MoonJihad's Page of LiveJournal Nothingness

Apparently, three months have passed since I last updated this spot. As usual, this is just another “Hey, I haven't updated for reason $X$.” post, where $X$ is some excuse about real life, health or something. Of course, this precludes anything funny being written in this update and any chance of having random eromanga images inserted in this post.

I know that I haven't updated this page last month, although I had a good reason not to do so: overtime. But now that I am back to a normal schedule with a normal sleep schedule, I have the time to write an update.

Seeing that at some point in my life I said that I would update this website/blog/decaying heap of XHTML every couple of weeks, I think it is time to write something of dubious value and a near nil signal to noise ratio.

Seeing as it is already March and I haven't written something that doesn't consist of a few sentences barely tied together over the last few months, I figured I could write as to why I haven't been updating. The answer can be summarized in two words, Real Life™, but what exactly have I been doing? Read on.

Well, it has been exactly a month since the last update and since I have some time today, I believe it's time for an update. Therefore, I have decided to fling more of my usual irreverent irrelevance onto this shoddy canvas I call my webpage.

It recently occured to me that we're now in the year 2005. Apparently, it only took me twelve days this year to notice the change in year(it took me nearly a month last year). Brace yourself for yet another meaningless and boring update, because I have no idea as to what the hell I will write in the other paragraphs.

Last weekend was interesting, to say the least. It all began last Friday, when I went to the arcade after work.

December 1st and it snows outside. (Looks like my model M keyboard is fine after spilling all that crap in it, so I'll be writing an update tonight. Hm, it might not be so fine after all. Aiee.)

I've been at my new job for a couple of days now. Unfortunately, I can't really talk about specifics on what I am doing, but it is related to computers, programming and Mac OSX.

I spent all of last week at home due to a nasty cold I cought. It gave me the occasion to catch up on some of the things I have been meaning to do, namely taking rest and indulging in a gaming and anime-watching binge.

I've been doing some Java work recently and moved to using the latest version of Java and some of its new features like generics and autoboxing. Of course, J2SE 5.0 offers a whole lot more syntactic sugar, but most of the daily work will involve generics and autoboxing.

Apparently, I haven't written an update here in quite a while and a couple of things have happened so I figured I could write about them so that the whole Internet knows random pointless trivialities about my life — not that it's interesting.

Yesterday, I installed Gentoo Linux on my computer. Or rather, I started installing it — it hasn't yet finished. Even though I haven't used it for 24 hours, I already hate it. And by using it, I mean running lynx and vim because that's the only thing that would compile within a reasonable timeframe. Yes, I'm typing this entry using lynx and vim. On a 80x25 terminal.

It's pong… or rather a mechanized German version.

Today, when eating supper, I went back to the kitchen to grab a glass of water. As I was heading towards the kitchen, a black shadow zoomed near my feet and went straight out the door. I turned towards the half-opened door and to my surprise, the neighbor's black cat was staring at me with its almost glowing green eyes. It seemed hesitant and somewhat afraid; I assume it felt the same apprehension and adrenalin rush when facing the unknown as we do.

I'm fairly busy nowadays and I have less time than before to devote to other things, such as writing entries here. I'll keep on writing here but probably not on a regular basis. If you haven't done so yet, I suggest that you grab a RSS aggregator and add this page to it so that you can still keep up with the updates here without the frustration of seeing that I haven't updated, unless you enjoy visiting this page every $n$ days, where $n$ is bigger than, say, 14. On the upside, this means that I won't try to spew a ridiculous amount of content and that I'll be able to focus on writing better content with a better form.

Over the last couple of years, this page has seen several revisions — this is the sixth iteration — and has moved five times, but its goal has always been the same : practice the English language. I believe it has been a success, considering that from my point of view, my English is better off than at least 60% of the rest of the Internet's denizens. Of course, being a non-native, sometimes awkward things will be said but the point usually comes across, which is the real point of languages. My fluency with the oral language isn't as good but it's nothing that cannot be fixed by spending six months in an English speaking region.

Along the way, I picked up several skills and met various interesting people. Of course, there also were some less than interesting people but there are always kids peeing in the collective Internet pool. The ones that weren't are the ones that made this whole ride fun and enjoyable. Thank you.

I'll still be reachable by the usual means but I'll move back towards being just an anonymous spectator rather than a contributor to this gigantic heterogenous mosaic of goatse, pornography and cute kittens. じゃあなっ。

Yesterday, I was reading about the techniques implemented in OpenBSD to make exploiting software bugs harder, such as W^X (W xor X) and using stack canaries. You can read the presentation Exploit Mitigation Techniques on OpenBSD's website, it's quite an interesting read. What are the other OS vendors doing? All I've heard apart from OpenBSD is Microsoft pushing the NX bit onto processor manufacturers.

Yet another late update! I have been busy over the last days doing all kinds of things, such as hanging out with friends, setting up networking stuff and burying corp... erm, nevermind the last part. So here's the overview of the last five days or so.

I got a new computer, so if things are down here, it's probably because I'm moving hardware around. It's not an extremely powerful machine, but it's still an Athlon XP 2600 with 1 gigabyte of RAM on an A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard. Happy happy joy joy :)

I knew that Lik-Sang had a lot of games and game-related stuff but I didn't know that they sold a bunch of toys as well. Heck, they even have Saki from ときメモ. Makes me wish that I had a credit card. And lots of money.

Do you find yourself searching frequently on the same website or wanted a way to be able to have the information from a particular website handy? If you are using Firefox or Mozilla, information has never been so close to you. Using specially crafted bookmarks, you can enter commands in your location bar which will take you directly to the results page. For example, on my copy of Mozilla, I can type “am orbital” and I will end up directly on AllMusic's page for Orbital.

I don't have an update written for today so go play with the portrait maker. Click the buttons to select a part, then click submit. In case you don't speak Japanese, here is a quick cheat sheet.

Here is what I made with it :

Feel free to show us what you made by putting it in the comments. If you need a place to put the picture, email me and I'll put it up.

I was reading Typographica, as I do every month and a half or so, and noticed that they mentioned The Manual of Linotype Typography. After a quick search on Google, it appears that archive.org has an electronic copy of the book. At 44 megabytes, it's a hefty download for dialup users — especially considering that it is a specimen book from 1923 — but the beauty of seeing the old-style typography and its warmth, unlike the cold and botched WYSIWYG designs we are bombarded with, more than makes up for that size. It also contains a short section on page layout.

Contrast the last example with the archetypical modern invitation.

Seriously people, lay off the Comic Sans MS. Friends don't let friends commit typographical faux pas.

Apparently, it's been so long since I wrote an update which consists of more than five sentences that I don't even remember what this page is about. Looking at the stats, I think I talk about eromanga, Doom 3 and tech news. Can I manage to assemble all three of these things in a coherent update that does not end in JPEGs stolen from an eromanga version of Azumanga Daioh? Probably not.

Looks like I forgot to update here over the last couple of days. I blame it all on crack.