News

Recent events involving the takedown of software that allows you to download other people's YouTube videos have prompted what is quite frankly a disturbing lack of understanding of how this is even possible or even what YouTube is doing. Most people seem to think "DRM means encryption" and that you can't take down YouTube downloader software for breaking what isn't DRM'd. There are several other non-DRM problems with the software in question which would allow it to be taken down.

After some further development of the rapidtar project, I've released version 0.2. The headlining feature is volume spanning, but other facilities have also been added or improved. The code for this project is available on GitHub and can be installed via cargo. Downloadable binaries are not yet available.

Today I am releasing a Rust crate titled rapidtar, at version 0.1. You can install it from crates.io or pull the Git repository. It is a proof-of-concept file archival utility that uses parallel directory traversal and write buffering to speed up tar archive creation. It currently supports no other functions, those are to be implemented in future versions.

I completed the visual redesign of the main site I was talking about a few days ago. The new theme, "MahoSpace", is much more visually distinct than the previous theme, "DoujinMart". For starters, we have this nice nebula background and some subtle starfield parallax effects... which only look good on a desktop or laptop with inertial touch scrolling. So the vast majority of users won't notice it, but I'm sure some designers I know will get a kick out of it.

So I have transitioned the site over to NearlyFreeSpeech's 24PHP5.4 instances, after having to deal with more than a little bit of issues regarding changes made in those respective platforms (Apache 2.4 doesn't like oldschool Order allow,deny directives; PHP5.4 wouldn't work until I truncated cache tables manually, etc). This means that the website is going to be faster, use less memory, and support more features (at least for me initially).

I've pushed SimKit (my 3D rendering code I've been working on) to git. It's a work-in-progress, and doesn't even have any renderers or material system code written yet. But it's designed to be a fairly good 3D engine for doing game development in C++. Maintaining this is the reason why I had no February 1GAM release, and why March will similarly be absent barring a miracle.

Fantranslation.org now has a games section. This is because I'm doing stuff for 1GAM, and my January submission is nearly complete. Said January submission is "Asplodiblox", an uninspired Lumines clone. It's not necessarily finished (no game truely is), but it is playable. Albeit very crude. I didn't say I was a good games developer, now did I?

Account registration now works. It turns out the default Drupal configuration is to disable newly registered accounts and restrict all permissions to administrators. I've changed the registration requirement to e-mail registration, added comment and vote permissions for all users, and closed all accounts created under the old policy. This will give you the opportunity to re-register with your desired username and fulfill the e-mail registration requirement.

The title of the article pretty much says it point-blank. SEGA is using DMCA takedowns to censor videos relating to Shining Force III, a Sega Saturn JRPG which was only translated in incomplete form and is only now getting a fan translation patch due to the system's extremely obtuse hardware. I'm going to just assume it had something to do with the translation patch, but the videos being taken down are fairly scattershot - even people talking about the game into a webcam with no uncleared music or video or what have you in the video are getting DMCA'd.