Rants from Vas

Localising a software product is a painful, time-consuming process. After much thought, I think there is just no simple way. If you ever plan to tackle the process, be prepared to sink a lot of time and effort into it. Then when you’re coming up to the next release, be prepared to go through it […]

I’ll be honest. When I first heard good things about the movie Ten Canoes, I was sceptical. I wondered if it really was good, or it was just politically correct to give it good reviews. I didn’t see it at the cinema, but I did watch the DVD yesterday (a legitimate, hired copy — not […]

The other day, I felt like playing Ghouls’n Ghosts (also known as 大魔界村). Now I have warm, fuzzy memories of this game. When I was much younger, the was one of them at the Rockdale bus stop. I didn’t know that the protagonist’s name was Arthur, so I called him “Silly Billy”, because you’d have […]

This kind of thing really annoys me. Not the whole strip – just the last panel. To suggest that there’s such a thing as “normal-sized” girls is ridiculous. Girls come in all sizes, and the real problem is that shops only carry clothes for “normal-sized” girls.

I just thought I should blog about this, as it’s bitten me recently: if you plan to use ATMs overseas, make sure your PIN isn’t too long to be accepted at your destination. For example, the maximum length PIN accepted by Australian and Japanese ATMs is eight digits. However, the maximum length accepted by Vietnamese […]

You just have to check this out (warning, telnet lin, opens in terminal window, if you don’t know what telnet is, forget this). It’s a complete, subtitled rendition of Star Wars episode IV in streaming VT100.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of low-level debugging at work lately. It’s never been my favourite activity. It would be nice if software just worked. But of course, it doesn’t. Computers do what they’re told – not necessarily what you want them to. Something gets lost on the way. But that’s not the topic […]

I’ve been tagged, so I may as well do this. Although the person who tagged me knows very well they’re wasting my time 😉

Here are a few photos we’ve taken around the place. Just a few to capture some of the things I’ve mentioned.

So far, we’ve been getting around Tokyo on trains. We didn’t really think a great deal about the other forms of transport, because the the trains have been so good. Tokyo is one of only about two cities in the world where public transport runs at a profit, and you can see why: trains go […]