Batman Begins as API

One of the lines I remember from the film Batman Begins is "it's not who I am underneath but what I do that defines me". I thought it was a cheesy film line until I connected it with API design.

The goal of an API (Application Programming Interface) is to provide functionalities to a programmer so he can do things without needing to worry about how to implement/achieve those things. It is not what is implemented underneath but what it does that defines an API. In other words, Batman (who stole the line from Rachel) referred to himself as an API. (My mind blew at this point.)

In conclusion, this realization is an obvious candidate for a gag comic for programmers; I just don't have time yet to draw it. (See? It's not what I do when drawing but what I draw that defines a comic. Holy API Batman!)

I Remember Love

After listening to Anime World Order's review of Macross Do You Remember Love (DYRL), I decided to watch the film (the review is practically a love letter to the film). Before watching, my memory of Macross is Hikaru/Rick in his cockpit, taking off (I think the scene is in Robotech intro). I also vaguely remember that it is about humanity's hopeless battle for survival against an overwhelmingly more advanced alien force (the Zentradi).

I think DYRL is meant to be a film for Macross fans who had watched the whole series to reminiscent about what they like from the series. As a stand alone film, it's not great. Things just happen and there is not much explanation. I could barely follow because I know the basic premise of Macross. Still, I can understand why Mr Surat (of Anime World Order) described this film as everything he remembered about 80s anime. Watching it gave me a kind of nostalgia and the main theme song, Ai Obote Imasu Ka (Do You Remember Love?) reminded me of 80s love songs I used to (involuntarily) listen to in my childhood.

My opinion is that DYRL is the film to watch if you want to know what started the whole Macross franchise without going through a long anime (36 episodes). The downside is that the film does not have time to elaborate the things that make Macross so wonderful.

Related to that, I finished watching Macross Frontier a few weeks back. It's a crappy show that looks good, IMO. The backgrounds are pretty, the characters are good looking; but the battles are messy (I don't remember any battle scene that managed to grip me) and the story is practically non-existent. The one thing that's great about the anime is the music.

Finally, I just noticed that Minmay has a drill hair. Wow. So we had drill hair even back then in 1984?

Please Set My Attribute

I just found out (probably a few years later than everyone else) that Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) does not seem to implement the functions getAttribute() and setAttribute() correctly. I was not too upset, though, because there is a quick work around: using the functions getAttributeNode() & setAttributeNode() instead.

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Another thing I just found out is this neat thing called "Itano Circus". It is a style to present a battle scene in a dramatic manner using patterns formed by lines. A line can be a it missile trail, a bullet trail, or even energy trail. Apparently, the style was pioneered by Ichiro Itano. Here is a video to describe how it looks.

I personally think it is a generalized form of Macross Missile Massacre.

Only Tourism

Only today I watched Only Yesterday and I already made up my mind to tell people tomorrow that I watched Only Yesterday only yesterday.

So yeah, I just watched Only Yesterday (Omoide Poro Poro). I think I like the film/anime because I am one of those people who work in an office setting where they do the same thing everyday and wish for something different.
The one thing I found interesting is that the film touched this particular topic. The city person in me thinks that farming life in the village is idyllic, nice, beautiful, etc. I come to this conclusion because I go to such village setting for holidays (which means limited period of stay, no need to earn a living, probably I'll eat the best food all the time, and novelty factor is still in effect). If I try to use a different mind set, say I live in the village permanently and need to make a living out of farming (which means unlimited period of stay, a must to work, eating not-so-nice food to minimize spending, and basically doing the same things everyday), HEY! Suddenly farming life is not so attractive.

This thought came to me when I visited Tomi and went to his hometown. It's interesting that since then I kept encountering this thought in different versions; Only Yesterday was one such encounters.

Oh, the film also made me think how to think of dividing with fraction (for example, 1/3 : 1/4) intuitively. I could not come with a direct way; my indirect way is to think of "dividing by 4" as "multiplying with 1/4", thus "dividing by 1/4" is like "multiplying by 4". Do you see the pattern, Taeko-san?
(Yes, this film also has mathematics! And drama! And sports! Even downhill driving!!! (Though admittedly there was no drifting nor tofu...) Oh, it also has pineapple. That's ananas in Finnish! (Okay, I should stop typing random things now.))

