Things began to change in 1979 however, with the premiere of Mobile Suit Gundam. With it’s character-driven stories, blurred lines between villians and heroes and robots that had at least some kind of “science” behind them. Despite being a commercial flop, it made a massive impression on the genre, much like Neon Genesis Evangelion would two decades later. Gundam would go on to become a juggernaut-like franchise, but what came in it’s wake was far more interesting. Specifically one creator, Ryousuke Takahashi and the genre he pioneered, real robot. And no, I’m not talking about this guy.

It’s quite easy to distinguish a real robot show from one of the earlier, super robot type shows. If the mechs are clunky, prone to breaking down and are mass produced like tanks for use in some kind of military context, chances are you’ve got yourself a real robot show. On the other hand, if the pilot is fond of screaming out every attack in a manner that makes their throat bleed, then you’re probably watching a super robot show.

Like so many creators who made big impacts on anime and manga, Takahashi cut his teeth working in Mushi Pro under that towering figure, Osamu Tezuka. After Mushi imploded in the mid 1970s, several of it’s ex-employees formed Sunrise Inc. – Takahashi soon joined his former co-workers. The massive bank of talent that Sunrise had at its disposal would go on to produce most of the shows that would define the next two decades of anime, including the Gundam saga. But the quality was really kicked up a notch when Takahashi was brought on board to produce some follow up series that were intended to ride the wave of Gundam’s popularity in the early 1980s.

Whilst he did work on various mecha shows that certainly aren’t in the real robot genre, such as the brilliant Panzer World Galient and the equally badass SPT LayZner – which I must talk about at some point – Takahashi is known for pioneering the real robot genre with two shows; Fang of the Sun Dougram and Armoured Trooper Votoms.

I just finished watching Dougram recently, thanks to the sterling work of X-Nebula. It’s quite a ride, Dougram is really unlike any mech show I’ve ever seen before and I’m surprised that it’s gotten basically zero exposure in the english speaking world, apart from some toys and model kits that briefly surfaced in the 1980s.

The setup of Dougram concerns one Crinn Cashim, scion of a very wealthy family who’s father is the head of one of the main political power blocks on Earth. In the future, Earth has some pretty serious overpopulation and resource problems and has become extremely dependent on one of it’s colony planets, Deloyer, for the majority of it’s raw materials. All the various Earth factions and corporate interests are playing some shady political games in order to control the lions share of Deloyer’s wealth and not surprisingly, the citizens of Deloyer would rather run their own affairs so various rebel groups have sprung up. Crinn, a very idealistic youth somewhat reminiscent of Che Guevara, encounters some young Deloyerans on Earth and is sympathetic to their cause, so much so that when he joins the Earth army and is posted to Deloyer, he hooks up with the rebels and steals a prototype mecha, Dougram, in the process.

Man, that’s only the first 3 episodes or so, before we even get into the various bits of drama that befall the Cashim family and the sheer amount of backstabbing that goes on between the rebels and the Earth governments. It’s not quite LoGH territory, but story wise it blows nearly every other mech show out of the water.

I’d hesitate to even call Dougram a robot show. Sure, Dougram itself is a central part of the plot but the show could nearly be described as a political or family drama that happens to have giant robots in it.

After completing Dougram, Sunrise commissioned Takahashi to produce another real robot show, Armoured Trooper Votoms. This really cemented the genre, gaining a loyal fanbase in the process. It also did away with most of the heavy military plot points that were present in Dougram, which probably made Votoms accessible to a much wider audience.

Towards the end of a centuries-long war, our main character, Chirico Cuvie – what is it with protagonists with the initials C.C.? – gets screwed over and left for dead by his army unit, a particularly nasty bunch who are out to steal as much stuff as they can in the aftermath of the war. He escapes and makes his way to a “wretched hive of scum and villainy” called Woodoo city – complete with its own band of roving biker thugs. There, he hooks up with bunch of people with questionable morals, fabulous afros and parachute pants, in order to take on his former commanders, some of whom are now in charge of Woodoo City, and find the answers to some strange things he saw right before he was betrayed and left to drift in space.

When you are used to the usual robot show protagonist, Chirico is a complete departure. Votoms continued and expanded upon, the political themes established in Dougram, being more focused and adding an element of a character driven by revenge but also the niggling feeling that there’s something not quite right about his existence.

The Votom robots themselves are interesting in that we normally see only one design throughout the entire series, perhaps one may appear with a different colour scheme, but they are largely uniform. There’s no “RX-ZZ-2000-Hyper-Votom”, success or failure is entirely up to the skill and wits of the pilot. Also, they’re prone to breaking down like a 1980s Alfa Romeo. Indeed, Chirico spends the majority of the first few episodes repairing one he found lying on a scrapheap.

