Chumsley Approves of My New Mouse

Since you asked... yeah, Chumsley get along fine with the new mouse. No tail for him to chew on =)

Nu

There were never any doubt that the Nu Gundam would be next in the HCM pro line-up. This picture confirms it.

Aside: I posted some new albums on my home page:

Chumsley (1 - 2 years old)
Baby and Chumsley
HCM Pro Zeta

Week-long Caribbean Cruise

Well, shipped my parents off to Florida this morning for their week-long Princess Caribbean Cruise. I do hope tropical storm Ernesto in the area doesn't ruin their vacation. I am looking forward to having some time to myself =)

In other (MG) news, the next Master Grade kits from Bandai will be the Crossbone Gundam and the IWSP pack for the Strike Gundam (pictures courtesy of the figure.fm community)

Crossbone pic 1
Crossbone pic 2
Crossbone pic 3
IWSP pic 1

Never read any Crossbone manga, but I guess it's fairly popular judging from the number of FIX models it has and now it's getting the MG treatment. The Crossbone name of course comes from the big X core fighter/backpack it has. I am not a big fan of the design, doesn't seem very practical.

Another Dead Mouse

Chumsley has chewed up yet another mouse cord, this must be his 4th or 5th victim. Of course my dad is jumping mad (since it's his mouse after all) and I am supposed to get him a wireless optical mouse this time and stop Chumsley's mouse hunt once and for all.

And this is what I ended up getting... For myself... (I am giving my dad my current keyboard and mouse)

I know... This is a bit more than just a mouse... But it's ok to indulge myself once in a while right?? This keyboard and mouse combo has some really sweet features, such as:

- Rechargeable mouse. Considering how fast my old mouse eats through the batteries, this should save some money in the long run.

- Bluetooth connectivity. This is a real plus, with the included Bluetooth receiver, it basically turns your computer into a Bluetooth hub. Really convenient for transferring files from my cell phone to the computer, since I don't have to crawl under the desk to connect my phone everytime I want to transfer something anymore (I can't keep the cable always attached to the computer, because any exposed loose wire is a great snack for Chumsley).

- Keyboard LCD, which shows you info such as current date and time, current track playing in media player, new mail notification etc. The coolest feature though is how it's integrated with MSN messenger. MSN messenger popups will be shown on the LCD. So for example, let's say you are working at your desk and the screen has gone into power saving mode, if anyone comes online or messages you, you can quickly find out who it is by glancing at the LCD screen.

- Touch sensitive media controls. Doesn't really enhance the user experience that much, but it's kind of cool.

And of course, there are a ton of other configurable buttons on both the mouse and keyboard. Here's a pic of the contents of the package, plus comparison with the old keyboard and mouse combo:

Chara Hobby 2006

I wish I could be there T_T

Pictures from the recent Chara Hobby show are beginning to surface on the internet, and a couple of items have caught my attention...

First, are the folks at Yamato finally going to release the long awaited, 2nd version of the YF-19?!? Check out the pics on this site! Looks like it's still just a prototype though.

Next up is this site, scroll to the middle of the page and check out the pictures of the coolsome looking Strike Freedom there. Could this be the an official MG kit?? Or is it mod of the MG Freedom? Notice though that the stand it's on is the MG Freedom stand... what does that mean??? (grrr... once again I wish my Japanese was better!)

Update: here is another pic of that Strike Freedom. And look at that Destiny beside it... that doesn't look like the HG version...

...

Gundam News

Gundam X will be #0033 in the Fix Figuration line of display figures, due out in December. The Fix line is something I have not gotten anything from yet, mainly because of the lack of articulation in them and they are kind of fragile; they are really meant for display rather than handling and playing with. However, Gundam X has always been one of my favourite designs, and the ability to display this as Gundam X or Gundam X Divider is a real plus (there is even a third form you can build it as, but it's just a grunt mech, it'd be cool if it was Double X). This one is tempting...

