Today is the last day of 2004. We just finished writing our New Year postcards (a three week long process). This year's total is forty-one (one short of the magic number and down from about sixty last year), another eight cards could not be sent because we lost the addresses. We are leaving for Chiba now, where we will spend New Year's Eve at a friends' house, if possible go to the famous (and totally over-crowded) Naritasan Shinsho-ji shrine and maybe also to an onsen.

Here is another rather silly experiment: I set up a web site that only exists in Google's cache. Since Googlebot has yet to find it, it does not really exist at all at the moment ...

It is snowing!

Whoever wins... We lose. True. About 100 minutes.

4 points

New York City in the 1930s: Reporter Polly Parker (Gwyneth Paltrow) is investigating the mysterious disappearance of famous German scientists when the city is attacked by giant flying robots. She teams up with former lover Sky Captain Joe Sullivan (Jude Law), who runs a private fighter plane squad, to stop the evil Doktor Totenkopf (a digitally resurrected Lawrence Olivier) from destroying the planet.

The big selling point of this movie is its rather unique visual style, but there is not much else to it. Punch lines can always ameliorate plot holes, so the actors (especially Angelina Jolie, who is hardly in it at all) should have been given more screen time, which instead went to lots of very silly action scenes.

5 points

Yesterday after work I went to the Yokohama International Stadium (site of the 2002 World Cup final and its unfortunate outcome) to see the German national soccer team play live for the first time in my life, and they wore completely unfamiliar red jerseys. The colours did not stop them from beating Japan 3-0, however.

Part two - Harada-san.

After several months delay (I suspect that my files did not make it out of Manila until after I complained about it) my Oracle Certification Program Success Kit arrived today. It includes a certificate signed by a Senior Vice President (although if Oracle is like Citibank, where apparently everyone with his own desk is called VP, that is not as impressive as it sounds), a plastic card, the right to display the OCP logo on resume and web site, and a free subscription to Oracle Magazine. Interestingly, the certificate and card are dated at May 30, 2004 and the kit has been posted in Germany, even though I am Tokyo and the sender in Edina, Minnesota.

So what is next? There are four choices for me if I want to continue collecting Oracle credentials:

• 9i is no longer the latest Oracle version. 10g was released this year, and of course, there are upgrade paths to become a 10g OCP. This will get interesting once we start migrating to 10g, but for now we are still using 9i (even for new projects).
• While the OCP is only the middle tier in the certification track (above Associate, below Master), the road to Certified Master seems to be quite long: there are no more exams, but you are expected to have several years of experience in the field, attended two advanced courses at Oracle University and you have to complete a practicum.
• Probably because of this (or maybe because certification is a lucrative business), Oracle have introduced a step in between, the OCP Special Accreditation. The first (and at the moment only) choice here is Managing Oracle on Linux, which actually makes some sense for me, as half of our Oracle installations are on Linux (the other half is on Solaris).
• I addition to Certified Professional DBA, I am also a Certified Associate Developer. The developer track also has an OCP tier, and I see myself more as a developer than a DBA, but whereas the OCA exams where about PL/SQL (very useful), the OCP exam focuses on Oracle Forms, which is a technology I have so far had no contact with. I am not even sure what it is.

But now I have to go and print name cards with the new logo.

One would think that the famous Japanese politeness would also lead to some healthy sense of political correctness, but that seems to be not always the case. So you have the mayor of Tokyo publicly issuing very conservative (to put it mildly) statements about the role of women in society, and the prime minister infuriating China and both Koreas every year by visiting Yasukuni Jinja with all the class A war criminals enshrined there, and now I have to contribute to a racist dating site. The latest project I have been assigned to is an online dating service catering mainly to American soldiers and Japanese girls. I do not have a problem with that, but the fact that the company running this service will require the users to specify their skin colour and that this choice will be visible in the users' avatars seems more than a little tasteless.

I cannot help but think that they will be eventually forced to scrap this plan, it is just too bad an idea. In fact, I hope this will happen, as I am not enough of an activist to get myself into trouble by refusing to go along with this, but at the same time do not want to have helped bringing this beast to life. I also wonder if they have discussed this at all with any of their potential American customers, who are known to be extremely sensitive about these things (I could imagine this might even be illegal in the US). And even if they accepted the categorisation, many would probably not even know which colour to choose (there are only three options: Caucasian, Asian, and African-American, making it tricky for example for Latin-Americans). Is there even any need for this at all? I know nothing about the match-making industry, but in the classifieds section of a newspaper, people usually do not reveal much more than their gender, approximate age and their interests. Also, users of the site can (and will) upload their photos, so this particular piece of information is readily available anyway, albeit in a non-machine-readable (non-searchable) form, which in this case is actually good thing.

While baseball is still the most popular sport in Japan, soccer has gained popularity ever since the inception of the professional J-League and especially after the World Cup in 2002 to become a not-so-distant second. When J-League was launched it attracted a lot of foreign stars close to retirement age, and some of them are still here: Japan's national coach is Zico, and tonight is the championship final between the Yokohama F Marinos and the Urawa Reds (managed by their former player Guido Buchwald). In other news, tomorrow will see FC Porto and Once Caldes competing for club world championship in the 25th and last Toyota Cup (it will be replaced by a new format from next year), and it was announced yesterday that the 2006 World Cup qualifiers will have Japan and North Korea in the same group (together with Iran and Bahrain).

Short stories are ideal for the daily train rides to and from work. I was expecting some solid fifties' science fiction from this compilation of 25 short stories first published between 1950 and 1968 in various magazines ranging from Playboy to the Ladies Home Journal. And while there are stories about the Handicapper General, who in 2081 and accordance to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Constitutional Amendments keeps everyone equal, a society with state-mandated ethical birth-control pills, Thomas Edison's dog, mental powers fifty-five times more powerful than a Nagasaki-type atomic bomb, cosmic radiation that creates life-threatening euphoria, living outside of your body, the devastating effects of cheap anti-ageing drugs, and about computers that cover about an acre on the fourth floor of the physics building and develop emotions, there are also more than one story about small towns on Cape Cod, the celebrities that drop by, and how to sell them storm windows and bathtub enclosures, about teen romance, schizoid jazz musicians, American puritanism, barbaric Communist guerilla fighters, noisy neighbours, interior decoration, orphans in post-war Germany, jobs at big companies, private preparatory schools in Massachusetts, the miracle of birth, the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club, and a review of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

Tomorrow morning I am going to fail miserably in the 2004 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (Level 2). The biggest problem is reading comprehension. Even if I could get the meaning of those long passages full of kanji (which most of the time I cannot) it just takes me way too long. Judging from my results in the prep course (last lesson today) I can expect to get a score of about 40%. The downside of all this is that I can hardly justify getting myself a Nintendo DS or a Sony PSP now...

Every year, Mark Fowler of the London Perl Mongers puts together his Perl Advent Calendar which introduces a different Perl module every day until Christmas.

Tokyo Filmex closed with this monochromatic, silent (except for the symphonic Mahler soundtrack) vampire ballet movie by Guy Maddin, who came on stage to answer questions after the screening. Before that, there was the closing ceremony and the jury announced the winners of festival prizes. The Kurdish-language Iraqi film Turtles can fly won both the Audience Award and the Special Jury Prize, while the Grand Prize went to Tropical Malady from Thailand.

6 points

I have an Hotmail email address (but do not send things there, I only keep it for my Messenger account and very infrequently read it) and I check it from time to time to make sure it does not reach its limit, which used to be just 2 MB. And in fact, the newest mail (dated three days ago) was a reminder from MSN that the account is almost full. However, the status bar showed my that I am just using 1% of my 250 MB. Seems that Google's new webmail service (which shocked the industry with a full GB of storage for everyone) has forced Microsoft to upgrade all their accounts as well. A 12400% increase in capacity. For free. Thank you Google, thank you Microsoft.

