Please vote for my Remix of LOST IN THE ECHO

Wanna help a dude?
Would be great if you guys could vote this for me...

Thanks a lot in advance!

Arrietty - Ghibli's latest masterpiece had me from hello

Finally I got the chance to watch the movie "Karigurashi no Arrietty", Studio Ghibli's latest animation movie. Being a fan of most their previous work, I couldn't help watching this movie with a great bunch of expectations.

The plot is based on a novel by Mary Norton ("Borrowers", never read it) and describes a short span in the life of Arrietty, a 14-year-old girl only a few inches tall, who has been living under the floorboards of a house with her family - unseen and unnoticed - for as long as she can remember. One day, the cardiac (human, just to mention it) boy Sho moves into the house, merely strong enough to walk, and by coincidence sees the girl.



Arrietty is Ghibli in all its glory : With endless love for Detail, the artists depict life in all its little imperfect ways, showing the beauty and fulfillment a simple life offers. Though being technically up-to-date (Ponyo was created completely traditional, Arrietty uses digital art as well), the main focus of the movie is the characters' relation to nature and life. I've always loved the way Ghibli teaches us modesty, and Arrietty is one more in the line of their movies doing so. Vibrant and harmonious colors dominate the tone, and as in Totoro or Ponyo, there's no villains as such (just the odd, mislead but generally good-hearted family member).

This time around, the director's chair is filled by Yonebayashi-San, who gives an incredibly stunning debut with it. He must be a really devoted fan of Miyazaki-San's work, since the movie is filled with references to it all over. Just to mention a few:

- pathway up to the house looks very much like the Totoro one
- When Sho enters the garden for the first time, a cat and a crow fight there (The cat returns)
- Sho's Grandma is called Haru (The cat returns)
- Fish passing under the Teapot remind of the giant beasts in Ponyo after the city is inundated.

Like Miyazaki-San, Yonebayashi-San is a great observer and shows exactly those things that matter, for example when a 14-year-old girl dresses up for meeting a boy.



The music in this movie comes from the feather of Cecile Corbel and sounds rather light-weight and joyful (not symphonic, sounds rather celtic in many ways), compared to the stuff Joe Hisaishi delivers. This adds to the relaxed atmosphere, and really leaves nothing to wish for (although I'm a fan of Hisaishi's work and hope to hear from him the next time).

I say : Yes, I've found another movie I can have my kids watch without the fear of spoiling them, and that's a rare find these days. It is great to see that Ghibli remains true to its love to nature, and I hope that this masterpiece will get all the claim it deserves.

X-Japan - Berlin - July 4th, 2011

Looks like this year I'll be celebrating independence day - in Berlin!

It's the return of Mortal Kombat 2 (and no kidding)!

It's been a while since I've blogged about games, and I don't really want to spend much time on that now either. So, here's just a brief side-note:

Mortal Kombat 9 is basically a Mortal Kombat for friends of Mortal Kombat 1-3, as it depicts the fighters and story of those parts. 3D graphics are used as means to create great visuals, but are completely left off the gameplay plate - that hasn't worked out so well since MK4, if you ask me.

Instead of inventing an abundance of new fighting feats, the developers have built on the solid base of those used in the early parts of the series. Creating MK3-Style juggle combos using exact timing of jump kicks and punches is just plain fun.

Story Mode is great fun, and you'll have to play characters that are not your faves every once in a while. All gaps left open in the story of MK I - III are quite neatly closed. Unlike other MK games released in the last decade, you have no free world to traverse or stages to clear, just a long sequence of fights sewn together by some storytelling.

To my mind, a large portion of the blood-gushing and bone-shattering violence that I see myself confronted with could have been left out and we'd (still) end up with quite a unique (but no so perverted) game, but it's either sex or brutality that sells, and the game has an strong accent on the latter.

What you get here is a visually perfect 2D beat 'em up and a nice treat for nostalgic MK game fans like me - I remember standing in front of the MKII Koin-Op when playing this...For all those new to the series it's still a good game, although most of them will probably just want to check out the gore.

That ain't no ham, Google!

In the last five days I have received Spam Emails from 3 Gmail accounts that are in my contact list. Yesterday my account has been compromised and used for sending Spam.

To check whether your account has been logged in to from unusual places, scroll to the bottom of your Gmail website and locate the text "Last account activity". There's a details-link next to it, revealing in my case :

Mobile Peru (190.42.51.51) Apr 25 (12 hours ago)

If you have received any email from my email account that contained a link without any explanatory text, please delete it at once - most of those links redirect you to online pharmacy / viagra stores. The most original feedback I got was :

It actually gave me visa/mastercard numbers for 34 unique numbers. Thanks! Vegas here I come.

Great mid-range pc at low-End costs

Ever heard about the way AMD produce their Sempron™ CPUs? Actually it's DualCore Athlon XIIs, artificially throttled. What the actually do is block a Core and part of the L2 Cache.

