Ideally, I would have gone to the Grand Opening of the Ginza Apple Store at 10 am today, received a free commemorative T-shirt and heard a speech by Steve Jobs. Two things prevented that: the Oracle exam in the morning delayed my arrival until 1 pm, and then there was this queue in front of the shop. About halfway en route to the tail end, I met Ingo, who had volunteered to grab my T-shirt for me and after three hours in line was only two blocks (and approximately two more hours) away from the front door. He agreed to forfeit his advanced position and have lunch and videos (The Killer, Analyze That) instead. We took pictures.

After two rather high-level exams in the Oracle Developer track, my first exam in the Database Administrator track focused on all those implementation details that are required knowledge to operate an Oracle installation. And these sixty questions about the many server processes, logical and physical data structures, initialization parameters, file types and associated vocabulary covered just the topics of installing, starting and stopping the database. Setting up network connections, installing client programs or performing backup and recovery operations seems to be beyond what an Oracle Certified Associate DBA is expected to know, and is covered in a second part of this exam.

I was searching today for some Oracle configuration documentation and tips, and many links that Google returned led to pages that required registration or were even protected by passwords. However, I could read them all from the Google cache. I wonder how Google could access them, and if the content providers know about this.

Ingo and me went to Odaiba this morning to see the robot show. Odaiba is Tokyo's newest district. Built on reclaimed land in Tokyo bay it aims to be a futuristic wonderland with its monorail (which we shunned in favor of a ferry ride), space-age buildings, the world's biggest Ferris wheel, and themed shopping malls. The exhibition itself consisted mostly of industrial robots (the kind that builds cars or packages beef curry) and on its last day did not offer all the exhibits anymore. I was quite disappointed about being unable to see the cyber-carp (a fish of fame) or Honda's Asimo. They did have Aibos and the world's most therapeutic robot (according to the Guiness Book of Records) though.

My struggles with ASP (and JSP) have just hit a new low with a page essentially looking like this:

<%
out = ""
out = out + "<TABLE WIDTH=100% BORDER=0 CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0>" + vbNewLine

.. many more lines like this

out = out + "</TABLE>" + vbNewLine
response.write out
%>
<%
response.write "</BODY></HTML>" + vbNewLine
%>

The one sorry reason for the existence of these technologies is that you can easily output large quantities of static text:

java.io.PrintWriter pw = response.getWriter();
pw.println("my pretty html "+myCoolVariable);
pw.println("<p>more of my pretty html");

becomes a more friendly

my pretty html <%= myCoolVariable %>
<p>more of my pretty html

Here is a step-by-step tutorial that introduces harmful and ugly measures you can take to end up with code like above:

1. You have heard server pages are bad because they embed a lot of programming logic in HTML, thus mixing presentation and logic, which should be separated. You amend this by reverting to old school, which has the reverse situation and put the HTML back into the programming language. Since you are still making a server page, you have to slap tags around everything to turn it into a scriptlet.

   <%
   java.io.PrintWriter pw = response.getWriter();
   pw.println("my pretty html "+myCoolVariable);
   pw.println("<p>more of my pretty html");
   %>
   

2. You have heard that you should buffer output before sending it over the network. You have not heard that your application server is managing buffers for you. So you decide to collect all the output before printing it. You do not see why you should use those extravagant StringBuffer things when it is much easier to just concatenate strings repeatedly.

   <%
   String out = "";
   out = out + "my pretty html "+myCoolVariable;
   out = out + "<p>more of my pretty html";
   response.getWriter().println(out);
   %>
   

3. You think your scriplet is too long. Also, you find yourself using the last line quite often in other pages and want to factor it out into something you can more easy copy and paste.

