Records of Hagabaka's Daily Mumbling

Frogatto now has a Chinese translation

2011-02-07T17:39:00.000-05:00

Frogatto is a platforming game with beautiful classic pixel art, stylish music, humorous dialog, and gameplay that ranges from relaxing to challenging. I easily became a fan of the game, and recently learned that it is possible to create translations for the game's dialog and menu text. For most platforming games, which have little text other than a settings screen, translation is probably a small issue. However Frogatto has a lot of dialog which illustrate its interesting characters and world, as well as things like hints and achievement texts. I worked with some Frogatto developers and users for a few weeks, and now the game can be played in Chinese!

The translation is written by another Frogatto player, CloudiDust, who I met on Frogatto's forum. I did write a translation by myself before noticing that another user was also interested in creating a Chinese translation. However, my Chinese is getting rusty, and I felt my translation didn't do justice for Frogatto's humor. So we decided to use CloudiDust's translations, and I focused on the programming side of getting the translation to show in game.

In most cases, creating a translation for a program doesn't really require much if any additional programming. Most programs use fonts installed in the system to display text, and as long as you have a Chinese font, these programs can display Chinese text. On the other hand, Frogatto uses a font that's manually drawn by the team's artists. This certainly makes it easy to achieve a consistent look between the 2D graphics and text, but it also posed a challenge for the Chinese translation, because the artists did not draw Chinese characters:

And even if someone started working on drawing a Chinese font for Frogatto now, it would take a long time to finish. Chinese has a huge set of characters, and just Frogatto's translation uses over 1000 characters. And when sentences in the translation are revised, it might require new characters. So, for a language like Chinese, I thought the best solution is to automatically create a font compatible with Frogatto, containing the characters used in the translation, from an existing Chinese font. This process needs to be done also for Japanese, Korean, and maybe more languages. So I built a system to do this, with help from Frogatto developers.

Since it is a very new feature, the Chinese translation doesn't work out of the box yet. If you use Windows, you can download a recent development build of Frogatto, 1/31/2011 or newer. You also have to extract this zip file into Frogatto's installation. Then, you need to set an environment variable LANG=zh_CN before running Frogatto. In a future release this should be much simplified.

If you use Linux, get Frogatto from SVN, compile it, run make update-mo, and run the game also with the appropriate LANG environment variable setting. Arch Linux users can just use the frogatto-svn package from AUR.

If you want to help translate Frogatto to other languages, the Transifex service makes it quite easy. A Frogatto developer and I started working on a Japanese translation, but neither of us is a Japanese native speaker, so we'd really like some help.

Problems with tabs in user interfaces

2010-02-28T14:10:00.005-05:00

I apologize to any old readers, and new readers who have looked at my older posts, that this post is quite disconnected from the older ones. Considering I haven't posted in more than 3 years, that's not a surprise though :p.

Reading Celeste Lyn Paul's ideas about using tabs in the taskbar has reminded me about some of my thoughts on tabs in user interfaces.

Every major browser is using tabs now, and we can also find them in text editors, virtual terminals, and as Celeste mentioned it is being integrated to KDE's window manager. One of the motivations for tabs is to limit the number of windows and task bar entries, by grouping multiple "documents" in the same window. This helps reduce clutter on the desktop and task bar, but often the clutter is simply moved to the tab bar of the application. My Chrome window tends to gather 10 or more tabs after an hour, and by that time, many of the open tabs aren't really related to what I am working on at the moment.

I think there are three cases of why people use multiple tabs (or if they were never invented, multiple windows or "documents"):

They need to work with multiple things at the same time. For example, I might have Google Translator open while translating a Google Document. I might be running some commands in one Konsole tab, while reading a manual page in another tab.
They want to move on to something else, but the old document cannot be closed for some reason. For example, while aptitude is upgrading packages in one Konsole tab, I want to run another command, and so I open another tab.
Sometimes the user didn't intend to be "done" with the first thing, but forgets to get back to it after opening a new tab. This is kind of in between cases 1 and 2. For example, sometimes while I'm waiting for an online video to load, or writing a post like this, I'd get distracted and open another site and forget about what I was doing until a few hours later.

I think case 1 is where tabs are doing the best in their role. Grouping closely related tasks on the same view can help the user increase productivity. Many applications that support tabs also allow you to move tabs manually, and create multiple windows with tabs, to organize tabs the way you need. However, I personally rarely use these features, and I think using them extensively could take enough time to cancel the productivity benefits.

Another problem is that closely related tasks are not always done in the same application. Nowadays you can do a lot of things with the web browser, including watching videos, playing games, word processing, calculating, and translating. But there are still a lot of desktop applications that can work together to help with the user's tasks. Normally you cannot put these separate applications in tabs to help with your workflow. KDE allows you to group windows from different applications together as tabs now, but it's currently not very convenient to do, and it can be confusing to have tabs both on the window manager level and the application level. I think ideally, applications shouldn't be concerned with having tabs, and should just leave it to the window manager and the user to organize tasks in different ways, be it to put windows side by side, dock them, or tab them.

