One of the nicer consequences of me passing the exams is that my research lab at University would provide with a new laptop. They'd already given me an old Panasonic to get me through the intervening months, but now that I'm a real student at the lab, they can afford to get me new stuff.
Based on Internet reviews I chose the Dell XPS M1330. Today, it arrived.
The pros: unlike your regular Dell laptop, this one looks extremely cool. The 13.3" widescreen WLED screen is fantastic. I like the keyboard so far (it's not gotten any real workout though). It has a fingerprint reader which is just plain cool (when Windows shows the welcome screen I just scan my finger and it logs on). Vista runs great on it, it's very fast, but with a Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz) and 2GB RAM, what do you expect? I also specifically picked the optional 7200RPM hard drive because I hate the usual slow laptop hard drives.
The cons: it's heavier than I expected. Maybe I've gotten spoiled by the Panasonic which weighs nothing. It's not super heavy but it could've been better. The edges around the screen are rather wide, without those the laptop could've been much smaller. It has only two USB ports. Dell installed the usual amount of crap on it that I had to take some time to remove.
One interesting thing is that Dell Japan didn't offer an option for an English version of Windows (especially weird since they did offer an English keyboard layout). But they did offer an option to get Vista Ultimate for a relatively small amount of money (which I didn't have to pay anyway :P ). So I got that and then used the English language pack available through Vista Ultimate Extras to turn the UI to English, which works great.
So overall I'm very pleased. But then again, since I've just gotten a great laptop for free, why wouldn't I be. :)
I've made a few small changes to the site today.
The most obvious one is the picture in the header (if you're still seeing the old one, refresh the page). The old picture was a satellite image of Leiden, which hasn't been really appropriate for about five months now, but I couldn't decide on what to replace it with. A similar satellite image of Tokyo might've been nice but the old one had a nice uniform colour scheme on account of all the roofs in the Netherlands being the same colour. Tokyo is more varied in roof colour, which makes it very hard to put legible text over the image. In the end I decided on this image of the Shinkyo sacred bridge from Nikko.
The other changes are less noticeable. For one thing, my own comments are now highlighted, making it easier to see when I've replied to one of your comments. I've also added links at the bottom of the main page to page through the post archive. The category pages, which previously would show all posts in a category which led to huge pages, now show only five posts and use this same paging mechanism. Similarly, on the page for an individual post, links at the top lead to the previous and next post. This should make the blog somewhat easier to navigate.
I've also changed it so a post with images attached shows at most five thumbnails in the post display. Any further images are simply indicated by the text "N more images". This should decrease loading time for posts with lots of images, and should reduce my bandwidth usage.
In just a few years, this will be me!
Go read PHD Comics! Recommended by leading experts as the number one way to procrastinate when you should be studying. :-P
I'm proud to announce the availability of Find As You Type 1.3!
This new version is not a very big release, but it contains some critical bugfixes and other minor improvements. For the full list, see the change log.
The biggest change perhaps is the availability of localized versions. That's right, Find As You Type is going international. Available right now are German and Dutch versions next to the usual English version. I'd like to thank Christian Liensberger for the German translations.
Unfortunately, support for Windows 2000 has been dropped. No, it's not just that the installer won't let you install it; if you'd try to use it, it wouldn't work. Windows 2000 users should continue to use version 1.2.
The coders among you will like to know that the source code has been cleaned up significantly and many comments have been added, so more than ever Find As You Type can be used as an example for IE toolbar writers everywhere. I plan to do some articles about some of the changes I made, time permitting.
If you know anything about anime, you probably know Neon Genesis Evangelion. Evangelion is said to have revitalised the anime industry when it first came out in 1995. It is also well known for its deep psychological themes, religious undertones and incomprehensible ending. As such, it's probably also the most over-analysed anime in history. :-P
Anyway, somebody thought it'd be a good idea to remake the TV series into a series of movies, with updated animation and computer graphics (the budget for the original series was very small so it suffered from low production values at some points), as well as some plot changes. The first of what will be four movies premiered in Japan on September 1st.
As an anime fan, I have of course seen Evangelion, and I thought these movies would be interesting to see in the theater. Of course, Japanese theaters are not in the habit of putting English subtitles on Japanese movies, so considering my current level of Japanese, that'd pose a problem. But I went to see it anyway. And I must say, I was impressed. The updated animation was great (while still retaining the style of the original Evangelion), and the sound was fantastic! The version of Eva I saw, the platinum edition, already had an updated 5.1 surround mix (the original 1995 series had a mono soundtrack), but this movie blows it away. Lots of good use of the surround and LFE channels during the battles. Just hearing that on a big sound system made it worth seeing in the theater.
As for the dialogue... I could understand about half. It definitely helped that I already knew the plot. Hopefully when the second movie comes out sometime in 2008 my Japanese will be better. But still, it was a very cool movie, and I definitely don't regret going to see it.
For those interested, a trailer.
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