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In the very short existence of Hatsune Miku, there have been more songs and videos than I have seen for any pop star except perhaps Michael Jackson (who, it may be argued, is actually less real than Miku). The internets are exploding with new content, and because I'm a fan, I've combed through it to bring the best to you.

• Last Night, Good Night - Miku drifts through a dream world.
• PoPiPo - Miku wants you to drink her vegetable juice. It's only 200 yen.
• Animeification - I don't even know what's going on here, but it's awesome.
• Black Rock Shooter - Miku goes black.
• Dove - Miku waits on Noah's Ark while chibi-Miku rides a dove in search of a leek.
• bpm - Miku spins at 128bpm.
• The 9th - Don't worry about not being a planet, Pluto. We love you, anyway.
• The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku - Don't delete Miku. With bonus kinetic typography.

And now, because I truly enjoy the suffering of others, I leave you with two videos. One is a truly awesome video of Miku beating the crap out of everyone, and the other involves cosplay.

Door #1 Door #2

Good luck. }:->

'In this direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, 'lives Anonymous. And in that direction,' waving the other paw, 'lives Tripfags. Visit either you like; they're both weeaboos.'

'But I don't want to go among weeaboos,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'We're all weeaboo here. I'm weeaboo. You're weeaboo.'

'How do you know I'm weeaboo?' said Alice.

'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

— found on 4chan

"Weeaboo" is a word with a very strange etymology. Nowadays on 4chan, it means someone who is fanatic about Japanese culture, probably to an annoying level. But it didn't start out anywhere near there.

Weeaboo was, to my knowledge, originally a nonsense word from the Perry Bible Fellowship webcomic.

Originally, the word used to describe a Japan culture fanatic was "wapanese." The story goes that one of the admins on 4chan's /b/ board added a word filter that changed "wapanese" to "weeaboo." As new people joined the board and learned from what they read, the meaning shifted and "wapanese" was completely eradicated from the popular lexicon. Through 4chan's ultimate control of communication, "weeaboo" is one of the rare instances of a definition that has changed words instead of vice versa.

Remember kids, speech control is thought control. :)

I've tried to write this post several times, but every other time I've opened the browser, I've forgotten what I was going to write. Is there an early onset Alzheimer's that occurs in your late 20's? I mean, I just turned a year older, but I'm not that old, yet. :-P

I am pleased to report that Hatsune Miku has passed a sort of J-Pop turing test. I downloaded the 1st song album VOCALOID2 and listened to it on the living room stereo. About half-way through the album, Erickson asked, "Who is this?" He thought it was a human singing. It's only a matter of time before Japanese fembots take over the world. It will probably be a lot like Chobits.

I've been thinking about the architecture and industrial design of future Mars. On Earth, we use a lot of plastics because of our abundance of oil. Mars most likely does not have any oil deposits, so plastics would be rare and valuable. Likewise, we use a lot of wood in our buildings because we have large native forests. On Mars, any trees would have to be imported, and they wouldn't grow very well because of the poor soil and lower solar input. It is likely that Mars is rich in metals, and we know it has plenty of silicates. So in my imagination, I see future Mars buildings being composed mainly of stone, metalwork, and glass. Martian-made devices will most likely have metal cases, or use plastics made from plant oils. The lack of oil and solar power will also mean that the two most abundant sources of power will be nuclear (most likely with imported uranium) and wind power.

Andrea got a "101 Things To Do Before You Die" book. It's full of quite a few interesting ideas, and a lot of well-done graphic design, but I don't really agree with the premise of the book. Sure, there are some things I'd like to do before I die, but why should I buy a book with someone else's list? It's a book that says "Dare to push yourself," then suggests that you follow in someone else's shoes. It doesn't quite work. What I think would be a better idea is to have a very large list of things from which you can select the 101 that you'd like, and then they'll print you a copy of the book with those items. If anyone wants to implement this idea, I'm only asking for 5% royalties. :)

I watched 3:10 to Yuma earlier today, which was a pretty good movie. However, I think it would have been better as a Samurai movie. The themes of honor and justice in the movie seem to me to be much better suited to feudal Japan rather than the wild west, at least in their popular portrayals.