After the original 52 episode run, Votoms ended up being a bigger hit than Dougram and continues to be popular to this day, with several movies, series and OVAs being produced including a spinoff show, Armor Hunter Mellowlink – the protagonist in this one is so badass he doesn’t even need a robot, going head to head with Votom suits armed only with an improbably-sized gun. A Korean animation company thought Votoms was so good in fact, that they lifted the suit designs for the eh, unique, Micro Commando Diatron V!

Takahashi would go on to direct a string of mech shows throughout the 80s and on into the 90s, right up until the present day. Some of these were a complete departure from the real robot genre, such as the aforementioned Panzer World Galient. He also worked on plenty non-mecha projects with a military theme, such as the OVA adaption of the submarine drama, Silent Service and an episode of the fantastic WWII OVA, The Cockpit. In 1998, he would revisit the real robot genre with Gasaraki, which is something I actually haven’t seen yet.

So what’s he been up to recently? Well apart from lecturing students on the business of making a successful anime series and directing lots more Votoms, he also worked on a 13 episode adaption of his old mentor Osamu Tezuka’s classic work, Phoenix, and most recently a collaboration with Space Battleship Yamato co-creator Leiji Matsumoto; Ozuma.

One thing I noticed when going through the list of variables output by facter was that no IPv6 address information was being reported. This was a bit of a roadblock as the majority of our systems are dual-stacked (IPv4 and IPv6), with many configuration files needing to know what IPv6 addresses to listen on. Whilst an ipaddress6 fact was added to facter 1.59, I’m working with a somewhat older version of Puppet (0.25) and Facter (1.56), these both ship with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS so I’d rather stick with them if at all possible, rather than resorting to a backports repository.

Luckily, the puppet guide provided a quick solution – custom facts. It was a simple matter of grabbing the relevant code from github and dropping it into a directory in the $FACTERLIB path. Running the facter command will now print out an ipaddress6 variable:

 $ facter ipaddress6
 2001:6f8:900:909::2

Of course, this only makes the fact available to the environment you are testing on. If you are running a puppetmaster server, you’ll need to follow the guide to distributing plugins as modules if you want to distribute the fact around your network. This can be done on a per-module basis, or globally as a top-scope variable by creating a skeleton module with a blank init.pp and the ipaddress6.rb file in the lib/facter directory.

To test if the variable is available, add the following to your site.pp manifest on the puppetmaster server:

 class puppet_v6_marker {
      file {
            '/tmp/puppet-v6':
            ensure => present,
            mode   => 600,
            owner  => root,
            content => $::ipaddress6,
            group  => root
      }
}

include puppet_v6_marker

Your puppet clients should now output their IPv6 address to /tmp/puppet-v6.

This film has been panned by numerous reviewers, usually as the most boring thing they’d ever seen. There are stories of people at screenings of Odin writhing in physical pain on the floor after an hour, some anime cons have even run “I Survived Odin” events with free tshirts for those brave souls who stuck it out till the end.

So, naturally, I thought it would be great to watch of a Saturday evening.

The first thing that strikes you about Odin is that it looks really good. Superb, in fact. The animation was obviously high budget fare. They’d also assembled a great cast of voice actors (Norio Wakamoto, woo!) and some talented directors are involved. But, that’s where things start to fall apart; directors, plural. No less than *three* different directors are involved in this film and multiple scriptwriters each with their own visions, whims and style. Not good. Too many cooks spoil the broth.

The plot involves a new class of “photon sailer” (laser/light powered) space ship that will be exploring beyond the bounds of the solar system for the first time. With a crew of hot-shot, MacGyver-esque geniuses who seem capable of solving any problem but spend most of their time running around the ship high-fiving each other whilst hair-metal from 1985′s chart toppers, Loudness, blasts away in the background. Shortly into their maiden voyage, they receive a distress call from a space liner in the asteroid belt that’s under attack from some kind of robotic destructo-thing which is quite hostile to any form of life. The only survivor is a nordic princess who helps decipher a data crystal she has in her posession, which may contain a map showing the way to a civilisation called Odin…or, not. Christ knows.

It’s hard to recall exactly what happens in the 2+ hours running time of this film, because you start getting a mild concussion at the 00:30:00 mark. Then everything becomes a blur of the crew pressing switches, warping, running around the ship, running around an alien ship, pressing more switches and pulling levers, warping again, running around the ship again. Rinse, repeat.