Now that I needed a new PC, I've looked into those Semprons and how to unlock the second core. Seems that all (or most, anyway) Boards with an AMD790GX Chipset and an AMD SB750 Southbridge support unlocking those beauties.

Here's the Setup / Cost :
- EUR 30 - AMD Sempron 140 @ Athlon X2 4400e - Boxed (not silent,granted)
- EUR 70 Radeon 5670. Ordered 3 times, all deliveries faulty : got the GDDR3-based card instead of the GDDR5 one. Finally, I give up.
- EUR 35 Any 4 Gigs of DDR2 Ram @ 800MHz.
- EUR 30 Hitachi 500 GB HDD, model HDS721050CLA362.
- EUR 50 LC Power LC6480S power supply (wouldn't wanna miss the cable management)
- EUR 30 Silverstone PS05 case
- EUR 40, used : Asus M3A78-T

As you see, this is not a machine fit for ultimate gaming but a good one for working on and performant enough to even do some serious 3D calculus.

Long-awaited 'Final Fantasy XIII' kills my PS3...

...and I'm sad to say I'm not kidding.

Ever since Thursday I banned Modern Warfare 2 from my PS3 to make room for FF13, but after 2 hours of gameplay on each thursday and friday my playstation won't read any blurays anymore. How can this happen?

Since Sony won't see themselves responsible for this, I guess I'll have to contact Square Enix to cover the damage their software has caused me. The internet is full of reports of the same problem!

F**K!!!!

What's the opposite of "LOW"?

According to folks at Adobe™, it is "VERTICAL".

Fun with Windows 7 64bit (II) - Getting XAMPP to work

Mentioned this before, Windows Apache is 32bit strict. Period.

So, how can I overcome the gap this produces in my productivity? Well, no way around a virtual pc installation. The greatly announced XPMode, which is a blend of Virtual PC and RDP, does no good here, as far as I've tested. So, VPC it is. After setting up XP on a virtual machine, I configured the desired apache vhosts and modified the vpc's hosts file accordingly. In order to make a call to those host names from my 64bit system, I also had to touch the win7 hosts file and enter the same host names, but redirect them to the VPC this time. Note that the resolution was a bit fussy - using the VPC's machine name failed, it had to be its IP.

Eventually, one more thing to consider : Where will my document root be? Clearly, the best way would have been putting it on a double-secured NAS, but no such thing is available here =) So I tried two ways:

1) Host Filesystem (Physical), then making this path available to the server to access via VPC Setting. This caused some trouble when the webserver tried to write back the compiled Templates. Probably solvable, but don't feel like trying now.

2) Server Filesystem (Virtual), Sharing the Document Root so that the host system can access it as a Network share. This works like a charm, but one drawback is that in the Eclipse-based Zend IDE linking Source Folders (PHP Explorer->build path->link source) works with local files only. Attaching a Network drive to the share circumvents this. Another drawback is that the files reside in that virtual harddisk and not as files on the physical disk.

This way, I can use my IDE in Win7 64bit and have a webserver on the same machine (sort of). I'd be most gracious if anybody told me that Apache could be run natively (and I don't mean blackdot.be's build) under 64bit Windows 7...

Fun with Windows 7 64bit (I) - Atheros / Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet

I recently installed Win 7 64bit and, guess what, whatever I usually do with my PC won't work. My favourized Sequencer works in 32bit environment only, my Scanner is declared incompatible, I can't even install an official Apache webserver!

Well, worst things first. My network was unsatisfyingly unstable and slow. Copying files from another PC reproducably resulted in a system freeze. Driver update. No freezes, but a performance of 5.x MB / sec, which is, how can I put it, bullshit.

So, the driver that works with my onboard Atheros L1 Gigabit Network card is the one located at the following link: http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?model=M3A&os=25&SLanguage=en-us

The board, besides, is an ASUS P5K.

Countdown...

Just a Microblog: Best wishes to all my friends for 2010 (To all others, too)!

Cheers!

GPU Offloading in new Flash Player

If you have an ION-based HTPC in your shelf, you might be very happy to read this article. About time this happened, man!

A lot of cover song activity going on

I haven't found much time for music for a while, but right now I priorized it above anything else I spend my private time with.

My myspace account turns out to be a dead end: The limit of only 5 / 6 songs is as frustrating as the 30 seconds-preview introduced on imeem, and since my myspace account is a non-musician account, I can't even use the 6 songs decently and have to mess around with my dummy account. I dare say, I've just about had it.

The only alternative I really see is to put it all up on YouTube, which has the nice side effect of making every recording feel like a little web-gig.

One more thing in the pipeline is a new version of my private website, which will come later this month, and - along with it - a new skin for my blog.

Welcome, Felix!

On July 19th 2009 my wife gave birth to our third child and first son, Felix Tim.



No more words for now...