Cases 2 and 3 are not benefits from tabs, but rather clearer demonstrations of their problems. Although, maybe the problems are inherent to multi-tasking and the amount of distractions in our lives today. I think it would help if there was a system that could automatically close, or hide long-untouched tasks. This would require work to be not lost when a window or tab is closed: for example, forum and blog editing pages should autosave the content, and the browser should be able to re-open a page with the same state as it was before being closed. On Linux we use the program Screen to keep a command line program running without keeping it on the display, and this could be extended to the whole desktop. However, there are challenges associated with keeping more and more programs running in the background, reloading them fast enough, and presenting their list to the user in a non-distracting way, yet preventing the user from forgetting about them completely.

A New Frontier

2006-08-10T00:23:00.000-04:00

Get a Better Browser Today!

2005-08-30T22:34:00.000-04:00

Opera is giving out free registration codes. I recommend and command any Internet Explorer users to get it so that they can view my blog better :).

Ironically, I purchased Opera about 30 minutes before learning this news :p. But it was out of my appreciation of this great browser, so I don’t feel uncomfortable about it.

I also use Firefox, and it’s very difficult to judge which one of the two browsers is superior in terms of functionality, customizability and pleasantness. But Firefox does use a lot of memory, especially left open for long time, with lots of pages open. I personally can tolerate this flaw, but I’m sure Windows users who have been unhappy about Firefox for this will enjoy Opera.

Today is the second day of school. I have much to say about the experience so far, and some plans for my blog (forshadowing, for good news). I have school work to do, school fun to have for now, but I’ll be sure to update in the weekend.

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Vantage Master Online

2005-08-13T22:15:00.000-04:00

Most non-Asian gamers probably only know Falcom as the maker of the Ys series. I played one of the early Ys games, but I didn’t enjoy it very much as the action rpg genre didn't suit my taste. However, a few other games made by this Japanese company make up the majority of my favorite PC games. Most of them are not popular except in Japan and China due to the lack of English translations, but a fortunate exception, Vantage Master Online, a turn-based strategy game, is available in English, and even free to download (for Windows).

Simple, Traditional, Yet Complete and Innotative Battle System

The four elements of natials in VMO—each is another’s natural enemy. from Vantage Master Online Manual.

The basic ideas in the battle system are a little clichéd, and you might want to just try the game and discover them yourself. In a battle in VMO, two summoners fight on a grid map. The goal is to reduce the opponent’s HP to zero, but the process involves more. The summoners can attack and use magic, but their main weapons are, of course, summoned spirits, called Natials by Falcom. There are 24 natials, categorized into four elements. The relationships between the four elements make it important to choose what to summon based on what the enemy summons. Within each element, natials also differ by properties such as attack and defense powers, speed, moving range, etc. Summoning natials costs mana, and each natial also costs some mana per turn, so you need to capture and defend magic stones, strategically placed on the map, to keep up with the expenditure.

An important feature is complex interactions between natials’s properties and the environment. For example, different terrain types might affect the movement for a natial, if it's land, water, or air borne. Natials with projectile attack have different launch angles, thus their range will be affected differently by height. In some maps there are transitions from day to night, while in others there is a fixed lighting level; accordingly there are daytime and nocturnal natials that will perform better or worse depending on the lighting. Summoners can use spells that alter the environment, e.g. switch day and night, or raise and lower water level, to make provide advantage to themselves.

Three Modes of Gameplay

There are Scenario, Expert, Free Battle and Network Battle modes. In Scenario mode, you start with only the basic natials, and after completing each scenario, you get one of the natials or a spell, and some stat increase. There are a few alternative maps at a time for you to attempt, and after beating all of them, new ones open up. As you progress, the enemies will have higher stats, and are able to summon more natials or cast more spells, and may have advantagious positions in the maps. In the Expert mode, you and enemies will both have all the natials and spells, but the maps require a lot more strategy.

The free battle mode allows you to pick any map, any character for the two opponents, and either or both can be played by human or computer AI. You can also configure which natials and spells each has.

Network Battle mode obviously allows you to play with someone else on another computer. It doesn't require a public server, and it’s pretty easy to set up as long as you have a modern version of DirectX. I’ve only used this once with a friend; although he wasn’t very interested in the game, it was still a fun experience. I’ll be very happy to match wits with anyone interested :)!

Playable and Useful Features

Besides boasting a network mode, VMO has many features that improve the playing experience. You can select any unit—your summoner and enemy, and any natials— and use a context menu to see its move range, attack range, and attack-after-move range, and all kinds of stats. Hovering on any tile will show its height and any influence on defense, etc. The main interface is similar to your famililar Windows applications—with scrollbars, menus and buttons, reducing the need to adjust to unique control methods.

Aesthetics

Screenshot of a VMO battle. Click to view full size.

For a 25MB download, VMO’s graphics is very impressive. The bitmap tiles and looping animations are very well used, making the battle maps look 3-D. Most of the maps have unique styles, making it easy for you to have a mental picture of the fantasy setting. The background music of each scenario also compliments the graphics and the pace/difficulty of the battle, and I’ve always liked music in Falcom games—as you can see I listen to them very often. Each natial requires an artifact–like item to summon; the descriptions of these items are also very artistic. There is some story in the game, in the form of simple animation clips with subtitles after the completion of some scenarios. Unfortunately the English version didn’t translate the subtitles, and you might only see garbage code on a non-Japanese computer; however they're not necessary at all to enjoy the game. In the beginning of scenario modes, you need to take a quiz to determine your attributes and your class. That is pretty fun too, and I heard that many of the characters come from previous games by Falcom.

