Pkchukiss – Reality Wine

Practically speaking, I’m just a script kiddie copying and pasting walk-throughs made by the kind people in the Open Source movement. I set-up this web server with the help of Google, and a liberal amount of experimentation (and lots of reformatting to get rid of all the odd-balls that pop up).

So today, when I saw that php-cgi was listed as one of the updated modules, I panicked. Basically, I had compiled my version of php-cgi from source, patched with php-fpm to run the fastcgi instances. With that patched version written over by the official version from Ubuntu’s repository, I had to find some way to re-compile the version I needed for the set-up to continue working.

It’s my epiphany. I might have lived under the illusion that I knew what I was doing, but in reality, I’m being shown that the rabbit hole goes deeper than it initially did. I re-compiled a newer version of php with the help of a newer guide, with trepidation in my heart. Will the compilation work, or would it crash and burn?

I brought php-fpm back up after it was installed. Immediately, my own blog started to throw warnings all over the page. In fact, if you were here moments ago, you would have seen the errors crowding the front page. With nowhere to turn to except for Google, I search for an answer online. Thankfully, so many people already had the problem that it was solved quite quickly. I patched the file in question, and so now the errors are gone.

It’s all thanks to Google that I’m able to run this server on my own, as well as the great open source community out there for being willing to help the newbies. I, for one, am grateful for the opportunity to use and learn open source software.

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General

At nearly a quarter of a century years old, I thought that I had finally gotten the rhythm of the world, and how to tick.

The events that unfolded these few months proved not only the unpredictability of this world, but also the extent of my naivety.

For the past 3 years of my polytechnic education, I’ve realised that many problems can be solved, especially since every single piece of possible dirt on any programming language can be found on the wonderful resource that’s commonly known as THE Internet. It’s the go-to tool to dig up documentation, code samples, and lots of discussion about programming.

It’s also my go-to tool whenever I got stuck during my own coding sessions. It all operates on a very simple, and elegant premise: the programming problem you’re stuck at has an extremely high probability of having been encountered and solved by countless predecessors before you. By combing discussion forum sites, or posting threads asking for help, most programming problems are very easily resolved.

It’s with this powerful and empowering mindset that I set out, and managed to re-write functions to print documents in Java when there are existing application programming interfaces that already do this. It was also with this same sheer brute-force that I came up with the algorithm for a movable carousel of CDs within a desktop application.

Then in the second semester of year 2, something drastic happened. I was being told that programming is a very tedious job, and that I shouldn’t like it. It probably has something to do with actually putting faith in that belief, but shortly after that, I started to lose steam on my assignments.

I’ll be the first to admit, it’s 100% my fault for actually allowing myself to be influenced so easily towards the negative; it’s still amazing that the episodics had a profound effect on my self-esteem. This is a lesson for me to be more inquisitive and careful in accepting what people want me to think.

I’ve never actually spoken to the person about this, because I have realised that it’s my own prerogative to be fully rooted and grounded in my beliefs. Being too easily receptive to another person’s opinion on how I should feel was my mistake, and it’s one that I’m still trying to sort out up until now. I neither blame the person, nor do I wish to out him/her at all.

You might be wondering who I’m referring to. Just be assured that it’s not you. I’ve been careful enough not to have that person on my MSN messenger or FaceBook, so he/she would not know that I’m talking about him/her. Got to be careful about social networking!

As I start anew on this final year project, I hope to find my previous mojo back. And this time, I’ll have my brain filtering software working at full capacity.

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General

For the fans of Naruto whom have been asphyxiating with the anticipation since Shippuuden came along approximately 2 years ago, you can finally breath now.

That missing gap, a clearly deliberate omission of a pivotal event in the Naruto-verse, has finally arrived.

Kakashi Gaiden explains the events of the ninja world a few years before the birth of Uzumaki Naruto and his compatriots. If you have been wondering why Naruto’s sensei — Hatake Kakashi — has a single Sharingan in his left eye when he isn’t of Uchiha blood, and why he always visits the war memorial at the village before every mission, this is the episode that will show it all.

The animation quality is not as good as I would have liked, especially since I consider the gaiden a cannonical, and important part of Naruto’s story. It first came out in the manga many, many years back.

The action scenes are jerky, and the animators over-used the sepia toning in quite a few scenes, as if creating a visual clue as to the old age of the events being depicted. It may have worked for audiences whom might haven’t expected the gaiden to appear smack in the middle of the story, but since the manga didn’t intend for Kakashi’s story to be told so late into the story plot, it must have felt quite disjointed for the audiences who don’t touch the manga. That probably justified the liberal browning in this episode, but as someone who actually does read the serialised manga, the effect looked way off for me.

Nevertheless, the animators were still able to capture the essence of the sub-plot in a succinct, 40 minute dual-episode. I could feel the anguish and pain that the main characters felt at that time, although the side-characters could use some serious re-work. The antagonistic ninjas felt dull and one-dimensional, and their dialog only managed to jar me from the soap opera between the 3 main characters.

Overall, I would rate it a 7 out of 10. I had high hopes that the animation studio would place the gaiden in high regard, and at least make more effort for these 2 episodes than they have for the last 100-or so. Those episodes were a cure for insomaniacs at the very best, which was why I stopped paying attention to the anime, until I heard the news of Kakashi Gaiden’s animation. A real pity, I definitely won’t be watching the next episode (which is back to the current storyline), but for the sake of catching up on what the manga dudes have read so far, this is a must watch.

Animation quality: 5 out of 10
Story-telling: 8 out of 10
Continuity: 8 out of 10

Overall worthiness: 7 out of 10

You can watch the episode online at Narutospot.

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Anime

[Via @JoeAugustin, via @johnkerrnz, via @MarketingEds]

When a large part of your social network is on Facebook, you don’t really want to post up your negative thoughts about any one of your contact on your Facebook, because, well: I think your contact can see your rant.

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General