It seems that there is more than one annual film festival in town: TOKYO FILMeX was launched in 2000 as a more independent alternative to the Tokyo International Film Festival. We went to see a symposium on the role of film festivals and their importance for audiences, film makers and the industry. The discussion was moderated by British Film critic Tony Rayns, and the panel consisted of former Rotterdam film festival director Simon Field, Japanese directors Hirokazu Koreeda, Shinya Tsukamoto and Takeshi Kitano, and the Japanese producer Masayuki Mori. As Rayns remarked at the beginning, it was a rather strange setup to have a foreigner lead a discussion with Japanese-speaking Japanese film makers in front of a Japanese audience, and in fact, it turned out to be rather tedious, although the translators did their best.

Perl has a mechanism that lets you intercept calls to undefined subroutines. You just have to write a subroutine called AUTOLOAD, which will be called instead of the missing subroutine. This feature can be used in various ways. You can for example create a customised error message. Or you can implement subroutines that are loaded on demand: the first time they are called AUTOLOAD creates and installs the subroutine, so that subsequent calls will work the same way as if the subroutine had existed all along (this is probably how this mechanism got its name). I started using it to call PL/SQL stored procedures from Perl.

I have a lot of stored procedures that all look like

function do_something ( some_parameter varchar2, another_parameter integer)
    return integer;

I can call this procedure using DBI

my $sql = $conn->prepare(q{
    begin
        :r := do_something(:some_parameter, :another_parameter);
    end;
});
my $result;
$sql->bind_param_inout(':r', \$result, 10);
$sql->bind_param(':some_parameter', $some);
$sql->bind_param(':some_parameter', $another);
$sql->execute();

It is quite easy to make a generic version of that code, which looks at the function name and the parameters it is given to generate the SQL statement and bind the parameters. Using this as AUTOLOAD in the database access module, I do not have to write any more code (SQL or Perl) to access these stored procedures, and can just do

my $result = Database::do_something(
    some_parameter=>'blah', another_parameter => 123);    

If I add another stored procedure do_something_else, it will automatically become available to the Perl program, which speeds up development quite a bit and makes the application code smaller and more maintainable by reducing redundancies.

my $result = Database::do_something_else(funny_parameter => 12345);    

A few years back, the German Post Office started offering a free email service, and they ran a big campaign to promote it as your free life-long email address and the last email address you will ever need. I believed them, and most people know me as planz@epost.de now. Well, it was recently discovered that the area of private web mail unfortunately did not prove to be a business model of sufficient synergy, and the service will be discontinued in February. All users are encouraged to move to Lycos Europe, but there is no way to keep the email address, not even as a forward-only account. I know that running an email service these days must be a lot of trouble, and that you cannot really complain about the loss of a service you did not pay for (on the other hand, they are also shutting down their paid accounts, and those users must be furious), but this is being done in very poor style.

Anyway, from now on, I am thiloplanz@web.de again.

As this blog easily reveals, I let the whole month of October, during which there even was the Tokyo International Film Festival, go by without seeing a single movie (the IMAX 3D documentary about ISS does not count). Not a good development. I will try to make up for it this month.

6 points

Now that the twenty-first century has arrived, Gibson novels do not have to be set in the future anymore.

Cayce Pollard is a freelance marketing consultant. Her special skill is a high sensitivity for logos, and she makes her money by predicting whether a new corporate identity or an advertisement campaign would work. The downside of this talent is that she gets sick when she sees Tommy Hilfiger sweaters or Louis Vuitton bags (her ultimate demon is the Michelin Man). She is also obsessed (hobbies are not for her, but she can obsess) with the footage, a mysterious movie that is being anonymously published on the Internet frame by frame. No one knows what it is about, who created (or still creates) it, how it or where it is made. After her online circle of friends discover some hints in the footage, and she finds herself suddenly equipped with corporate credit card, iBook and flight tickets from New York to London to Tokyo to Moscow, Cayce embarks on a quest to track down the unknown genius behind the footage.

Hard disks seem to hate me (and I am beginning to return the sentiment). This time I am really hit hard. After my iBook's internal disk died months ago, I switched to an external Logitec Firewire disk. It has recently started producing errors, but data loss was minimal and I ignored it. Here is a lesson: At the first signs of disk failures, get a new one. Well, I did not, and the Logitec died on me today. It looks like a severe hardware problem, and chances of recovery are slim. I lost a lot of data today, almost enough to move this post from the /tech to the /life category.

CSS god Eric A. Meyer has created another amazing tool: S⁵ is a slide show system based entirely on XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. The slide shows work in all modern web browsers without requiring any special plugins, making them very easy to distribute. Sure, you do not get fancy fade-ins, but it has keyboard navigation (press space or cursor keys for the next slide) and most browsers can go full-screen, too. The whole slide show is contained in a single file, and if you know anything about HTML you can create slides with your favourite text editor. If you know something about CSS as well, you can tweak the style, if you do not, just use one of the available themes. Go see the introductory slide show!

• Catalogues are in short supply at IKEA.
• People rush into subway cars before letting other passengers get out first.
• There is a neat prepaid Public Transportation Card that works with trains, subways, busses, ferries and even taxis.
• The German-built maglev train to the airport runs at up to 431 kph, but is not available if your flight arrives at midnight or leaves in the early morning.
• Pyjamas are perfectly normal attire when going out.
• Remote controls have to be wrapped in plastic.
• Wedding guests do not dress up much, but expect free cigarettes.
• Almost all taxis (and hence half of all cars) are Volkswagen Santanas.
• Starting at 2 Euro, legal DVD are not much more expensive than pirated ones, but not many shops carry them, there are less titles to choose from, and they have region code 6.
• Chinese food is different.

I am getting around quite a bit these days, and my passport is beginning to look like a stamp rally. China is actually one of the very few places I need a visa for (at the same time it is one of the very few places Cissy does not need one for). I have also started to collect mileage, or rather mileage cards. I have three now (Star Alliance, JAL, NWA/KLM), each used at most twice, and Air China is likely to give me a fourth one today.

Regular expressions are the Swiss Army Chain-saw for string manipulations and no one disputes that Perl really shines here. I would say they are almost indispensible when working with text data. Regular expression engines have recently been added to the core Java platform and the Oracle database. I know that I miss them in my Parrot experiments (Parrot already has a working regex engine, with all the low-level opcodes required for that, but no compiler to target it). While Perl did not invent regular expressions, it has made them popular, and Perl's implementation has become the gold standard of the field (the most popular C library for the task is even called pcre -- Perl Compatible Regular Expressions).

Regular expressions are a (rather cryptic) language unto themselves, and I am not going to describe them here in detail. Have a look at the Quick Start Tutorial or the regular Tutorial.

The funny thing is, now that everyone has copied Perl's syntax for regular expressions, Perl 6 is going to throw it overboard and start anew. See Exegesis 5.

I do not command the most legible of handwritings, and my penmanship is steadily evolving (degrading?). This has become a problem with banks, because I cannot reproduce my signature from two years ago. While I am able to do most of my banking through ATM or online, I could not close my unused (but far from empty) Citibank account today. The fact that I do not know my secret number (because I do not use the account) or that the online banking account is locked (because I unsuccessfully tried to guess my secret number a few times) did not help to enhance my credibility either. Now I have to find my copy of the account opening document and practice the old signature.