Vantage Master Evolved: VM Japan

VM Japan, released more recently, is a much more decorated version of VMO. It has a more involved story, and the graphics and music are no longer mini-gamelevel. There are more natials, and all of them originate, or seem to, from Japanese folklore. More variety is introduced; for example there’s a spell only mastered by one character, and a natial is very powerful, but can only move on one special type of terrain. These changes might be too few and disappointing for some VMO fans, but it’s still nice to see Vantage Master evolve into a full-sized game. I think there are two volumes of the VM Japan series already, and it’s also available for PS2. Unfortunately, I don't think there are English versions yet.

Summary

I think VMO deserves much more attention, especially among strategy gamers. It makes excellent use of its small size, and beats many bulky games in terms of playability. I hope you will try it out, and hopefully be interested to VMO-duo with me :)

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Season Finale

2005-08-13T20:34:00.000-04:00

Alternative Title:

Thus Ends Hagabaka’s Tale Under the Golden Arches

Today was my last day of work at McDonald’s this summer. It was pretty enjoyable compared to most of other days I worked, and people were extra friendly to me :). In future vacations, I will try to find part-time jobs that relate more closely to my major, Computer Science, so if things go well, today will be the last day of my McDonald’s career…. In the next two days, I will be helping my sister move to her new apartment in Oxford, Ohio (while my home is in Perrysburg, Ohio, so I will be out of town), and following that are days for my own preparation for back to school, and I should have plenty of time to catch up with fun as well.

For other Blogger users, if you haven’t noticed, there is a user survey for you. I filled it out yesterday, and it was actually much more enjoyable than most of the surveys I've done. Whether my input will be read or taken into consideration is another question, but I appreciate seeing Blogger’s interest in hearing from us.

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Happy Hagabaka in the House

2005-08-11T02:28:00.000-04:00

I’m in a good mood tonight, because of a few pleasant happenings:

AudioScrobbler, after a few days of upgrade behind the scene, is now back as Last.fm. This is a great service that automatically collects songs you listen to on your computer, submits information such as title, artist online, and forms musical neighborhoods and networks. So basically, you get to have an online copy of your favorite playlist, and get recommendations from other people who have similar taste. The new site looks much more brushed up, and kept most of the features. Missing is a feed of your recent tracks, provided by the old site, but it never worked for me, and Last.fm assures me that these and more features will be added. You might not care about a feed, but when it is available, there will be some cool addition in the sidebar ;).
Speaking of cool additions to my sidebar, there is now a list of blogs that linked to me recently. On most popular browsers (excluding Internet Explorer), you can hover on them to read what people said about my blog or one of my posts. Ahem, that means free advertisement for your blog! So link to my blog, preferably my posts, often to take advantage of it!
Another episode of Bleach is fansubbed. I was impressed with this anime series from the first episode, and now it’s definitely on the top of my favorites. I will probably write about it later, because the episode has already finished downloading (good things just keep happening :)).

Actually, the feed on the old AudioScrobbler site is working, so I am able to put up a list of recent listened to tracks on the sidebar. The links don’t work though. When the new feed service is working, they will probably let you view detailed in formation about the tracks, artists and albums, and maybe a stream preview. Tags:

Lessons Learned

2005-08-09T02:36:00.000-04:00

I'm truly amazed how many bloggers think that Google is personally out to get them. Here's how the story goes. You've been blogging and have 6 readers according to your FeedBurner stats (Technorati, Feedster, Mom, Dad, PubSub and IceRocket). You decide to throw up some ads and make a little money. Unfortunately, you find out that with 6 readers that you're not getting any clicks. So, you start clicking yourself, several times per day. Google sends you an email telling you that you've been cut-off of Google Adsense for invalid clicks. You then turn your blog into an anti-Google campaign.

from The Google Consipiracy.

I’m quoting this because the Google link above points to my last post, thereby including me in those who turned their blogs into an anti-Google campaign. I found this post through my StatCounter logs, which recorded that a visitor (a few more, later) came to my site through the link in that post. While I appreciate the exposure, I feel misunderstood and stereotyped by this author. I only wrote that I was banned from AdSense, confessed that I clicked on my own ads and knew some of my friends helped me click them, and I did the same for them, at times. I didn’t protest Google’s decision, or dissuade people from participating in AdSense. I hoped writing about it would remind me of my mistake, and provide an example for those who wonder whether abusers do get caught. After thinking about advertisers who pay for clicks on their ads, I feel even more guilty for my abuse (even though Google says it returned all my earnings to the respective advertisers), and I admit my action deserves to be ridiculed. However, the post didn’t criticize my abuse, but focused on, apparently, the fact that I wrote about it. And the author seems to have misunderstood most of the other linked posts too—some writers also admitted their mistakes without complaints; some others complained about getting banned without doing anything wrong.

