Just a short message: My previous website, Lazaryn.com, is no longer owned by me. I let the domain expire a few months ago and it has since been squatted by a third party. I still have the old site data sitting on my local server but as it was basically just used as an online diary I don’t think I’ll be uploading it anywhere.

On a completely unrelated note I am really no longer interested in website development anymore—instead of working on Undefined Fire in my spare time I am now helping out on the KDE as a core developer, currently focusing on KWin compositing and effects for KDE 4.2. If I am ever required to release feature examples or special “behind the scene” footage I will convert this site into a development log with v5, most of the code and design-work is finished but I just haven’t ported all the existing content over to the new system as it’s structured entirely differently.

Until next time.

While moving furniture around today I came across my old Japanese hiragana and katakana charts that I used to use as a cheat sheet for my self-teaching Japanese studies. As I’ve completely forgotten everything again (This is like the third time now) I decided to replace the charts with higher quality ones and put them up somewhere where I can see them. After spending a good ten to fifteen minutes searching around the web I came to the realization that no good charts exist for printing purposes that don’t require a credit card to access. So I ended up making my own.

Some open source PDF readers do not display the katakana for “ko”, if this happens to you just open the file in a different application.

Choose your format:

• OpenOffice.org ODT (25KB)
• Adobe Acrobat PDF (58KB, recommended)
• Image PNGs (146KB and 118KB each) available below:

Earlier today Blizzard announced StarCraft II at their 2007 Worldwide Invitational event in South Korea. Initial reports state that it will be real-time strategy similar to the original with the same three playable races: The Terran, the Protoss and the Zerg. Although that is all good what surprised me the most was that the game has been in production since 2003, talk about keeping a secret.

Although there has been no information released about the story IGN is speculating that Kerrigan will be back as well as the official website saying that it picks up where StarCraft: Brood War left off. With this in mind I also believe there also may be an opening for the return of the Xel’Naga, the ancient race that was supposedly destroyed by the Zerg after they gave them intelligence. Maybe Kerrigan found out where they were hiding and decided to finish the job that the Overmind started? Who knows, I wasn’t really into the whole StarCraft thing so most of my knowledge on the game comes from the pages of Wikipedia.

Speaking of Wikipedia I managed to get so caught up in the knowledge database that three hours of my day vanished with only a Firefox history log to prove that I didn’t manage to break the space-time continuum. This is not the first time this has happened to me and I’m sure that some of you that are reading this has lost many hours to the wiki god. Does anyone know if there is a Firefox extension that records the user’s Wikipedian journey? After doing a quick search I couldn’t find any but I am sure one exists somewhere.

Read full article…

I have always favoured the number 7 for as long as I can remember. Why is it my favourite? I wouldn’t have a clue. After pondering on this question for a while I came to a startling realisation - The number 8 is better than 7.

What things does 7 have going towards it? All I can think of is that it’s a prime number. The number 8 however has quite a few good points:

• its glyph is symmetrical,
• it can be flipped and is still an 8,
• it can be rotated 90 degrees to form the infinity glyph,
• it is a key number in binary, and
• it is a part of the Fibonacci sequence.

Not bad is it? These definitely prove that the design-friendly number of 8 is overall more useful than the lopsided 7.