I had a similar experience last month at Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank when I wanted to let them know my current residence. At that time, they kindly let me see how the signature should look like, so that I could copy it. All of this is making me understand the real value of the name stamps that Japanese people use instead of signatures on legal documents: unfailingly constant output throughout the years.

We went to visit the construction site of Tokyo Duo City in Shin-Koiwa, where we are going to move in to next spring. The building itself is finished now, and they started work on interior decoration, but have not reached the fourteenth floor yet. The next major step will be in January, when the interiors will be completed and the future owners are invited to check everything.

Our little friend TOMTE use magical secret power for delicious BREAD that. Well enjoy in next morning. Children who living in NORTHERN EUROPE tell us secret that just baken BREAD. Yes ..... TOMTE's secret. HOKUO as. BREAD country SAPPORO is very similar with TOMTE's land.

Scandinavian Natural Roman
Best bread message
Hokuo, since 1979

Now here is a clever use for the digital cameras that come with every mobile phone these days. QR Codes are similar to bar codes and can store about 3 Kb of binary data, enough for 4000 characters (or 1800 Japanese characters). To read it, just take a picture of it with you mobile phone, which recognises the format and can display the content. This is a much faster way to enter a URL or email address into a phone, and it is really getting popular for print advertisements or on business cards. To the left you can see the code for 72game.com, which also has a small mobile section with ring tones and background images for download.

I am traditionally very good at not remembering people's birthdays and I set a new record last Sunday by forgetting my father's. My bad. Very bad.

The next incarnation of Perl, Perl 6, will run on top of its own virtual machine, much like Java or C#. This virtual machine is called Parrot. Unlike the Java Virtual Machine, which has been constructed just to run Java, Parrot will be the target platform for many other languages in addition to Perl 6 (such as Python, Ruby, PHP and BASIC). In fact, Parrot is very likely to be released significantly before Perl 6, and there is already an experimental version of Perl 5 (called Ponie) using Parrot, which will probably evolve into the official Perl 5.12 a few years from now. This approach will allow developers to share code libraries written in different languages. The are plans for a Parrot version of the excellent Perl database interface, which would make it accessible to other Parrot languages. There is already a prototype of mod_parrot, embedding Parrot into the Apache web server, that could one day replace mod_perl, mod_php, and mod_python.

There is still no real-world compiler available targeting Parrot, so you cannot use high-level languages at the moment and have to program it in its Assembler-like native code, but you can already access all the amazing features built into the core runtime engine, such as JIT compilation to real machine code, dynamic loading of shared libraries (in both machine and Parrot byte code), I/O functions, Unicode string manipulation, and access to objects (Perl datatypes like arrays or hash tables, or those you write yourself).

Tomorrow will be the official launch of NTT Communication's 72game.com, powered by GaiaX, the project that has been keeping me busy these last three months. 72 is Japanese for nostalgic, and on 72game.com you can play classic NES games such as Elevator Action (or Binary Land, my current favourite). At the moment users can choose from ten titles but more are in the pipeline. It is basically a pay-per-play service (not cheap at 30 to 80 yen per game) with several subscription models, too. The games itself are converted from the original games' ROM images (and thus authentic) and run in an ActiveX emulator (meaning you cannot play them on a Mac).

My contribution is the web site system which maintains high-score rankings, and allows players to discuss the games, buy items for in-game use (sic!). The HTML is produced by a Perl/FastCGI program, sitting on top of an Oracle database with all the business logic implemented in PL/SQL. NTT will be doing a lot of promotion for the site, so it is important that my code can handle many concurrent users, which of course has not been really tested so far. I am quite confident about its performance, though, and also still very happy with the code in general, which is unusual since like most programmers I normally want to trash and rewrite everything once it is finished).

Once you start using a note-taking application, you cannot live without it. These tools are so much more convenient than text editors when you just want to take or retrieve a few notes: You do not have to worry about when and where to save files (this is handled by the application itself), you do not have to find and open files in order to see your notes (as you would have to do with a normal text editor), the application is smaller, launching and responding faster than a full-blown editor, and has very streamlined operations for searching and updating notes.

So far, I have been using jNotes (the name is a little confusing, as it is not written in Java, has nothing to do with Japan, and there are also several other programs with the same name). jNotes manages multiple notes using tabs. The only essential feature it lacks is Undo, which is quite strange as Undo functionality on Mac OS X is provided by the operating system and thus comes for free (even PerlPad has it).

Today, I switched to Notational Velocity. It does Undo, it has an auto-completing search box instead of tabs, encrypts everything with IDEA (Are you paranoid enough? It does make sense, actually, if you store passwords with it), supports System Services, and can come to the front on a single and configurable keystroke.

Both applications are freeware.

Contrary to prior announcements, there are prints of House of Flying Daggers with English subtitles being shown in Tokyo. Yimou Zhang's (Hero, The Road Home) latest movie has received a lot of extremely bad reviews, mostly from Chinese people, but I agree with most of the Western viewers that it is a great film.

It stars Andy Lau and the Japanese/Taiwanese Takeshi Kaneshiro as two police officers in ancient China who are ordered to find and arrest the new leader of a group of rebels called the House of Flying Daggers. Their plan is for Kaneshiro to go undercover, free the recently captured blind daughter (Zhang Ziyi, currently China's hottest actress, star of Hero, Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon, and The Road Home) of the old leader from prison, win her trust, and led her lead them to the rebels' secret hideout. As it turns out, the undercover officer is not the only one with a hidden identity and a secret mission.

8 points

We are leaving for Bangkok later today. Because a lot of people had the same idea there were not many flights available and we got some pretty unfortunate ones: Leave Sunday afternoon, arrive in Bangkok at midnight, return flight leaving Bangkok at 6 am. In addition to that, because I do not want to miss my Japanese language course on Saturday, I am returning on Friday while Cissy stays until Sunday.

The BBC Weather Centre forecasts thundery showers for the whole week (with temperatures in the thirties nonetheless).

A British movie set in a not-too-distant dystopian future, where humanity is divided into those that live inside metropolitan areas in relative prosperity under the control of a global regime, and those that are exiled to the outside. In order to move around, people need special visa issued by a global entity called Sphinx. Sphinx knows what is best for everyone, and who resists it is exiled or has his memory erased. Tim Robbins plays an investigator sent to Shanghai to find out how fake permits can be produced and leave the local Sphinx branch. Using an empathy virus that allows him to read minds, he quickly finds the culprit, but instead of turning her in, he starts an affair that turns out to be illegal in an unexpected way.

If you liked Gattaca, you will want to see Gattaca again.

6 points

Being more intelligent (and maybe arrogant) than other people, cats only do what they feel like doing and cannot be forced to do anything else. This is a problem for Yuri Kuklachev, who created the world's only cat theatre (not counting tiger shows) and turned it into one of Moscow's favourite weekend attractions. The show is in Tokyo this week and we went to see it yesterday. It was entertaining, but the cats have not really been doing much. One of them did a handstand on its front paws (twice!), but most of the time they are just walking across the stage, holding on to objects that are being tossed around, or sitting decoratively in the background, leaving the juggling, clownery and illusions to the four human and the four canine performers.

I applied for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December today. It is unlikely that I will be ready for it by then, though. I had trouble even to fill out the application form...

I sometimes (and at the moment) have a subscription to my favourite German-language newspaper which is apparently shipped to me by individual airmail, resulting in a rather hefty price, about three days delay (I am today reading the Tuesday issue), and a questionable ecological effect. So I am quite interested in a print-on-demand project that they announced today (well, last Tuesday): Using technology developed by the South African company Ince, the paper is sent in digital form to South Africa, where it can be printed and distributed locally. On the same day. Cheaper. I wonder if they plan to introduce a similar system in Japan.

