Japanese Magazine Censorship

Source.

I'm amazed that it got through to begin with. Wait till they see Yuirppe's dakimakura.

Nanoha Curry

Source.

There is just so much win in this. Its almost as good as watching Paul Ducklin's (of Sophos) 90 Second (security) News.

Fun with Channel News Asia

Source.

On 15 Nov 2010, Danny Choo (and ors) appeared on Channel News Asia's Prime Time Morning breakfast TV show. Now whatever one may think about CNA and/or their editorial policy, I still think they are still better than the waste of tax payers money that is Bernama TV. (Or what ever it is called these days)

Someone called "YuKi-To" at Dannychoo.com's post on the event kindly posted a link to the video on CNA's online video website. While handy, made for difficult watching when CNA's video server isn't the fastest around, and streaming the video of the interview was, well, stuttery at best.

So, how do you download a video that is encapsulated in its own .swf player? Answer: a whole afternoon.

First the link:

http://video2.channelnewsasia.com/cnavideos/multiplevideos_no_watermark.asp?skin=player1.swf&bgskin=playerbackground.swf&filename=101115_ptm_anime.flv&adfilebefore=cna%20video2.flv&adfileafter=&playmode=S

As one can see, its a GET, which passes a few parameters into a ASP file. Crucially, it also includes a file name, "101115_ptm_anime.flv".

So, putting

http://video2.channelnewsasia.com/cnavideos/101115_ptm_anime.flv

into your browser should work right?

Er, no.



Viewing the source wasn't much more inspiring. I could see it was a Javascript (ugh) function that checked the Adobe Flash version, passed it into a hasRightVersion() function, and used document.write(oeTags); to embed the flash video.

Running it through an online Javascript interpreter wasn't much help either.



It gave me what I expected, but still based on the GET passed into player1.swf. However, there were more clues. In particular, the folderName parameter. So I tired:

http://video2.channelnewsasia.com/cnavideos/videos/101115_ptm_anime.flv

Still no go.

Frustrated, I fired up Wireshark, hoping to at least capture the stream to extract it. However, it didn't resolve the slow download speed from CNA's video server. Bored, I started to look through the Wireshark captures.



The video stream was being piped through port 1935 of video2.channelnewsasia.com. And with the elusive video folder. Surely, I had finally found it? Typing

http://video2.channelnewsasia.com:1935/videos/101115_ptm_anime.flv

into my browser, I got this:



Success was mine, I thought. However, it was short lived, when I saw this:



Despite the server returning that the file was there, not a single byte was coming down. Looking closer at the Wireshark dump, it seemed like when a GET request for the resource was sent to the server, it responded with FIN's. Clearly it wasn't as simple as hitting save.

I played around with browser headers, refers, to no avail. The file was there on the server, yet I couldn't get it. It was very annoying and painful at the same time.

Then it struck me: what protocol does flash video use? From the deep recesses of my mind I remembered it wasn't your bog standard HTTP. Then I saw it:



Surely, it couldn't be as simple as changing the protocol name?



Figured as much. So, how do you access a resource behind the RTMP protocol?

Solution: a command line application called rtmpdump. (Thanks Andrej Stepanchuk and Howard Chu for making it and releasing a Windows binary!)



There you have it. The elusive 101115_ptm_anime.flv. rtmpdump gave more information on the file, namely it came from a mpeg (CNA is still broadcast in PAL 576i after all), done not much longer after the broadcast was done.



I must say for a 8 minute and 44 second length video, it is terribly big, with the file size clocking at just under 30MB. And not that it's high quality either:



Encoded with the (ugh) VP6 codec, at 352 x 288, its just around half the standard PAL 576i resolution. I feel much of the filesize bulk is due to the audio.

I'm no media expert, so I will demure on the performance of everyone in the video. However, I do have to echo the words of iron2000: "The presenters of Primetime Morning, Suzanne Jung Ki Eng and Steven Chia, really don't seem to know any anime stuff". And that's fine really. Breakfast TV shows are always with the weird and unusual.

If nothing else, Danny Choo can add CNA to his list which includes CNN, the BBC and NHK.



So there you have it. How to extract flash video files. And there goes my life. ^_^''

Edit: a copy of the file is here: http://www.mediafire.com/?tuv79jdxb4bqyvz.

