebase.

On April 15th, a mere 8 days later, the first person requested the source code.

I like bugzilla!  Its cool!  If I wanted to use it for my own (non-Mozilla) project, how can I go about getting a copy?

But alas, it was still a proprietary Netscape product at the time.  In fact, we learn from Terry in that thread:

you need to be aware that it is built on top of the Kiva application server stuff, and on top of a database (I think it’s an Oracle database). Neither of these things are free.

Wow. Not only were they not free, they were expensive.  Kiva cost about $35,000 at the time, and Oracle…  if you had to ask, it was too much. :)   Not only that, but:

first we’d have to convince the folks here at Netscape who wrote it (not me) that this is something they want to do.  That might to be doable, but it hasn’t been attempted yet.  It’s always possible that someone at Netscape has plans to make money off of selling that code.

But that request apparently bore fruit.  On August 26, 1998, with this post, Terry Weissman announced that a new completely rewritten version of Bugzilla had been deployed on bugzilla.mozilla.org.  What’s more, this new version included the source code being available for download, and it ran under Apache using MySQL for the database.

The first checkin to CVS was at 11:15pm PDT, August 25, 1998.

Happy 10th anniversary to the open source Bugzilla Project!

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