July 26, 2007
After landing at the New Chitose airport in Hokkaido, I went to pick up my luggage. I noticed they had attached a label “Heavy”. I guess it was by Japanese standards. Time of arrival: 4.10PM
Things started getting more interesting then. Declan was supposed to pick me up from the airport and drop me off at the dormitory where I’m staying. He was nowhere to be seen. No problem, everyone can be late. I was pretty tired of sitting dozn all the time, so I went for a stroll in the airport. I oblivously had to take my things with me, not wanting to risk getting them stolen or detonated by a bomd squad (although both are very unlikely to happen in Japan).
An hour had passed and my suitcase was starting to become heavy even by my standards. “Maybe Declan is looking for me at a different location?” I thought to myself. I took out my paper with useful number and wanted to make a phonecall. Unfortunantly, the thing only took 100 yen coins. To get some change I decided to buy something to eat and drink. I only got a single 100 yen coin, so I could only make one phonecall. It turned out Declan wasn’t at the airport, but driving people to their homestays. Before hanging up,he did mention that a girl was supposed to be arriving. And she did, we talked for a while and were soon joined by some other people. It wasn’t until around 7PM before Declan finally arrived. There was still supposed to be one more person arriving, so we decided to get something more decent to eat at the local MOS Burger. I had a Curry Chicken burger (thankfully, the menu was all in katakana, so I could actually read it). I forget what time it was when we left the airport, but it was already dark outside. I think there were around 5 people who had to be dropped of, most of them had to be in different places. For those of you who don’t know the Japanese street system: neither do I, but I know it’s very confusing. It basically boils down to this: I was midnight until I finally crashed down on my futon/bed thing.
Posted by Gyrbo under Summer 2007 Trip | Comments (0)
July 25, 2007
Taking the plane over to Japan was quite an expirience. After a train ride from Brussels, I arrived in Paris. I has to walk half way across the 2F terminal building to get to the correct check-in. I had to ask twice since it wasn’t indicated on the ticker. A friendly immigration officer finally showed me the way. Unfortunantly, it wasn’t manned so I had to wait. Luckily there was a a power outlet nearby so I spend some time practising my kana on my DS. I was pretty much the first person in line when the counter finally opened. Checking in, getting trough security and customs took about 30 minutes, a lot less than I has imagined. I spend the rest of my time in front of the gate, which had a WiFi terminal with some more power outlets.
The first thing I noticed when I got on the plane was that almost everyone was Asian. I should have expected that, though. The food wasn’t as bad as some claim, but I had a lot better. I had an aisle seat next to the wing, which meant the engine was pretty loud. I didn’t get any sleep at all. Just as I was starting to get sleepy, it was time for breakfast. It was around 2AM Belgian time at that point and around 9AM Japanese time. It was noon when I finally had solid ground under my feet (actually I didn’t, since Nagoya is an artificial island).
Transfering was a little nervewreking. Getting through immigration took around half an hour, most of it was spend filling in the (de)embarkation form (I was already standing in line when I noticed everyone but me had it). The officer was asking a lot of questions, but as soon as I showed the Yamasa acceptance letter, they allowed me in without any problems.
Next up was customs. For some reason I was picked out for a complete bagage check. This meant unpacking everything. Not something you want to do when you’re short on time. He was quite friendly though and he even called someone over to help me repack.
After that, I had to get my ticket from the ANA counter. The lady who was helping me barely understood English, so that was quite a challenge. I think the travel agent most have arranged something, because my bagage was let through without any difficulty. I got to the gate 10 minutes before boarding commenced. The plane was a lot smaller and I was the only foreigner on it. The people at the security check and the gate checked my ticket several times to make sure I was at the right place.
Next time: landing in Hokkaido.
Posted by Gyrbo under Summer 2007 Trip | Comments (0)
July 24, 2007
I’ve been in Japan for a day now and I have a lot to talk about, but still have to go to the store before it closes, so you’ll have to do with these pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/gyrbox/JapanSummerTrip2007
Posted by Gyrbo under Uncategorized | Comments (0)
July 20, 2007
After months of preparation, I’ll finally be leaving for Japan the day after tomorrow. I’ll be gone for almost a month, the longest I’ve ever been away from home. The main purpose of the trip is to study Japanese, but I only have lessons in the morning, so I’m free in the afternoon to do some “touristing”.
I’ll be going to Sapporo in Hokkaido (the northernmost island). Accommodation and education is provided by Yamasa. I’ve heard some good things about them, and they’re pretty much the least expensive Japanese language school I found. In addition, it’s as close to an all-inclusive formula as you’ll get (only lunch and most transportation isn’t included).