There are some strange business models out there, and I just found one of them in my web server access logs: FakeZilla is a tool that generates large amounts of fake traffic (pretending to come from many different clients) to a web site, so that if you're running a pay-per-click search engine, text or banner advertising, or any other marketing campaign that require unique hits to satisfy your clients you can cheat those clients out of their money. I thought this was a joke, but it is actually a commercial product, costing between 40 and 160 USD.

As a result of simultaneous business trips, Cissy and me are staying in Manila this week, more specifically in Makati City, which is the financial and commercial centre of the country. We are very conveniently (and cost-efficiently, and least for GaiaX and me) sharing a room in the luxurious Mandarin Oriental that Citybank likes to book for its employees. I have to admit that I am feeling a little uneasy in this high-class hotel and am somewhat shocked by the intensity of security precautions here: Armed guards (and we are talking really big guns here) are posted at the entrances of all buildings in Makati, and they check the bags of everyone going in. Cars driving up to hotels and shopping malls are also searched. This is apparently not a recent development triggered by terrorism, as the Philippines have quite a history of commercial kidnappings, piracy, and political assassinations.

On the plus side, everyone speaks English, and everything is cheap. In fact those are the two reasons that brought me here since Oracle University seminars in Japan are available only in Japanese language and at five times the cost (even including flight and hotel still about twice the cost). Plus, I get to eat a lot of fruits here.

Ingo's last weekend in Tokyo was marked by three pop cultural highlights. We started with a screening at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu of Wah! Mikey returns, a collection of twenty episodes (about three minutes each) of TV Tokyo's popular and hilarious puppet comedy series that also made (unlike myself) to this year's Berlin film festival. Next was an exhibition celebrating the goddess of character goods herself, Hello Kitty, who is having her 30th anniversary. Kitty Ex is actually split into two parts, one at the Laforet Department Store in Harajuku and one at the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills, where we went. On the way down from the fifty-second floor we stopped by another exhibition showcasing the making, artwork, and background of Steam Boy, a recently released animation movie set against a Jules-Verne-type late 19th century London.

One of my favourite programming inconveniences and frequent source of bugs is shared by Java and Perl, so it is probably inherited from C and cannot be changed in order not to break old and fearsome legacy code.

Java

java.util.Calendar.set

public final void set(int year,
                      int month,
                      int date)

Sets the values for the fields year, month, and date. Previous values of other fields are retained. If this is not desired, call clear first.

Parameters:

year - the value used to set the YEAR time field.

month - the value used to set the MONTH time field. Month value is 0-based. e.g., 0 for January.

date - the value used to set the DATE time field.

Perl

Perl, in fact, is even worse in that it bases its month at 0 and its years at 1900.

localtime EXPR

Converts a time as returned by the time function to a 9-element list with the time analyzed for the local time zone. Typically used as follows:

# 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time);

All list elements are numeric, and come straight out of the C `struct tm'. $sec, $min, and $hour are the seconds, minutes, and hours of the specified time. $mday is the day of the month, and $mon is the month itself, in the range 0..11 with 0 indicating January and 11 indicating December. $year is the number of years since 1900. That is, $year is 123 in year 2023. $wday is the day of the week, with 0 indicating Sunday and 3 indicating Wednesday. $yday is the day of the year, in the range 0..364 (or 0..365 in leap years.) $isdst is true if the specified time occurs during daylight savings time, false otherwise.

A special message for all fans of text-to-speech, and the reason I brought headphones to office today. Let us all hope that they can fill in the holes in their database without the record companies shutting them down for copyright infringement (according to the FAQ this is all covered by the license granted to the Swedish Radio, but with those guys you never know).

Most people are probably fine with following the dialogue just by reading the subtitles (I know I would if I could read Japanese), but unless they fix their sound system which totally drowns voices with background music (and this time add noisy insects in nearby trees) I think I am giving up on the Ebisu Star Light Cinema. Since I officially state my favourite actress to be Winona Ryder, it would have made sense for me to actually have seen a few of her defining movies (rather than just Alien: Resurrection). While I have seen Reality Bites (including Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garafalo and first-time-director Ben Stiller) now, and also enjoyed the soundtrack, the probably witty dialogue was lost and today does not count. No rating possible.

Yesterday the temperature topped 30 C for a record 38th day in a row (and that was just before 10 am !). My Japanese language teacher claims that an even longer heat wave led up to the Great Kanto Earthquake that destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923. On September 1st (soon). Now this could be just an urban legend, but while the Meteorological Agency states that the previous record was set in 1995, they have started making their observations in 1923.

Side note about our new apartment: If the earthquake strikes down the building before we are given the key (next March), it voids the contract and we are refunded our money. If it strikes after that, it is our problem.

RSSgenr8 is a hosted HTML to RSS Scraper Tool which dynamically generates a RSS feed from a HTML web page. So if your blogging tool does not support RSS (must be a very old-fashioned tool then) this offers a simple solution (although it seems to have problems with German umlauts). Ignoring my aversion against PHP and the unnecessary traffic such a tool generates, I installed it on my server in order to be able to subscribe to my sister's two blogs.

Every summer the Yebisu Garden Cinema organises Star Light Cinema, showing free open-air movies at weekends. This year they are also celebrating their tenth anniversary and the line-up of Star Light Cinema is a selection of fifteen out of the about 120 movies they have screened over the last decade. Unlike in previous years they started handing out (free) reserved seat tickets in advance to distribute the limited seating. It is not clear if you are allowed to sit on the floor without tickets, but they did not stop us from doing so. More troublesome was the poor quality of the sound, which made it very difficult to understand the dialogue (the volume of the dialogue was too low and completely drowned by the background music), but that could have been a problem with this particular movie and the fact that everyone (except us) was probably just reading the subtitles anyway.

The five weekends are grouped thematically, and this weekend is Children's Voice, with two Swedish movies and a 2003 version of the German classic Das fliegende Klassenzimmer. The movie was surprisingly good, the story was updated to modern times in an intelligent way by including the German Post-War Separation and Reunification as background motives (although I was less happy with the rap music parts), and even the usually annoying Piet Klocke is funny in this one.

6 points

I am really amazed by the current poster campaign for smoking manners, for a number of reasons:

Firstly, it is a campaign to ask smokers to respect the health and comfort of others and the campaign is being done by Japan Tobacco, the world's third largest manufacturer of tobacco products. Secondly, government regulations are very liberal towards smoking (just compare the size and content of the health warning on cigarette packs here and elsewhere), so I think JT are not required to do such a campaign. Thirdly, the idea of a campaign that calmly and politely asks smokers to reflect upon their habits is totally different from the drastic and sometimes very graphic quit-smoking campaigns launched by governments and health organisations all over the world. And then there is the cool minimalist design of these ads. It is monochromatic (a friendly green) and has these bizarre parodies of functional drawings found in technical instruction manuals or educational material.

But finally, and most importantly, the posters are bilingual and the English is plain wonderful. In contrast to your average use of Engrish in Japanese advertisement, it is grammatically perfect, uses whole and sometimes long sentences rather than just catch phrases, and strikes an interesting tone in its indirect and thoughtful way of conveying the message without using direct imperatives or even judgemental language. Here is a selection I could find online, but there are a lot more:

Cissybank has a lot of activities for its employees and their families, and we are semi-active members of the Walking Club, joining them about three times a year on their monthly hikes. Today was a special event, organised as a volunteer activity to entertain orphaned children, but the forty volunteers were at least equally well entertained as the twenty children. Mt. Tsukuba is a two hour bus ride from Tokyo, a cable car lifted us halfway up the mountain to the place where we met the children, we walked three hours across the mountain to meet the bus again, which took us to a camp site where we had barbecue. The whole day was perfectly well organised, we did not even have to bring food, water or backpacks, the weather was great, and the children in a good mood.