Odin is very typical of the mid to late 80s anime boom, when every hair brained idea for an OVA or movie got millions of yen thrown at it. It was also, famously and quite obviously, part of producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki’s failed attempt to restart the Space Battleship Yamato franchise in various forms. It was even dubbed into english and released here and in the US as Odin: Starlight Mutiny, albeit with about 45 minutes (mercifully) removed.

So as a historical curiousity/train wreck, perhaps the anime equivalent of the David Lynch Dune movie, it might be worth a look. Otherwise, leave it on the shelf and back slowly away.

With IPv6 on Linux, things aren’t so straightforward. Duplicate Address Detection (DAD), which basically does what it says on the tin, introduces a short delay before addresses are fully configured, the address has been added to the network interface, but not really.

I recently came across this whilst attempting to get BIND to listen on some secondary service addresses on a particular machine. BIND would not er, bind, to the IPv6 addresses at boot, failing with messages like this:

bind9 could not listen on UDP socket: address not available

Modifying /etc/init.d/bind9 to print the output of “ip addr show” to a file at the time BIND attempted to start up showed the tell-tale “tentative” flag on each IPv6 address being added to eth0. Since the addresses are in this state, BIND or other daemons will refuse to listen on them.

The problem has become very noticeable since parallel boot systems such as Upstart have become the default in quite a few Linux distros. Daemons will often fire up before the network is fully ready and in some extreme cases network filesystems that reference hostnames may fail to mount if you are using an IPv6 DNS resolver. Of course this isn’t the case across the board, some daemons and services appear to handle the unavailability of an IPv6 address somewhat gracefully, backing off and trying again a short time later rather than simply giving up on the first go.

Anyway, a simple “hairy hack” to get over this problem is to add something like the following to your startup script:

sleep 5

Yes, a one line sleep command to make the daemon wait a short while before actually starting. This seems to ensure that the IPv6 address has moved out of the tentative state, but it’s still somewhat silly..

At Eirtakon this year I presented a panel on a particular interest of mine, awful anime dubbing. It’s one of these things that always gets a good few laughs, especially when you present clips of some anime dubs that, whether through accident or design, are just hilariously inept, completely nonsensical, or downright offensive.

Quite a few people approached me after the panel and asked could they have copies of the clips I played. Since all of them are actually available on youtube, I thought I’d post some of the highlights here.

So we start off with some of the attempts that companies localising anime made to translate the opening for a particular show. Some of these were valiant attempts, others were just epically bad.

• Bow-chika-wow! This opening was recorded by Mark Mercury, a “space, electronic, electro-acoustic, ambient, cinematic” musician”. From the 70s (in case you hadn’t noticed).

  Captain Harlock – English Opening

• Soldiers of warlords from deep space! Before Robotech, Harmony Gold produced a “concept” english dub of Macross entitled Space Fortress Macross. You have to love the way this song describes the plot of the entire show. Which is a recurring theme…

  Space Fortress Macross – English Opening

• Seijushi Bismarck is a funky little show with robotic, rocket powered horses. It was brought over to the states and retitled Saber Rider and The Star Sheriffs:

  Seijushi Bismarck
  Saber Rider and The Star Sheriffs

• So here’s the original Japanese opening to a show called Ninja Senshi Tobikage, remember the tune because you’ll hear it again in a second.. NINJA ROBOTS! NINJA ROBOTS! This has it all. You have to hand it to them, they did a great job of summarising the entire show and re-using the melody of the original OP.

  Ninja Senshi Tobikage
  Ninja Robots

• Back in the 80s, the fantastic film Macross: Do You Remember Love was chopped to bits, given a comedy dub in Hong Kong and released as Clash Of The Bionoids. Check out these clips of “jet jockey in action”.

  Clash Of The Bionoids – Dating Advice
  Clash Of the Bionoids – Chauvenism
  Clash Of the Bionoids – Alcoholism

• Some brilliantly awful clips from the Ziv dub of Harlock.

  Harlock – I think it’s a woman!
  Harlock – Zetons

• I’m a sugar frosted donut…. with cream:

  20 short clips from Dangaioh

• The dub isn’t the only amazing thing about Black Lion, it was created by Go Nagai after all, but it does complete the experience:

  Why you should see Black Lion right now

• Wow, just wow. Tecno Police is the archetypal example of the early 80s Hong Kong chop job. Originally planned as a series but then abandoned, the remaining footage was cobbled together and released as a movie in the UK. Some interesting people who would go on to much greater things worked on it, including Toshimichi Suzuki (Bubblegum Crisis) Joe Hisaishi (composer for many Ghibli films) and Shoji Kawamori (Macross). Thankfully, it sank without a trace:

  Tecno Police – Best dub ever!

