We are leaving for Shanghai this afternoon. Throughout the next week wedding guests will arrive almost every day: Miyuki and Tomoko are sharing the same flight with us, but will leave for Xi An tomorrow and rejoin us next Friday. David and Jeanett will arrive on Sunday. Jacek will also arrive on Sunday, but in Beijing, and travel to Shanghai from there by yet unspecified means. Kojima-san will come on Wednesday, my parents and sister on Thursday. Friday sees the arrival of the other guests from Japan (Ingo, Chihiro, Imai-san, Sawada-sensei, Natasha, Masataka, and Miwa-san, all on the same flight). Audi will arrive Saturday morning, just in time for the party. The Chinese guests are supposed to find the way by themselves. European mobile phones are likely to continue working in Shanghai, Japanese ones probably not. Cissy will have a mobile phone, and I will try to read email as often as possible. We will carry a piece of paper with everyone's schedule on us all the time, so hopefully no one gets lost (if I failed to mention you above, that is definitely a bad sign).

Just received an email with above subject. Those spammers are really getting lazy. Can they not at least set up their tools properly?

0.32.g
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This release's primary focus is to fix the blocking by MSN.

As it turns out, Ingo is a CSS wizard, too. He kindly donated a new style for the T-Files, called Flip Flop. He warns that it is an extremely annoying stylesheet featuring a lot of dynamical stuff, and it definitely shows off some nice tricks. It was designed using Mozilla Firebird 0.7 and Ingo has no idea whether it'll work with other browsers than the Gecko ones. Well, I checked Safari and it looks great there as well. Good work!

Microsoft announced this more than a month ago, and today it happened: The MSN Messenger network has been closed to all clients using older protocol versions, so the wonderful free multi-protocol client Fire cannot connect to MSN anymore. Fire and other third-party clients will undoubtedly have support for the new protocol version soon (same as in a similar case with Yahoo Messenger recently), but the problem is not only this (rather trivial) technical issue: Microsoft now also requires third-party clients to acquire a license for using the network, potentially adding a more serious legal barrier.

Since I have to use MSN Messenger for work, I have no other choice now than to use the official Microsoft client, which of course does not support ICQ. And since I do not want to have two chat clients running all the time, I will probably not be online in ICQ a lot these days. If the Fire guys can make it work again, they are definitely in for some of my patent money (which so far went to the Perl Monks, Sourceforge, and JEdit).

Nicolas Cage is Roy, who makes a living as a con artist, tricking people into handing over their savings to him and his partner Frank. Unfortunately, his numerous neuroses and nervous ticks become completely uncontrollable when he runs out of his prescription pills (for which he has no prescription), so he has to consult a psychiatrist, who encourages Roy to contact his daughter, whom he has never met because his pregnant wife left him after a failed marriage 15 years ago. After the teenage girl moves in with him, and displays an interest (and talent) in his profession, he has to let her help with the next swindle, which leads to complications and a surprising twist at the end.

7 points

Today I went to an audition for the role of the German voice of a soldier in an upcoming PlayStation2 war game. Unfortunately, they were only looking for professionally trained voice-over artists, a fact they could have indicated to me before I travelled to their office, especially after I told the guy who scheduled the audition about my complete lack of experience in the industry. I wonder if I should have mentioned my one year in the army.

Enough is enough. I had to take the unusual (for me) step and sign a petition. I also handed in my resignation from the company's intellectual property task force and pledge to donate the 10.000 yen bonus I got for my work in that team so far to open-source projects.

In August, Microsoft lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Eolas Technologies. The jury in the case decided that Microsoft's support for ActiveX controls, plug-ins and Java applets in its Internet Explorer browser infringes on United States Patent 5,838,906, owned by the University of California and licensed to Eolas in 1994. Microsoft was ordered to pay $521 million to Eolas and the University and also change the way Internet Explorer works. They have now announced changes it will make to stop Internet Explorer from infringing on the patent. Unmodified pages will very likely prompt the user every time when some Flash or Shockwave or Java applet or Quicktime movie or ActiveX control is loaded, greatly disturbing the browsing experience. This prompt cannot be disabled by the user. According to Microsoft (and Apple and Macromedia and the Mozilla Organization), there will be new ways to embed the plugins that do not infringe and thus can be shown directly. Although this will hopefully restore the status quo, it does incur a lot of otherwise unneccesary web page rewriting.

Another annoying fact is that Microsoft are the good guys this time.

From the Japan Times:

Badges and mobile-phone straps engraved with the crests of crime syndicates are being offered on Yahoo Japan Corp.'s auction site. Yahoo Japan said Thursday it has yet to decide whether to ban sales of yakuza badges on the site. In June, sales of attorney's badges were banned on Yahoo Auctions Japan after the Japan Federation of Bar Associations asked the company to stop the sales.

What does this tell us? Apparently crime syndicates are official institutions, comparable with lawyer's associations.

Unlike in the first epsiode, I did not fall asleep during this one, but I was not very tired to begin with, so this is probably not Angelina Jolie's or Jan de Bont's merit. Could they please get Indiana Jones out of retirement?

4 points

Public baths are very popular in Japan. The motivation here is not to get clean (although this used to be an aspect before every family had their own shower or bathtub) or to swim but to relax in hot water, usually laden with healthy minerals. There are many different types of these facilities depending on whether the water is coming from natural sources, on whether it is outdoor or indoor, on whether they allow peoples with tattoos, on whether it is used by men and women separately or together. If it is gender-separated that also means that you have to go naked (with a small towel), if it is not then you have to bring trunks (there is also a rare and very traditional third type, which has undressed men and women together).

The shiny new Toshimaen Garden Spa is surprisingly small at first, but then turns out to have everything anyway: warm, clear water with bubble jets, hot, muddy water supposedly good for your skin, outdoor basins, several kinds of saunas, a bucket shower, and even a pool of Dead Sea water (tastes horrible).

The O'Reilly MacDevCenter sparked this discussion, which has the potential to become the Mac version of the old Emacs versus vi dispute.

That is Finder, Mail, Camino, Mozilla, Fire, iTunes, iPhoto, WordLookup, Look It Up, iTerm, JEdit, Remote Desktop Connection, System Settings, Fugu, ChromaCocoa, Sherlock, Console, X11, jNotes, NetNewsWire Lite, SubEthaEdit, PerlPad, Start OpenOffice.org, and Tofu positioned at the bottom (non-hiding) with magnification enabled.