A Message from the Past

Hi, my name is FreakedOutProgrammer009 and I come from the past to warn you about the future. Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) actually has 4 rendering modes, not just 2 as you might believe. Please refer to this article, Activating Browser Modes with Doctype, and scroll down to the section "IE8 Complications".

Time is running out and I have to go now. Please remember this message...

Fitting Gundam names in a sentence

It started with an ad I saw while walking to work. It was an ad for watches; the upper half has a picture of a lady hugging a huge rabbit, while the lower half has a picture of another lady hugging a wolf. Each half has a text, they are:

• "Waiting for a lifetime for [something I don't remember]?"
• "Taking the moment to [do something I don't remember]?"

Those sentences made me think, "On impluse..." which at the time seemed to me to be between the 2 extremes the ad had. And, as I think of the word "impulse", which is a Gundam, I completed the sentence with more Gundam references, "I strike for freedom".

So, I arrived at the question, "How many Gundam names can I fit in one sentence without making it sound unnatural?"

I spent the next 5 minutes thinking of such a sentence, but I failed to come up with anything good. But, hey, I reached work by then.

A New Finding

I've been listening to Anime World Order podcast. They are very informative. For example, I just know that Patlabor stands for "Patrol(ing) Labor". After 20 years, I finally know!

Another Summer

The last 2 films I watched happened to be adaptations of 80s(?) cartoons. It thus feels natural to compare them.
(Spoiler warning if you haven't seen these films.)

The first film is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (I'm sure everyone noticed that the acronym of the title sounds like Transformers: Rolling on the Floor, possibly laughing). I did not expect coherent story; I was quite ready to overlook stupidities and just enjoy the visual.

I did enjoy the visual.

• The opening part was cool. They managed to capture the different fighting styles between the Arcee team (smaller in size so they rely on speed and coordination) and Optimus (more bulky, but delivers decisive blows).
• The puma-like Decepticon is cool. I love the shot in which it ran out of the sea and onto a beach.
• I love the fight scene between Optimus and the Decepticons (I remember Megatron, Starscream, and some other disposable robot to be owned by Optimus).
• I looked forward to the combining robots, which turned out to be Devastator (or was it?). I enjoyed that scene too.

Somehow, despite all the nice visuals and my attempt to overlook the stupidities, the film still left some bitterness in my mind. All my disappointments with the film can perhaps be traced to the fact that the film did not spend any time to tell us more about the robot characters.

• Who is Optimus Prime? Why is he so keen on hunting down the Decepticons (other than because "Decepticons are evil")?
• Who are the Autobots? Are they really good robots? Why are they willing to come to earth? What are their stories? What do they do on when they are not fighting Decepticons?
• Similarly, what do the Decepticons do off-screen?
• I also find myself asking why The Fallen made it to the title of the film. Even though he is supposed to be the big bad, he does not feel like on at all (and he ultimately got trashed in few seconds).
• The robots are tweaked to be stronger/weaker so much that the outcome of fight scenes feel random. For example, Megatron feels much weaker in this film (he was much more menacing in the first film) while Optimus and Bumblebee are much stronger. It is ironic that Megatron still said "You are so weak!" to Optimus.
• The supposedly climactic battle felt overdrawn (and boring) for me. Had it been edited more tightly, I think the film could have been around 2 hours long.

In short, the film does not feel like a Transformers film to me. It felt like a generic good-robots-fighting-evil-robots film. Compare this with how well Spider-man films adapted Spider-man comics.

The second film is G.I. Joe. I did not plan to watch it; I decided to watch it because a friend invited me to. So, I probably had no expectation and no idea what I can expect from the film (though I thought the accelerator suits were potentially cool when watching the trailers). My friend and I did agree that probably the visual would be inferior compared to Transformers; we hoped that the film had some other means to compensate.

I found the film entertaining even though there are many joke attempts and scenes that I found lame. (Strong spoiler warning.)