And my synapses have stopped firing again. 'night.

The world of Linux is vast and diverse, covering many varied areas of computing from embedded systems to huge clusters. One particularly interesting development is the invention of the Live distribution — a distribution meant to run in a volatile fashion from a CD or other removable media. The most popular for a long time was Knoppix. The idea spread, and now you can get most normal distributions in Live CD form. The formula was pretty simple: Make a compressed filesystem, then use an initrd to find the disc on boot and mount that image as /. Many times, some sort of union filesystem was used to give the system the illusion of modifiability, but it would go away when you turned off the computer, or if it were really fancy, it would save it somewhere on shutdown.

Slax is a live distribution that takes all this to a kind of extreme. Instead of one compressed filesystem, there are several, each of which provide a core feature like X or KDE. Like a cake, Slax is made up of layers of these modules with a read/write frosting on top. But instead of using a ramdisk for the read/write layer, Slax can use mounted storage to transparently provide persistent changes. If you're booting off of a USB drive, for instance, Slax will use that to store changes, and if you're using a FAT filesystem, it uses a POSIX overlay filesystem to pretend that it supports permissions and users. The upshot is that you get a system that acts like it's a real Linux system, but can run entirely from a FAT-formatted USB key.

On top of the core modules, you can select from a plethora of user-contributed modules that provide many extra packages. You can put those modules with the rest of Slax and they will be inserted into the system on boot. Alternatively, you can download and activate the modules after boot by simply clicking on the "activate" link. If you can't find the package you're looking for, Slax has you covered. Download the source, compile it as usual, use checkinstall (provided with Slax Devel) to make a Slackware package, then Slax's tgz2lzm to convert that to a Slax module. Activate the module, and you're done. Copy the module to your slax/modules directory, and it will always be there.

There is a third option for those who already know what they want: You can build a system on the website from the modules available and download it as either an ISO or a tarball for a USB key. Slax is not only customizable out of the box, it is customizable before you even get the box.

Distributing packages as compressed filesystems has a distinct advantage: it's fast. To add a package, you simply mount the filesystem and add that as a branch in the union. Deletion is the reverse. It takes seconds regardless of the package size, and is much faster than traditional extract and configure package management. Additionally, the package stays compressed on disk, so you need less space. The downside is that it will slow down when you add thousands of packages, so it's really only useful in systems like Slax, where you're merely adding sprinkles on top of a cake. You can, with Slax-provided tools, consolidate many modules into a large module if this ever becomes a problem.

The core modules provide a base system, X, KDE, applications, KOffice, and development tools, but the secret is that you can strip away nearly all of that down to the base and run a text-only system. Slax scales up and down. The full system takes 190MB, but I only have a 128MB USB key. I started with the base, then compiled a bunch of text-based tools to create an uber-minimalist system that fits in about 95MB. And it's not useless, either. I have dvtm to manage many terminal windows, mutt for mail, slrn for news, vim for text editing, w3m for web browsing, and Freetalk and irssi for chat. For my media player, I have MPlayer working on the framebuffer. With a bit of scripting, I can even watch Youtube. Slax comes with Perl, and I have Python as an add-on module. If I want to share anything, I have nginx, which can serve both regular HTTP and WebDAV. And this is on top of everything that comes in Slax Core, which includes BIND, httpfs, lha, lvm, Midnight Commander, neon, OpenSSH, rdist, rsync, rzip, screen, sshfs, and wget, among the more common bits. Calling it a Swiss army knife barely does it justice.