Speaking of Gundam X, I just put up the album to my HG 1/100 Gundam X kit.

Web Site Updates

I have been working on a couple of new sections on my home page. First is the photo album section. Rather than writing my own photo album though, I am just rendering the interface off of ImageStation's RSS feed (and this way, I don't have to take up my limited space on geocities). This mini-project was also my chance to experiment with some AJAX programming techniques. Although, in the end, I can't really claim credit for writing any AJAX specific code because I came across a handy little package called Sarissa.

Originally I thought it would be fun to write some js library functions to wrapper around the calls to the XMLHttpRequest object and handle doing XSLT as well. But as usual, anything I think of doing has already been done, I am serveral years too late in fact T_T. Sarissa is such a project, it provides a nice interface for doing AJAX programming. It was quite easy to use, although it's not without its share of bugs and quirks. But it's definitely better than me fudging around with browser specific instantiations and handling of XMLHttpRequest objects.

So now that the photo album is working, I put it to use for the second section I was working on, which is a section on my cats (those who know me shouldn't be surprised right? ;) The cats section can be found here. There are 3 albums so far =)

Another week gone by

Another week has gone by so quickly, well it was a short week anyways since Monday was the civic holiday. Last weekend I tried out that Owl of Minerva Keith recommended. It's really good authentic Korean food. There aren't many choice there though, but that's ok, everyone just goes there for the pork bone soup, it's really good.

Not much happened this week. I was very tired after work these past few days. I didn't go to gym at all (shame on me!) Work was not particularly intense, not sure why I feel so tired, maybe just been starring at the monitor too much...

[Review] Service-Oriented Architecture - A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services

I bought this book a little over a month ago. I was hoping to learn more about SOA and web services in preparation for working in my new department. This book has 5 star review overall on Amazon, so I thought was getting exactly what I needed... Unfortunately, things could not be further from the truth.

The problem with this book is that it's too high level. Many of the scenarios described in the book are described in such high level that in many cases, I am at a loss as to what are the differences and points that the author is trying to get across. In those examples, ultimately it all boils down to stripping away the communication layer of an application and slap on a web services integration layer which appears to do just about the same thing. Magically, your applications will be able to talk to each other with ease, but there is no clear explanation as to why a web services approach would do better than other traditional approaches. Sure, pros and cons are given, but they are simply statements made without enough detail to support them.

I also found the flow of the book hard to follow and erratic. Often it feels like points are made simply for the sake of making it, there is no logical continuation from the previous point. There are a lot of back references too, i.e. in chapter 10+ you would still get a lot of: "for more information on XYZ, please refer to chapter 5". But of course it is rather pointless to refer back to chapter 5, since it is just more of the hand-wavy high level overview of the particular concept.

Another thing that bugs me are the diagrams in the book. Too many times I have found a diagram referred to in a paragraph would be found a couples pages ahead resulting in a lot a page flipping. *Good* thing the diagrams are about as useful as drawing stick figures in an anatomy class and soon I have learned to ignore them.

One might argue that the book is aimed at system architects and I am the wrong target audience. That is probably true but I have my doubts about the usefulness of this book for system architects as well. I would argue that any IT professional with experience architecting systems and background in software engineering would already be familiar with the strategies and best practices outlined in the book. Even to me some of the strategies and best practices sounds just like back in first year economics when the prof says that higher demand will result in increased supply.

My rating: 2/5

AJAX and REST

I first read about AJAX on Danny's site. I thought it was some kind of server-side add-on module, but actually AJAX is technique for doing Web development that improves a page's interactivity without doing page loads. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML and you can read all about it here. The concept is quite interesting. Basically, parts of the HTML on a page is generated dynamically with Javascript, using XML data retrieved from the server via an XMLHttpRequest object. And since the data exchange is asychronous, the whole page does not need to load.

