On Tuesday, a server we rely on that’s located in another state, under someone else’s control, went poof. They have another machine we can upload to, though, so I changed all references to point to it.

All the ones I knew about, that is. A little-used script in a particular branch of our software had a hardcoded reference to the dead host, which it used to download previous uploads to produce a small delta release. The result, of course, was a failure Wednesday that left the QA group twiddling their thumbs until I could fix things. In the end, other failures turned up that prevented them from getting the delta release, but they could live with a full release, and that’s what they got.

That was my day from about 7am to 2pm, not counting the repeated interruptions as I explained to people that the backup server we were uploading to had about half the bandwidth of the usual connection, so data was arriving more slowly.

Things proceeded normally for a few hours, until the next fire at 4:30pm. A server responsible for half a dozen test builds and two release builds had a sudden attack of amnesia, forgetting that a 200GB RAID volume was supposed to be full of data. A disk swap brought it back to life as a working empty volume, but by that time I’d moved all the builds to other machines. I’ll test it today before putting it back in service.

Just as I was finishing up with that mess and verifying that the builds would work in their new homes, our primary internal DNS/NIS server went down. The poor soul who’d just finished rebuilding my RAID volume had barely gotten back to his desk when he had to walk three blocks back to the data center. Once that machine was healthy again, I cleaned up some lock files so that test builds would resume, and waited for the email telling me what was supposed to be on the custom production CD-ROM they’re shipping overseas today.

That, of course, was IT’s cue to take down the mail server for maintenance. Planned and announced, of course, but also open-ended, so I had no idea when it would be back. Didn’t matter, though, because then my DSL line went down. I’d never made it out of the house, you see, and was doing all of this remotely.

The email I was waiting for went out at 9:30pm, I got it at 10:45pm, and kicked the custom build off at 11pm. It finished building at 12:30am and started the imaging process, which makes a quick query to the Perforce server.

Guess what went down for backups at 12am, blocking all requests until it completed at around 3am? Nap time for J!

At 4:45am I woke up, checked the image, mailed off a signing request so it could actually be used to boot a production box, set the alarm clock for 6:45am, and went back to sleep.

This was not a day for deep, thought-provoking anime. It was a day for Grenadier disc 2 and Maburaho disc 4 (which arrived from Anime Corner Store just about the time the mail server went down). I considered getting started on DearS disc 2 and Girls Bravo disc 3, which also showed up, but decided instead to make a badly-needed grocery run.

I can see why a lot of reviewers find it easy to pan this series. High-school loser hero? Check. Missing parents? Check. Dream girl who suddenly appears from another world and moves in with him? Check. Girl-next-door type who can’t confess her feelings about him? Check. More strange cute girls showing up? Check. Insane teacher? Check. Color-coded fighting team? Check. Based on a PS2 game? Check. Fan-service? Check, check, check.

If you’re looking for truly original ideas, compelling plots, and genre-breaking characterization, you’re in the wrong place. Yumeria is an ecchi harem comedy with a touch of sentai and a dollop of sci-fi, nothing more. It’s a fun show, though, with excellent character designs, good voice acting, and a story that’s just big enough to last a dozen episodes. And Mone.

Mone. Mone mone. Monene. Mone? Mone! Mone mone. Mone.

If her remarkably expressive one-word vocabulary doesn’t drive you insane, Mone will kawaii her way into your heart.

A few of the in-jokes are a bit forced, and the insane teacher is particularly gratuitous, but most of the humor flows quite naturally from the characters and the situation. I see no reason not to buy, and enjoy, the rest of the series.

ADV is closing out a lot of anime DVDs. Some are older series now available in box sets, but a few are recent releases, such as the first disc of Yumeria, which came out less than three weeks ago.

Let’s recap. Disc 1 introduced a spunky teen heroine, ruined her life, set up a plot, and began introducing the rest of the cast. Disc 2 followed her through her new life and finished introducing the cast, tossing out the occasional plot crumb. Disc 3 was stuffed with plot crumbs like you’d stuff a turkey for Thanksgiving, not entirely to its benefit. All three were amusing and entertaining, with the exception of one infodump that’s badly delivered by a throwaway character.

In an ordinary plot-driven anime series, self-contained episodes that don’t advance the plot are often regarded as filler. Sometimes they contain important character development, but far too often they add nothing, not even decent art. With Daphne‘s scattershot approach to plotting, at least 10 of the 16 episodes to date would count as filler, so it’s either a terrible attempt at a plot-driven series, or the plot is just a backdrop for the comedy. I’d prefer the former, since they worked so hard at the beginning to make me care about Maia and her problems, but with only two discs to go, it’s not looking good.

