Spring Update + Spring Anime Previews
It’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog, so I figured I’d make a quick post to say that I’m still alive. I have some major project deadlines and interviews coming up, so I probably still won’t be able to update very often. In any case, be on the look out for new posts every now and again.
First off, good luck to all of the CDX 2012 teams. I’ve heard some similar stories to what we experienced last year, but in any case I hope it amounts to a good experience and you are all able to learn some things from the exercise. Special encouragement to AFIT teams 1 and 2. Always have to root for the home team :Þ
I wrote these up on a different site, but I figured they were worth sharing here as well. So here are my quick thoughts on the series that premiered for this anime season. No pics incoming because I don’t have time and am lazy.
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SPAM
I’m a little surprised that even as an author of very small blog, I still get a fair amount of spam from random bots. In fact, I receive more spam comments than actual comments. Nearly all of them are picked off right away by the comment filter, but it places them in a separate folder so I can view them later. That said, I get a good laugh from viewing them every once in a while. It becomes a game for some, as they were clearly directly translated from some other language and the original context or meaning becomes lost. Others yet appear to be just compiled from verbs and nouns picked at random and applied to a template. In any case, I’ve picked several of them to share with you and try my hand at translating what they were trying to say. There are certainly spam bots better than this out there. Perhaps if this blog grows further it can eventually become the target of more efficient or discrete spam bots, although I would rather do without that aspect.
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Happenings
Suffice to say, I’ve been busy lately so I haven’t been able to write as many posts as I would have liked. However, some important things have happened for me recently so I might as well share them.
First off, I have become a published researcher. My paper Botnets as an Instrument of Warfare has finally been released to the public. I initially wrote the paper for a class, but it showed promise and was revamped for publication. I presented the paper at the IFIP Working Group 11.10 Critical Infrastructure Protection Conference in March of 2011, and in November the collection of fully-edited papers was published. If you’re interested in reading it, both the stand-alone paper and the book are available through Springer. The abstract is as follows:
This is one of the most essential parts for a computer, but also one of the most easily forgotten and hardest to understand. Even now, I admit that this is the component I have the weakest knowledge of. That said, I still know plenty about what to look for in an appropriate PSU for your new rig.
It’s a MOBA World Out There
The Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre is something that’s sprung up only recently in the gaming world. Initially started with the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA), many offshoots are now competing to pull in new players and capitalize on this new competitive game type. The playerbase now numbers millions of players from across the world, so it’s certainly a new point in the crowded games industry.
I’ve only been playing MOBA-type games for about a year and a half now, so I haven’t been involved with these games long enough to be considered one of the aged pros by any means. I generally approach these games just from the standpoint of playing with people I know and trying out new things, so I’m not even overly involved with the competitive side of things. That’s not to say I’m not a competitive player; I’m not the best, but I’m most certainly in the upper echelon of skill level. I don’t particularly have a passion for these games either, but since it’s what I spend a good deal of time playing lately, I figure I should spend a bit of time talking about some of the MOBA games that are out there. I’m not going to give an introduction into the generic gameplay for these games as it would probably start to take too much room; it’s described very well elsewhere and I’d encourage you to check out some videos as well.
Computer Building: Case
The case can be one of the most or least important parts to your new rig. It is the main housing for everything else, and protects the inner electronics from dust and battery. On the other hand, it’s also what everybody sees, and is “iconic” for a user’s computer. A little bit of lights and flair are great if you think it looks cool, but don’t sacrifice quality in other areas in order to get them. It is important to find a design that fits your personal taste, if nothing other than it being a personal expression.
Computer Building: Sound Cards
For most purposes today, the integrated sound cards found on many motherboards are sufficient for general use. There is a small sacrifice of audio fidelity, but in reality this difference will not be noticeable with anything but the most premium of headphones. The speakers for desktop use will fall short in all cases. That’s not to say that the sound quality is bad, it’s simply a matter that the technology has reached a peak point of audible quality vs theoretical quality, with the audible quality being more than enough.
Computer Building: Memory (RAM)
I’ve decided to split up each of the sections for the Computer Building guide into separate posts, and then I’ll compile all of them into a separate page later. So for now, here are some tips for picking out memory.
Memory serves as the short-term memory for a system. It seems like this is one of those items that people often think of as a quick-fix for slow machines, saying “oh, you should get more RAM. That will speed it up.” Whether this is true or not depends on a number of other factors.
Winter/Spring 2011 Anime Reviews
Rather than doing full-on anime reviews like I did for Heat Guy J, I decided it would be better for me instead to give many shorter reviews at once. I watch a lot of series fairly quickly, and it’s simply easier for me to write out my general impressions on a group that I finish rather than take a large chunk of time and write about every metric for every show. There’s simply too many shows to make that feasible for me to write about all of them, and too much information for the readers to take it all in. So instead, please take these mini-reviews to help determine which series fit your own tastes and are thus worth watching. I’m going to avoid general synopses, so instead please check out the AniDB pages for each of the series to get a general overview as well as its generic genres.
For these reviews I will also be making use of a new multiple-metric system to come up with the overall score. This guide can be found here, and is also listed in the menu bar under “Guides”.