Why Ong Is Not Really Bak (Or: The Not-So-Sequel By Tony Jaa)

When I first heard the words "Ong Bak 2", I thought to myself "What, you mean Tom Yum Goong?". But I was taught it was true, a real Sequel! How grand must this be?

I have to admit I don't keep track of Martial Arts movies that much anymore, but Ong Bak 2 came to me as a real surprise. In fact, I only ever heard about it
when it was already released!

So I did all I could to get my hands on this movie, cough, and watched it with expectations that were impossible to fulfill, even by Tony Jaa standards. During the course of the movie, I felt my enthusiasm die away, bit by bit, until after the whole length of it a kind of "so, that was that..."-feeling remained.

The Sequel, as it turned out, is only a sequel by name, a marketing trick. Other than that, nothing even references to Ong Bak. To be precise, I even wonder whether the meaning of "Ong Bak" may be something like "Kick Ass", since that is the only thing the two movies have in common.

It's not a bad movie at all, It's just not Ong Bak. And it is way below Tom Yum Goong, as well. Much more swordplay and Jaa performing too many different styles altogether (It's hard to surpass what he's done in his previous movies) make it hard to see the real badass stuff that we used to get.

General Music is Dead, long live General Music

After my GEM PRP 800 has had a severe failure recently, I sent it to MusicStore, but repair is impossible (lacking parts, since GEM have declared their bankruptcy few months ago).

My current Keyboard is now a Fatar StudioLogic SL990, which I'd rate a lot inferior to the PRP's keys. Anyway, I have fallen in love with the PRP's Fazioli and Steinway sound, so I ordered a GEM RP-X sound module to keep, at least, the sound.

Can't imagine why no-one bought the company (or at least the DRAKE technology).

Windows 7 Street Date confirmed

Microsoft have finally announced the GA Date for Seven : October 22nd, 2009.

What a great Day this is gonna be!

First impressions of the Intel D945GCLF (Atom) Desktop Mainboard

My old AMD Geode NX1750-based energy saver machine (I posted about it here) has for some reason passed away - the mainboard keeps on crashing. May it rest in peace.

I took a look around to find out what's current in the energy saving market, just in order to decide whether repairing would be worth it, but in the end i opted for a completely new solution based on an Intel Atom CPU.

Since I always intend to keep investments as small as possible, I chose the Intel D945GCLF all in one solution, containing Mainboard, CPU and Video Card - the smallest solution offered by Intel. I would have preferred the D945GSEJT which is using a better CPU, the far more energy efficient notebook chipset and allows using external 12V adapters (which are all passive and more energy efficient), but it's about twice as expensive. I also try one further energy optimization : I exchanged the system HD with a Notebook drive. All storage comes as PNP USB devices. I could tell myself this will reduce the system energy consumption, but that would be fooling myself, I guess.

The new system brings along two major aspects of optimisation for me :
-I can now use cheaper RAM modules (DDR2 instead of DDR)
-I have a bootable S-ATA Controller, which makes HD replacement rather easy. IDE / P-ATA Disks are supported as well, I currently use an 2.5" IDE disk. I intended to buy a PCI-pluggable controller for the old machine, but that would have been as expensive as the whole new system (~ 55 Euros).

I can't seem to find my ammeter, so I don't realy see the difference in energy consumption. There's a review on the internet that displays some measured values : A system with a 2.5" Disk and DVD-drive supposedly consumes somewhere around 25-30 Watts idle and about 45 Watts in a burn-in-test-scenario.

Debian 5.0 Windows 7 RC1 runs smoothly on the system, which is meant to be online somewhere close to 24/7. No driver trouble - everything was installed using the netinst DVD image (I only had to tweak the xorg.conf to add a few resolutions) using standard settings.

Of course this system is not perfect, and here's the drawbacks (those that I have come to notice so far, at least):
- audible chipset cooler. I resent that, but I'll have to live with it. That's the skinflint's price for saving at the wrong end. If your main goal is absolute silence, use a D945GSEJT instead. This will mean ZERO noise, but it costs a penny more.
- Low peak performance of the CPU. Firefox with five tabs (running on debian) is about as much as I would give to this hardware. For working, this is useless. For numb tasks like Server-, Router- or Download-Solutions this will do just fine.
UPDATE: Windows 7 (RC1) runs a lot better than Debian 5. No performance problems, even with ~10 Tabs in FF :D

All in all, I really enjoy this kind of hardware :)

GIMP is short for "(Oh, how )Great Is My Photoshop"

Recently, I've had to deal with the GIMP from time to time, my company lacking a Photoshop license.I think eventually I got a bit into it, but it still makes me chunder whenever I have to use it.

To sum it up:
Using GIMP for photomanipulation is a bit like asking for a car and getting four wheels instead.
Using GIMP for webdesign is impossible.

Amen.

Sustainable Job Disposal

If you want to lose your job and make sure you won't get another one anytime soon, why not try this ?