My Oracle certificate arrived today. I can now call myself an Oracle9i PL/SQL Developer Certified Associate. At this apprentice skill level, Oracle Associates have a foundation knowledge that will allow them to act as a junior team member working with database administrators or application developers. I am also entitled to use the OCA logo on my resume, business cards, and business proposals to help endorse and promote my blooming career as an Oracle Developer. Now I know how boy scouts feel when they receive a pin or patch to add to their jackets for first aid or fire-building skills. Of course, I had to agree to a six-page license agreement for this logo. It seems to be okay to put in in my weblog. Just to make sure, I hereby declare that I am independent of Oracle, this website does not reflect in any manner negatively on Oracle, I did not translate or localize the logo, nor did I animate or alter it in any way, put it within other shapes or logos, use it in a running copy or a headline, put it at an angle, or made a pattern out logos. The area surrounding the logo is equal to the height of the Oracle Signature and no text or other graphic appears within that area. This page is neither a product splash screen nor a Web-based application. Be warned that you are not allowed to download the logo. Only I am entitled to use it. Hah !

Ingo arrived yesterday. He will stay as an exchange student at Tokyo University for a year. He brought me a loaf of real bread and proved that even though you can take an expensive train in order to get to Narita faster, they will find other ways to waste your time, such as making passengers take about 90 minutes from landing to baggage claim. I wonder if he will be more successful than me at leaving Tokyo again after the year is up ... (Considering that he lives in Berlin, which is significantly closer to Tokyo than Darmstadt, he should be)

Speed Tribes is a collection of twelve pseudo-documentary short-stories, each describing a few days in the lives of young people in Tokyo. The book was written in 1994 with the stated intent to show that Japan is not just the polished and polite paradise of its official portrait. While Speed Tribes is about ten years old now, it is still quite up to date and the adventures of Izumi, the Yakuza bookmaker, Tats, the biker, Dai, the motorcycle thief, Choco and Emi, the porn stars, Keiko, the clubbing girl, Hiro and Yoshihara, the Todai students, Kazu and Hiroko, the drug dealers, Tusk, the hard rock singer, Ozaki, the right-wing fanatic, Jackie, the bar hostess, Moto, the Shibuya small-time criminal, and Snix, the high-tech geek, could happen here every day all over again. Excellent read about contemporary Tokyo.

I have been asked for the list, so here I am, having actually taken my laptop to the toilet to write down the names: The Gallery in the Hall of Fume, from left to right, top to bottom, as of today:

Jay Leno, Martin Verkerk, Larry Ellison, Grace Park, the Japanese Minister of Finance with Bob Sapp, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency with Sesame Street characters, Tony Blair, Fidel Castro with Junichiro Koizumi, Mel Gibson, Nicole Kidman, Kristanna Lokken with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Karl Malone, Michael Ballack, Yao Ming, Daniel Auteuil, John Travolta, a feverish White Supremacy priest, anti-globalisation protestors, Nick Nolte, David Beckham, Californian gubernatorial candidates Mary Carey and Larry Flint, a Japanese dancer at the Asakusa samba carnival, Ronaldo, Bulent Ecevit with his Minister of Defense, Martin Sheen, an Australian hunter with a dead boar, Pete Sampras, a cat, Oliver Kahn, Joschka Fischer and Gerhard Schröder, the climber who freed himself by cutting off his own hand, Robbie Williams with a girl, Jassir Arafat, Venus Williams, an Islamic priest and politician, Keith Richards, Irish EU-supporters, Winona Ryder with her lawyer, Madonna with Pierce Brosnan, Jude Law, Dobbie with Vladimir Putin, Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates with Minnie Mouse, and Andre Agassi.

Earthquake and typhoon combine into a miserable day to go outside, especially in Nike Air Socks that dissolve after five minutes in the rain, making it nearly impossible to walk.

A very lively Johnny Depp and an undead Geoffrey Rush talk like pirates, Legolas can handle a saber as well, and Jerry Bruckheimer somehow makes sure it sounds like one of his movies.

7 points

Oyak, tihs is olny milldy fyunn, but since envryeoe is wrntiig like tihs tyoda, I ssuppoe I have to foollw stiu. Trehe is eevn a bolsoxm pilugn now to jlumbe wdros aullacitamtoy and you can fnid the PaelrPd senippt taht peudocrd tihs blog bewol.