• Scarlett reading a book while running on treadmill is simply ridiculous.
• Duke is supposed to be the main character, I think. But I found myself tolerating him instead of rooting for him. (Why couldn't he face Baroness after her brother was killed? To me, that does not feel like "a real American hero" at all.)
• I didn't really understand why Snake Eyes took his vow of silence. And why did the master favor him over Storm Shadow?
• How Baroness ended up at the end of the film is weird and disappointing. I was hoping that there would be an irreversible twist between her and Duke, but nothing happened. It was simply a good ending for her :\
• How the 2 big bads (are they Cobra Commander & Destro?) ended up is also lame. They finally announced their real identity as the big bads in a dramatic manner; then they were captured.

There are other things I don't like, but I guess they are nit-picking.

On the good side, the visual is good enough not to distract from the film. More importantly, I feel that the film is more faithful to the original material than Transformers.

• I liked how the film sneaked in references, like "knowing is half the battle" and "he is a real American hero". I also like the line "when all fail, we don't" (because it is easy to sneak in real life conversations).
• Accelerator suit scenes are good. (I remembered thinking, "They should have something like this in Starship Troopers film.")
• Baroness is hot :3 (probably the greatest redeeming value in this film?)
  
• Snake Eyes is cool. The film did a good job on this one because I thought it's quite easy to slip and make his character pretentious or "trying too hard to be cool".

Probably I won't remember this film for long, but it was entertaining.

After these films, I'm somewhat numb with action-oriented summer films. But summer has not ended yet. I'm planning to watch Up! next week. I hope it will be good.

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants to Manage Paths

In other words, using other people's code instead of implementing path management from scratch.

I needed to add a JavaScript function to resolve paths. Resolving paths can mean 2 things; in my case, I want a function that accepts a path (which is potentially a relative path) and outputs an absolute path. The catch is that the function is implemented in JavaScript.

After 2 days of search, my colleagues found js-uri, a small JavaScript library that does exactly what I need. So far, it performs beautifully.

To test the function, I use the test cases given in RFC 1808 section 5.

I hope someone will find this useful when he/she needs to resolve paths in JavaScript :)

Using link to trigger click event

I just spent almost a full day (not mentioning past frustrations) to find the cause of yet another strange IE6 behaviour. Here is what happened.

The web application I was debugging uses this:

<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="SomeJsFunction();">Call SomeJsFunction</a>

SomeJsFunction shows an iframe that continuously fetches images from a remote source. The link works fine for IE7, Firefox 2, and Firefox 3. Yet with IE6 somehow the iframe does not fetch any image at all. Why? That was the question that causes much debugging frustration.

Thanks to this particular post at dbug, I found out that the cause is that using "javascript" as a pseudo-protocol is apparently a bad thing. An alternative is to use "#". It ends my problem.

However, if you want to go further and be good, this topic at StackOverflow suggests many other, better alternatives.

Office Move = Biking

Two weeks ago the company I worked for moved office. Our new office is so close to my apartment that I had thoughts to bike to work. Thoughts became a want, a want became words I blurt out during lunch session, and the words became the peer pressure I succumb to.

Just kidding. I really wanted to try biking to work and so I did. I was caught in a heavy rain the very first day I biked and spent that day in a wet pair of jeans in an air-conditioned room.

Please interpret the two paragraphs above as my cynical sense of humor. I really enjoy avoiding crowded MRT.

I will post some photos of my bike soon. It a transforming bike! With 3 forms no less! That's half of Sixshot's forms!

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Onto the progress of my otariiman life.

Recently I finished watching Gundam OO season 2. Even though I enjoyed it better than season 1, I can't help thinking that it missed so much potential. I start to think that this is a characteristic of a Gundam series. A lot of potential storylines/conflicts/interesting exploration in the beginning of the series only to be killed off by some weird/stupid/unsatisfying plot progress or even abandoned altogether (such as Kati & Kujou's past).

Anyway, I predictably fell in love with Gundams all over again. OO Gundam + OO Raiser look so goodddd... I like Cherudim with its armor bits and just love Seravee/Seraphim trick. On the other hand, I don't understand why Arios is in season 2 at all. Most of the time Arios is either out of the action (e.g. guarding Celestial Being's escape pods) or just shooting generic units.

