bytex64.net

I've heard a lot from people about how Opera is a better browser than Firefox. It uses less memory, loads faster, has more features, makes toast, etc, etc. And having used Firefox for quite a while, the claims seem plausible. Firefox isn't the most stable, well designed piece of software in the world. It's known to leak memory, and I've personally had it crash on me numerous times. Opera is making inroads on a lot of places outside the PC; you can get it on your Wii, your DS, and your cell phone. "Is it worth making the switch on the desktop?" I wondered. So I found out.

These tests were performed on Windows 2000, but they should be comparable across the board. Opera has no "native platform," but has probably seen the most work on Windows. Firefox likes Linux, so its Windows performance can't possibly be much better. As usual, the winner of each test is in bold. The data:

Test	Opera 9.25	Firefox 2.0.0.11
Memory Usage	54208K	41028K
CPU usage (spinner)	4%	39%
CPU usage (temporal text)	99%	50%
Download size	6.3MB	5.7MB

Firstly, any claims of Opera using less memory are a load of bollocks. The memory usage test had each browser open three tabs (This blog, slashdot.org, and digg.com), and read the "Mem Usage" column in Windows Task Manager. Of course, I can't call either of them "lightweight," but using an extra 30% makes Opera the clear loser.

Secondly, which browser has better JavaScript performance? The answer, it turns out, is a resounding "it depends." Both temporal text and spinner were written by me, and make use of math, basic text manipulation, and W3C DOM manipulation. Spinner is heavier on the floating point math, using trig functions, while temporal text is more graphically oriented, using DOM Level 2 style to fade letters in and out using the "opacity" property. It seems then, that Opera is much better at DOM manipulation, but likely has a much slower CSS parser. Since most interactive websites use the two hand-in-hand, it's really not clear who the winner is, here. Interesting side note: I ran this test in 64-bit Linux Firefox as well, and it sapped every last bit of CPU I had, I think partly because Linux was using an anti-aliased font where Windows wasn't, and partly because X blows.

As a supplemental test, I ran a comprehensive JavaScript benchmark on both browsers to shed some light on the situation. The details are boring, but overall, it showed that Opera was faster at function calls and data structure manipulation, but Firefox had faster control structures (if/switch/for/while) and faster text processing, particularly in the area of regular expressions.

I threw download size in there because I couldn't really think of anything else to test. Opera is a slightly larger download, but it does also include an IRC client as well as a Mail/News client. Furthermore, Opera seems much snappier when compared to the ever-more bloated Firefox. If you've got the memory, it really is a subjective call. I'll be sticking with Firefox. Why?

Opera doesn't do tab-completion. :P

Unless you live in Japan, it's hard to find up-and-coming anime series you like without drinking from the bandwidth firehose. Sites like Animesuki provide a handy, frequently updated index of fansubbed anime, but downloading them requires bittorrent. BT is fast enough, but for the purpose of previewing an episode, it's far from ideal.

But I've found a great little place that provides the quick, easy downloadability of Youtube, but without the terrible quality: Stage6, run by DivX labs. Yes that DivX. The provide their own DivX Player plugin, but it turns out to be completely unnecessary. Each movie has an ID, which shows up in the URL as a number. Plug that number into http://video.stage6.com/[number]/.divx, and you're done. Play with mplayer, vlc, or download it with your favorite HTTP client. It even has resume support. Thanks, DivX, for providing absolutely no obfuscation! :D

First on the list: Utawarerumono.

SUDDENLY, CATGIRLS! THOUSANDS OF THEM! (Ok, two of them are angels...)

Utawarerumono is an anime series based on an (hold on to your hat) adult adventure/tactical RPG. Imagine a game that mixes Love Hina with Final Fantasy Tactics, and you will be pretty close. The game was developed by Leaf, the same people who brought us To Heart, an adult dating game set in a high school. Now before you write this show off as a cheesecake-fest, I submit to you the following checklist:

• Samurai: Yes
• Giant, man-killing beasts: Yes
• Epic Battles: Yes
• Zombies: Yes
• Mecha: Yes
• Feudalistic society is actually a post-apocalyptic scenario: Whoops, spoilers!

