The Melbourne Anime Festival (Manifest) will be starting a fortnight from now, on Friday, September 14th. If you’re an otaku, or at least know what otaku means, then I heartily recommend coming along to this con. It’s held at Melbourne University so hopefully it should be easy to reach for most people living somewhere near the city. Most events, screenings, trading and general fun is to be had on the Saturday and Sunday but it’s good to come and get everything organised on Friday and see some of the early cosplay and screenings.
Archive for August, 2007
Julien Lecomte has released version 2.1 of YUI Compressor upon an unsuspecting public - followed closely by a bug fix release 2.1.1. If you are serving JavaScript from your own site then I highly recommend using this to compress it first.
After reading about Sony basically pulling the plug on their primary ATRAC-encoded content delivery service, the format seems to be coming to the end of its downward spiral into oblivion. I think that ATRAC actually has a few nice features that have a place in the world of audio formats and it’s a shame to see Sony simply throw that away. I think that a “solution” to this is for Sony to open up the ATRAC standard for use by anyone.
I noticed that Madman Entertainment recently made a few improvements to their website. These things were fairly minor - changing the log in confirmation button from “proceed to checkout” and allowing for cross-session log ins so you don’t have to log in every time you visit the site - but go a long way towards improving the overall feel of the site. Since I’ve used the site for quite a while I thought I would go through some things that I think they should try to tackle in the near future.
Another PHP framework has come to my attention today: Akelos. Its basic claim is that it’s a port of Rails to PHP, including adding some “Ruby-like” functionality that PHP can’t handle natively. I do wonder why we needed yet another PHP framework when we already have CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Zend, PRADO, Solar and probably a hundred others. Seriously, do people create new frameworks for fun?
I have finished updating the comments template to separate out the trackbacks and pingbacks from the regular comments made by visitors. This will mean that visitor comments and discussions don’t get interrupted by machine-generated comments.
I made these changes based on the code from Noscope’s modifications. The alterations I made to this were minor: mostly to clean up the code to my own coding style and to adapt it for my theme, rather than the default.
This mod is a pretty good idea and I’d recommend it to anyone running their own blog.