Hung Truong: The Blog!

Firefox 3 RC 5 Impressions

So I installed Firefox 3, RC5 because my old Firefox install was pooping out on downloading .css files for some reason, which left website viewing to be less than desirable.

It seems okay, I guess. I think I’m already used to the new UI that makes the back button bigger than the forward button. Even though I sort of hated it at first, I guess it makes sense since people go back more often than forward (via the buttons, anyway).

So Firefox 3 runs a lot faster, and using a lot less ram. In the past, I have yelled at Firefox like Mel Gibson in Ransom asking for my ram back. I have 5 tabs open right now and I’m only (my expectations aren’t that high) using ~165MB or ram. The whole thing moves a lot faster too. I’m not sure if that’s because of the added side effect of more than half of my plugins not being compatible, though. I can live without most of them, but Firebug is really sort of indispensable. I hope FF3 comes out soon officially so everyone will get their plugins updated. There seems to be something weird going on with Flash 9 as well. Not too sure what.

So far, I’d say Firefox 3 is lookin’ good. I totally skipped getting a Firefox 2 shirt, so I’ll definitely have to get the 3 when it ships!

Final Fantasy IV? On DS!?

So I haven’t really been paying much attention to video game news since I started grad school. Not enough time for video games! BUT, on a cursory stroll to Kotaku, I found out that Final Fantasy IV for DS is on its way for this Summer.

Wait, FFIV for DS? Apparently it’s already out in Japan. That’s how behind on video game news I am. Perhaps it’s good that I don’t follow this stuff, though, because I’m not one to really like waiting for stuff anyway. There’s also a bunch of other neat Square games on DS like Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings and Crystal Chronicles. WTF? How’d I miss this stuff!?

Final Fantasy IV (I want to say Final Fantasy II) was my first FF game, so it’s sort of near and dear to my heart. I just rediscovered my Nintendo DS, and my unfinished copy of Final Fantasy IV Advance! So I played for a couple of hours this weekend. It’s kind of weird playing it now since I’m used to a lot of story being told in FF games. Like, Rydia comes back from the dead and all you get is a simple three sentence explanation. Come on Rydia! We want details! Also, is it wrong to think Rydia is hot since she starts out being a kid in the game, and through some weird game mechanics, gets to be super hot later on?

I must say, I’m a bit worried about the whole transition from old school game to DS 3D treatment. I played Final Fantasy III on DS and it was a bit disappointing. My main beef with these conversions is that they screw up the game mechanics. All of sudden you get the same number of random encounters, but there’s a cost of a few seconds because of fancy panning before the battle and the victory screen after the battle. Everything seems so snappy on the old school version of FFIV that I’m playing right now. Except for those damn vampire bats and their drain attack, whose animation takes FOR-EV-ER!

Man, I sure do sound like a cranky old school gamer. I’ve been wanting to finish FFXII, but I think the time requirements on that one are a bit higher than FFIV. The whole dash thing they built into the game has made it play a lot faster. I remember when I played the original, I rented it for the weekend. So each weekend I would start the game on Friday, and by Sunday when we had to return it I had gotten to the underworld part, basically where you get Edge. Then the next weekend I’d just start over again. How sad, right! But it’s left me with pretty photographic memory of what happens at each step of FFIV. Right now I’m pretty damn far and I have only 9 hours on the game! So hopefully the conversion to DS doesn’t slow things down insanely.

Facebook Feature: People You May Know

Might as well be called something like, “People you befriended then removed because they were jerks” or “People you know but aren’t friends with” or “Jerks who are friends with many of your friends.”

The algorithm is probably pretty simple. Facebook probably just grabs people who are not your friends but share a large number of friends with you. I imagine they aren’t doing any kind of interesting (mathwise) stuff like weighing friends with low degree higher and friends with high degree lower. That would mean that friends who are friend whores count less toward your “People you might know” score than friends who have very few friends.

And that’s why Facebook needs employees well versed in network analysis and graph exploration!

*HINT HINT*

Also, I’d really like to see a “DO NOT WANT” button for the douchebags who keep on showing up in my list of people I may know. Just because I may know them doesn’t mean I want to be “friends” with them, FB.

Google App Engine + Django == FAIL

Edit: Using the tutorial from this dude, I was able to get the Django “hey, you got the barebones working!” page working. I may have time to mess around with this more in a week or so.

I just wasted an hour trying to get the Google App Engine and Django to work together on both my Mac and my PC. Both give failure errors when I try to run the server.

Should I assume I’m a bad computer scientist? Or should I assume that Google needs to do more testing/documentation before releasing stuff? Granted, I haven’t used Django before, but it should really work if I follow the directions correctly (and I did, twice)!

I would consider learning the webapp framework, but I’d rather learn something I could use on a server other than Google’s. I’ve been meaning to learn Django for a while now. I had some high hopes that I’d be able to get something cool running in a short amount of time, but I guess not.

People are saying this App Engine thing is a great competitor to Amazon’s ECC. Not quite yet. You can’t run any software you want on App Engine, you’re limited to using Python for now, and from my experience, App Engine seems a bit half-baked at this point. What about cron-jobs? What about running scripts? What about root access? I can’t see why Google didn’t just decide to copy Amazon and allow developers to upload a linux image or something.

My initial impressions are disappointing. Maybe once the semester is over, they’ll have a more stable version of this available…

Blogging Considered Harmful

Via Venture Beat (who knew?), the New York Times thinks that blogging could be hazardous to your health:

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

I heard about Om Malik, but I didn’t know two other blogger dudes died of heart attacks. I guess I can imagine how this happens though. When I was starting my Anime Blog I wanted it to be successful, so I did spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to get to that point. After a while though, I just figured that blogging should be for fun, not dollars (even though my blogs actually do make some $$$).

The article mentioned bloggers either gaining or losing weight due to blogging. I wonder if there’s a blogging diet! If anything, I think blogging has had an opposite effect on me…

Of course, obsession to anything can be dangerous. Guys in Korea die of playing WoW all the time! Workaholics die from “Karoshi,” yes, Japan actually has a word from death by overwork!

Me? I try not to stress out too much. In fact, I am writing this blog just so I can procrastinate doing homework for one of three things that are due in the next three days!

Also, Om Malik sounds like the name of some Sith Lord, doesn’t it?