It has almost everything I could ask for. And I wasn't joking about thousands of catgirls. Nearly everyone in this world is almost-human. Most of the time this means animal ears and a tail, but sometimes wings, or sometimes ears that look like wings. The main character, oddly enough, is the most normal looking of the bunch, and he wears a mask with horns.

I haven't played the game, but the show really downplays the adult aspect, instead focusing on the main character's rise to power and subsequent military conflicts. It does get a little Evangelion-esque in the end, but overall it was a pretty good series. If you like all of the above in addition to ridiculously powerful women with ridiculously spherical breasts, you'll love it.

Here's some other stuff I've perused:

• Gundam 00 - It's about the war in Iraq! No, really, watch it.
• Sky Girls - Little girls who are also airplanes. Blame Konami.
• ef - a tale of memories - A show with a very interesting artistic style. So far, it doesn't make much sense, but it seems like a puzzle that you're meant to piece together yourself.
• Starship Troopers - I'll bet you didn't know there was a 1988 OVA based on Robert A. Heinlein's novel, did you? Neither did I.

Of those, it looks like ef is going to be most interesting. I'm surprised at Gundam 00, though — it's gotten all the way to episode 13, and it hasn't been licensed, yet. :)

Please stop.

I guess the idea of broadcasting what you're doing and thinking every fifteen seconds is kinda cool. I personally find the idea vain and annoying, but I'm sure there are plenty of vain and annoying people who find your service a godsend. Previously, they would have to tell each person individually what they were doing or thinking, a process which could take minutes. Now they can inform everyone who cares with a single action. They can even twitter via Jabber or SMS, for those times when it's too much bother to load a webpage.

But as long as twitter stays within its own little garden, I don't really mind that it's the intellectual equivalent of throwing crumpled up pieces of paper into a wastebasket. But it seems you've given people the ability to export these little nuggets into previously sensible places, like blogs. Where once were places I could go to for a well-formed piece of prose, now I find a list of half-formed thoughts and descriptions. Must the internet's attention-deficit culture violate the last few bastions of actual thought?

And to the people who use twitter: Can you not find the time to collect these half-formed thoughts into a reflective editorial? Must I sift through your mental droppings like a prospector looking for gold, trying desperately to find something worthwhile in a stream of detritus? You can do better.

Twitter, you disappoint me.

I had an interesting thought the other day, possibly spurred by Danielle's present of a real-life replica of a Second Life T-shirt: "If my body was a canvas, what would I paint?" This is something I've pondered in Second Life, where changing your appearance is as easy as drag and drop, but I've never really thought about it in the context of the real world. Should I get a stack of plain T-Shirts and a permanent marker? And then, as it often does, enlightenment struck.

The way I look, i.e. the clothes I wear, my hairstyle, etc., can be an expression of self.

I'd previously thought that caring about your appearance was simply vanity. Indeed, it can involve vanity, but that's not the only force at work. The idea is not to groom yourself to be accepted by others, but rather to make your outer image match your inner self. Just like any other form of self-expression, originality and skill make a great artist, but mimicry and indulgence makes you a tool.

"Well duh," I can hear you say. The thing you have to realize is that when the rest of you were figuring this out, I was busy playing MechWarrior 2 and learning Linux. Sorry, I'm slow, gosh! :-P

The reason this is important is that I've always felt uncomfortable about grooming and style, since for most of my life, I've had no idea what the point was, and didn't really care to find out. But now, I have the money, talent, and enough weird ideas to actually design half the things I wear. And why shouldn't I? If my sister can take this picture and turn it into a T-shirt, then why can't I customize my entire wardrobe?

Textile hacking. It's just strange enough to work. :)

The IBM ScrollPoint III is a very interesting mouse. Apart from being one of the only mice that offers three physical buttons in an optical USB form-factor, it is the original "stick mouse." In the middle of the button area is a brightly lit blue stick, identical in operation to the TrackPoint mouse found on so many Thinkpad laptops. With this stick, you can scroll in two dimensions, but the stick is not just a functional substitute for two wheels — the stick is variable. The harder you push, the faster it scrolls.