Oh well, I’m not in the position to tell others what to write about my posts in their blogs, and the shameful link does make me think more about my mistake. I will add to my lessons learned: make sure I really others’ words before I judge them. And, I hope I did when I wrote this post.

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Return of the Hagabaka

2005-08-07T02:07:00.000-04:00

Welcome back! Sorry about another long period without posts. My life in the last two weeks were still monotonous and laborious, mostly alternating between McDonald’s, bed, and behind the computer screen. However, there were a few interesting blog-worthy occurrences.

Movies of Wars

I recently watched Star Wars. I had been ridiculed many times by friends for never seeing this classic, and I’m very proud to have finally filled this hole in my life. The movie was indeed amazing. Although I watched the DVD on a TV, the experience greatly exceeded most of the movies I watched in theatres, thanks to the great story, lines, acting, and well-used special effects, and probably a lot more that I haven't been able to analyze :).

I also watched War of the Worlds. It was also a great experience. And scary. I might write more about it later, but Justin already wrote a good review on it.

Blog Sorrow

Google AdSense, which used to display context-sensitive ads on my blog has transformed from nonsense to non-existent. An email from Google explained that I was banned from AdSense because I was found generating invalid clicks. I did click on my own ads a few times on a few days in June, which is against the usage policy. But somehow I don’t think that was the exact reason, because Gravi-T, Fizza, and his friend also got banned from AdSense around the same time with me. We sort of regularly helped clicking each other’s ads, and that was probably the reason. I don’t think Google would label any click from a friend of yours invalid, but they were probably unhappy to see almost all of my click coming from two IP addresses. So in case I get into another advertising program (which is now made less likely because ad services might read my post and think I will do it again), I will definitely resist the urge to click my own ads or tell others to do it.

To add to the sorrow, while I was tweaking my template, Blogger decided to truncate it, leaving only the useless beginning part of it. Therefore I had to switch to a new template, and restore some of my customizations, with the help of a backup I luckily made. I like this new template—it gives a little more room for my text, and is still pretty decorative. There are still many things I want to add and restore, but it will take a while.

Job

I’m almost at the limit! Two months of work, mostly late nights, and only one day off per week is not what I’m used to in summer vacations. But of course, paychecks are nice, and I was voted the Employer of the month for July! \o/ There’s only one week of work left, and I’m sure I will be able to survive that. After that, I will have a few days to catch up with fun and rest before school.

Whew! It’s time to say mumble to you later. Mumble back!

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Nuns to the Rescue!!

2005-07-20T07:23:00.000-04:00

Among my school friends, I've been often viewed as an anime guru. This is probably because in my first two years of college at Case Western Reserve University, I took advantage of the world’s most powerful learning environment by downloading anime episodes from the Internet and the school network, and regularly going to the CWRU Anime Society, where members view anime episodes on a projector screen in a lecture room. Compared to most friends on IRC, my anime knowledge is very limited. Still, I plan to write about a few series I watched, in an attempt to rescue my blog from death. The first one I shall feature is Chrno Crusade.

There are light, vague spoilers below. After rereading, I don't think my post will ruin it for anyone who hasn’t watched or finished watching this show.

Background

Sister Rosette, prepared to fire a Gospel. from AniPlanet

Many people describe Chrno Crusade playfully as a show with nuns with guns, giving you a little idea of the series’s background: in the U.S., 1920, heroine Sister Rosette, one of the professional exorcists of Magdala Monastery, and her partner Chrno investigate events related to demon worship and fight the culprit (summarized from AnimeNfo’s description).

Development and Themes

The beginning episodes are light, humorous, thrilling at times (exorcism scenes), and as the story and characters develop, the episodes becomes more emotional and heavier, but still with enough comic relief. The themes of religion and heresy grow stronger as the show progresses. I feel they are merely a setting for the anime, not intended to be taken seriously, but there are a few episodes with heavy religious references that I find difficult to associate with the rest of the anime. Still, for a casual pagan viewer like me, these themes provided an interesting setting, and some spooky and impressive scenes and music :) Many episodes are action packed, where Rosette and friends rescue, pursue, confront, or survive from ambush. One scene in a later episode especially fits the aforementioned popular description, with a large troop of nuns shooting at demons with machine guns loaded with holy bullets :)

Music

I find music in most of the anime series I've watched appealing; actually, anime OSTs constitute 70% of the music I listen to. Some anime soundtracks adapt to the show very well, but are too boring, weird, etc. to be enjoyed alone. But I was impressed with Chrno Crusade’s background music and theme songs when I watched it, and I still enjoy the soundtrack regularly two years later now. The music is mostly classical, played by orchestra, piano, and/or voice.

Overall Evaluation

I enjoyed Chrno Crusade greatly for its unique setting, emotional story and exciting action. The ending was a part of the show I didn’t like, but a few commentors seem to favor it. I think this anime will also be welcomed by most anime watchers with a diverse interest.

So there is my first anime review ^_^ I’m looking forward to feedbacks from you!

Revision

By requests in the comments, I added a short evaluation paragraph above.