Disc 4 is a plot-free zone. It’s fun even when it’s predictable, and includes just enough plot crumbs to keep you wondering if they’re ever going to tie things together, but that’s it. Judging from the fansub reviews, this trend will continue until episode 21, after which it’s wall-to-wall plotty goodness until the end. At least one reviewer thought the ending made up for the show’s flaws, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

File under peculiar the fact that the box set for this series is sized for seven discs, but the series is being released on only six. My guess is that Geneon originally intended to put only three episodes on four of the discs, but market conditions and fan feedback led them to shrink it a bit. As good as the music CD is, it won’t quite fill the remaining space in the box, but I can’t really complain about a consistent 4-episode-per-disc release.

I got sent to Denver (okay, Longmont) for a few days to do some setup work for our office here, and the folks at Budget begged me to take a free upgrade to a minivan, to help alleviate their shortage of smaller vehicles.

Anyway, it’s got a gutless engine, poor sound insulation, and a whopping big blind spot when you’re merging, but otherwise it’s actually a pretty nice travel-mobile. Very comfortable to drive, plenty of room for adult passengers, and decent handling for its size. It’s no comparison to my Lexus RX-300, but still, a lot better than I expected.

Coming soon to a home office near me: Dual dual-core 2.5GHz G5 PowerMac, with 4GB 533 DDR2 ECC SDRAM, 2x 500GB SATA HDD, NVIDEA GeForce 6600 w/ 256MB RAM. Add a Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard and a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse, and life will be good indeed. I suppose I’ll need a new set of speakers, too…

Coming soon after, a copy of Aperture.

While my Japanese class is going well so far (the pace is a bit slow, due in part to the overhead of community-college drop/add handling), I’ve found one serious annoyance: the audio CDs are crap.

There’s nothing wrong with the content; the material is presented clearly by native speakers, and the original mastering was well-done. Unfortunately, it was mastered for cassette tape, and the CDs were apparently converted from that format. How well was this done? Here’s a thousand words on the subject:

That’s what it looked like when I loaded a track into Audacity. I can crank up the gain, but then the hiss becomes objectionable, and Audacity’s noise filter introduces some rather obnoxious artifacts, even at its gentlest setting. I’ll be using these CDs until March, so it’s worth a little time and money to me to get them cleaned up. Any recommendations for a good tool?

So my new Japanese class has started (lousy classroom, good teacher, reasonable textbook, nice group of students, unbelievably gorgeous teacher’s assistant (I will never skip class…)), and, as expected, the teacher is pushing us to master hiragana quickly. I did that quite a while ago, so while everyone else is trying to learn it from scratch, I can focus on improving my handwriting.

One thing she suggested was a set of flash cards. I had mine with me, and mentioned that they were available for a quite reasonable price at Kinokuniya. Her response was along the lines of “yes, I know, but nobody ever buys optional study materials; do you think you could photocopy them so I can make handouts?”

I could, but that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as making my own set. The first step was finding a decent kana font. Mac OS X ships with several Unicode fonts that include the full Japanese kana and kanji sets, but they didn’t meet my needs: looking good at display sizes, and clearly showing the boundaries between strokes. I found Adobe Ryo Display Standard. TextEdit seems to be a bit confused about its line-height, but I wasn’t planning to create the cards in that app anyway.

How to generate the card images? Perl, of course, with the PDF::API2::Lite module. I could have written a script that calculated the correct size of cards to fill the page, but I was feeling lazy, so I wrote a 12-line script to put one large character in the middle of a page, loaded the results into Preview, set the print format to 16-up with a page border, and printed to a new PDF file. Instant flash cards.

For many people, this would be sufficient, but one of the things sensei liked about the cards I had brought was the numbers and arrows that indicated the correct stroke order. There was no lazy way to do this, so I used Adobe Acrobat’s drawing and stamping tools. The stamping tool lets you quickly decorate a PDF file with images in many formats, so I just modified my previous script to create PDF files containing single numbers, and imported them into the stamp tool. The line-drawing tool let me make arrows, although I couldn’t figure out a simple way to set my own line-width and have it remembered (1pt was too thin after the 16-up, and 2pt had too-big arrowheads).

So why is this post titled “the cleansing power of Quartz”? Because the one-per-page annotated output from Acrobat was more than six times larger than the same file printed 16-up from Preview. Just printing the original file back to PDF shrank it by a factor of four, which, coincidentally, is almost exactly what you get when you run gzip on it…

The final results are here.