Today, a major upgrade of the KDE Community Forums took place. The change brings quite a number of changes to the forums themselves, and it’s a further step towards providing a better experience for KDE users (and developers too!).
Today, after some customs delay and courier problems, I finally received the first volume of Tears to Tiara. Having got a PS3, I chose the Blu-Ray version (priced 8,192 yen, quite steep if you hear me): as I preordered it soon enough, I got the first presse edition, which, according to CDJapan, was comprised of a “deluxe outer case”, a “stick poster” and a booklet, in addition to the Blu-ray itself.
This is how it looked after unpacking:
The “deluxe outer case” is in fact a cardboard case which is quite large. Perhaps too large for its contents when we look inside:
As you can see, we have here a rather thin artbook, the famous “stick poster”, and the BD itself. The rest of the box is filled by cardboard to keep things in place. Not the best deal for 8000+ yen, indeed.
The artbook contains interviews with the staff, details about the places, and information on the characters. Here is an example (badly taken photo) showing a part of Arawn’s profile:
The “stick poster” is quite long once unfolded, and is an illustration of Morgan and Octavia, done by the series’ character designed, but colored in a way that reminds more of the game:
And now to the BD itself. Video is encoded at 1080p (quite nice!) but the audio is classical stereo without any bells and whistles. I wonder what the buyers of the non-first press version get, because inside there is absoultely nothing save a promotional sheet and the disc. Once loaded on my first-generation PS3, the disc played normally, and indeed at 1080p. It’s quite nice to view the opening in HD format.
The menus inside are terrible. They only offer chapter selection, a “play all” feature and an “information” link which plays some commercial of related Aquaplus anime adaptations, namely To Heart 2 (the upcoming OAVs) and Utawarerumono (again OAVs that should be out very soon). Sadly, this is on par with the rest of the offerings from other Japanese companies (and most Western anime publishers, too): the disc is simply a container, and nothing else is offered. I could understand if the price was lower, but at 8000 yen and more it’s simply unacceptable.
What about the content? Weil, I like it of course. The anime is very faithful (save some minor changes in recent episodes) to the game and thus I’m enjoying it qute a bit. I haven’t watched the episodes closely yet, but I doubt there will be any “redone” parts in this volume (I was hoping for specials a la Utawarerumono, but oh well…). Hopefully I’lll be able to write a little more (time permitting) once I finish watching it.
At last, after months of inactivity, I pushed out a new release of DataMatrix. Although the version bump is small (0.8) there are a lot of changes since last releases. The most notable include:
- Ability to apply functions to elements of the matrix
- Ability to filter rows by column contents
- Ability to transpose rows with columns
- An option to load text files produced by R (which are, by design, broken)
- Removed the getter for columns, using dictionary-like syntax directly
- A lot of bug fixes
The download links on the project page have been updated, along with the documentation. Also, there is another change, because from now on the official Git repository is hosted on gitorious.org, and no longer on github, because gitorious (the software) is also free, while github.com’s is not. It’s mainly a philosophical issue (the same that prompted me to switch from twitter to identi.ca).
Also, from today DataMatrix is also officially hosted on the Python Package Index (with the name “datamatrix”), meaning that you can use easy_install to quickly install it.
If you use this module, let me know what you think (including bugs, if you find them).
Hello, and welcome to the second issue of the KDE Brainstorm Digest! This issue comes in slightly late, due to some real time commitments, but I couldn’t leave you without it, could I?