Another One of the Lame Posts

2005-07-16T03:47:00.000-04:00

Greetings. I haven't posted in a long time, not to mention a post of interest. This one is still going to be uninteresting, but I think I can promise you to write something to rescue my blog from death soon :)

Today I did heavy-duty tweaking, as it should be obvious. If you're familiar with Blogger, you'd know there are a few great-looking templates for you to apply to your blog. I was getting very bored with my old template, Rounders 3—or maybe it's just my blog hasn't been changing its look for a long time due to the lack of new posts—so I switched from my old template Rounders 3 to Rounders 4. Looks fresh, doesn’t it. And this provided me with something to write about. The Rounders templates are very similar, so the process is easier than changing to one of the more different templates. But it still wasn’t a one–click process, since I had to recover multiple customizations I made to the template, and adjust them to fit the new look. But having this experience, my blog’s next face-change will be a little easier. :)

Another excuse for me to write this post is my commenting service, HaloScan's down time. Its forum has been under maintenance for at least a day now, and while I was tweaking the template I noticed the comment links are gone. I’m a little worried—I hope this service won’t go down forever. But it has been up for three years, so I think this is only one of the technical difficulties that will get fixed soon. When the comment links are up, please don’t ridicule me for abandoning Blogger comments for an outside service that has downtimes like this—as I showed you in previous posts, HaloScan has brought you and me many advantages. So long!

Update

The comment links appeared soon after I posted yesterday, but new comments seem to be disappearing. HaloScan maintainers are aware of the issue, and said the new comments are safe and will be restored soon.

New update

The new comments are lost, and cannot be restored now :( I know Fizza posted one, and I could put it back easily like I copied the old Blogger comments when I switched to HaloScan. But I hope there were no other comments...if you posted one and it's not listing here now, could you try again please? Thanks. Now I'm going back to cry....

Warning: Content is Hot!

2005-07-07T03:17:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, as I was entering McDonald's for work, I was greeted by a huge poster on the glass door with a Sony PSP on it. I didn't have time to check if I was hallucinating or read the text, but luckily the rest of the restaurant was also full of postings regarding the new PSP giveaway. Basically, you get chance to win a PSP or other prizes for buying a Big Mac or a large fry. Some details can be found here. The official site of the program is PlayAtMcD.com, but I found the site distracting and unhelpful. It's still worth checking out for a laugh ;) and you need to go there to enter your "MAC Code" for the giveaway. Would working at McDonald's increase my chances of getting a free PSP?—Let me fantasize about the possibilities again—No, because McDonald's employers are not eligible to enter. :( I suppose I could still save money—quit job—buy Big Macs, but I probably don't have the luck anyway.

Still, I'm proud of my employer's display of great taste. This seems to be a step in their campaign to attract young, tech-savvy customers. I also learned recently that McDonald's is a sponsor of Bleach, an anime series I'm following. This has raised my level of respect for McDonald’s a lot, and I might actually enjoy my work better because of it :)

Tomorrow (I mean when the sun comes up next time, which is soon) is a day off from work for me. Hopefully I'll be able to use it to post something interesting. My friend Justin, who started blogging two weeks later than I, has much more interesting content on his blog, and is now a contributor on BlogCritics.org, so he can write reviews on his blog and they will show up on the site. That will probably bring him many more readers! I'm a little jealous, and I plan to apply too, as soon as I'm sure I can find things to review on, and be able to review often :) I know most of my readers are also bloggers, so I suggest you try it too, as Justin also recommended.

Psst, look aside!

2005-07-02T03:09:00.000-04:00

Apology to my readers who are more interested in personal stuff, but this post will again be technology-oriented. But it's very cool, and nothing hard to understand :)

First, please finish reading this paragraph, and then follow its instructions. Look at the side bar. Scroll down, as you see stuff like "About Me", "Previous Posts", "Archives". And keep going...

(Now I give you a few seconds to do it)

Didn't you see something cool?? Hopefully with your name in it! This is a list of latest comments to my blog. When you move your mouse on the commentor's name, a tooltip shows you the first few words of the comment. You can click on it to see the page with the comments. This is made possible by LastHalo, an addon for HaloScan, my new comment service.

You may already see something missing: you can't tell what post the comment is for. Unfortunately, even after you click the commentor's name and open the page with comments, you have no way to get back to the original post. I read about this problem in HaloScan's forums; it seems Blogger makes it very hard to get back to the original post. There seems to be a partial solution, and I'll look into it soon.

So, why not leave a comment and be on the cool list? ;)

On Comments and...“an ‘Arse Feed’ You Say?”

2005-07-01T02:37:00.000-04:00

Warning: this post is technicality-heavy. But I think you might find the information helpful...leave a comment after you finish reading whatever you felt like reading, anyway :)

As Gravi-T noticed and pointed out, I changed the commenting page. My comments are now hosted on HaloScan. You can find its logo on the "Powered By" section of this site's side bar.

What does this change for you? When you click on the "comments (n)" link, a popup window will open, listing the comments for this post, and on the bottom you can type your own comments. If you're a Blogger user, the new window won't automatically fill in your name and profile any more...you'll have to type them in, but your browser will probably remember them the next time. Otherwise, I don't see the change bringing anything bad for my dear readers :) You can still use bold, italics formatting and links in your comments, and a bonus is "clickable smileys". They are easily accessible when you click the "?" besides "Comment:" on the popup.