There's no way my Manaka can be so cute!

Source.

For those who don't get the reference, Takane Manaka from Love Plus is voiced by the same seiyuu that does Aragaki Ayase in OreImo.

Hence, this image.

Of floating point representations and a RM 806 trillion bill

Remember the RM 806 trillion bill?



Came across a write up by Gilbert Healton who noted that the .01 at the end of the full amount (RM 806,400,000,000,000.01) looked like a rounding error in floating point numbers. There is a very interesting replication of the error in the C programming language at his page.

A good read up on avoiding the more interesting bugs, and a good reason why try() {} catch() {} functions are the best thing since sliced bread. Generally.

"Your imouto is in your bed. What do you do?"

Seanver's been running a poll over at his site:


As at 12 Nov 2010, 0221 UTC.

Kyosuke's choice was probably more realistic than most people give credit for.

It's not just Amazon.com......

Chikorita157 received a big box in the mail:

Seriously Amazon, do we need such a big box to ship a keyboard protector for the Macbook Pro? I thought you are about saving the environment? With a box that big, i’m expecting a dakimakura or something.

Its not just Amazon.com. Hobby Search is equally guilty of putting small goods into impossibly big boxes. I've seen the packaging weigh more than the item itself. Through it has to be said that Amazon packages tend to fit into mailboxes too well at times.

Ostensibly its to protect the goods in transit, but no amount of padding can save any purchase from the horrors of the Malaysian postal system. And I'm not talking about Pos Malaysia either.

CLANNAD Clocks

Aka "What I found on Youtube this week"

There's actually an alarm clock that features the seiyuu of Nagisa (Nakahara Mai), Kyou (Hirohashi Ryou) and Tomoyo (Kuwashima Houko):


Nagisa.


Kyou.


Tomoyo.

Maybe if it had Kotomi (Noto Mamiko) I might consider waking up, but I'm a man of simple needs. I'll settle for Kuwashima Houko to wake me up.

Twitter Gems, part 18

Sometimes, it feels like Hobby Search, AmiAmi et al are the biggest sources of foreign investment into Japan.

Bandila

One interesting thing about living in a multi-cultural society like Australia is having a "multicultural" television station like SBS. And having SBS broadcast news bulletins from other countries.

While I don't understand most of them (save for the ones from CCTV Beijing and TVRI Jakarta), it is always fascinating to see how different cultures present their news.

The opening sequence of Bandila from ABS-CBN Manila has to take the cake through:



And its not like Bandila is some crummy commercial tabloid news program either. It seems it is actually a rather respectable news program, where one of its journalist has actually experienced the perils of being a journo in the Philippines: being kidnapped.

You got to admit through, their presentation is amazing. When I first saw this I didn't believe I was watching a news program.

I can't stop laughing at this piece of news

The Borneo Post, 7 November 2010

Hang on: A (Malaysian) solider robbing tourists?!

KLIA's (Permanent) LCCT

The Star, 14 March 2009

11 March 2009: With some issues on the table, it is questionable whether the new LCCT can be built by 2011.

13 March 2009: [Managing director of Malaysia Airports Berhad Datuk Seri Bashir Ahmad] said in a media briefing today that the target completion date for the new LCCT, estimated to cost RM2 billion, is some time in the third quarter of 2011.

3 May 2010: The PLCCT is expected to be completed between September 2011 and March 2012. It will have a capacity of 30 million passengers or double the capacity of the present LCCT.

30 August 2010: The targeted completion date for the new LCCT, estimated to cost RM2 billion, is April 2012 based on a 20-month construction period.

Mark your diaries people. Let's just hope it doesn't get pushed any further back.

Twitter Gems, part 17

Did no one think to check on them?

Disable reverse DNS lookup for SSH login

One annoying thing I've always had to deal with with SSH was the slight delay between entering the username and password. The real annoying part was knowing the problem, but unable to think of a solution.

As it turns out, the solution to stop SSHd from doing reverse DNS lookups is amazingly simple. Just add:

UseDNS no

to /etc/ssh/sshd_config (for Debian based distributions).

Credit and source here.

News Caption Speaker Identity Fail

ABC News 24, 5pm AEST (+0800), 1 November 2010

Somehow, I just can't quite see Federal Member for Cook having a press conference at Wisma Putra.