The differences can be summed up as such; that Chinese is heavy and messy, that Korean looks alien like and that Japanese is lighter, sometimes much lighter, than Chinese.

You’d be forgiven if you thought that ‘alien like’ and ‘lighter’ are too subjective to be useful.  My use of these terms is by no means scientific nor standard, but it is descriptive, and likely a bit derogatory. Fear not, a more complete and useful description is provided later, but first I should explain to more depth.

Since Chinese is the basis from which Korean and Japanese have evolved it would be logical to start with it.

范丽青：前两天已经公布过一个两岸新增航点以及春节增加航班班次的新闻。尽管春运期间空运资源异常紧张，而且京沪穗深的机场也异常繁忙，但是大陆民航业务主管部门还是想方设法来尽量满足两岸同胞春节期间往返两岸走亲访友和旅游休闲对航空的需求。 Courtesy of  news.workercn.cn

Notice how ‘cluttered’ or ‘dense the text is. Beyond that there is not anything discernable about Chinese other than it is not Japanese or Korean. Someone with an understanding of the characters would of course take issue with my description since a more accurate term would be ‘detailed’.

Now compare the density of Chinese with the light, less dense, text of Japanese.

通常必殺技をはるかに上回る威力を持つ、スーパーコンボ。これよりも強力な超必殺技が、”ウルトラコンボ”だ！　今回入手した写真は、リュウのウルトラコンボ。ド派手な演出からくり出される波動拳の強化版といったところだろうか。体力ゲージが一気に半分くらい減っている点も見逃せない！ Courtesy of Famitsu.com

The important factor is that Japanese uses both the Chinese characters and the かな, whiten in the Roman alphabet as ‘kana’.  The kana are extreme simplifications of certain Chinese characters and instead of carrying meanings as the Chinese characters do, they represent sounds, much like the English Alphabet. They are used for Japanese invented words and words from for foreign languages such as English. The kana are thin and comparable to the English alphabet in density. A general rule of thumb for telling Japanese apart from Chinese is to look for areas of high density, the Chinese characters, followed by areas of light density, the kana.  To achieve a better understanding you will likely have to study the kana, it is not hard to learn them but it is a bit pointless unless you are also studying Japanese as a whole.

Finally last and the easiest, Korean.

복수노조 허용 및 전임자 임금지급 금지 등 노조법을 두고 30일 국회 환경노동위원회에서는 고성이 오가는 등 몸싸움이 벌어졌다.  Courtesy of chosun.com

Notice how alien like it is? Okay so you’ll likely want something a bit more concrete, that’s perfect, because such a thing exists. Written Korean contains circles. If you can remember that then you are set. Neither Chinese nor Japanese texts will ever contain circles. In fact the closest thing Chinese and Japanese have for circles, are squares. This is caused by stroke rules which do not allow the curves needed to make a circle. Convenient eh?

So perhaps a more complicated yet more useful general rule would be that Japanese has periods of density followed by less dense areas, that Korean contains circles and that Chinese is neither Japanese nor Korean.

• The new parts:

Only the motherboard and the Trendnet switch were bought from Newegg, the rest I had already bought from NCIX.

The gigabit switch (TEG-S50G) combined with the gigabit integrated NICs in the server’s new motherboard and desktop will finally give me a gigabit connection. I have also used the switch to segregate the three  hubs on the network, although this is not a big deal since the vast majority of traffic is between the desktop and server.  I do hope to change this and setup a backup system for the house’s laptops as well.

While I have no clue as to the electrical merits of this power supply, a Antec Earthwatts 500W, it is from a brand name I trust and what reviews I read gave it great praise. One thing I do know is that it has a ton of connectors, I can only wish I had as many SATA drives as this thing has SATA power cables.  Its also a 80+ rated power supply which is nice since this server is on twenty four seven.

The mother board is a  ECS A740GM-M, I choose this one because it was the cheapest shipped with a gigabit nic and has plenty of SATA ports.  One down side is that I had to go down to two gigabytes of RAM since it only had two DIMM sockets.  This hopefully will not be an issue since the server never went over 1.4 gigabytes before.

• The disasembly:

Before shot:

Half way shot:

Before wiring:

Completed:

Over all everything was really uneventful. The only program I ran into was that the motherboard maker, ECS Elitegroup, in an attept to make the motherboard as multilingual as possible did not mark the power on, restart and LED plugs on the board itself. Instead they provided a large cheat sheet in Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and a few others including English if you can find it. All this and they still only call the plugs by their abbreviated English names like “PWR” plus a translated introduction to what it actually is. Basically why they did not simply print it on the motherboard is beyond me.

