Blolg

Es esmu pārcēlies (atpakaļ) uz Sviesta Cibu — latviešu LiveJournal mazo māsiņu. Mana jaunā adrese tagad būs pyonpyon.klab.lv. Iemesls tam ir tāds, ka es sapratu, ko es īstenībā gribu, un tas nebija blogs, bet gan dienasgrāmata. Citiem vārdiem, es gribu vietu, kur varētu bez lieka stresa rakstīt nesvarīgas lietas. Bez lieka stresa nozīmē arī to, ka es to darīšu latviski. Ja man radīsies kaut kas padalīšanās ar visu pasauli vērts, tad es to varēšu uzrakstīt angliski, bet visādi citādi latviski rakstīt ir daudz vienkāršāk, un iespējams, ka tādā veidā mani arī lasītu vairāk cilvēku.

Atā atā.

Looks like it’s going to be remade by Geneon as Hellsing Ultimate OVA series, and this time with a decent budget. The seiyū will be the same, and the plot will be closer to the manga than before. A trailer has been made available in the official site. The opening theme is Broken English by Schaft.

A fansite reports:

Dear Final Fantasy Fans of the World, the moment has arrived, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, the full movie has been leaked. And not only a cam or fake release, a full DVD quality release. The encoding is XviD, it is a DVD Rip Release. The film is in Japanese and the provided subtitles are also in Japanese.

There are English subs for it too.

It turns out that with a plugin called ICOFormat you can save icon files directly from Photoshop. It’s somewhat limited, but still good for saving favicons. For more serious purposes I recommend GIF Movie Gear. It’s the best tool I could find, after testing quite a few.

ArenaNet announced the release of Sorrow’s Furnace today. It includes new areas, quests, mobs, weapons, increased faction rates for PvP, and above all — less grind. People are reporting that good drops are much more common now too. A full list of changes can be seen at the Game Update Notes page.

It’s a very good and welcome update, but personally I don’t feel like playing again now. Just getting to the new areas feels too slow and time-consuming. This still isn’t a game you could play for 30 minutes, and have fun, it takes 30 minutes just to get to the parts where you can start having fun. I’m talking about things like finding good groups in TotPK and such. Just too slow for me.

In a recent post in their official blog the IE team has confirmed that, among other things, the * html selector bug is fixed in IE7’s strict mode. Actually it was mentioned by their lead programmer Chris Wilson before, and this is what he said about it:

As for the * html selector issue — actually, it’s currently fixed (that is, it no longer works) in beta 2; however, I’m on the fence as to whether we should ship that ….

That was more than a month ago. Now, with the plethora of other IE related problems this might seem like a minuscule change they’ve made, but it’s very important for people like me that rely on this bug together with CSS child selectors to work around other IE’s bugs and treat it like a seperate entity from the modern browsers. It would mean trouble in the form of broken sites if they had decided not to fix this in the strict mode, rendering layouts that employ the * html hack incompatible with IE7. Here’s a nice table outlining this dilemma:

IE team’s options

		* html selector bug
		Fix	Ignore
Other bugs and CSS	Fix	Everything works	Many sites look broken
	Ignore	Many sites look broken	Everything works

It looks like, that, unless they don’t care about backwards-compatibility, they will have to fix everything, from rendering bugs to a more complete CSS2.1 support.

One of the stated objectives of the IE team is “to remove all causes of difficulty for web developers”, and I wonder if this marks a small change of attitude from Microsoft. I mean, ASP.NET Whidbey is going to be standards compliant too, MSN search is now valid XHTML, they’re sharing the information about IE7 publicly etc. If it’s true, it means the web will be a better place for all of us, at least for a few years. But if IE remains the market leader, the future of standards like CSS3 is completely in Microsoft’s hands, and I guess that’s the downside of it.

There’s going to be a live-action film based on the same ninja novel by the now-late Futaro Yamada as GONZO’s Basilisk: Kouga Ninpou Chou (Kouga Ninpou Chou is the name of the novel), called Shinobi: Heart Under Blade. The director is Shimoyama Ten, and the actors that will be playing Gennosuke and Oboro are Jô Odagiri and Yukie Nakama. You can see them in the official site and the trailer.

Apparently Shinobi is notable for being first-of-its-kind to allow the general public to invest in it. The studio responsible for this experiment is Shochiku, who also work with one of my favourite directors — Takeshi Kitano.

The film is supposed to open in Japan on September 17th. My hopes are that it’s going to be at least as good as Basilisk and somebody will have the mercy to sub it.