And I absolutely loathe what Graham became. There's another perfectly fine potential totally wasted.

As OO season 2 just ended, I had thoughts of drawing a (thin) fanart book for it this year. (I'm typing my thoughts here with the hope the same cycle I described above to repeat itself.) I had a scene idea for each Gundam; but I don't know if I can finish enough pages on time (i.e. before November).

Ultimate Reality TV Game Show

While on a cold bus ride home from Gleneagles Medical Centre, an idea for the ultimate reality tv show dawned to me: "My Life Is Better Than Your Life". It sounds so full of nastiness >:D

Other than that, I realized that "platformers" (the game genre) rhymes with "transformers" (the thing in physics or the title of that robot franchise). I think this is an important fact to remember, in case I need it when writing a poem or a trinary.

Have a Few Web Amusements

A few amusements I got from the Web this week:

• Live enactment of Super Mario (with Obama cameo!)
• Initial D parody in Lucky Star

Meanwhile, I'm inking an amusing Genshiken fanart. I will post it by tomorrow <3

[14 Feb edit]
As promised, here it is: "What have you done, Sasahara-san?!"

14 Months Later

This post is a follow-up of this post on November 2007. In that post, I listed the following books to read:

• A Clockwork Orange*
• Brave New World
• Ender's Game*
• The Selfish Gene
• Epic of Gilgamesh
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Neuromancer*
• In the Beginning...was the Command Line*

I surprised myself by actually following the list and read 4 items (those marked with an asterix). I finished only Ender's Game, actually. I couldn't stand the language in A Clockwork Orange and I have seen too many recent cyberpunk stuff to appreciate Neuromancer. I do like In the Beginning...was the Command Line but I only read the beginning part of it, the reason being I read an online version of it instead of printed version (and it's too long for me to read on screen).

I do have a much longer reading list on my notebook. Trying to keep learning, I suppose (yes, this post is going nowhere so I'll stop now).

Mirror's Edge postmortem article

I bumped into an article on Mirror's Edge postmortem interview from Reddit today. I think it's worth reading if only for an example of good replies for an interview. I'm sure a lot of details are omitted, but a little dose of honesty in the replies makes me respect Tom Farrer, the interviewee.

Of a special note is Mr Farrer's mentioning Singapore as one of the cities that influence Mirror's Edge cityscape design.

Liking what you do

There are times when I feel as if whatever I am doing, it all does not matter to the world. Last few weeks have been such times. This week is perhaps the start of my healing process. It started off with me going out with my good, old friends and somehow everything looked much better after that.

Today, I found something that reminds me that it does not matter how difficult and painful the process is, it is my attitude while throughout the process that matters most in life. That thing is David Sirlin's (very long) article on the process to balance Street Fighter II HD Remix. If you are a Street Fighter fan, I recommend going through some parts of the articles.

What I would like to highlight is the overview and the feature list.

Let's start with the overview. Quoting the opening paragraph:

"Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix was originally going to be a graphical update of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, but along the way some magic happened. HD Remix is now a completely new Street Fighter game—the 6th installment in the SF2 series."

I originally thought that HD Remix is nothing more than a masochistic project to update the sprites to Street Fighter II. Only after reading Sirlin's articles that I appreciate its magic. It is the product of hard work done by people who love what they do. (Also note the magic that a company actually allows such magic possible. It's much easier and less risky for them to do the masochist project.)
Balancing a game is very difficult. It is very easy for a player, who experience only a portion of the whole game to criticize, "Hey, this part is not balanced!" It's much, much more difficult to look at the whole game and balance every part (or at least most parts).

I guess the point it reminds me of is this. When I like doing something, I usually want to get better at it. And as I get better, the thought of doing the thing makes me mentally recall a long list of difficult things I need to go through to do well.
This is where I usually lose patience. This week I learnt that patience is not that difficult for the benefits it brings.

You might say that the introduction, like so many other introductions, is more interesting because it promises to give us things. Well, the summary of things the article gives is in the feature list. My highlights are:

• #7 double-blind character selection online. A simple point perhaps, but it happens every single time we play, so the cumulative effect is great.
  
