not that there’s much that interests me, but i will be looking forward to watching the nintendo conference tonight.  lets hope they dont announce another portable gaming system to make my dslite obsolete ^^;

i think gen will be providing quite a good coverage of the stuff worth watching/knowing about so you should have a look over there if you’re interested!

why are dvds so dodgy to burn :/.  i think the overall quality of dvd media in japan is quite bad really (unless you’re willing to pay a large sum of money).  i’ve coastered two dvds so far tonight trying to burn nana… one more try and i’ll give up.

paper maps are in the past right? but what do you do when you don’t have a net connection and want to see the awfully detailed internet map? i don’t know if that was quite what i was thinking when i started work on this, but that is my official justification :p

google’s mapping api uses some java applet, but behind it is just a massive collection of 256×256 gifs which are loaded as you scroll. so i began by taking the bounds which gave a full coverage of himeji city and its close surroundings.

this resulted in a large number of image files which i was left to join together. from the start i was planning on using imagemagick to do this task, since it is very scriptable and flexible in handling images. unfortunately it seems it wasn’t made to handle joining together this many images

so i had to break the task down.. to the point where i joined each row of images one at a time using imagemagick. this took roughly 2.5hours on psrv, and left me with 60 odd 19456×256 pixel gifs which are long enough to probably cover the length of perth city if printed (at a low dpi ^^)

leaving imagemagick to then stitch these rows together and form the final image resulted in an even larger problem. the segmentation fault that appeared after a couple of hours made me think imagemagick simply couldnt handle these dimensions. then i tried to copy a file and found out there was no disk space left on psrv..

imagemagick ate 4gigabytes with its tmp files.

i ended up getting another program and this time (wisely) running it locally on my vaio. all went smoothly. the process took only 1 minute 34 seconds after i decided to output to bitmap over gif format. photoshop would handle the conversion smoothly after all.

quite a big file.

quite a few pixels! 330,793,472 to be exact.

this is a very very zoomed out version of it. it was only after i got to this point that i realised the bounds i first set were a bit off.. and its a bit too far east than necessary ^^;. once i get a day off uni i plan on recentering it and then ill try and find a use for it.

to those that still ask WHY?

why not?

omake: my current desktop.  its been a while since ive posted a desktop image so :d

this is the sign that i am all too used to seeing in front of ds and dslite shelves..  sold out, wait for next shipment.  therefore it was very surprising when we found a few left in the department/variety store “Tokyu Hands” in kobe.  as this was my mission for the day outing to kobe, i was very happy to fulfill it in the first shop we visited.

what can i say?  its a nice little machine – the screens are so bright that games look different to what they did on the original ds colour wise.  i was kind of planning on getting the white version, but this store only had light/dark blue.  this colour is actually a lot nicer than i thought it would be though – a very pale shade of blue (probably looks a bit different to the picture above even).

i already bought ouendan second hand last week, so i wasn’t really planning on buying any games today.  then there was a change of plans when i found children of mana on sale for 2980yen ^^;.  at least i had a game to play on the way home .  children of mana is interesting – the fighting system is quite unique and doesnt get boring, the graphics are awesome and colourful.  if i have one problem with the game, its the simplicity of transport between dungeons, which involves a main map where you can choose a location and instantly be transported to it.  the story is also quite.. shallow?  but i guess i’m not *that* far into the game yet.  the dungeons are fun when it comes to replay, as you can try to beat your time in order to get higher ranks and earn item rewards.

tonight at the shops i saw that big band game second hand – is it worth buying?  i never really got a chance to play it :/

my school rumble marathon viewing was interrupted when i realised i was short 4 eps…   and even more frustrating is the torrent for 23-26 going at 0.5k/s