The Citiclub hike also passed the shrine on Mt. Tsukuba, but there was no time scheduled to actually visit it, which is a real pity since this is a very scenic mountain-shrine, and apparently important, too (they have an English brochure, which explains that the mountain has captured religious awe for as long as there have been people living in the Kanto Plains, and that the two divinities enshrined here, Izanagi-no-Mikoto and Izanami-no-Mikoto, are the sacred progenitors of the Japanese race and even gave birth to the very islands of Japan). While it is definitely not the spirit of pilgrimage to just drop by and pick up the temple seal, that was all I could do this time. To make things worse, I forgot to bring along my album and had to ask for the stamp to be issued on a loose leaf.

The logic of null values in Oracle is peculiar. For starters, an empty string is treated as a null value, a behaviour that is totally against the SQL standard and common sense. And comparison operators also behave in unexpected ways when they encounter nulls. A null value is never equal to anything else (makes sense). A null value is also never equal to another null value (stranger, but I can live with that). But apparently a null value is also never not equal (!=) to anything else (which I find very counter-intuitive):

SQL> select * from dual where null = 77;
no rows selected

SQL> select * from dual where null = null;
no rows selected

SQL> select * from dual where null != null;
no rows selected

SQL> select * from dual where null != 77;
no rows selected

This all adds up to a gaping security hole in my login password checking code:

if ( password != v_password) then
    events.count_it(-1); -- wrong password
    return -1;
end if;

Before I changed it to

if ( password is null or password != v_password) then
    events.count_it(-1); -- wrong password
    return -1;
end if;

people have been able to log in just by entering an empty password, which gets interpreted as NULL, which is never regarded as different from the real password.

I am very grateful that someone spotted this before we launched the site.

The temperature in Tokyo hit an all-time high yesterday at 39.5 C just before 1 pm. The previous record of 39.1 C was reached in August 1994.

There is a saying in the Perl community that nothing but perl can parse Perl. While this mainly alludes to the two well known facts that the Perl syntax is much more complex than that of other programming languages, and that Perl is very well suited to write parsers, it also hints at particularily useful feature common in interpreted languages: run-time evaluation. This ability to treat input data as little programs makes it very easy to extend and configure your Perl applications.

With Perl, you do not really need, for example, a special syntax for configuration files. If you can live with the obvious security implications, you can just use Perl snippets instead of .ini, .properties or XML files. Using those files from your application is actually easier than reading any other type of file (the built-in do() function does all the work), and you can

• use comments, spacing and indentation at will
• use Perl's many quoting styles
• use complex data structures -- arrays, hashes, nested if required (ever tried to create an array in a Java properties file?)
• set Perl variables
• set environment variables
• load additional modules
• call functions to calculate some settings dynamically
• or anything else you can do in a program, but never dared to ask of a configuration file.

One person's data is another person's program.

Programming Pearls, Communications of the ACM, Sept. 1985

Part one - Tanaka-san.

The problem with these serial movies is that they do not really have a beginning, but continue where the previous one left off (so that you have to remember many things from the a movie you saw two years ago) and, even worse, they do not really have an end, but leave everything open to possible further sequels. And then, of course, there are the 41 (and counting) mistakes.

6 points

This third part of the Vampire Chronicles starts great: Awakened by Lestat's (who has taken up a career as a rock star) songs, Akasha, an Egyptian queen and mother of all vampires, rises from her six-thousand-year sleep, bringing great uncertainty and worry to blood drinkers of all ages and countries. In the first half of the book the major characters travel to San Francisco to see Lestat's concert where all events culminate. Their backgrounds are very diverse and interesting and the idea to integrate the publishing of the first two novels (Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat) into the story line is also quite clever. In the second half, after the concert, however, I found the book to turn rather dull, and almost decided to put it down and stop reading Anne Rice for good (in fact, I did put it down and turned to The Bonfire of the Vanities). The novel is somehow redeemed by its last chapter, which, after Akasha is dealt with, provides a cliff-hanger opening to the next parts of the series.

Basically all movie theaters in Tokyo have Ladies' Day (1000 yen instead of 1800 yen for the ticket) every Wednesday, but I can of course only benefit indirectly from that. Well, I just found out that Thursday at the Shibuya Cine Palace is Men's Day. Yie-hah!

21 Grams tells a very depressing story about how a terrible car accident brings together and destroys the lives of a deeply religious ex-con (Benicio Del Toro, looking like a wasted version of Brad Pitt), a mother (Naomi Watts) and a professor (Sean Penn in various degrees of bad health). To say more than that about the plot would be unfair in case you want to see the movie, as its main feature is how the story unfolds with a completely non-linear arrangement of many small scenes.

7 points

Most of the time I am reading a novel, Cissy says I should just wait for it to be turned into a movie and get the video instead. That would save a lot of time. I cannot agree with this reasoning, but this one I am going to rent, although according to the reviews the movie does not live up to the book, which was extremely entertaining.

Sherman McCoy is one of Wall Street's top brokers, but he has a fatal collision with the real world when he gets lost in the Bronx and involved in a hit-and-run car accident that he cannot mention to his wife. Reverend Bacon is an ambitious black community leader who seeks to exploit the accident to his political advantage. Lawrence Kramer is an assistant district attorney, for whom the case becomes his chance to be famous (and to impress the cuter female members of the jury). Peter Fallow is a British reporter working (when he is not too drunk for it) for a sleazy local newspaper run by Brits who all despise the Americans. The major and the district attorney are fighting for re-election, and the lawyers on both sides are only in for the glory or the money.

Another concentration of Buddhist temples is near the big Asakusa Kannon, so that just by walking from one subway station (Inaricho) to the next (Tawaramachi), I was able to add nine stamps to my collection. The atmosphere in the temples varied a lot. Some of the temples were in their original buildings, others on the second floor of a modern concrete complex. We met a very jovial priest who was still dressed up quite formally from the funeral ceremony he conducted just a moment ago (not really a funeral actually, but the memorial service one year after that). We met a young apprentice whose brush strokes for my album were interrupted twice, once by the telephone and once by a delivery boy. We met very friendly ladies that gave us tea, sweets, scented bags, and a handkerchief. We also met the more business-minded variant, who handed out prepared pages that had been signed and stamped in advance (in that case, you are still supposed to give them an empty page in return).

I have now been to nineteen of the eighty-eight places in Tokyo.

Went out to buy a notebook to write down my Japanese homework.

Pleasure is born here.
unintentionally with individuality and nonchalantly with sensibility
Mini Notebook Size: 91 x 128 mm 32 Sheets

When I did not take Yoshinoya's announcement to stop offering gyudon (beef strips on rice) completely serious earlier this year (and it was unbelievable after all), I was wrong. Since February, there has been no more gyudon at the big ex-gyudon chain stores (only the fourth largest franchise, Kobe Lamputei, switched to Australian beef), and Yoshinoya's customer volume fell 32 percent. But Japanese engineers have come up with a possible solution: A PlayStation game that puts you in the role of a Yoshinoya employee. And digital beef is apparently safe enough, so there is gyudon in the game.

In related news, a Yoshinoya spokesman yesterday said that they are ready to resume sales if Japan eases its ban on US beef. An exemption for meat from young cows is currently under consideration.

