Today I got the first Maho Shojo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS R2 DVD in the mail. Even though I haven’t watched it properly yet (I plan on doing so tomorrow) I can say I’m already impressed. Usually Japanese DVDs are little more than improved video tapes: they provide just the bare minimum (and not for a cheap price). However, this is not the case with Nanoha StrikerS.
The title comes from some random thoughts I had while reading aseigo’s latest entry on Plasma. I was thinking about the line “who uses KDE for his/her day job, and why?”, but related perhaps to people who don’t code for a living. Here I will illustrate my point of view on why I chose KDE as my day to day desktop environment.
The reason for this post is the time I wasted this afternoon to enable DMA for a DVD burner in Windows, in order to burn a backup DVD at a decent speed. Apparently, the two optical drives are IDE while the HD is on a SATA controller. For no reason, DMA got turned off on the DVD burner (but not on the other drive).
Of course I tried everything I could, of course. It was very frustrating to reboot every time to test (probably due to the large hack called Registry) and of course not being able to get it working. Google searches did not get conclusive information, perhaps a BIOS bug or a firmware bug.
On Linux, it’s just a matter of using
[code lang='c']
hdparm -d 1 drivename
[/code]
What’s the easiest way? Obscure options of the device manager (which lists SATA channels and IDE channels with the same name) that only say “DMA if available” with no option to check what went wrong, or a simple command that outputs the result of the operation in real time?
The FFXI Encyclopedia has an interview with the Final Fantasy XI developers with regards to the upcoming expansion, Wings of the Goddess. Skimming through the lines, they give a lot of hints but no definitive answers. Sadly, there will be no barriers for missions, and no one asked about their length: Treasures of Aht Urghan had very short missions, often ridicolously easy, so I’d like a better challenge this time.
Among the other things mentioned, new jobs (I wonder if the usual people will start already complaining about “they suck for endgame! Boo hoo!”), a global adjustment of all the other classes (I’m hoping on an adjustment of Ninja as a subjob, probably the most abused subjob ever) and eve a hint on Tanaka’s new MMORPG, which is apparently still top secret.
Also, there was an annoucement of another fan festival: I wouldn’t mind going this time, providing I find the money.
