Kuraudo's site

Whoa whoa whoa

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:57:11 +0000

So I checked my bank account online today, -$315.93.

Apparently I forgot a bill that overdrew my account (+$33 fee), causing my balance to be negative for a bill that I remembered, which was returned (+$33 fee) and re-presented (+$33 fee)...

Soooo if anyone is feeling charitable and wants to make a HEFTY FUERTE HEFTY donation that might bring my balance near-positive, I'll love you forever. (And I'll pay you back next month.) If not, no hard feelings; it's a lot of money, the economy sucks, and Japan is needier than I. That said, don't be skurred to push the button and append many zeros!

ISPs, Internet Speeds...uh?

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 23:22:32 +0000

I'm pretty good with computer software. But hardware and services and such are out of my domain, so excuse my ignorance.

Wireless-G routers offer a maximum bit rate of 54Mbps. Wireless-N routers commonly offer a maximum of 150Mbps or 300Mbps, though the specification itself supports a maximum of 600Mbps.

That's all very good. It really is. But my question is this: why? Where does one even find and ISP that gives you those kinds of speeds? I know the ISP I'm with currently---ZoomTown¹---certainly doesn't. I can find two packages from ZoomTown: One that offers 5Mbps down/769Kbps up, and one that offers 768Kbps down/384Kbps up.

So given that my family has always been poor, it didn't surprise me that we were paying for slow high-speed Internet. I wanted to see what providers offered speeds of 54/150/300/600Mbps, and how much those cost. The thing is, my search turned up zero results. As an idea, http://performance.toast.net/fastestisps.asp turned up Rogers as the fastest average ISP, averaging at about 4.7Mbps down. That's only an average, so even assuming 100% variance, the cap would be at 9.4Mbps.

I then went to look over at the big guys at Verizon, after hearing so much about their fiber-optic FiOS offerings. However, even with their "Tier-3: Fastest" plan, the cap is at 50Mbps. This is a significant improvement, and I may consider going for a tier-1 or tier-2 line when I have my own place, but even the tier-3 at 50Mbps doesn't touch the 54Mbps cap of Wireless-G.

I'm trying to figure out exactly where these routers that offer upwards of 54Mbps connectivity come into play for residential customers. What possible benefit could there be to splurging on a Wireless-N router for 150/300/600Mbps if your ISP is only offering you a small fraction of that amount to begin with?

If I'm being completely ignorant of some obvious information, I apologize. I'm not the brightest techie in the world, but this has been bothering me for a couple of days now.

¹ I did NOT encourage the switch to ZoomTown from RoadRunner.

ELAN, Because Someone Has To

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 05:52:38 +0000

I'm not an Apple-hater. Really. But I dislike much in the way of how Apple does business. I also dislike how high they price everything, since I'm a poor fellow. It's high time someone knocked them down a peg. I mean, someone besides Microsoft.

ELAN to the rescue: http://phandroid.com/2010/04/01/ apple-tastes-own-medicine-gets-sued-for-multi-touch/

SquareDMI Updated

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:32:08 +0000

I just uploaded an update to SquareDMI. This update addresses a couple of things:

Loading of "square" icons was buggy (ironic!) due to a small error:
if(dw > image.width())

// instead of:

if(dw >= image.width())
Added support for icons made before 4.0, with the "\4DMI" file header. If for some reason you're one of the few who still have a collection of files before the update or have somehow managed to not update to 4.0, your icons are now supported.

SquareDMI

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:37:15 +0000

I just wrote up a blog post about a program I've just released. I'm sure many of the artists here do a lot of editing in external image editors rather than Dream Maker, and figured this may be somewhat useful.

http://www.byond.com/members/ Kuraudo?command=view_post&post=91104

SquareDMI

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:34:44 +0000

Ever gone to edit one of your DMI files in an external editor such as Adobe Photoshop, only to find that you were dealing with a monstrously wide image? Wondered why you were editing some 4096x64 pixel image when instead you could be editing a significantly more reasonable 512x512 pixel image? Fear not, I've got you covered!

I just uploaded SquareDMI to my blog. While finishing up my DMI loading and saving routines for another program, I came up with the idea to make this. Essentially, it performs three major functions:

Load your image.
Sort the icon states alphabetically. (Because I always wished Dream Maker could do this.)
Save the image back as one with more reasonable dimensions.

There are some caveats, however. The generated image does not have any excess dimensions; there are no blank trailing spaces following the data, and therefore the dimensions must come out to a rectangle based on the total number of frames in the icon file. Because of this, it often won't be square: if you have an icon with 15 frames, you'll probably end up with a generated image of 5x3 frames. Worse, if the total number of frames is a prime number you're back to square one on the whole humongous-horizontal-strip thing. Also, all of the code is fresh, so there is some chance of programming error. As well, I haven't programmed in legacy support for the old DMI format---you can always re-save old icons in Dream Maker before running them through this though!

All that said, I thought it would be worth sharing this with the community, despite my love of hoarding cool toys for myself. Enjoy.

Reminder

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:15:40 +0000

If anyone wants to help pay my bills...

It's always appreciated. <3

Kenichi: The Mightiest WTF

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:54:32 +0000

I just finished watching the 50th [final] episode of "Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple." I liked the series a lot.

However, halfway into the final episode---be it by bad subtitling or not---the following occurred.

"Their power levels..."
"...are over 9000!"

In other words:

I don't remember any episode before that mentioning "power levels." And now that I've seen that, my image of Kenichi may have been permanently stained. WTF

Edit:

Sharpen Up

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:46:17 +0000

Oh! Humanity

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:46:49 +0000

Well I was just watching some nice, uneducational TV and saw a clip about this really smart girl who had the answers to all of California's problems. She should run for guv'ner!

If you want to watch about the same amount of content from her, but with some other people contributing their knowledge:

All this reminds me of a beautiful blond girl who outlined a plan for boosting education in Africa, the Iraq, and the Asian countries:

As for the former two: I still plan to move to California...but I think I just may steer clear of Santa Cruz.