In fact, when you take a closer look at the HID device properties, you see that the device has four relative axes. The scroll functionality is not the same as a traditional scroll mouse, where each click of the wheel registers as a mouse button press, which is in turn interpreted as a message to scroll up or down. The scroll widget reports pressure values on both axes from -64 to 64. The ScrollPoint III is a three-button mouse... with a joystick on top.

The implications are pretty big here. Instead of using clunky and discrete clicks to scroll by large intervals, the ScrollPoint can scroll by minute nudges or vast sweeps. The added precision means you can scroll smoothly and evenly through documents of all kinds, from linear Word documents to two-dimensional images and webpages. Not even the Mighty Mouse, with its much-hyped integral trackball, can do that. Heck, I could take this mouse and play Nintendo 64 with it.

The problem is that, at least in X, most applications are barely even aware of scrolling functionality, let alone the variable two-dimensional variety. X doesn't support the variable sensitivity, and many applications have their own idea of what horizontal scrolling means. The GIMP works predictably, but Firefox thinks you're using a mouse with forward/back buttons. Furthermore, most scroll wheels report one scroll event per click of the wheel. The ScrollPoint can report hundreds of events per second, making scrolling an experience not unlike playing a game designed to run on an IBM PC XT on a Pentium — so fast that it's useless. IBM supplies special drivers for Windows, but I'll bet they have their own problems as well.

But what's the fun of having some new hardware if you don't have to hack it to get it working, right? Since the obvious solution of letting X handle things isn't working out, I'm going to tap directly into the Linux event device for the mouse and write a program to convert that to sane and variable amounts of scrolling events. More word on that as it develops.

My brother got Unreal Tournament 2004 for Christmas, and it's quite a beast of a multiplayer game. It features no less than seven different gameplay modes out of the box, from classic CTF and DM to fast-paced soccer-like Bombing Run to massively team-oriented Onslaught and Assault modes. You could play the game for hours on end, but in the process of learning how to make a custom announcer for the game, I delved deeper into what the developer sees: The Unreal 2 engine.

The Unreal 2 engine is rather interesting on the inside. Similar to other engines like Source or Doom 3, it supports things you've come to expect like bump-mapping, skeletal animation, and a completely modular asset system. But Unreal 2 takes off from there, also providing an object-oriented in-game programming language and runtime for manipulating nearly every aspect of the game. If you want to write a system that supports an arbitrary dual-wield system like Halo 2, you can, without ever touching the engine code. And by virtualizing the logic system, Unreal 2 games are portable to any platform the engine runs on, which includes the expected Windows and Mac, as well as Linux, Xbox, and PS2.

A great example of this extensibility is one of the mods we've been playing called Ballistic Weapons. The game includes a couple dozen new weapons and reworks nearly every aspect of the FPS interface. Unreal Tournament is a simple point-and-shoot game — there is no recoil, no reloading, and a simplistic movement system. Ballistic Weapons adds part-specific damage, accuracy and recoil effects, reloading, a disturbing gore enhancement pack, and the aforementioned dual wield system. The game also sports several interface enhancements to deal with all the extra weaponry. Calling BW a mod doesn't really give justice to Unreal's modularity, though. BW is available in any UT2004 game type as a Mutator. Unlike a standard mod, which gives you a modified version of the game engine, a Mutator modifies the engine at runtime, and can be mixed with other mutators to create a completely customizable game type.

Perhaps more interesting to me is that the runtime appears to be, from the POV of the program, running many threads of execution in parallel for the various entities in-game. That's right, Unreal 2 is a parallel programming toolkit with a pretty 3D front-end. :P

And this is all technology that's five years old. The newest Unreal 3 engine does all this and more, running on Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox 360, and PS3. To be fair, though, some of these innovations happened elsewhere. Quake 3, for example, pioneered the virtual runtime, and the Quake series has run on Windows, Mac, and Linux for a decade. The Unreal engine is still quite an interesting piece of work.

