how things are; experimenting with some new things
So, it's been *ages* since my last LJ update. Ever since coming back from our vacation in Japan, I haven't really felt like blogging, because life has just gone on as usual, with the normal ups and downs. I have no significant changes, unfortunately, to report. OTOH, I suppose that's better than having really, really bad news.
So, what have I been doing lately? Well, someone on LJ had commented that fanfiction.org is worthless, so I remembered I still have an account there, logged in, and found an advert for a web site that hosts manga per page online. Which is very, very nice. (when the pics download, anyway: that sometimes glitches) Been able to catch up with the newer Negima chapters from after AQS stopped (well, they claim to still have scanlations in the works, but seeing is believing...)
Since my vacation I've also been vacationing from the learning-Japanese efforts. I'm starting to feel ready to start doing stuff on that again, but don't ask when. And an intention isn't a promise..
Recently one of the things I've been playing around with again is downloading LiveCDs of Linux distributions; my PC's been randomly crashing a lot lately (or at least the Vista GUI has been), so I want to check out alternatives. Kubuntu 8.10 worked very well for me, the only thing that didn't work is it wouldn't access my normal Windows drives (the external USB drives were no prob), and it failed to open .Rar files...
I'm also playing around with other browsers than default Firefox. (Since I suspected relatively large memory use by FF might be a possible culprit for my PC probs). So I'm now running the 2nd beta of Firefox 3.1 (which does use less memory). OTOH, it doesn't work well with Hotmail, so for that I'm using Safari (with an updated WebKit from the last two weeks or so)
I'm also playing around with other stuff. Just yesterday I downloaded and ran a MinGW autoinstaller (MinGW == GCC on Windows). I'd played around with MinGW before, but considered it not-really-quite there yet since it didn't seem to support working with wide characters, which is kind of the minimum I really expect... As well as supporting STL. But I also got the MinGW alpha version of GCC 4.3, and that does seem to support wide-chars out-of-the-box... But it also displayed a supposedly wide string (correctly) as output to a DOS shell (which is *not* what I'd been expecting, I figured I'd see a list of question marks, I think that's how command-line Visual Studio would do). So now I'm trying to figure out how to prove it *is* doing what I tell it to, preferrably without resorting to writing-to-a file (it's easy, but I like more elegant solutions)
So, what have I been doing lately? Well, someone on LJ had commented that fanfiction.org is worthless, so I remembered I still have an account there, logged in, and found an advert for a web site that hosts manga per page online. Which is very, very nice. (when the pics download, anyway: that sometimes glitches) Been able to catch up with the newer Negima chapters from after AQS stopped (well, they claim to still have scanlations in the works, but seeing is believing...)
Since my vacation I've also been vacationing from the learning-Japanese efforts. I'm starting to feel ready to start doing stuff on that again, but don't ask when. And an intention isn't a promise..
Recently one of the things I've been playing around with again is downloading LiveCDs of Linux distributions; my PC's been randomly crashing a lot lately (or at least the Vista GUI has been), so I want to check out alternatives. Kubuntu 8.10 worked very well for me, the only thing that didn't work is it wouldn't access my normal Windows drives (the external USB drives were no prob), and it failed to open .Rar files...
I'm also playing around with other browsers than default Firefox. (Since I suspected relatively large memory use by FF might be a possible culprit for my PC probs). So I'm now running the 2nd beta of Firefox 3.1 (which does use less memory). OTOH, it doesn't work well with Hotmail, so for that I'm using Safari (with an updated WebKit from the last two weeks or so)
I'm also playing around with other stuff. Just yesterday I downloaded and ran a MinGW autoinstaller (MinGW == GCC on Windows). I'd played around with MinGW before, but considered it not-really-quite there yet since it didn't seem to support working with wide characters, which is kind of the minimum I really expect... As well as supporting STL. But I also got the MinGW alpha version of GCC 4.3, and that does seem to support wide-chars out-of-the-box... But it also displayed a supposedly wide string (correctly) as output to a DOS shell (which is *not* what I'd been expecting, I figured I'd see a list of question marks, I think that's how command-line Visual Studio would do). So now I'm trying to figure out how to prove it *is* doing what I tell it to, preferrably without resorting to writing-to-a file (it's easy, but I like more elegant solutions)