Nanataku

Updates written by Keiji

The Team Ikaria Blog

FileMagnet

2011 May 29th

Been a while since my last blog post, hasn't it? This was mainly due to being busy with Uni. Well, Uni is almost over now, so yay.

Team Ikaria's longest-running app, the fileshare, has just entered a new era and been given its own name and website for the first time: FileMagnet.

The main difference is that you can't actually store files on it any more. Instead of being a host, it's now a search engine, building off of our original tag-search algorithm. So far, there's no new features as such, but the codebase has been rewritten from scratch and this will allow features to be added much more easily. Soon, you'll be able to:

Please do check back for when all these features are available!

Oxygen v0.2, Puyo Puyo Mania v0.1 released, new server IP

2010 July 21st

Yes, it's been TWO YEARS since Puyo Puyo Mania version 1.0 was released, and now I'm releasing version 0.1? What is this madness?

Well, that numbering mainly reflects the game's features. The new PPM has far less features available than the old one. However, this is because it's been rewritten from scratch, in C using SDL under the Oxygen environment (as all future TI software projects will be). While .NET PPM had been known to run at a shockingly bad 11 frames per second, require Windows 2000 or above and .NET Framework 3.5, and not even work at all for half the people that tried it, Oxygen PPM has achieved a framerate of around 330 frames per second (that's thirty times faster), and is cross-platform and open source, so it should work on any computer with a C compiler and an SDL implementation.

Puyo Puyo Mania v0.1 has been included with the v0.2 release of Oxygen, which can be downloaded at The Oxygen Project wiki. Also, Tiki is a horrible piece of software. I wish I knew this before I installed it...

Finally, our host Zernebok changed ISPs recently, so we have a new IP. If any TI-related domains are down for you, they should be back up within 3 days.

The serious work begins

2010 April 19th

Well, to be honest, it began a little while ago.

Those who know me well may already know about a project called Oxygen. In simple terms, this is a cut-down version of the Union Desktop Environment (UDE) where everything is implemented with quick-and-dirty code simply because it means the job gets done. Oxygen is written in pure C and relies on nothing but SDL, and is slowly growing to include the tools I need to actually make any serious projects.

I won't reveal much about Oxygen or the Union project yet, though. However, I've decided to base all the games and graphical programs I make on them - which will be (eventually) released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License, so you can look forward to those in the future.

Website Refactoring

2009 November 11th

The old front page was a mess. It was the unfortunate result of change of plans after change of plans, and I never got around to fixing it. Well, now I have! Here's an abridged changelog:

As you might imagine, all of the above are relatively small changes for the better, which will help future updates to the site - stay tuned! :3

Nanako 2.1

2009 October 29th

I am exhausted.

Why you ask? Because all of yesterday I was doing quite some hardware modding involving transplanting hard disks.

Of course, this involved reinstalling both c2007 and c2009's operating systems; c2007 simply runs Linux Mint, which was easy to install, but c2009 ran the Windows 7 Release Candidate, which is why I waited until now, when I could go buy the real thing and install it properly. I'm also going to have to reinstall c2008 quite soon due to Vista not liking the reorganization mentioned below, but it's been in need of that for quite a while anyway.

As for Nanako herself, not only has the total disk space increased but the entire filesystem structure has been redesigned to increase security, improve the automatic backup process, and improve organization across the network.

Kawachan 1.5

2009 September 22nd

Earlier this year I posted about Rageboard, which would replace MediaWiki, the wiki software that Kawachan runs on. There's been a change of plans recently though, meaning that instead of developing Rageboard from scratch, I'm just going to integrate all the features it would add into MediaWiki. As you may know, I had already started doing this before the name "Rageboard" was even thought up, and today I implemented the Rageboard theme into it. I've decided to dub this "Kawachan 1.5", as it's not quite version 2 yet, but it's certainly getting there.

In other news, I've decided to abandon Project Nanako and other big projects. All my life I've announced something big and awesome and it never got far, so it's about time I stopped doing that. I shall concentrate on smaller projects that I can get done, and are actually useful.

Vocaloid fans, I apologise that I haven't ripped any songs at all since my last blog post. And unfortunately, I just noticed a stupid, embarassing bug in the request code: when it says your request has been sent, all it really did was duplicate the last line in the requests file. Well, this has been fixed (by a one-word change), and I promise you a total of 300 Vocaloid songs by the end of the year.

Goodbye Yoda!

2009 May 6th

Brief history lesson: on March 22nd this year, I bought a VPS from Zernebok Hosting for $160 per annum. Team Ikaria's shared hosting was $60 per annum, for comparison. Today, however, I have successfully moved everything hosted on Yoda (the shared server) onto Gollum (the VPS). There was a bit of downtime for TI, but everything's fixed now - and more importantly, everything's going at lightning speed.

What's happening at the moment, you ask? Most importantly, I'm developing a new web software called Rageboard. This is currently a wiki, written completely from scratch and motivated by the complete suckiness of MediaWiki, but there are plans to merge in the Team Ikaria Fileshare and Nanako Resource Browser too. This blog may also start using the Rageboard software as progress continues.

Next on the list of things to talk about, I do believe I mentioned completing "various .NET programs" early this year. Well, that hasn't happened, and isn't going to happen, with one possible exception which I may go into detail on if it ever gets started. As mentioned above, Rageboard is the current project, and once that's finished, I'll be moving on to writing Project Nanako - in pure C, using SDL and OpenGL. That's a much better idea than .NET.