So this AJAX stuff is cool but how to get my hands into it you ask? Well, one of the things you can do is add a Google quick search to your site. Yes, that's right, Google has an AJAX Search API, and I am quite impressed with how easy it was to incorporate into my home page.

Speaking of web development, I was suprised to find that YouTube has a REST API for retrieving videos from their site. REST is only a concept I've heard about from my manager once, this is the first time I encountered a real world application of it (but as it turns out, many sites such as Amazon and eBay have REST APIs too, I just don't know about them). REST is certainly a topic I would like to learn about. Furthermore, it sounds like AJAX and REST goes hand in hand together.

Saikano Movie

I didn't mention that I actually found a subbed version of the Saikano movie a couple days ago. At first I didn't get it because it was in mkv format and I didn't know how to play it. But it turns out to be quite easy, I just need to grab the Combined Community Codec pack. It even plays ogm files, so no need for the Nimo Codec pack anymore.

The movie casts Aki Maeda in the role as Chise and some guy that looks like 古天樂 as Shuji (he doesn't look any way like his anime counter-part, at least they could have made him wear glasses!) The film opens up shortly before the Sapporo raid in the story.

Sapporo Air Raid	Chise, you are on the wrong swing!

Most differences between the movie and the anime are a result of fitting the storyline into the a format what works as a movie; such as fewer supporting characters and some that play slightly different roles. Also, the relationship between Chise and Shuji is not as well developed as in the anime, this is to be expected given the length of the movie. The most significant change is the ending though, which I find weakens the film. I like the anime ending much better.

The special effects in the film was sparse, but those that we do get are done quite well. Some parts of the movie is quite dark though, and I suspect it let's the director get away with doing less special effects.

I was disappointed with the BGM of the film though. I was looking foward to hearing some of the music from the anime. That just didn't happen.

Overall, the movie does a decent job of capturing the essence of the anime. But because of the weak ending and lack of a good soundtrack, I have to give it a lower review than the anime: 5/10

P.S. I changed the template on my blog. I really liked the last template but it had some bugs with rendering the side-bar (some links doesn't appear unless you hover over them).

SPCA Shelter Destroyed

Heard on the news that an SPCA animal shelter was struck by lightning from last night's thunderstorm. The shelter caught fire and many animals were killed or injured. Such sad news, nature's fury can be devastating. Donations to SPCA can be made online, follow the link at the bottom of this article (http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_2462.aspx).

Darken Skies

Well, this is how the sky looked on my way home today (the top right corner is the massive rain cloud and it's in the direction I was headed). This was just the prelude, within minutes it was pouring cats and more cats... I thought driving through a snow storm was bad, driving through tonight's thunder storm at the peak of it was worst. It was like getting slapped over and over again with sheets of water from every direction. Good thing it was a short drive home.

Finished downloading Saikano OST. There are a couple of tracks I really like, the others were ok... they are nice but I don't recall where I've heard them, so they don't jog my memory about the series at all. The 2 songs I like the most just happens to be the opening and ending songs (not really surprising considering I've heard them so many times). I've uploaded them to my webspace and you can download them from here:

• Koisuru Kimochi (OP)
• Sayonara (ED)

Since space is limited, I probably won't leave them up for a long time.

News travels fast...

Apparently someone thinks I should update my blog more often =p Wow, you sure get wind of things quickly sp... Especially since I only told a couple people (literally) about my blog so far.

I *was* going to write something in here last night, but then my connection was lost and I had to reboot my computer to get it back, so didn't bother to re-type everything. Nothing much to talk about anyways, just stuff about work (I am sure no one wants to read that). So instead boring everyone with work, I decide to post pics of these instead:

Why am I posting them? That's because I just checked HLJ and my order is being processed for shipping ^_^. Can't wait for them to get here, look forward to more pics and reviews of them when they arrive. And of course, I'll also retroactively put up pics of models and toys I currently have in my collection (either here or in my home page). Stay tuned!