At 1,890 yen a pop for the Blu-ray release, I don’t know whether I should be expecting a proper OVA or a five-minute OVA short. In any case, keep blackrockshooter.jp bookmarked and watch for it when it gets released in the spring of 2010.

I’m writing this from work actually since I dropped my T61 off at Algonquin College on Wednesday in order to get it serviced since the display seems to have finally met its demise. For the longest time I have been relying on my Dell 2709w but since I don’t have that with me in Ottawa it’s been a little rough. On Tuesday, it finally decided to just give me a black screen.

Anyway, my Internet access will be slim on the evenings though I’ll be on MSN via my PSP. I’ll probably be spending this weekend at the office so I can try to get some stuff done and to also have access to a proper browser. ;)

October 15th is the target release date at the moment. If it changes, I’ll post back.

I just can’t get enough of this amazing song. Now I would like to go on record and say that I liked this song even before I found out that ryo had composed and arranged it so there was no bias involved in any way, shape, or form. I found the Japanese lyrics from surfing around. I doubt they’re “official” but it seems close enough anyway.

あれが デネブ アルタイル ベガ
君は指差す 夏の大三角
覚えて空を見る
やっと見つけた 織姫様
だけどどこだろう 彦星様
これじゃひとりぼっち

真っ暗な 世界から見上げた
夜空は 星が降るようで

いつからだろう 君のことを
追いかける 私がいた
どうかお願い 驚かないで
聞いてよ 私のこの思いを

Just last month, I joined the ranks of Nick Boldt, Ian Bull, Veronika Irvine, Wassim Melhem, Eric Moffatt, Andrew Niefer, Paul Webster, and presumably many other Eclipse community members that I don’t know of, in receiving my diploma from the University of Waterloo. I officially stopped being a student and subsequently began referring to myself as being “unemployed” instead of being a “student”. While I like being unemployed, bills don’t pay themselves.

Next Monday, I will transition from the “unemployed” state to the “employed” state, entering a world that young and naive people like yours truly refer to as the “real world”. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel any pressure. For the past three or four years or so, I could do whatever I wanted and do it whenever I felt like. If I felt like playing some video games instead of hacking on code, well, I could do just that. Of course, now that somebody’s paying me for my time I don’t really have that luxury anymore. :P

This transition translates to a couple of things:

1. participation in the newsgroup/forums, it’s kind of an on and off thing for me, I tend to only post when I’m working
2. decreased activity on #eclipse, as many of you may know, supporting users in real-time requires a lot of mental physique, I may or may not continue hanging around, here’s to hoping that the channel can sustain itself though
3. more blogging, at least that’s the plan
4. naturally, the “employed” blogging corollary follows, with “the writings on this blog are my own and may not reflect my employer’s stance on the issue in question” notice

I suppose the million dollar question is who will I be working for? The answer to that question would be IBM. I don’t think this is too much of a surprise but I’ll let my readers decide in the comments. I’ve given Ian a bit of dirt in the past for the Foundation being too corporate-ish…I guess now it’s his turn to give me some. What goes around comes around, eh?

What will I be working on? I know I’ve told some people that I’ll be working on Platform/UI but it seems that fate has something I like to call the element of surprise as I was informed about a month ago that I’d be sent to the Jazz team instead (okay, you got me Wassim). Of course, I’ll still have my commit rights but my activity on Bugzilla and CVS will be taking a hit.

Thanks goes out to everyone that has helped me along the way these past few years, you all know who you are. I would however like to single out Paul for all his help on IRC, both for splitting up the user support work and for my own Eclipse-related problems, and Chris for providing me with the user-to-contributor bridge when he mentored me back in 2006 for the Google Summer of Code program. Kudos also goes to everyone on IRC. I’ve had a lot of laughs and learned a lot from all of you both with Eclipse-related material and the many other random things we felt like talking about during any given day. ;)

Before I go, I would like to express my apologies to the Eclipse community at large for making the Platform team less diverse than it used to be as an “Individual” committer has now been replaced with an “IBM” one. :O

Well, I’m pretty late since it seems that the news came out while I was away. Good to see that they’ll be pressing Blu-ray Discs for this OVA. Here’s to hoping that the third season will get the same treatment.

「化物語」, or Bakemonogatari if you will, is a must watch. Episode one was filled with SHAFT-y goodness and I expect this trend to continue into the later episodes.

Let’s go over a checklist of this show, shall we?

• Animation production by SHAFT
• Directed by Akiyuki Shinbou
• Ending theme by ryo of supercell
• Casting includes Hiroshi Kamiya and Miyuki Sawashiro

SHAFT is probably the only other studio that I’m willing to watch a show on the basis of “nothing” besides the fact that it’s from them, the other being Production I.G. The third point is more than a nice-to-have but the fact that an ending theme is awesome doesn’t make a series awesome. Also, while I like Kamiya and Sawashiro, they are not really a make-or-break for me in terms of “I’ll watch this because this person’s voicing a character in this show”.

I’m flying to Hong Kong early morning tomorrow and won’t be back until next Friday at night and will have limited Internet access while I’m there. You can communicate with me through email but I won’t be on IM clients much I don’t think.

Eclipse-based applications looks and feels native thanks to SWT but once you start gandering at them icons, it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. For the readers out there that are familiar with the Tango Desktop Project, the window below doesn’t look out of place at all, right?

In the Eclipse world, the icons don’t really bother us at all since we’ve been looking at them for so many years. Unsurprisingly, for some clients and users, this doesn’t quite cut it and they want to customize them a little or they want the icons to match their own desktop’s. What if you could appease these people by adding a little ‘Theme’ menu at the top to flip around some options? Or what if the user could just define their own icon preferences…?

If you’ve ever been troubled by icons like the two bug reporters above, e4 CSS support could be the solution to your problems. Feel free to comment on bug 281593 if this piques your interest. You can help shape e4 into the next generation platform that you and your clients need! Join the e4 team, today! :)

Note: I realize that in the Eclipse world we have very specific user interface and icon design guidelines so this may not be everybody’s cup of tea. But hey, if you’re not interested in this, feel free to work on something else! Let me tell you, there’s no shortage of work in the e4 project. ;)

Famitsu has updated its website with (what is likely to be) a snippet of its magazine coverage on Steins;Gate. I’m going to be completely honest here and give my unbiased opinion on the game’s female characters.

They’re not very moe.

Hopefully, some other artwork of the characters will sway my opinion. I shall eagerly await in-game CGs (over the current “sprites”). For those that are wondering, the character designer is huke, the same person that brought us BLACK ROCK SHOOTER.

From what I understand from the article, there’s going to be a lot of “time” and “time travel” related stuff. Early in the game, the protagonist will meet the main girl even though she supposedly died a few hours ago. So yeah, time-related stuff…As to the character’s names, they haven’t provided any furigana yet so I’m going to hold back on referring to the characters with their names since I could be spelling it wrong.

I’ll be providing my crappy “second-handed” translation of any interesting information I find directly here. Any information that I’m confident in and have confirmed will be posted over at Wikipedia.

Anyway, it seems that they’re aiming for a fall release at the moment. That’s not really all that far away so it’s fine by me though I was personally expecting a winter release.