The Japanese language is phonetically rather simple and has fewer sounds than most other languages (they overcompensate that with the complex writing system, of course). It creates considerable confusion (and amusement) among foreigners when there is no difference between Ls and Rs and Bs, Ws, and Vs. So far I have been quite good at figuring things out, but they really got me this week: Shibuya station at the moment is plastered with big posters for a new PlayStation soccer manager game, depicting a somewhat familiar looking guy in several poses. The slogans seemed to indicate a German loan word, Bengel (young, somewhat rude fellow). Angry bengel, happy bengel, thoughtful bengel and so on. After passing it every day for a week or so, I finally figured it out. Sega were not announcing that their game can turn grown men into mischievous little boys (using a word that does not show up in my Japanese dictionary), they were just parading the fact that one of the biggest names in professional soccer is endorsing their product. It reads not Bengel, but Wenger, as in Arsene Wenger, who just led Arsenal London through a season without a single defeat. Stupid me.

Euro2004 made me stay at Shibuya Capsule Land last night. I recommend every visitor to Japan to go to such a hotel at least once as part of your sight-seeing. You are not going to see that anywhere else. The capsule could have been a little longer, but it did include free cable TV, so that I could just open my eyes at 3:30, watch us almost beat Holland and go right back to sleep, without having to get up. Actually, it is not possible to get up, unless you get out (of the capsule) first. The pricing (3,900 yen) was quite reasonable, included use of the public bath (fully equipped with towels, bath robes, razors, toothpaste-treated toothbrushes and the like) and even a breakfast. Plus it is close to office. I am tempted to see some more games there now, but Cissy is not too happy with the idea.

I did not stay up until 3am to watch the opening game of Euro 2004, but after reading about Greece's unexpected upset of host Portugal, I immediately regretted that. So the TV situation is as follows: The matches start at 1:00 and 3:30 in the morning. A few of them can be seen on the free TBS channel, for the rest you need a WOWOW subscription (which we do not have). The free games are the opening game, France vs. England, Denmark vs. Italy, England vs. Switzerland (strange choice, can only be explained by the Beckham craze), Holland vs. Czech Republic, two of the quarterfinals, the Thursday (in Porto, already Friday here) semi-final, and the final. I have to work out something at least for Germany vs. Netherlands.

Two new developments in my incoming spam. First of all, I received my first mobile spam. My mobile phone is very old: No colour display, no digital camera, cannot receive email (only network-internal SMS from Tu-Ka or Vodafone). It can apparently receive spam (by SMS), though. Of course, I could not access the included URL because the phone does not do web, either. On the email front, I received several German-language right-wing political rants, probably introduced for the European elections this week.

A son returns home to learn the truth about his dying father, whom he has not spoken to in years because he could no longer stand the fantastic stories his father would make up about himself all the time (such as the one with the big fish). Sounds like a straight (dull ?) story, but turned out to be something like Tim Burton's version of Forrest Gump (complete with spiders, witches, giants, Siamese twins, a circus, daffodils, werewolves, a war, a bank robbery, and Steve Buscemi). All in all the best movie I have seen this year.

9 points

I changed courses at my Japanese language school. I was taking normal classes (conversation, reading, grammar) two evenings a week, but am now enrolled in a special preparation course for the JLPT Level 2 exam in December. This is going to be tough: There will be three hours of class every Saturday and easily enough homework to take the rest of the weekend. I will have to cut back on my office hours, too, which is maybe not such a bad idea, anyway.

Just in time to make my quarterly performance review look a little more favourable, I cleared this last exam in the DBA track in my second attempt. I was much more confident with my answers to all those questions about database recovery than in the first time round, and most of them were correct, too. Still, I prefer not to have to exercise those new skills, recovering databases is a very stressful business.

Two years ago, I would have been able to call myself an Oracle Certified Professional now. Unfortunately, Oracle has in the meantime introduced a new requirement to attend one instructor-led hands-on course. I have to find out how to do that in Japan (in English), which is probably not such big a problem as the class can also be attended online somehow, and if there is a budget for me to take part in this rather expensive event.

Porto reached the European summit for the second time with three brilliantly taken goals to seal an emphatic victory at the Arena AufSchalke stadium but they will begin their defence of the trophy with a new man in charge.

Mike Collett, Reuters

Arena AufSchalke. This is even worse than BayArena. Sometimes CamelCase and WikiWords are seriously OutOfPlace and JustSilly. Der Spiegel seems to be making fun of it, too:

Der Erfolg AufSchalke war das Ergebnis einer mannschaftlich geschlossenen Leistung, Abwehrstärke und Clevernis.

On a related note, I wonder if I can see anything of Euro2004 here.

The Coen Brothers' (The Big Lebowsky, Fargo) latest work has received mixed responses from their regular viewers and drawn a lot of criticism for foul language and vulgarity from people who took the whole family to see a Tom Hanks movie. Well, I think it works quite well as a dark screwball comedy, think A Fish Called Wanda. Sure, the plot is simple, the characters are completely one-dimensional, exaggerated, unrealistic and without background, and some of the jokes could offend sensitive people, but it is funny and the actors (especially Tom Hanks as the professor) are doing a great job.

7 points

Another great thing about Perl is that it can be used for a wide range of programming tasks. On one end of the spectrum, you can write complex applications with thousands of lines of code spread among dozens of files. On the opposite end, Perl can also be used for small shell scripts, or even directly from the command line (for ad hoc tasks). Here is a real world example.

The first rule of content management: If you have more than five pages to maintain, use some sort of content management system.

Suppose you have a web site with sixty static HTML pages. You chose to ignore the first rule of content management, and the only way to edit the pages is to, well, edit the pages (by opening them one by one in a text editor). Now you need to change some common part consistently on all pages, let us say to update the copyright message. Enter the Perl.

First, we need to write Perl code to find the string we want to replace (© 2003) and substitute it with the updated version (© 2003-2004):

s/© 2003/© 2003-2004/

That was trivial, but we already know that Perl is great for working with text. Today's lesson is about Perl's support for being a command line tool and that, in consequence, your work is already done. The other things that need to happen (opening all HTML files in the directory, reading them into memory, applying above substitution, and writing the modified file back to disk) can all be dealt with with command line switches:

perl -pe 's/© 2003/© 2003-2004/'  -i *.html  

So what do these options do?

-e

This switch is the heart of all Perl one-liners and lets you specify the program to be run (the one-line substitution snippet) on the command line (rather than reading it from a source file).

-p

This tells Perl to loop over all the specified input files, executing the program for every line (the line becomes the special variable $_) and print the (possibly changed) line afterwards. An alternative is -n, which does the same, but omits printing.

-i

specifies in-place editing, so that what we print is written back to the original file (instead of going to stdout). This rather dangerous switch can be instructed to make an optional backup.

*.html

Any files you name after all other options will be read and processed one by one.

See also the Perl manual about all the other interesting command-line options.

It was raining today at the company camp in Atami, so we had to replace the outdoor sports with bowling. I pushed my previous record of 128 to 129 pins.

Frame: 8/- 6/2 G/3 9/- 7/-  XX  XX 1/2 3/5 7/2
Score:   8  16  19  28  35  56  69  72  80  89 

Frame: 6/- 6/X 8/- 8/1  XX  XX 9/X 6/2 9/- 6/-
Score:   6  24  32  41  70  90 106 114 123 129

Because of our unfortunate schedule, we had only one day to see E3 Expo. Almost the whole show was dedicated to showing video games (for PC and consoles), with very little else to see (most of the rest are video game press and products for the retail industry, such as CD repair machines). We did manage to find an Israeli company that streams regular Windows software over the Internet (mostly for game subscription services), a Swedish developer of high-end mobile games (for handheld consoles, palmtops, and powerful mobile phones), another Swedish companies with Java-based mobile phone and web games, and a Taiwanese MMORPG producer we are already in business with.