But what I really like about Slax (and its Slackware underpinnings) is that it's not trying to be a Mac, or a Windows PC, or a Solaris server, or an IBM mainframe. It's using advantages native to Linux (mainly FUSE) to create a wholly unique and useful system. I will even go so far as to say that Slax is the most advanced Linux distribution currently in existence. It breaks the mold and makes life better. That's what Linux should be doing instead of perpetuating both the old, crusty UNIX software engineering legacy and the slightly less old, stale Windows/Mac user interface legacy.

So if you want a powerful system in your pocket, consider Slax. It's all the Linux you need and none of what you don't. Oh, and as further proof of non-uselessness, this entire article was researched and written on my minimal Slax system. :)

Early this afternoon, I decided to take my laptop into the living room. I was well rested, I'd had breakfast, but still something terrible happened. I think it is best told with some MS Paint action.

If it's not clear, that's me carrying my laptop (hostname tsuchiya, after Anna Tsuchiya from Shimotsuma Monogatari) with the power adapter still plugged in. I caught the cable on the Christmas tree box, spinning the laptop out of my hand, and it landed hard on the floor. The laptop was running at the time, with the hard drive spinning. I thought for sure it was a goner.

But it wasn't. :D

I opened it up, and everything was still running. Not only did the fall not jar the battery, but the entire system was still chugging along as though nothing had happened. The keyboard wasn't working properly, but a little disassembly revealed that it had just been knocked loose. Reconnected, everything worked fine. The only damage that I can see is a couple of broken screen latches and a slightly bent frame. I bought a Thinkpad because they're durable, but I wasn't expecting it to survive a three foot drop to the floor while running. And yes, that comic was (except for the last frame, which is always the same in this meme) drawn with the Trackpoint in my Thinkpad. :)

So if you want a keyboard, get a Model M. If you want a truck, get a Toyota Hilux. If you want a cell phone, get a Nokia in a candy-bar form factor. If you want a laptop, get a Thinkpad.

A while ago Yamaha made a very interesting and rather convincing singing voice synthesis program called Vocaloid. The original incarnation had some pretty good voices, but you'd never find it unless you were looking for it. The voices weren't good enough for professional work, and the software was too expensive for hobbyists. For the second release, however, they did something a bit different. They gave the voice... a face. Allow me to introduce to you, Hatsune Miku:

But it wasn't until someone combined Miku's voice with the Levan Polka meme that she really took off. Reduced to a super-deformed version and waving a leek, a star was born. The leek has become such an integral part of Miku's image that you can buy figurines that come with a leek for her to hold.

The Japanese fan community for Miku has produced some really great work that has finished the transformation from just a voice to a full pop idol. You can even buy her CD. Here are a few "PV"s (the Japanese way of saying "Music Video") that caught my eye:

• melody... - 3D animated Miku sings future trance. Also available in Engrish.
• White Letter - A watercolor Miku explores the Japanese postal system.
• Yukkuri Shiteitte ne!!! - Miku rocks out on guitar (synthesized, of course).
• Triple Baka - Miku gesticulates wildly while her friends watch. One is playing a cell phone. Later, flying ensues.
• Reverse Rainbow (逆さまレインボ) - Miku sings this time accompanied by Vocaloid #2 Kagamine Rin (yes, there are more).
• The Empty Stomach Song - Miku is hungry.
• Love is War - The animation in this one is great; you get a real feeling of Miku being angry.

And just because I want to make your head explode, Miku sings:

• Fly Me To The Moon
• I'm Gonna Be (from The Proclaimers)
• Heaven Is A Place On Earth (from Belinda Carlisle)

And there is much, much more where that came from. So to all of you with aspirations of being a pop star in Japan, you may want to re-think those plans and work instead on a career in Computer Science. :)

For those of you who aren't cool enough to have subscribed to the RSS feeds for VFS (but are apparently still cool enough to read my blog), VFS 2009.1 has been released.

Reception thus far has been good — especially the College of Awesome commercial, which may finally garner us that coveted one star rating. Erickson wants to do a musical bit, and Alex has been inspired to write a script for a green-screen sci-fi show he bills as "the best American sci-fi show of 1980." According to my research, he only has to beat Galactica 1980 and Beyond Westworld, so in all likelihood, he will succeed.

