So, watching ai sp@ce’s RSS feed, I caught their announcement of the second round of public testing of their squirt gun game. (I know I’ve used “watergun” in previous posts, but “squirt gun” is what I grew up using and feels more natural to me. n.-) This one is going to be running from the November 17, 2009 5 PM maintenance to the November 24, 2009 11 AM maintenance.
Anyone who logs in during that period can participate in the game. However, there will be some stats reset after the end of the test. There’s also a couple of warnings/caveats, and announcement of a gift for testers. Further details after the jump. More…
Well, Youtube appears to be having issues. Every video I try to load in standard quality gives me the error message: “An error occured, please try again later.” Videos only available in standard quality won’t load at all. However, the standard quality version of some videos will load if they have HD or HQ versions, while others will still give that error and refuse to load unless you switch to the HQ or HD version of the video. None of the HQ or HD videos I’ve tried has given me that error when I’ve tried to view the HQ or HD version.
Searching Twitter shows that I’m not the only one that’s having this issue, and I’ve confirmed it with friends on IRC as well. Youtube’s Twitter indicates that they did some maintenance that ended at 3:30 PM Pacific Time, which was about 5 hours ago. This issue is still persisting. Hopefully they’ll get things working again soon, as this is a major issue.
Update 1: It has been brought to my attention that there are some videos that are working, but the problem still persists for the videos I have been trying to watch.
Update 2: It looks like that issue has finally been resolved, as videos I was having issues with are now working.
[Pic taken from Safebooru and converted to JPG format]
So, a new fiber-optic cable named “Unity” has left Japan, bound for a rendezvous with another ship coming from Los Angeles. It was announced in February of last year, and is a joint effort by Google and a group of telecom companies. The companies involved are Bharti Airtel from India, Global Transit from Malaysia, Google, KDDI Corporation from Japan, Pacnet from Hong Kong, and SingTel from Singapore. Supposedly its full capacity is 7.68 Tbps (yes, that’s terabits per second), though will be running at 4.8 Tbps when it’s fully launched. The two ships will meet in the middle of the Pacific and fuse their cables together, and the new cable should be operational by early next year. More…
So, something popped up on the ai sp@ce website recently that I missed until this evening, as I was busy with other thing, such as studying. ;) It seems that there is going to be a “comic” (that’s the word they used, in katakana, so I’m using it as well) based on ai sp@ce, which will be previewed in one of the special editions of Dengeki G’s Magazine known as “Dengeki G’s Festival! COMIC Vol. 9,” which is to be released on December 26, 2009. Serialization is to follow. The title of the comic is to be called, if I’m reading this correctly 「あいすぺ＠」 … Don’t ask me how to read that. ;)
What makes this more interesting, however, is that they’ve decided to let the ai sp@ce users decided which of four character templates to base the heroine charadoll off of by using an online poll. This charadoll would be the partner of the main character of this comic. The voting period ended Sunday night in Japan, right before midnight. The four character templates will be explained after the jump. More…
As some of you may already be aware, Konami released a new DS dating sim game this fall known as “Love Plus.” Konami is, of course, famous in this market for their Tokimeki Memorial series. The difference with this game, however, is that it continues after the player has successfully wooed the girl. (This is likely the source of the use of “plus” in the title.) From what I understand, the bulk of the game is interacting with the girl with her being the player’s girlfriend.
The website “boingboing” recently posted an article entitled, “Advisor: My husband has a virtual girlfriend,” in which a Japanese couple living in San Francisco was interviewed about the game and if/how it has affected their relationship. More…
Xerox has announced that they have developed a procedure to print with “low-temperature” silver ink using ink-jet technology on a variety of surfaces. What makes this new technique so different and promising is that existing techniques required high temperatures, which would melt materials such as plastics, and/or a so-called “clean room” environment. This new development requires neither.
This is the sort of breakthrough that the RFID industry has been waiting for. With this, it becomes practical to print RFID tags on everything, as costs have been dramatically lowered. According to PC Mag, Xerox claims that this could bring costs for RFID tags down from where they are at about a dollar (US) or so, down to roughly a penny each. In the research I’ve done on RFID in the past, this sort of drop has been seen as critical in the development of item-level tagging.