This Christmas, not wanting to do the same old Christmas routine at our house, my family rented a house in Nauvoo, IL. Nauvoo is right on the Mississippi river at the western bulge of Illinois. The house was literally a stone's throw from the river, perched up on a hill. We had fun getting our cars up that hill, since that part of the state was covered in recent snow.

Safely inside the house, we initially marveled at its design. On the outside, it looks like an old English cottage. Inside, it's definetly modern construction with accents designed to make it look older than it is. The refrigerator, stove, and dishwasher had fascias that echoed old metalwork designs, and the walls were covered in faux stonework. After further inspection, though, many flaws showed through. The dishwasher was difficult to operate, one of the stove's burners didn't work, and the oven was completely non-operational. Thankfully, there was a stove downstairs, so we were still able to cook. Worst of all, they had satellite internet, which meant even trivial things like loading google.com were an exercise in patience as the round-trip-time from earth to space added up for every exchange of data.

Christmas Day was the usual — wake up early, eat a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, and distribute the presents for unwrapping. Before we started, though, we looked up the history of Nauvoo. It turns out that it was the original large Mormon settlement, started by Joseph Smith. In 1844, a newspaper spoke out against Joseph Smith, who retaliated by declaring the paper a public nuisance and had it shut down. The surrounding non-Mormon towns, appalled at this apparent quashing of free speech, had him arrested. He was guaranteed safety, but while he was awaiting trial in the county jail, a mob went to the jail and shot him from both sides as he tried to escape from a window. With their leader murdered, Nauvoo fell into disarray and Brigham Young stepped into Smith's shoes, leading the Mormons to Utah. Abandoned, Nauvoo came to be settled by Icarian French and Catholic settlers. At Nauvoo's peak, it was one of the largest cities in the state, with around 12,000 people. At the same time, Chicago was only a city of 15,000. Nowadays, Nauvoo is a small town of just over a thousand people far from any major highways. Still, the town gets a lot of visitors because of its history.

After opening presents, we ate our MREs and then took a walk along the riverside. There was still snow on the ground, and parts of the river were frozen. Back inside, we had a ham dinner and played some Wii on the house's wide-screen TV.

The day after, we visited a local winery (which, IMHO, is not nearly as cool as a brewery), then headed across the river to Burlington, IA to gas up at $2.69/gal and eat at a place called Big Muddy's. Big Muddy's sits right on the river, and is a bar and grill that also offers family dining at a decent price. In one of the archways, there is a line on the side with a label "Flood of '93" about a foot off the floor. I had some breaded catfish that was great, and my brother had a steak sandwich called a Pylon. My mom ordered one, too, so when Tim ordered, he said to the waitress, "I'll have an additional Pylon." We are such unredeemable nerds. :)

I've been spending most of today playing Tim's present, Unreal Tournament 2004. I'll have to explain more about the Unreal 2 engine later.

And, of course, the loot list:

• Cooler Master aluminum laptop cooler.
• IBM (Lenovo, actually) ScrollPoint III Optical USB Mouse.
• Various clothes, socks, and snack-food items.
• Six large pilsener-style beer glasses that hold 22.5oz each. This is enough to not only hold the standard 12oz bottle, but also pints, half-liters, and 22oz Bombers.
• A mix-a-six of various beers from Tim (who won't be 21 for three more years...).
• A travel first-aid kit from Andrea.
• A real-life replica of the T-shirt my Second Life avatar wears (Thanks, Danielle!).
• Aperture Laboratories Parking Permit #0811

It's not a lot, but each one of those things was thoughtful and useful, and that's what matters most to me. I could write a couple of paragraphs about each of the above, but it will have to wait 'till later. :)

I came across this rather spectacular piece of fiction (or at least I hope it's fiction) in an OKCupid profile, and I just had to share it with all of you.