Also, we got up to 251 Vocaloid songs on the NRB so far. There's still plenty of new songs to add and a huge backlog of requests - don't worry, I'll get to them eventually! I've simply had many many more important things to do than ripping songs lately.

Finally, there's one last little change that Gollum brought - the Nanako URL http://nanako.teamikaria.com/ now no longer redirects to Zapto! The Zapto URL will still always be available, as the nameserver at Gollum polls it to make dynamic IP updating easier for me, but you should use the aforementioned URL whenever possible.

Here's to a Happy New Year 2009

2008 December 31st

Wow, I almost forgot about nanataku! Good job I saw the link while clicking lots of links on TI to make sure everything worked.

Sadly, Blogger is continuing to be annoying, so I'm resorting to doing this the good old-fashioned way - plain HTML.

So, what is in store to celebrate the new year? The Nanako Resource Browser! It's not yet at all finished, but it now works properly for Vocaloid media, bringing back the functionality of the TIVC which... kinda broke when I went on a reorganization rampage a week or so ago. Filters and sorting aren't in yet, but don't worry - they'll be there soon! The browser will also work great for other types of media, like pictures, music and torrents.

Once again, the past year was the best yet with lots of accomplishments. Let's look forward to what 2009 may bring us. We should hopefully complete various .NET programs early next year, and realistic big releases later on look like Puyo Puyo Mania, Sonic & Knuckles 2 and Project Nanako.

New icon style and MORE Vocaloid!

2008 July 28th

This is probably the fourth time I've said to myself something along the lines of, "wow! That looks so much better than before! This is how you make good icons!" but hey. I decided to ditch the half-gradients on top of everything and add alpha-gradient inner highlights instead. And it really does look better. You'll notice the new icons on the front page and the Vocaloid Collection for now, but as always, they could end up anywhere.

Speaking of Vocaloid (and to quickly copy-paste from 43 Things), I’m now on 169 songs. I’ve also renovated the Rating column, to include separate ratings for music and vocals, and also added icons representing “epicness”, type (unknown/game/video/standalone/original/arrangement) and language. I’m thinking of adding a stats page and some more filter options too.

Say hello to Puyo Puyo Mania

2008 June 24th

The front page explains all!

Puyo Puyo Mania has been in development for a while, and unlike most things, I've finally gotten to a point where I know I can finish it, so I figured I'd make use of the up til now near-empty front page. Of course, it's really just a redirect to /ppm/, so that I won't have to move everything later on and confuse search engines.

I also took the opportunity to reorganize my minor tools for the world to see and use.

Nanako 2.0

2008 June 11th

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS came out earlier this year, and pretty soon afterwards, the 6.10 version which I had been using almost ever since its release had sadly stopped being supported. Thus, I decided it was time to upgrade all four Linux computers in the house. Nanako was the last to be upgraded, as the process was much more complicated in her case due to her being the server (for the rest, everything was moved to Nanako prior to the upgrade, which involved wiping the disk).

However, I bought a new 80 GB hard disk (the smallest you can get these days... jeez XD) and added it to her current 500 GB one. Aside from the palava of moving everything off of the 500 GB disk on to three other computers and then back on again afterwards, one of those being my dad's laptop, everything went fairly smoothly, and I managed to make the 80 GB disk the boot one so that any future upgrades will not need any files to be moved around and thus should go really quickly.

A positive side-effect of all this is that backups can now be done from one disk to the other (anime and music takes up most of the space - this won't be backed up as it's less important and can be redownloaded anyway), so that if one disk has a failure, we'll still have all the data.

Yet more Vocaloid stuff going on

2008 May 5th

http://nanako.teamikaria.com/vocaloid/

In an attempt to organize this better, I've generalized it from Miku to all Vocaloid songs, and added a Singer column and a filter form so you can choose whichever combination of singers you want. 99% of the songs are still Miku, though, since she's just awesome like that. Another new feature is the Rating column, which shows (on a scale from X to crown) how much I personally like the song. I don't particularly want to add a voting system right now, or it might start getting ridiculous.

The old /hm/ link still works just fine - it automatically adds the filter to only show Miku songs, too.

By the way, don't worry about the date modifieds - Winamp messed them up ;_; I've now changed all of the songs to read-only and owned by a user called "vocaloid", so that won't be happening again no matter what.

HM collection version 2.0!

2008 April 25th

http://nanako.teamikaria.com/hm/ again... Now with moar PHP!

As is, it's the exact same as before - but if you click the new "Show extended info" link, it will display song albums, lengths and sources. As always, feel free to suggest corrections or additions in comments.

Miku-tan's own page :3

2008 April 22nd

http://nanako.teamikaria.com/hm/

Yeah, this is what I've been working on today.

Now you can download all the Hatsune Miku songs you want for free right off of Nanako! We'll be adding more every now and again, so be sure to check often (hint: you can click the down arrow on the date modified column to put the newest ones at the top).

Also, it's valid XHTML! Not even any warnings this time. Hooray!

First real post

2008 April 20th

Wow, it's been a long day...

So, say hello to nanataku! Any time I come up with something new, it'll end up here for the world to see. Hopefully it will be put to good use. Remember to use the permanent links (click the time the post was made to get it) for linking, and always start URLs with http://nanako.teamikaria.com/, not http://nanako.zapto.org/, even though the latter may well be in the address bar.