If this really takes off (and I do believe it will), this could cause alot of changes in retail. Everything from better inventory management due to “smart shelves” that can tell how much/how many of an item still remains on them, to effortless checkout, where you just push your cart through a reader and it rings up all your items at once. Videos after the jump. More…
Wow, what a poignant video! Truly a great work of art, and I felt I just had to share it. Found this by way of Kurofune through Google Reader.
The video has been reposted quite a few times on Youtube under the title “Romancing Your Soul”, but I believe I’ve found the original post, which calls it “Lost Generation,” and that is the one I have embedded here. It was an entry for AARP’s U@50 video contest, and placed second in that contest. More…
Apparently the manufacturer of Time-Warner cable’s default modem/router combo, SMC, is run by a pack of incompetent morons. Yes, I am using such strong words because they are needed to express the depth of the stupidity in how this router is setup.
First off, the default setup for these routers (model SMC8014WG-SI) is WEP encryption. Anyone who knows anything about wireless networks will tell you that WEP is pretty much useless. They can be cracked within minutes. However, it gets even better. There’s a normal user account that can only access certain options, supposedly. However, the administrative functions are apparently only restricted from non-admin users by HIDING THEM WITH JAVASCRIPT! Hence the double facepalm above. Words fail me at this point, so let me just quote the guy who found this, Dave, from his blog. More…
Sorry I didn’t get to this post until now, but midterms have been killer. ^^; I went to Halko Momoi’s Osaka concert on her “No Answer, No Live!” concert tour last Saturday. It was quite fun, though tiring, as it was standing room only at the venue, so I was on my feet for several hours. More…
A notice was posted on the ai sp@ce website on the 16th with regards to the (apparently) widespread client crash issue.
Essentially, they acknowleged, as of 6:05 PM that day, that there was a bug that was causing clients to crash after logging in and selecting their avatar. They also stated that they are currently investigating the cause of the crashes and would announce when they have tracked down the cause of the bug. As far as I can tell at this time, they haven’t put out that announcement yet, so it’s likely they’re still working on it.
This is likely related to the watergun shooting game, which appears to be quite popular and is putting a huge strain on the ai sp@ce servers (as I reported on earlier).
Full text and translation of the announcement after the jump. More…
So, watching ai sp@ce’s RSS feed, I caught their announcement of the second round of public testing of their squirt gun game. (I know I’ve used “watergun” in previous posts, but “squirt gun” is what I grew up using and feels more natural to me. n.-) This one is going to be running from the November 17, 2009 5 PM maintenance to the November 24, 2009 11 AM maintenance.
Well, Youtube appears to be having issues. Every video I try to load in standard quality gives me the error message: “An error occured, please try again later.” Videos only available in standard quality won’t load at all. However, the standard quality version of some videos will load if they have HD or HQ versions, while others will still give that error and refuse to load unless you switch to the HQ or HD version of the video. None of the HQ or HD videos I’ve tried has given me that error when I’ve tried to view the HQ or HD version.
So, a new fiber-optic cable named “Unity” has left Japan, bound for a rendezvous with another ship coming from Los Angeles. It was announced in February of last year, and is a joint effort by Google and a group of telecom companies. The companies involved are Bharti Airtel from India, Global Transit from Malaysia, Google, KDDI Corporation from Japan, Pacnet from Hong Kong, and SingTel from Singapore. Supposedly its full capacity is 7.68 Tbps (yes, that’s terabits per second), though will be running at 4.8 Tbps when it’s fully launched. The two ships will meet in the middle of the Pacific and fuse their cables together, and the new cable should be operational by early next year.
So, something popped up on the ai sp@ce website recently that I missed until this evening, as I was busy with other thing, such as studying. ;) It seems that there is going to be a “comic” (that’s the word they used, in katakana, so I’m using it as well) based on ai sp@ce, which will be previewed in one of the special editions of 
As some of you may already be aware, Konami released a new DS dating sim game this fall known as “
Apparently the manufacturer of Time-Warner cable’s default modem/router combo, SMC, is run by a pack of incompetent morons. Yes, I am using such strong words because they are needed to express the depth of the stupidity in how this router is setup.
Sorry I didn’t get to this post until now, but midterms have been killer. ^^; I went to 
A 