#! perl-pad -a
foreach my $word (@F){
	if ($word =? /^(.)(.+)(.)/){
		my ($a, $b, $c ) = ($1, $2, $3);
		$b = reverse $b if rand() < 0.5;
		$b = "$1$3$2$4" if rand() < 0.8 and $b =? /^(.)(.)(.+)(.)$/;
		$b = "$4$1$3$2" if rand() < 0.8 and $b =? /^(.+)(.)(.)(.)$/;
		$word = "$a$b$c";
	}
	print "$word ";
}

Utpdae : As you can see avobe ( and I did not see it in time ), the cdoe deos not plrpeory work wtih inotatcnupreitn ( the lsat word in a scentnee is not prleproy sebmarlcd ). How emnssaraibg .

My iBook has a gaping hole in its keyboard now. The key m just broke out. When typing this letter I am now directly pressing the naked button underneath the missing key top. This probably makes both of us uncomfortable. So after checking with an authorized Apple repair shop (they charge a ridiculous 26.250 yen for replacing the keyboard) I went to Akihabara in the hopes of finding a used keyboard, or a single key top, or a cheap replica, or just the extremely fashionable cute round transparent plastic protective cover for the plug on the power adaptor that I predictably lost a few weeks after I bought the iBook. No luck, though.

While Akihabara Electric Town is supposed to be the mecca of high-tech hardware I have to say it does not hold much appeal to me anymore. They still have the traditional small shops that made the place famous, selling all sorts of electronics components from radio tubes to solar panels to capacitors to LEDs to standard integrated circuitry, but the area has been mostly taken over by the big chain stores, whose offers of consumer electronics do not differ at all from those of their outlets anywhere else in Tokyo. The third kind of shop is otaku-oriented: manga, computer games, collectibles, character goods, adult video. Except for shops and a few fast-food restaurants there is nothing else in Akihabara. And the not-so-unique shops do not even have especially long opening hours, so after 8pm Akihabara is a ghost town.

Of course, I could not find my key top or even a keyboard. I bought acryl glue in a hobby shop and glued the broken key back in, but the key keeps popping out. Next thing to try is eBay, or as they call it in Japan: Yahoo Auction. If that does not work out, I can mail-order the key from some shop in America.

The following piece of code prevents my wife from using my iBook for shopping online at DongDong.com:

<html>
<body>
<form action="/customer/query.asp" method=post name=form1 id=form1>
</form>
</body>
</htmL>
<script language=vbs>
	window.form1.submit()
</script>

Why do people do that? Using VBScript will make a website unusable in almost all web browsers (except for the one with the 95% market share). I can understand resorting to VBScript to do some fancy stuff that cannot be done otherwise, but just to redirect to some other page after making login cookies? This can be easily achieved otherwise, especially in this case, where there are not even any parameters to be passed around, completely removing the need for a form at all. If they cannot redirect internally, what is wrong with sending HTTP redirect headers, or at the most an empty page with meta-refresh? Finally, although any kind of script is unwarranted here, they could use JavaScript without even changing the syntax. I am really hoping the recent Chinese/Korean/Japanese push for non-Microsoft software will put an end to this nonsense.

Cooks and Crooks. Anthony Bourdain is the executive chef of a New York restaurant and Kitchen Confidential is his autobiography. Apparently, the world of professional cooking is a harsh realm: He makes his career sound like that of a pirate, far removed in morale and manners from the guests and the restaurant owners (unless those are mob members, which is not that unlikely, either). I am not much of a gourmet and restaurant-goer, have never heard of most of the dishes mentioned and cannot draw from his cooking tips, but if you share the author's love for food, you will enjoy this book (or maybe stop eating out altogether).

Cang is spending two weeks in Japan and he organized a hiking trip to Mount Mitsutoge near Mount Fuji. As it turned out, Cang is addicted to hiking and goes every week, twice as much on vacations. He is also a scheduling fanatic as can be seen in his incredibly detailed itinerary (which he carries around in a blue binder). We had to get up really early to arrive in time after a two-hour train ride, which led to the discovery of some weak spots in JR's ticketing system. The 14 km hike itself (climbing 1100 to a peak of 1785 meters) took more than the advertised 6-7 hours and although the weather was pleasant, we were surrounded by dense clouds completely hiding Mt. Fuji from us, even from the official viewing place (Mt. Tenjo), which was our last stop and from where we down to Kawaguchi-ko by cable car to end our trip. We did not meet a lot of people on the way, probably because it was Thursday ( I was taking advantage of a company regulation that working days are more or less up to every team's discretion).