• Trouble shooting:

Now onto the fun part, its not as if something would ever work just the way you want it to right out of the box eh? This time though the configuration issues were minor which may just be that I’m getting better at this.  I opted to reuse the Windows installation from before the rebuild since even though I have read posts otherwise I have never had an issuse running windows with changed hardware.  Once I booted the computer up Windows started searching for drivers. It found what it needed for everything except the integrated Ethernet. Luckily for me I had installed the wireless drivers for my wireless dongle a while ago.  So I check the NIC’s id from the device manager and feed it to google. The first search result was some find-all-drivers program, with a free trial, I skiped that.  Next result had the drivers with a direct download link. I grabed that and tried to install it, the installer ran but nothing came up. I moved on but then I notice something, there were two Windows security icons.  I already knew that this was a tactic of scareware, my suspicion is confirmed soon when one of the icons informs me that I have been infected with a “virus” no less.  First thing I did was of course pull out the wireless dongle, without internet access I have plenty of time.  Next I killed the proces, a 123643.exe, seriously why would someone use such a unique name, no other process ever uses a random string of numbers.  Then I go into msconfig and untick the autostartup, I also take a look in program files but in this case the programmer was not as obvious. I then rebooted the system. All that is left now besides some never to be executed binaries is the server’s new desktop wall paper. It looks kind of cool I must say although I will never see it since I always RDP into the headless server with wallpapers turned off: After that I got back to looking for the driver and fianlly found it on ECS’s website.  For some reason only the audio drivers and new bios show up when you search the downloads section for this motherboard, you have to go to the motherboard’s product page to find the other drivers. All this and later I find that there was a driver CD hidden inside the manual.

The next problem to fix is the fans. For some reason the case fan and the cpu fan which both plug directly into the motherboard are always on high. Turns out even though the BIOs lists fan settings none of them do anything, the fans always get max voltage. I also tried speedfan, while the fans may have been loud they were doing a great job, the cpu was running at 29 Celsius. Although I do suspect the motherboards heat sensors to be a little, off, temp sensor three was apparently at negative one hundred and thirty two.  My solution to this annoying bug was to replace the heatsinks fan with a larger one that would run much quieter at the same voltage and to unplug the case fan.

Now all that is left is to hook up the TV Tuner but I’ll leave that. So here is the finished product my “server” room in all its techy glory:

Which brings me to my next failure, I just woke up today to find that my computer would not turn on.  Turns out my Silver Stone strider is striding on its last legs and that it sometimes makes a “pop” then it has to be turned off at the back for a minute or so. I’m going to take a risk with this and use it until the Earthwatts I ordered arrives, I can only pray that it does not blow up and take other hardware with it.  Especially now that I do not have a backup. What I think I will do is turn it off at the back when it is not in use.

My speakers and keyboard also have seen better days, I’ve leave them.  Really all this can be attributed to the fact that I got off the upgrade wagon, I like my new found frugality.

PS: I see that the foam on my secondary chair’s arm rest is splitting, I’ll leave it until I can justify buying a really nice chair.

This mess was, in my opinion a result of out first attempts at maps.   You see when Sid Meier’s Railroads was first released there was no SDK, that didn’t stop us and as such Dwax was the first to made a map based soley off of reverse enginering the games files.  Ok so saying that makes it sound harder then it was, after all the game used primarly XML and hightmaps.  The fact that the game shared an engine with Sid Meier’s cizilization and Oblivion also meant that there were a number of tools we could use for the models.

The problems mostly came from the conflicts between the XMLs. This was only compounded by the fact that Sid Meier’s Railroads istelf before the patches was bugy and had a nasty tendency to crash to desktop(CTD).   Making it very hard to tell apart a mappers error or “normal” gmae crash.  With that said thanks to efforts to standardize our use of the XMLs we were able to make maps work together some of the time.

By this point we had a wealth of maps but many of them would not work together, a big stumbling block for new users.  This lead me to suggest Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental(SMRI) with the goal of making a all in one map pack.  All a user would need to do was install and play.  I am actually surprised that Sid Meier’s Railroads Intercontinental got off the ground, really all the thanks goes to Atani and Snoopy who put work into the installer and maps and managed to get ~20 maps together.   In the end we got it out in time for Sid Meier’s Railroads one year anniversary.

After that we got one minor patch out before we left it all alone.  At the time it was my intenention to make a sequel.  That just never happened though and now its nearly two years later and I say for sure that it will not, well atleast not by my hands anyway.

I guess I should these two bits of knowledge, there are two known bugs from what I can rememeber.

1. Sid Meier’s Railroads must have been luanched at least once before you go to install Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental. It works this way because Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental must be installed to the “my games” Sid Meier’s Railroads directory which is only created once the game is luanched.  This might create some conflict for users with none defualt home directories.  To get around this simply copy the Sid Meier’s Railroads “my games” folder to where it would be in a defualt configuration, you should then be able to copy and overwrite the folder back to where Sid Meier’s Railroads expects it.
2. The Egypt map has a bug that will cause you to crash to desktop. If I remember right and I likely don’t, this has to do with the XML for one of the goods.

So in closing I will make these points.  That Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental is still the easyiest way for a new player to get new maps that I know of.  As well if anyone is interested in reusing the Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental name for anything Sid Meier’s Railroads related they are welcome to it, just contact me for the Moddb profile and Atani for the website. You must though be serious about this, I still do have an afinity for SMRI.

Anyway thank you everyone who has played Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental, thank you all the mappers who made this possible and thank you Atani and Snoopy.  I really love the time I spent with you all on the forums, maybe I’ll see you guys again.

I would preffer to use Keyhole TV since it has a much larger selection of Japanese, the problem is that there seems to be some anti leaching protection built in since whenever I leave it running over night the station goes “off air”. It jsut might be that the radio stations really are going off line either way though it goes my alarm no good if I wake up to static. This has forced me to use LiveStation and its only working station, FNN.  It is better hen nothing though and I may in future do more research.