Nobody knows how my life began as I washed up on a vietnamese beach at the age of 63 bruised, without my memory and with "I love Elmer" written across my abdomen with a sketchpen. I survived only by my ability to whittle peoples' likenesses in bars of coconut oil soap. Later, I was arrested by the local authorities for creating a risque soap statue of the president. I am legally bound not to continue this story. Being a dilettante sculptor can only take a 3 limbed football hooligan so far, however. Soon after, I was attaching myself to the underbellies of FOX network executives on holiday, feeding off scraps of their insatiable appetite for the tender meat of young coastal children. Decades passed. The liberation of Ms. Pacman brought great new strides to the world of meat packaging, and political gurglings in Russia took angry monkeys to never-before reached heights. I, however, was wrapped up in the world of pandering to licorice pornographers by harvesting vast fields of Moringa Oleifera (a.k.a Murangai). Chased away by a cloud of belligerent gnats, I found myself in strange and terrifying new lands. I was able to keep myself warm at night by burning the carcasses of several mildly retarded caucasian individuals that I trapped in a deep mud pit by luring them with marked down Coldplay CDs and random shiny bits of tin foil. 38 years after washing up on that beach, I finally decided to return to civilization. I really, really wanted a bag of doritos. In closing, Fuck You. Fuck all of you, you bumfaces. ...

Heh, Coldplay CDs. :)

I just bought a song from Amazon. It was easy.

I'm by no means an expert in this area, but I'd say that it was just as easy if not easier than buying from iTunes for a couple of reasons. Mainly, I didn't have to check if my download was a DRM-free version — everything downloadable from Amazon is unrestricted. Also, (and this is a big one for me) I didn't have to walk into the other room to use the Windows machine or iTunes. I know I'm in the minority there, but I don't think I should have to use a major platform to buy something as simple as music.

The entire transaction was as simple. I browse, pick a song, click "buy," log in, verify credit card info, and then download. The download was just a regular HTTP download that went flawlessly, though they do offer an optional downloader for windows that integrates your download automatically with iTunes and/or Windows Media Player. $0.89 and two minutes later, I had a MP3. That's how it should be.

Amazon's downloads are plain old 256Kbit MP3s, which aren't going to please an audiophile, but offer enough quality for most casual tasks. The big win is that MP3 is the most portable digital audio format, hands down. I can play that MP3 without conversion on any computer, my DS, my phone, my modded PS2, our APEX DVD player, my mom's Treo, my brother's Creative MuVo, or even the Wii if I stream it through a flash applet on a webpage. In addition, this little MP3 will probably outlast every piece of physical media I have, because Amazon lets me copy it wherever I want. A business model based on trusting the customer? What a novel concept.

But even if I do lose it, I can view everything I've downloaded from Amazon in their "yourmedialibrary" and re-download it. And as far as the requirements for purchasing and downloading, this is what their FAQ says: "You can buy songs from any computer with a web browser capable of downloading files from the Internet." It's probably not that simple, but I admire their optimism. Amazon has a really winning combination here, and I'll be coming back for more.

What song did I get, you ask? You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch. :D

One of the things I like to do when I'm feeling depressed about life is to immerse myself into completely fanciful anime series. When I look at the world through the distorted lens of Japan's artists, things don't seem so bad. I mean, I'm not fighting alone for the survival of mankind, I'm not trapped in a virtual world, and I'm not trying desperately to keep my alter-ego from destroying everything that I hold dear (...mostly).

Most of you are aware of how much I wish I had a girlfriend (and I'm fully aware that it's mostly my fault I don't have one, so please, no "well, if you would just..." replies), so a frequent source of respite for me is the relationship/harem genre. When I was 20, watching Love Hina, I thought, "Man, this guy is also 20 and he's living with this awesome girl! Granted, she outwardly hates his guts and regularly abuses him, but there's hope for me yet!" It is a little sad that I look up to a fictional guy who got the shit kicked out of him by this girl on a daily basis, but that's how a depressed lonely guy's mind works. Or at least my depressed lonely mind.

Right now I'm re-watching REC, a cute little anime about a man and a woman who, through bizarre circumstances, grow into a couple. Unlike Love Hina, the whole series is realistic — it's very much an adult comedy/drama, just animated. And (here's where the delusion kicks in), the guy in it is 26. This means I have at least another year before I'm more pathetic than a fictional character. There is hope for me yet. :)

Yep, ladies, that's how awesome I am.