   <%
   String out = "";
   out = out + "my pretty html "+myCoolVariable;
   out = out + "<p>more of my pretty html";
   %>
   
   <%
   response.getWriter().println(out);
   %>
   

4. Change from Java/JSP to Visual Basic/ASP.

So here is the scoop on the China pictures:

• We received the official pictures as prints (and as such in a non-digital form). We will distribute them fairly and send them out by conventional mail.
• We also received the official VCD (about one hour long). I will try to make copies available (but the files are quite big, of course).
• The pictures we took ourselves are not many. Especially of the wedding there are none, since we were busy getting married. You can therefore just see us travel in Xi Tang and Shanghai.
• In addition to our pictures, there are the pictures the guests (for example Kojima-san [1] [2] [3]) took, which I hope we all get to see, because some of those are really fantastic.

For the first time in over a year I attended a university lecture: Loren Carpenter (co-founder and chief scientist at Pixar Animation Studios) spoke today at Tokyo University about the history of Pixar, his work for them and for Lucasfilm, and his ideas for audience interaction in digital movies. There were no technical details (which I would not have understood anyway, I guess), but he showed clips from some of their movies, pictures of his Academy Awards and of Pixar's interesting new (earthquake-resistant) office complex.

Quention Tarantino's fourth movie brings us an adult version of Charlie's Angels.

Tarantino movie checklist:

violence

plenty. It starts with Reservoir Dogs-style (unpleasantly realistic) brutality and ends in (totally unrealistic) martial-arts splatter

overtime

yes, in fact the movie had to be split in two parts because of its length

complex storytelling

no. The plot is a dead-simple tale of revenge (Uma Thurman sets out to kill her enemies). We get a fair amount of flashbacks, off-screen narration, and even animated sequences, though.

great cast

Hmm. We have Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu. We can expect more of Darryl Hannah, David Carradine and Michael Madsen is the second part.

B-movie background

no doubt. This is one big homage to pulp fiction movie making (especially Asian fight flicks)

cool music

definitely

hip talk

Not in this one: the dialogue is either tough-talking threats or in Japanese(!)

6 points

Twice a year, the whole company takes off to some countryside hotel for a weekend of meditation about our mission. It is usually two days starting with incredibly boring discussions and ending in half a day of outdoors activity, only the latter being a lot of fun. This time, we are at Kawaguchiko, a lake at the base of Mount Fuji. The place is a Japanese-style hotel and offers great food, a nice public bath, and over-priced vending machines. Since Cissy is still in Shanghai, I do not much mind spending the weekend like this, especially since this time I brought my iBook along (including Air-H-Internet) and can happily code away while everyone else gets completely wasted (drunken Japanese businessmen are a rather ugly sight).

Japan (unlike China) is a very quiet country. Everyone is a) too shy to make noise and b) too polite to notice other people making noise. So on my way back home in the train station I was quite surprised to see a) two girls kissing each other with an intensity that made b) people take pictures of them with their mobile phones.

The timing of the Tokyo International Film Festival is very bad for me: It opened last weekend (when I was in Shanghai) and it closes this weekend (when I will be at our company weekend camp near Mount Fuji). On the weekdays in between, most of the screenings are in the morning or early afternoon, with only very few movies after 6pm and the latest shows as early as 8pm.

The Suit is a Russian movie about the adventures of three young men and their Gucci suit. It is set in a small beach town along the Black Sea, and while it has some interesting scenes, everything is a little incoherent.

5 points

Exposé may be cool, but I definitely do not like the many ways Perl is broken now. Camelbones (and PerlPad) are currently completely useless, all my additional modules cannot be found and need to be reinstalled, installing those modules does not work anymore without the Developer Tools (which provide the required header files that used to ship by default), making CPAN less accessible to end users, even perldoc is broken.

All of this will take some time to fix.

A problem with my diary is that when we travel, I have no time and possibility to write about it. And when I come back, I cannot make myself fill in the past days. So same as with our European trip the details of the China trip (such as seven motorcycles in a steel ball) will be lost to those that were not present (of course, there will be lots of wedding pictures which I will post and distribute when I get them).

Anyway, the day started early because we (Natasha, Audi, Ingo, Mark and me) had to catch our morning flights and not even two broken phones and a broken elevator could stop us, so now I am back home in Nippori. Cissy is spending one more week in Shanghai with friends and family.