As for the video games, I have to admit I have completely lost touch with the recent developments. I am sure there were many exciting new titles being showcased, but it did not really capture my attention. All I noticed was that most games these days are either first-person-shooters or multi-player online fantasy games, and that the quality of the graphics is really impressive nowadays, which makes the level of violence in some (most?) of the games even more troublesome.

Probably the two biggest E3 news were the presentation of Sony's handheld PSP system (able to play PS2 games and movies, although probably not directly from the regular disks, since those are too big) and Nintendo's next generation, double-screen GameBoy (also backwards compatible). Both looked very interesting, will be released later this year (at least in Japan) and I would have loved to take a closer look, but there were seriously long lines in front of their booths.

One thing I was counting on that did not materialise were dozens of give-away T-shirts. As it is, I only got one from a video game TV show, who would give a free iPod Mini to a lucky handful they spotted wearing their shirt later. We met one such winner on the Metro platform on the way back to the hotel (which reminded me that we forgot to visit Apple's booth). All I could salvage was a couple of demo CDs and a Magic starter deck.

I spent the weekend at Ashley's and Maciej's place in Richmond, which is a very nicely located residential area on the West side of San Francisco. A five minute walk (across a golf course and past a museum) takes you to the coast with a great scenic view of beaches and cliffs. They let me stay in their basement (bed room / Buddhist temple), gave me a tour of all the main attractions (excluding Alcatraz, but including an over-hyped burrito that once again demonstrated why I should stay clear of Mexican food), Maciej took photos, and all of us (including Ashley's parents and their impressively wooly cat) had a good time, I think.

It just occured to me that one of the reasons for the strict US immigration checks are that they have to deal with visitors from the future. I, for example, left Tokyo at 3 pm today and arrived in Los Angeles at 8:30 am, more than six hours before I left. But just for the record, I was neither fingerprinted nor photographed (at least not that I am aware of).

Every year Gaiax sends some members to the E3 Electronic Entertainment Exposition to get inspiration for new products and meet potential business partners. This year the lucky ones to go to Los Angeles are Kojima-san and me. Before that, we will visit two companies in San Francisco and nearby Palo Alto to learn about micropayment technology. So tomorrow, I am leaving for a week in California. Together with the Golden Week holidays in Western Japan last weekend and the country-side company camp in Atami the following weekend, this month sure sees a lot of travelling around.

The island of Miyajima (near Hiroshima) has been known for centuries as one of Japan's three most scenic places (Nihon Sankei, Three Views of Japan). It is probably most famous for its floating torii gate, which stands in the middle of the sea in the morning and becomes accessible later during the day as the water withdraws. It belongs to the Itsukushima shrine, although it is obviously difficult to enter the shrine through the gate (and yes, I did get a stamp there). There are also a lot of other shrines and temples on this sacred island (Daisho-in is probably the most beautiful Buddhist temple I have seen so far), as well as many deer (which are much more relaxed than those in Nara).

Himeji Castle is the best preserved castle in all of Japan. Unlike many others, which were destroyed by war or disaster, the White Heron Castle has never been invaded or damaged and kept its original form for four hundred years. It is included in the UNESCO World Heritage list. We were very lucky to have been given a guided tour (in English and for free) by the friendly and competent Komoto-san of the Volunteer Guide Association of Himeji Castle, who runs an electronics store during the week and explains the castle on his holidays. We learned that despite the beauty of the castle, it was a purely military structure for the Tokugawa shogunate. Its white colour is actually plaster intended to stop the wooden castle from catching fire. The main tower was never inhabited and intended as the last line of defence. During peace time, it served as a storage room.

I met some serious collectors of temple stamps in Engyouji temple on Mount Shosha near Himeji. They did not have an album to contain the seals but instead had them put on both a cloth scroll and an ornamental robe, drawing my immediate admiration. Being conscious of the fact that I have not yet advanced to their level, however, I started another album. Engyouji is number 27 of 33 holy places in Western Japan (the westernmost of them actually). I also decided that three concurrent Buddhist albums are my limit and I will not start one more before I finish one first.

Wow. In retrospect, it was a good decision to separate the movie in two parts, because it gives Tarantino (and Uma Thurman, and David Carradine) more time and you would not want a single scene cut here.

8 points

Who says this has to be in English?

C'est notre plaisir de continuer a fabriquer les gateaux aimes par vous tous dans cet environnement de la villeriche de verdure.

Again I am reading the first novel of a series after the second, but this time I am not alone, as The Da Vinci Code has been a New York Times best-seller, and most readers are directed to Robert Langdon's first adventure by the blunt marketing slogans pointing out that fact. The two books are terribly similar: Langdon is pulled from his bed to the site of the brutal murder of a CERN scientist (rather than the curator of the Louvre) and finds himself with the victims daughter (rather than his grand-daughter) in a chase across Rome (Paris and London) where he has to figure out an ancient puzzle created by Galileo Galilei (Leonardo Da Vinci) that leads to the secret lair of the Illuminati (the Knights Templar), all the while being chased by a dangerous Arabian assassin (an Albino monk) and fooled by a traitorous friend who turns out to be the master-mind that has been deceiving both the evil assassin (the Catholic sect) and our heroes. Add to that an unhealthy dose of science fiction (only in Angels & Demons) with massively super-sonic flights and an anti-matter bomb(!), and you might have to think this is a rather silly book. Maybe so, but it is really fast-paced, full of twists and Brown pulls no punches in the incredible (yes, silly, but stunning) finale.

Try our Naive Lady, toilet tissue soft and of good quality. Choosing recycled paper is the first step to keep the earth full of greens for your own children.

At least half of the power of Perl lies in the many modules that are available for almost any programming task you can imagine. Finding, getting and using these modules is very easy, thanks to the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). The core Perl distribution includes a CPAN client application that can automatically download and install the desired module, along with all the modules it depends on and their documentation.

The only problem with CPAN is that because everyone can upload and because there is always more than one way to do things in Perl, there are often a lot of similar modules to choose from and it is sometimes not easy to decide which one is best. A recently introduced rating system should help here.

A movie about Tokyo that has it all: Karaoke, German tourists, stupid expats, lonely expats, ikebana, excursion to Kyoto, skyline, crowded trains, foreign celebrities, hot baths, Shibuya, salary men, sake, school girls, crazy parties, confusion over consonants, taxi rides, video games, luxury hotels, Japanese TV, elevators, temples, bullet trains, sushi.

7 points

When the curator of the Louvre in Paris is found murdered in his own museum, an American professor of symbology and the victim's grand-daughter find themselves in the middle of a struggle for survival between a radical and desperate Catholic sect and an ancient secret society sworn to protect the Holy Grail. What is most intriguing about conspiracy theory novels is that it is hard to tell where historic fact ends and fiction begins. I have doubts for example about Leonardo Da Vinci having invented public key cryptography. But for what little I know about art and history, he could have been the head of a secret society and hidden a lot of subversive jokes and messages in his pictures. I have to check the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper more carefully when I have a chance to see them again.

No comment.

Frame: 8/- 8/1 -/8 7/X 7/1 7/X -/- 7/- 5/- X/7/1
Score:   8  17  25  42  50  60  60  67  72    90

Frame: -/8 5/2 5/4 -/5 1/2 7/- 9/- 6/- 9/- 8/-
Score:   8  15  24  29  32  39  48  54  63  71   

DBI is the Perl database interface. Like all modern database interfaces, DBI consists of a database-independent API and specific drivers for the various databases. This means that you can write code for Oracle, SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL or any other supported SQL database management system without having to learn a new interface every time. Theoretically, this also allows you to switch your application to another DBMS just by loading a different driver (without changing code). This does not work in the real world, however, as each DBMS has its unique features (which you can hardly avoid making use of) and SQL flavour.