The switch wasn't painless. I had to copy/paste all the comments you left on Blogger, and edit their time and commenter's name, and homepage. It took about 3 hours! So why the switch? It's mainly for my benefit :) As I post more, it can get hard to keep track of comments. It's not so bad with the newer posts, since I see how many comments there are in the main page, and I could tell if there were new posts by remembering how many comments there were before. But if I wanted to find a comment on an old post, maybe because I just remembered I could write something about it, it'll take very long to dig it out. HaloScan can display all my comments in one page, where I can edit, delete, and search them.

HaloScan also provides an "RSS feed" of the comments—this term might sound mystical to you, but it works very much like email, and in fact you can use Thunderbird to read a feed. So the comments won't spam my email inbox, and I can look at them in an organized, familiar interface. By the way, the blog itself also uses "RSS" technology, meaning you can read my postings in Thunderbird. There are many more programs you can use to read RSS feeds, but so far my favorite is NewsGator Web edition. You don't need to download and launch a program, because this works on a website. I've subscribed to some of my "Friends with Blogs'" blogs very easily, allowing me to see if they have new posts at a glance. I encourage you to try it out, and feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Project “Get Personal” Movement 1: My Job

2005-06-29T02:27:00.000-04:00

Long time no see. Sorry for lack of updates for so many days...fortunately, my experience in the last few days can be easily summarized:

At about 2AM, I drive home from work—everyone's favorite restaurant, McDonald's!—sit in my chair and plan to go to bed "early" for once, but again, waste a few more hours at various places on the net, until I hear birds start chirping outside, or my parents get up, and then I crash into my bed. This describes about 60% of my night-life of this summer so far.

At about 3PM, I wake up, eat whatever I can find in the fridge, and go back to the Golden Arches.

To complete the circle, I should tell you a little about what I do at work. I said in the last paragraph that McDonald's is everyone's favorite restaurant, but I guess that's only close. ;) But even if you don't looooove McDonald's, you would still be interested to read about what I do in my job, don't you? (Actually, what I wrote in next paragraph was very boring even to myself, so feel free to stay out...)

So, you probably know that McDonald's workforce has many components—people who you talk to at the counter, window, people who make the food, etc. I'm typically in charge of cooking hamburger patties, frying chicken and fish. I feel that as many people read this, their respect for me will drop a lot, because "flipping burgers" usually represents a very lowly job. But trust me, this job does have its challenges and requires technique and experience. I put all the items I cook in a "cabinet". As people order food, some other workers take the items and makes them into sandwiches and other things we sell. The hard part is that some of these items can only stay in the cabinet for about 15 minutes, and must be thrown away, so I must observe the business of the restaurant, and even the popularity of individual items at the time, so I don't cook too much or too little. It's still impossible to completely avoid throwing away expired food, or making customers wait because the cabinet becomes empty, but I have to try to minimize these situations.

I am also a "closer", meaning that I stay at the restaurant to clean up, and help prepare for the next day after we close. That's why I often get home so late. Closing is a little more enjoyable than working during opening hours. The latter is often either very stressful because I get a ton of things to do during peak hours, or very boring during slow hours. After we close to customers, everything's predictable, and being able to go home in one or two hours gives me a little more energy to work. But the cleanup also consists of some of the dirtiest tasks. One example is we need to count the number of each type of item we wasted (which we put in a special bucket) during the day. After the lack of attention for a few hours, the wasted meat, poultry, and fish become an ugly, soft, sticky, reeking pile, and I need to go through them and write down the approximate number of each. But having done this a few times, it's not very displeasant any more. After a closing shift, I'm always dirty and tired, but as a closer, my hourly wage is a little higher, so it's worth it...

If you read to this point, thank you for your support. :) Next time, I will write about something I enjoy, and hopefully it will be more enjoyable to you too. Before leaving, I recommend checking out a "simulator" that's very relevant to this post. Thanks to Justin for posting the link!

Coolness Rediscovered

2005-06-24T03:39:00.000-04:00

Hooray, I found a new service that can actually find things on my blog—Technorati (try it!). Its search box is added, and you can also find the logos of this and several other services in the sidebar. Don't they make my blog look cool :) I like blogging again.

A few (so far, as many as 2) of my loyal readers pointed out to me that my posts are too technical, and lack personal content. I am deeply touched that my readers care about my blog enough to advise me that :) As I newly started on maintaining a blog, I've been most excited about the layout and things I could do with those "technical stuff". Therefore, I'm afraid my posts are still going to mainly focus on reporting customizations for a while...but I will try to write about other things once in a while.

Grrr, nazis!