• #13 hitbox display. It's obvious that the purpose for this feature is for players to refine their skills. If this does not show "love-what-I-do"-ness, I don't know what does.
  
• #15 dipswitches. I thinks this is the most hardcore feature of all: enabling known bugs on purpose because they affect gameplay. I personally probably won't use this feature, but I can appreciate that there are people who (like the game so much that they) do.

You can watch one of David Sirlin's matches: EvoWest 2007 Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo Finals.

Three Panel Soul

From the misty realm of teh Interweb, I found Three Panel Soul webcomic. It has a style that I like and quite a number of strips are funny. But this is not the reason for this post.

The reason for this post is that I find this particular strip on companionship cute, heart-warming, and yet painful.

Now go on, browse through that archive :)

Firefox Woes

I intended to write about this in April 2009 but I soon forgot about it. Well, today the problem showed up once more so let's get this one out of the way.

A plugin for web browser is a program that can communicate with a web browser and make the browser do additional things that a browser usually cannot do. For example, browsers cannot play videos on its own. That's why we need to install Flash plugin to play a Youtube video.

A scriptable plugin for a web browser is a special kind of plugin: we can write JavaScript codes to program how the plugin should behave. Internet Explorer browser and Firefox browser provides different mechanism for us to crate a scriptable plugin. In this post, I will consider only the Firefox mechanism because this post has the title "Firefox Woes".

Mozilla provides a number of ways to write scriptable plugins. One of them is the NPAPI. Ignoring that the documentation provided is confusing, there is one particular NPAPI bug that is annoying enough for me to want to write this post: the unsigned integer bug in NPAPI.

What could they have been thinking?

Star Fruit

While browsing the Piggy Farm forum, I impulsively clicked on Bryan B. Wong's Live Journal. I find this particular entry amusing. Apparently, random butter tried buying some star fruits because of Bryan's Start Fruit manga.

Well, Wikipedia says that star fruit is native ot India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia (wow, I didn't know that!). My point is that I grew up with star fruit, so I never think of it as anything special (in the neither-good-nor-bad sense). It's quite interesting to see how other people find it :D

This is why I think I'll need to proceed with caution if I ever go to countries like Japan or China or Korea. They have way too many risky food stuff :)
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More new knowledge about Indonesian stuff from the eyes of non Indonesians: bilimbi. Is this what we Javanese call "blimbing wuluh"? Wahaha, fascinating! I call star fruit "blimbing" in my native tongue (which is a mix of Indonesian language, Javanese language, and some Chinese dialect of which proper name I never know of). "Blimbing wuluh" is entirely different. I think it's much more acidic or something and thus is more suitable for cooking (as opposed to eating as a fruit). Again, I never really pay attention to it so I don't know much about it either.

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I think this post somehow joins my otaku side and my nerd side. Childhood things tend to do that.

Figurine Fun

I went to Anime Festival Asia over the weekend. It was lots of fun.

Some photo highlights:

• Huge Gundam Exia figure near the entrance
  
• Street Fighter IV arcade
  
• Kamen Rider Black/RX figurine

I bought myself the Kamen Rider Black/RX figurine. It has one main body to which I can attach Kamen Rider Black armor or Black RX armor. Check out my first bunch of shots on my Picasa album.

Out of the package, the figure has the Black RX armor on. I took them off and put on the Black armor. I found the Black armor more attractive; I love the grasshopper look of it. Black RX looks too neat and robot-y. What I soon found out while posing the figurine during the photo shot, though, is that the Black armor comes off far too easily. The small pieces just "hugs" the main body, in contrast to Black RX armor that can be secured comfortably. Still, I did have fun with it and to a certain extent re-discover my liking for photography.

That reminds me of Wei Man's remark about figurines. Before this, she didn't understand what's so good about figurines. Somehow, she bought her first figurines from AFA: a poseable Yuffie (of FF7, her favourite character) figurine and a bunch of Magna Carta figurines. While posing Yuffie, she saw how well-designed figurines work and she was wowed. It was fun to see her finding the charm of poseable figurine (and taking photos of them). One more otaku in our sketch group, mwahaha.