Hopefully this means there will be more interest and momentum for VFS going forward, but I'm not counting on it. That's my new years' resolution for VFS: Stop worrying about deadlines and just get stuff done. Not that I really did, but now it's official. There will be no schedule. :)

So watch, enjoy, etc. I hope you like it as much as we do. :)

Would you like to see the most retarded thing currently on the Internet?

Believe it or not, I found that on oreilly.com. Just thought you'd like to know.

I'm not a big fan of Coca-Cola as a beverage. It's always been a bit harsh for my tastes. As a solvent, however, it's quite a handy substance. I'm sure you've all heard of the experiment where you put a tooth in a jar of Coke and it completely dissolves the tooth. I'm sure some of you think that's an urban legend. It's not.

It's no secret that sodas are acidic. Most of the time you'll find some citric acid, and the carbonation will produce a small amount of carbonic acid. Coke, unlike most other sodas however, contains phosphoric acid.

Phosphoric acid is a bit tougher animal than the others. To illustrate somewhat abstractly, I've pulled from a list of common acids and bases at 0.1 molarity (molarity isn't important to this comparison, but it means that in all cases we are measuring the same concentration). Carbonic acid is relatively weak at 3.8 pH. Citric acid is 2.1. Phosphoric acid is 1.5. Now, of course, you're not drinking 0.1 molar phosphoric acid in a can of Coke — that would burn your throat — but you are drinking something a fair bit stronger than a Sprite or even a Barqs. Other internet sources put the pH of Coke somewhere around 2.5.

So what you've got is a nice mild acid that powers through surface gunk on about anything. I've been using it to clean charred metal bits from my dryer. They were so gray and dingy that I thought they were steel. After a few hours soak in a Coke, I rubbed them clean to find that they were actually copper. That is serious cleaning power there.

So if you're going to drink Coke, for god's sake, brush your teeth afterwards. :)

Oh, and yes, Happy Christmas!

My Christmas went well. We were lacking Andrea as she was off with Alex at his family's this year. We had a rather different tree, a tropical bush-like evergreen that sat upon a chair and was decorated with a string of lights and many tiny shiny balls. After opening presents, we ate MREs. Andrea and Alex joined us later in the day for dinner. The obligatory swag list:

• Erickson got me The American Language, Fourth Edition, by H.L. Mencken. It's a wonderfully weighty tome detailing the divergence and evolution of American English from the English of Great Britain. So far, it's been a brilliant and entertaining read.
• Erickson's parents got me John Hodgman's two books, THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE, and its continuation, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE. They are packed with more entertainingly plausible lies than a man should be able to create in his entire lifetime.
• Some clothing and food, notably some real bacon bits.
• From Danielle, a set of bacon-scented candles. Unfortunately, when lit, they smell a lot more like soy than bacon. I suspect that they were made by a vegetarian. Luckily for Danielle, it is the thought that counts, and I love them. :)
• From Andrea, a bar of Dove chocolate, a candy cane, a lexically well-mangled card, and a mystery gift still traveling through the mail.
• From Tim, a new stocking cap that replaces the one I lost not days after buying it.
• From Mom and Dad:
  • A spare (1200mAh!) battery and car/wall charger for my camera.
  • A suction-cup camera mount that will only be used in an entirely safe and responsible manner.
  • The Korg DS-10, which is currently the most Korg you can possibly get for your money. Expect a full review later.
  • A couple of splatter screens for my skillet.
  • And as a complete surprise, a replacement set of air shocks for my CRX's hatch.

I think I made out pretty well. Oh, and even though it wasn't really a Christmas present, thank you Alan and Annie for the oatmeal raisin cookies. They were delicious. :)

I hope everyone is fat, happy, and not freezing/sliding/drowning/blowing away. Not joking about the drowning/blowing, either. We are seriously under a flash flood and tornado watch right now. Eeek.