2005-06-23T04:36:00.000-04:00

I had put up a Google AdSense for Search box on the side bar, which looks like a standard Google search box, but in the results page, displays some "related" ads that brings me money if you click on them. If you didn't have the chance to try it before I deleted it today, it searched on the web, instead of this site only. Today I thought it would be nice to let it search on my blog only, since my post numbers are growing. The search box on the top of this page, provided by Blogger, also does it, but it would still be nice to have my own. So I went to the setting page for the search box, and saw that it allowed me to add multiple domains to search. I liked that, and added domains that would search on my blog only, all blogs on Blogger, and the Blogger site. Unfortunately, it made the search form too wide to fit in the side bar: (it's not very obvious from the screenshot, but the form does grow out of the side bar, and as you can see the domains' layout looks ugly too.)

Google doesn't provide settings to restrict the width of the whole search form, but the code it gave me was in HTML, which I now understand a little, instead of a javascript on some remote site. So I tweaked it a little and made it look pretty nice on this site:

Now the tragic part :( I thought of asking whether Google would allow me to change the display of the form like that, and went to its policy page. And the answer was:

Any AdSense ad code or search box code must be pasted directly into Web pages without modification. AdSense participants are not allowed to alter any portion of the ad code or change the layout, behaviour, or delivery of ads for any reason.

"Not...for any reason", so no "buts".

Someone wrote in a forum that Google isn't really strict about these policies, and I don't think they will actually compare every user's code to see if they modified it...but having read the policy, I don't feel comfortable using it modified. It's also kind of a boycott. (And I know nobody cares.)

Another reason I removed the box was that the site search completely doesn't work on my site...Even the box on the top. I typed in words in my post, and no results come up. Even "blog" wasn't found. Maybe it's because Google hasn't crawled my site again. It could also be my or Blogger or the template's author's fault—my page doesn't validate by W3C, with over 100 warnings—but I don't think that's the reason...

It's very late, and I'm tired...maybe it will work tomorrow...

Power Tweakage

2005-06-21T20:01:00.000-04:00

w00t! Today I wrote (well, half-copied) and applied my first CSS class. The result is in the side bar, where there are many links with descriptions now. Hopefully they're more informative...some people might not like the small font, and some others might think they take up too much space and separate the links from each other...but I'm satisfied with the appearance myself for now. You're welcome to leave any suggestions or complaints in a comment.

I also added a little to the code for Peekaboo comments, so that the comments automatically show up in individual post pages, but starts out hidden on the main page with multiple posts. This should make it easier for users who don't have javascript to see the comments. This addition did not involve javascript, but Blogger's template tags.

The second Google ad on the bottom of the page is now gone...probably not much point having a second one since they display about the same types of ads. Those of you who were able to get a look at it, consider yourselves lucky. :)

Update report: fresh and hot!

2005-06-21T03:46:00.000-04:00

The old counter service wasn't displaying the counter yesterday for a while; it was eventually fixed, but I still searched for another service and replaced it. According to it's web page, it's pretty good :) At least this one is more flexible: you can put it in the middle of a paragraph, for example. There's still something annoying—it puts spaces around the counter automatically. I really don't get the necessity of that—I know it's not to prevent users from typing multiple 0's after the counter, because I can actually set the display at any time. I could have copied the last value of the old counter, but for some reason I think it's probably not so accurate...I can still do it later if I want.

And I did the unthinkable—adding another huge Google Ad to another spot of the page. Where? How about you find it? ;)

Blogz0r Hax0r

2005-06-18T03:11:00.000-04:00

Today I walked through a Blogger Hack that makes comments appear on the main page, and allows you to show/hide them with a click (on the "n comments" link). I didn't figure out that this Preview wouldn't reflect this change, and spent an extra two hours on it as a result. Oh well, I'm happy it's now finally working. The disadvantage is your browser has to support Javascript for it to work. And your comments should now contribute to Google Bot's understanding of my page...when he comes by.

Speaking of whom, a nice person on IRC advised me that Google bot could take weeks or even months to crawl a site, and that's why my ads are not relative to the blog's contents. So Google Bot, I would like to apologize for criticizing your crawling ability without being informed, and please visit me soon! :)

Oh, there are some more customizations of my blog—can you find them out?

And my two days off from work are over...9 hours tomorrow and the day after, and I don't know how much more are waiting for me...

AdSense Nonsense · Counter Math

2005-06-17T16:29:00.000-04:00

I've probably written more than 1000 words in the blog, but Google Adsense still displays only ads related to "blogs" and "RSS". What a put down! So this is what Google's bots must do: if (SITE belongs_to BLOGS) put_ads(SITE, ADS_FOR_BLOGS[rand()]);

From Gravi-T's blog:

Also... keep on clicking on my ads! I've gotten $1.07 so far! Thanks everyone (and hagabaka)!

What? I haven't earned $1.00! And he just put it on yesterday! :( Anyone reading this? Please click on my ads! Again! ...

I've been more pleased with the counter on the bottom of the page. Although it doesn't bring me any money, and as I said in a previous post, it is annoyingly uncustomizable, it does display somewhat impressive statistics, and you can click on the "graph" icon to view detailed information about visitors. If you're too lazy to scroll down, or unwilling to move your eye from my interesting text, the link to it is here. You can also look at a break down of Operating System and browser usage of my visitors.

I'm getting there!

2005-06-16T20:39:00.000-04:00

I tweaked the template a little bit again, so now my links, blog related links (Previous Posts and Archives), and the Google ads show up in separate boxes, instead of all together in one. The whole CSS and HTML thing is still very mystical to me, but I'm learning.