• Whilst Transformers finished its original run over here, in Japan it kept going with disastrous results. Yet another HK dub for the SE Asia and UK markets. There were also quite a few bizarre name changes – Metroplex is called “Phillip”, and Fortress Maximus is known as “Spaceship Bruce” :/

  Transformers Headmasters – Sappo the sap
  Transformers Headmasters – Sixshot, the ninja consultant!
  Transformers Headmasters – Everyone is stupid and useless

• It’s impossible to describe what happens in Garzey’s Wing, so I’m not going to try:

  Garzey’s Wing – Comedy gold

• Stopthenonsense! It’s Locke the Superman. This is yet *another* Hong Kong dub for the SE Asia and UK markets. A long-running manga given an even longer OVA treatment between 1984 and 2000, the first OVA was dubbed and released as Locke the Superpower:

  Locke the Superpower

• In the early 90s, many anime importers got into the habit of inserting copious amounts of swearing into their dubs in order to bump the rating up to 15 or 18. A cynical person would say it played up to the then prevalent tabloid image of anime as “violent japanese porno cartoons”, but that would be ridiculous! Here’s a selection of some of the more extreme examples:

  Violence Jack makes an entrance!
  Legend of the Overfiend
  Cyber City Oedo 808 condensed
  Mad Bull condensed

So that about sums it up… or does it? If you find this kind of thing hilarious, I recommend you check out Bad American Dubbing from the Corn Pone Flicks guys, or Mike Tool’s Dubs That Time Forgot panels. I stole some of my funnier content from these guys

DNSViz shows some nice graphs of the delegation chain.

It’s certainly not the most convenient method to make your cup of joe, best approached on a quiet Sunday afternoon, but it does produce an amazingly clean and balanced brew with little to no leftover grit.

Invented in Germany in the 1830s, the Coffee Syphon, also known as the vacuum pot, is one of the older methods of producing coffee. It was actually quite popular in most households up until the 1960s, when more convenient coffee machines and instant coffee appeared on the market. They normally consist of two parts made from heat-resistant glass – a lower flask and an upper chamber with a long glass tube and a rubber seal. When placed together, a seal is created allowing a vacuum to be formed. A filter made from metal or cloth is placed between the upper and lower chambers.

The principle of the device is pretty straightforward. Heat some water in the flask, the water expands up the glass tube into the upper chamber where the coffee grounds reside, allow the brew to steep for a minute or two and remove the heat. The liquid then contracts as it cools and moves back down to the lower chamber, getting filtered on the way.

The particular syphon that I have is a TCA-5 made by Hario of Japan, where these things still seem to be reasonably popular. There are many different possible heat sources, stove-top models also exist, but this particular syphon comes supplied with an alcohol burner that sits below the flask. It consist of a cotton wick and alcohol container, the wick is immersed in the alcohol a few minutes before use. Clean-burning alcohol such as methylated spirits should be used, which can be obtained from most chemists.

The TCA-5 comes with a cotton filter secured to a metal disk. The disk also has a spring-loaded chain that you attach to the bottom of the glass tube of the upper chamber. It’s important not to let the cotton filter dry out after use, otherwise stale coffee flavours will stick around, so I keep it stored in a small lunch box filled with water.

A small clip holds the spring loaded chain to the glass tube. I always try to center the filter in the upper chamber as much as possible, this ensures that no grinds can bypass the filter.

The best grind size for the syphon seems to be something between filter and espresso. Not too fine but not overly coarse either.

I always boil up some water beforehand, you can use the burner to do this but I’d imagine it would take a very long time. The burner is then lit and the upper chamber is placed onto the flask.

Once the flame looks clean (more blue than orange), it’s placed under the flask and the whole apparatus is sealed by pressing the upper chamber and the flask together.

Soon after, the water will quickly shoot up into the upper chamber, creating bubbles and a nice coffee aroma.

Once most of the water is gone from the flask, a very small amount will be left in the bottom, allow the coffee to steep in the upper chamber for a minute and stir it. Then the heat is removed and the vacuum takes over.

Going..

..going

..gone.

Pouring out the coffee.

There’s very little left in the bottom of the cup once the coffee is drunk, especially if you compare this to what’s left after a cup of french press coffee.

Over the past while, I’ve been watching (and re-reading) Phoenix, a sprawling epic by that towering figure of anime and manga, Osamu Tezuka.