Besides being the first time in Japan (or even outside of Western Europe), it’ll also be the first time flying. I’m not really worried about the flying itself, but about getting around. I’m a preparation freak, so being in a completely unfamiliar situation doesn’t exactly put me at ease. To lessen the problem, I’ve been doing as much “research” as possible. I’ve printed maps of all the airports I’ll be at (4 in total!). From what I’ve gathered, I’ll also be flying 3 different types of aircraft (777-200, A320 and 767-200). Let’s hope I don’t get lost or get on a wrong airplane (luckily, that’s pretty much impossible with the current security measures).
Most of my flights will be with Air France (most operated by JAL), but one is with ANA. This brings me to another problem: baggage. Most airlines have quite a reasonable free allowance. Not so with ANA. They have a grand total free baggage allowance of 15kg (hand an checked together). I already mentioned I’ll be gone for nearly a month, so I have quite a couple of things to take with me. With my suitcases alone weighing around 7kg, I won’t be carrying around much luggage. This basically means I’ll be doing a bit more washing than anticipated on top of paying an excess baggage fee (there is no way 8kg is enough). Luckily this is during my departure (I won’t have any souvernirs yet) and a domestic flight in Japan, so the rates are fairly reasonable (around 520JPY/kg from what I gather). Next time I’m flying to Japan, I’ll make sure to avoid ANA…
Posted by Gyrbo under Summer 2007 Trip | Comments (0)
September 2, 2006
I’ve reworked a huge portion of GyFW. After doing some real work with it, I found out it’s not very pleasant to work with. I’ve change it to use exceptions instead of return codes for the most part now. I wasn’t originally planning to do this in the contest timeframe, but certain things happend that made me go through with it. Read more…
Posted by Gyrbo under Uncategorized | Comments (0)
July 8, 2006
I haven’t been working on Project Finite lately, mostly because I have something else to focus on. I decided to try and enter the Four Elements V contest (4E5) from GameDev.net. It’s going to be a 2D side scroller. I wanted to join last year too, but unfortunantly I wasn’t able to due to time constraints. This year I decided to try and use a little more existing libraries. Read more…
Posted by Gyrbo under Development | Comments (0)
July 7, 2006
A while ago, a friend of mind told me an interesting bit of information. If you replaced the IDE cable in an external HDD enclosure with a regular one, you could hook up two drives.
I would’ve tested this long ago, but I had very little time at the moment and sort of forgot about it.
Today I finally got time to test this. I rumbled a but through my “random PC stuff” box and got a molex power splitter and a regular IDE ribbon cable. First of all, I verified that the small power supply of the enclosure would be capable of handling double the power draw. According to the official WD website, that drive uses around 500mA, the power suppliy is rated for 2A. No problems there. The other disk was an old Maxtor I found laying around. It has even lower power draw, but I caught an interesting bit of info. Apperantly the power draw at spin-up is around 2A. That would be streching things a bit, but I still decided to go on. It would only use that much power for a brief second, so it should be fine.
After hooking the two drives up to the enclosure, I turned on the power. Both drives happily spun up without the power cutting out.
Next, I connected the USB cable to my laptop for testing. After windows finished doing whatever it had to do, I had two additional drives. Experiment successful!
I’d post some pictures of the rig, but I don’t have a camera at hand, so you’ll have to make do with this screenshot:
Some info for those willing to test this out themselfs. The enclosure is an IcyBox 351U-B. One disk was jumpered as master, the other as slave. It’s IDE-only for disks and USB2-only as external connection. If you have tested this with other enclosure(s), post something in the comments so other people know what to buy if they want that little bit extra 
.
Posted by Gyrbo under Technology | Comments (0)
April 25, 2006
I’ve been working on a game and I thought it would be a good idea to write about the progress.
I’ve written a small framework that can be reused in other applications I may write, called GyFW (Gyrbo’s FrameWork). It has some basic features like a virtual filesystem, data file loading/saving and loading archives. I may add a resource manager too, but that’s for later.
The main archive I’m using is a custom format called dotG (.g). It’s selling point is it’s simplicity. This makes is very easy to load it (only a couple of lines of code). While the format has support for compression and encryption, I’m currently not using it (and haven’t implemented support in GyFW). I’ve used the format before for some unfinished projects, and I have a nice commandline tool to create the archives.
The datafiles are also custom. I didn’t want to implement full XML support, so this is what I came up with. The main reason for using this is again simplicity. I’m using an internal data structure that can be easily saved to disk. It also has Python binding so that the structure can be manipulated in scripts.
The virtual filesytem was the first thing I wrote for the framework and I’m not quite hapy with it. While writing the data saving (serialization) I realized I forgot to make it possible to write files. Because it was late and I didn’t want to spend too much time on it, I made a quick hack so it worked. I’m going to have to rewrite the code behind it to make it cleaner.
Posted by Gyrbo under Development | Comments (0)