Monthly Archives: February 2011

24Feb

Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel

Posted in Mecha, Technology, Visual Media | 3 Comments

It wasn’t long ago that I discussed another of Isaac Asimov’s legendary novel series, Foundation, and how it’s potential adaptation fell into the hands of Roland Emmerich who has done great movies (Independence Day) and awful, boring, overly CG-heavy movies (2012).

This adaptation aside, the Foundation series introduced me to another series of novels from Isaac Asimov under The Robot Series which followed the exploits of Elijah Bailey, a plainclothes investigator from Earth, and his partner R. Daneel Olivaw, as he finds himself embroiled in murder cases.

What makes matters worse is that his cases involve the Spacers (more…)

21Feb

Weird OS X file permissions

Posted in Apple, Technology | Leave a comment

So I am organizing my files on my desktop and ensuring files for my blog have the right file permissions I notice some files have additional characters beyond the usual r, w and x. I start to worry, thinking I might have been using chmod wrong when I come across this gem:

OS X file permissions issue @ Ask MetaFilter that cleared things up.

It turns out that in Snow Leopard whenever you download files from the Internet they are marked with an additional, extended file attribute, such as com.apple.quarantine. This file attribute in particular is used when downloading programs, such as Mozilla Firefox, from the Internet as a precaution to ensure the file is safe.

When the install file is downloaded this attribute is added so that the user will be prompted the first time it opens the file. This explains why I always get prompted with a message about running a program I just downloaded and installed from the Internet.

21Feb

Solving the issue of disappearing icons in the Snow Leopard Finder’s sidebar

Posted in Apple, Technology | 2 Comments

It’s interesting how the Internet has come along since the 1960s when it was a small research project co-ordinated between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Since then we have seen grow into a great resource for information, entertainment and communication with tools like Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and MSN Messenger.

(more…)

20Feb

Ubunchu: Whatever Happened to the Comic of Tomorrow?

Posted in Linux, Visual Media | Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I last talked about Ubunchu, the comic by Hiroshi Seo, about the three members of a high school Computer Club. In the months since I last spoke of Ubunchu there hasn’t been much activity besides a post last month in which the author mentions he is undergoing some financial difficulties and can’t spare the time to work on Ubunchu at the moment.

This seems a little sad since I hadn’t known of the difficulties he was having until recently when I checked out the Ubunchu the Goolge Groups page. It explains a lot as to why there hasn’t been any new chapters since last September when the 7th chapter of the comic was released. Since then fans of the comic have been waiting not only for the preceding, unreleased 6th chapter, but also for the next 2 chapters whose titles are already listed on Hiroshi Seo’s blog.

Here’s hoping for Hiroshi’s success in overcoming the financial difficulties and seeing more from him as he weaves together a slice of life comic with a touch of Ubuntu.

Source: Ubunchu (Official Site), Ubunchu the Goolge Groups page, Hiroshi Seo’s blog

19Feb

System Malfunction: Restore Complete!

Posted in Site Updates | Leave a comment

So over the past I have been trying to track down what’s been causing some issues when uploading images directly via WordPress and a 3rd party Blogging software client I use, Mars Edit. Although I haven’t quite tracked down the exact cause I have a strong feeling that my database was corrupted somehow.

Over the past week I have done some manual restoration, making use of my SQL know how and programming skills to completely restore all my old posts and comments.

It looks like the blog is fully operational again, hopefully for many long months and years down the road.

Now that this is out of the way and I can upload images using Mars Edit I can look forward to writing more and worrying less about the internals of this blog.

Image courtesy of: Gundam Unicorn Official Website (International Version)

12Feb

The World’s First Avenger: Captain America

Posted in Visual Media | Leave a comment

It seems like every year the Super Bowl rolls around the focus isn’t so much on the game, but on the onslaught of commercials airing during the Big Game promoting the latest and greatest cars, food and services.

Let’s not forget that the Super Bowl is one of the most watched TV events every year, and just so happens to be the perfect place and time for movie makers to unleash a sneak peak at their latest movie magic that they’re conjuring up for us movie goers. (more…)

10Feb

Final Fantasy IV: The Remake Again

Posted in Gaming, Nintendo, RPG | Leave a comment

Fans of Square Enix and their popular Final Fantasy franchise will have yet another chance to relive a classic as Final Fantasy IV: Complete Collection hits the Sony PSP this spring.

Much like the re-release of Final Fantasy I and II on the PSP, this version of Final Fantasy IV (originally released as Final Fantasy II for the SNES) will have 2D upgraded graphics, similar to the upgrades made when Square Enix released Final Fantasy I and II previously for the PSP. (more…)

09Feb

Valkyria Chronicles 2: Review

Posted in Gaming, PlayStation, RPG | Leave a comment

It’s hard to imagine that only a few years ago the landscape for Japanese-developed RPGs (JRPG) looked dire.

The majority of JRPGs were generally either ports, remakes or sequels of established franchises for handhelds, with few JRPGs hitting the home consoles. Games like Tales of Vesperia, Lost Odyssey and Eternal Sonata did eventually come out to home consoles, but there wasn’t anything truly new or innovative.

This changed on April 24th, 2008 (more…)