I’d read most of the manga a while ago, but I’d not seen any of the anime based on it. Phoenix concerns itself with some pretty lofty themes; birth, death, the meaning of life, mankind’s place in the universe and the quest for immortality. That last one crops up quite a bit.

The titular Phoenix is the classic fire bird that is reborn from the ashes, common to many mythologies both western and eastern – it’s called Hi-no-Tori (bird of fire) in Japanese. Throughout the chronology of Phoenix, which spans eons, the bird appears many times. Oftentimes to advise people, influence the development of life, observe or comment on man’s folly. It is also an object of desire for people throughout time, as it is said that drinking it’s blood will give one immortality. As it turns out, those that do achieve this suffer the most of all.

It’s hard to pin down what the Phoenix represents, it refers to itself many times as a galactic spirit, other times as one aspect of the life force of the universe. In any case, it is instrumental at key points throughout history.

Tezuka began work on Phoenix in the mid 60s and continued to write it up until his death in 1989. He had intended to tie all aspects of the story, past, present and future, in the final chapter – unfortunately it remained unfinished. Phoenix contained a lot of experimental artwork and themes that were very advanced for the time, so it was initially published in Tezuka’s “out there” magazine, COM. The manga has been released in english by viz and is collected into 12 volumes. I’ve managed to get 11 of these, however volume 4 seems to have fallen off the face of the planet and is extremely difficult to find.

In terms of adaptations, the first was actually a live action version, from 1978, of the Dawn chapter (volume 1 in the viz release). This is a *really* odd film, it appears very much like it was made by students and was obviously done on the cheap – locations range from some kind of rural cottage, grass huts and what appears to be an abandoned gravel quarry. It also mixes live action with anime in parts – Astro Boy even makes an appearance at one point!. Despite it’s strangeness, it’s very faithful to the source material. As an aside, the subtitles on the copy that I have are hilariously bad in parts.

The first anime adaption came along in 1980, Phoenix 2772: Ai no CosmoZone, released in english as Space Firebird (very imaginative translation there guys). I’ve not seen this in it’s entirety, but from the few clips I have seen it looks extremely impressive, especially for the time.

The english dub is also amusing, it was one of those cheapo dubs that were oh so common in the 80s, done with British actors that didn’t bother to disguise their regional accents.

In the late 80s, 3 OVAs were produced, based on the Karma, Yamato and Space chapters. Directed by Rintarou, I think these convey very strongly the essence of Phoenix with high quality animation and an extremely atmospheric electronic score. If you only watched one Phoenix series, I would suggest this.

Finally, in 2004, a 13 episode series was released. This was directed by Ryousuke Takahashi (he of Votoms, Dougram and Gasaraki fame) and covers the Dawn, Resurrection, Strange Beings, Sun and Future chapters. Whilst this was a very impressive series for the most part, I felt that they took too many liberties with certain chapters – in some cases totally changing the setting and cutting out massive chunks of the story in order to fit things in. For this reason I was left with the impression that the latter half of the series was somewhat rushed, it would have worked better if they’d covered a smaller number of chapters in the same amount of episodes.

All in all, this is a monumental series from one of the greats of anime and manga – Tezuka called it his “life’s work”. If you are up for something that will fascinate, amuse, surprise, shock and promote some interesting debate on the nature of existence, Phoenix is really worth a look.

My previous attempts at signing spoofedpacket.net fell into disrepair and the zone expired soon afterwards, since I was doing everything manually. However, the whole lot is automatically managed by OpenDNSSEC now, apart from the KSK rollover of course. But there are some clever things you can do to fix that, with the DelegationSignerSubmitCommand.

So here’s the current trust anchor for spoofedpacket.net in DNSKEY format, and in
DS format.

Unfortunately, joker (my registrar) don’t appear to be accepting DS records at this point. So neither of the above are in the wider DNS even though .net is now signed. However, I did register mechazawa.net with godaddy, who are currently accepting DS records through their somewhat clunky interface.

This has worked fine, until I enabled the signed root in Unbound. Suddenly, the entire local zone was being treated as bogus, since, obviously, it appears nowhere in the root. This was manifested as SERVFAIL responses and general badness on the network – including my NAS losing it’s DHCP address whilst I was watching an episode of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood….not good.

After scanning down through the sample unbound.conf, a simple solution presented itself:

 domain-insecure: "localdomain"

This tells unbound to put up with the fact that a particular domain may be bogus/insecure, and life goes on. It could be argued that it’s not a good idea to let some domains be treated differently than others when it comes to DNSSEC, but I think it’s good that the developers of Unbound had the presence of mind to include a solution to this particular corner-case.