Sadly, the blog template I chose is already getting boring...What's worse is Blogger doesn't know to keep your content when you choose a new template, so I have to do a lot of copy/pasting to pick a new template and put my links and ads back. I guess this is unavoidable, since different templates here have different structures, so the "content section" will not be inter-template compatible. Oh well, I think I'll keep this one for a while and customize it more, and hopefully I'll become knowledgeable enough to be able to restore my customizations in a new template.

Whee, fourth post

2005-06-14T01:56:00.000-04:00

A blog is not a forum, so I guess I need to do the most work...

What shall I write about? Michael Jackson was declared innocent yesterday. Okay. Or not okay. I have nothing else to write about this...so I'll write about computer games instead.

I'm a big fan of RPG games. Until two years ago, I thought “RPG” was a subset to only computer games. Then I learned that some people play “role playing games” with just pencils, paper and dice, or even without them. I think these RPG’ers are super geeks—contrary to my usual conception that using the computer to do something is geekier than doing the same thing not using it.

Many of my favorite RPG’s come from Japan. Among the first computer games I played was “Cage-Song of the Ocean” (「海の檻歌」), the third game of the “Gagharv Trilogy” by Falcom. For a game released in the late 1990's (you check yourself, I'm too lazy), it was really old school. I'm not proficient with names of old-school gaming consoles, but its graphics were at the same level as some of them. Its story was linear, so everyone who played it probably had about the same experience. But Falcom managed to make such a simple game very enjoyable. The story was cutely childish, a little educational, but also epic and sometimes emotional. Bah...that's all I can write about it for now, even though I enjoyed it so much. Afterwards, I played the other two games in the Gagharv Trilogy, which came out before this one. Most people who played all three games of the trilogy seem to prefer these two. By the way, they are now released for the PSP.

I've also played Baldur's Gate and BG2. I liked the huge worlds, culture, freedom, scenary, and well-written main story and quests. But unfortunately, I couldn't keep up with the difficulty, and started cheating with editors soon, and eventually lost interest in the game.

I don't own any gaming consoles, but I played a few games on my friend's multiple consoles this year. The most memorable one was Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter. This is a crazy game. It does have a story, but not much of a plot...it's relatively short, but you're supposed to play the game again and again, or play parts of it again and again...despite these crazy designs, I enjoyed it like a classic.

Now let me talk about my favorites in other genres...

Or let me get a life and do something else. Stop writing! Later.

Life is tough

2005-06-13T03:00:00.000-04:00

It's tough being a blogger...I'm already running out of ideas of what to write about. People are leaving mostly negative comments. And I had to beg for most of these comments!

I also find HTML and CSS very complicated so far. I tried to modify the blog template to make a Google ad banner and a counter display in one line, but didn't have good luck. I think what's bringing the bad luck is the restrictions on the free counter...it has to be center aligned and has to on its own line :/ I also have to choose from a few counter styles, none of which blends in with my blog nicely. Maybe there is another better free service, but I'm too lazy to look at the moment.

But beware, life, I will get you one day!

Updates!

2005-06-11T03:54:00.000-04:00

As I'm sure no one has noticed, I've done extensive :) updates to my blog, including changing the sidebar contents and writing the "About Me". It felt like a great accomplishment. I think this might not be a complete waste of time after all...actually, I have already thought about some objectives I hope to accomplish from maintaining the blog:

Learn HTML and CSS
Become better at writing
Become more artistic
Become more 1337
Get my friends to comment
Get more viewers so my ads will actually help me

But the only thing I'm sure of is I will waste a lot of time on this. Maybe I'm not even sure about that, because I hate writing. I felt the urge to put smileys after 80% of the sentences above, but I managed to restrain because that will probably make me appear n00by :D ...

Hello World

2005-06-09T02:39:00.000-04:00

Hagabaka enters the world of blogs today!

Records of Hagabaka's Daily Mumbling

Frogatto now has a Chinese translation

Problems with tabs in user interfaces

A New Frontier

Get a Better Browser Today!

Vantage Master Online

Simple, Traditional, Yet Complete and Innotative Battle System

Three Modes of Gameplay

Playable and Useful Features

Aesthetics

Vantage Master Evolved: VM Japan

Summary

Season Finale

Thus Ends Hagabaka’s Tale Under the Golden Arches

~~Happy Hagabaka in the House~~

Lessons Learned

Return of the Hagabaka

Movies of Wars

Blog Sorrow

Job

Nuns to the Rescue!!

Background

Development and Themes

Music

Overall Evaluation

Revision

Another One of the Lame Posts

Update

New update

Warning: Content is Hot!

Psst, look aside!

On Comments and...“an ‘Arse Feed’ You Say?”

Project “Get Personal” Movement 1: My Job

Coolness Rediscovered

Grrr, nazis!

Power Tweakage

Update report: fresh and hot!

Blogz0r Hax0r

AdSense Nonsense · Counter Math

I'm getting there!

Whee, fourth post

Life is tough

Updates!

Hello World

Happy Hagabaka in the House