Illidan's Castle of Runes

I'd planned to try Tor, but I found gladder.

gladder makes a great ladder over the Great Fire Wall (GFW). Yes, it truely works. I see wikiepdia again, though a bit slower because proxying is applied.

Thanks, gladder.

(Both Tor and gladder are extensions for Firefox browser.)

Yesterday, I suddenly became interested again in xmame, an arcade game emulator for Linux and Unix.

I had tried it a few days before. It resulted in a failure to run and I gave up.

I hoped I would be lucky this time. And I turned out to be. I installed it on my ubuntu laptop with

sudo apt-get install xmame

After installation, it ran well. After that I played Shadow Force and Captain Commando, which were among my favorite games in childhood.


I went to install it on Everest Linux 0.2 on my desktop PC, from source code this time, since there wasn't pre-compiled package for Everest. I did encounter difficulties to build it from source code, but I was fortunate enough to make it work by tuning its configuration files.

Days ago I moved an AVI file, containing the TV opening of American version of "Saint Seiya", to the partition labeled "Beta" in my removable hard disc. After that, every time I connected my removable disc to a computer, an error would be reported that this AVI file did not exist. I had no idea how to settle this problem except formatting the whole partition. However, there was as much as some 10GB data in "Beta" Partition. If I wanted to format that partition I had to copied all data to another place, which would cause considerable effort. So I decided to hang it to some time in future when I had bought a DVD rewriter and copied the data to DVD's.

Unfortunately, last night I found that the "Beta" Partition wasn't able to be recognized by the computer, after several attempts. This morning I tried it again, still only the "Alpha" Partition in FAT32 format being functional, the "Beta" Partition unrecognizable.

After failures in applying disk recovery tools, I had no choice but to format the "Beta" Partition, losing all data in it, including a complete anime TV series of "Chobits" in good-quality AVI format, which accouted for about 5GB. Of all data that had been lost, the Chobits video was the most important to me. However, it would not take me much effort to download it again from Blueink FTP service, to which I had a fast connection.

This time I chose "FAT32" for file system format for the "Beta" Partition, in the hope to obtain more compatibility across operating systems. "NTFS", which proclaimed better security and I/O effeciency, had little sense for removable hard disk, as I thought now, since I did not connect my removable disc to a computer for a long time, reading or writing it frequently.

The misfortune assured my of two decicions: first, to buy a DVD rewriter as soon as possible; second, to buy a new shell box for my removable hard disk. Storing plain data or video in DVD's was much more reliable than in hard disk. The removable disk's shell box with the IDE-to-USB chipset, had been buggy, resulting in problems for me ever since I assebled this DIY removable disk. I shall not hestitate any longer : Zhongguancun market, this weekend.

"Sister Princess" is a anime TV series that tells stories of a boy and his 12 pretty sisters. The girls are of distinct characteristics, of whom I like Mamoru and Rinrin best. Mamoru, who always walks on roller skates, is so active and energetic that you may easily take her as a boy, but she is not lacking in girlhood. I usually appreciate lively girls. One of the other girls, Rinrin, is a genius innovator, who is capable inventing from robots to submarines, from laptop computer to intelligent handset able to send E-mails. Her cute robot, Mecha-rinrin, enhances her own charm. I cannot stop appreciating this lovely girl inventor.