Java people seem to think verbosity a virtue, and this also shows in JDBC (the Java database interface). Perl DBI is much more concise. Compare the following two fragments that do the same thing (a one-row database query).

Java version

PreparedStatement sql = conn.prepareStatement(
    "select count(*), sum(price) from sales"
    + " where category = ? and trunc(sales_date, 'Month') = ?"
    + " group by trunc(sales_date, 'Month')"
    );
sql.setString(1, category);
sql.setString(2, month);
ResultSet rs = sql.executeQuery();
int count, sum;
if (rs.next()){
    count = rs.getInt(1);
    sum = rs.getInt(2);
}
rs.close();
sql.close();

Perl version

my ($count, $sum) = $conn->selectrow_array ( q[
    select count(*), sum(price) from sales 
    where category = ? and trunc(sales_date, 'Month') = ?
    group by trunc(sales_date, 'Month')
    ], {}, $category, $month);

The images for the T-Files are hosted on a separate server (Saving Bandwidth Part Three: put stuff on other people's servers ;-) and this server is moving next week. Actually, the machine itself is not moving at all, it will just be changing its name (from gaiax.com to gaiax.co.jp). That means I have to update all the links on the T-Files (luckily, there are not too many images). Updating old entries without changing their date is a little tricky in Blosxom however, so there could be some missing images for a while.

I am getting about thirty spam mails every day now. Deleting them is only mildly annoying as the Apple Mail filter detects most of them automatically. But I got one email this morning that really made me unhappy, as it had a faked return address and pretended to have been sent by me (it also included my picture, but that was fortunately not really part of the mail, it was automagically inserted client-side by the OS X address book -- got me startled, though). I wonder how many people are getting spam using my address. I hope all of those messages get deleted unnoticed.

The last exam in the Oracle DBA track covers setting up database server and client applications for use in a network as well as backup and recovery operations. About half of the 63 questions focused on Oracle's recovery tool (RMAN), which I have not used at all so far. I was hoping that just reading about RMAN would be enough, but the exam was rather tricky and I missed the passing score by two questions. I suppose the backup procedures of the database I am managing will enjoy a lot of attention during the thirty days I have to prepare my second shot at 1Z0-032.

On the average weblog you can not only read what the author thinks, you can also read what he reads. Here is my current list of subscriptions (which I feed to the excellent NetNewsWire Lite):

• General news

  BBC News

  BBC News: Updated every minute of every day - FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY

  Japan Today: National Headlines

  Japan Today: National Headlines: The world's leading source of Japan news in English.

  SPIEGEL ONLINE

  SPIEGEL ONLINE: Schneller wissen, was wichtig ist

  N24 - Nachrichten

  N24 - Nachrichten: N24 - Werden Sie Augenzeuge. Deutsche News rund um die Uhr. News in German.

• Tech news

  Slashdot

  Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

  kuro5hin.org

  kuro5hin.org: technology and culture, from the trenches

  Linux Journal

  Linux Journal: Linux Journal focuses specifically on Linux and other open-source OSes, allowing the content to be a highly specialized source of information for open-source enthusiasts.

  Lockergnome Bytes

  Lockergnome Bytes: The latest technology news and links from the perspective of a Lockergnomie.

  Wired News

  Wired News: Technology, and the way we do business, is changing the world we know. Wired News is a technology - and business-oriented news service feeding an intelligent, discerning audience. What role does technology play in the day-to-day living of your life? Wired News tells you. How has evolving technology changed the face of the international business world? Wired News puts you in the picture.

  Japan Today: Technology Headlines

  Japan Today: Technology Headlines: The world's leading source of Japan news in English.

  heise online news

  heise online news: Nachrichten aus der Welt des Computers

• Mac news

  MacDevCenter

  O'Reilly MacDevCenter -- macintosh development, open source development

  MacMegasite

  MacMegasite:

  MacMerc

  MacMerc:

  freshmeat.net - Mac OS X

  freshmeat.net - Mac OS X: freshmeat.net maintains the Web's largest index of Unix and cross-platform open source software. Thousands of applications are meticulously cataloged in the freshmeat.net database, and links to new code are added daily.

  macosxhints

  macosxhints: Get the most from X!

  MacSlash: A daily dose of Macintosh News and Discussion

  MacSlash: A daily dose of Macintosh News and Discussion: A daily dose of Macintosh News and Discussion

  MacRumors

  MacRumors: the mac news you care about

• Mozilla and web design news

  MozillaZine

  MozillaZine: Your source for daily Mozilla news, advocacy, interviews, builds, and more!

  Blogzilla - a blog about Mozilla

  Blogzilla - a blog about Mozilla: Blogzilla is a weblog about Mozilla

  WebReference

  WebReference: Daily news, views, and how-tos on all aspects of web design and development. Features free web-based tools, open source scripts, and in-depth tutorials on DHTML, HTML, JavaScript, 3D, Graphics, XML, and Design for webmasters.

  A List Apart: for people who make websites

  A List Apart: for people who make websites: Web design news, info, and insights since 1995. CSS layout, XHTML, usability, accessibility. Designing with web standards. ISSN: 1534-0295.

• Perl news

  use Perl

  use Perl: All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

  Perl.com

  Perl.com: The Source for Perl

  search.cpan.org

  search.cpan.org: The CPAN search site

• Personal blogs

  Surfin' Safari

  Surfin' Safari: Dave Hyatt's Weblog

  Sucking less, on a budget

  Sucking less, on a budget: I try so hard to make things suck less...And miles to go before I sleep.

  raelity bytes

  raelity bytes: The raelity bytes weblog.

  0xDECAFBAD

  0xDECAFBAD: Confessions of a Caffeine Addicted Mind

  Squawks of the Parrot

  Squawks of the Parrot: Dan natters on about, well, stuff.

  Tim O'Reilly

  Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly & Associates.

  Nicholas Riley's Weblog

  Nicholas Riley s Weblog: High-performance computing, medicine, usability, Mac OS X, Python, Cocoa and hiptop development, and my life.

  Joel on Software

  Joel on Software: Painless Software Management

  WIL WHEATON DOT NET: Where is my mind?

  WIL WHEATON DOT NET: Where is my mind?: WIL WHEATON dot NET: 50,000 monkeys at 50,000 typewriters can't be wrong.

  codepoetry

  codepoetry: technology, unabridged

  ::: ztracen v Japonsku :::

  In Czech. I do not understand a word.

• My own sites

  The T-Files

  The T-Files: Everything Thilo feels he needs to share ...

  The T-Files: Access statistics

  Big Thilo is watching you: Web site access statistics for the T-Files

  Weblog Japan: Recent updates

  Weblog Japan: Recent updates: These pages have recently updated

  PerlPad project summary

  PerlPad project summary: A summary of key project details for the perl-pad project on SourceForge.net.

If you plan to visit me from Germany, please bring along the following papers/magazines:

• taz - die tageszeitung
• Bild Zeitung
• c't - magazin für Computertechnik

Thank you.

Within walking distance from our apartment, just across Nippori station, lies Yanaka, which was a religious centre of Tokyo during the Edo period. It seems every family at that time established their own temple, and as a result the neighbourhood now abounds in them. Yanaka has between seventy and eighty Buddhist temples today, seven of those on my pilgrimage to the Eighty-eight Places Within Tokyo (of which I have seen nine so far). I started going to the Eighty-eight Places Within Tokyo in addition to the Thirty-three Places in Kanto, because those are quite difficult to reach, but I will not begin visiting the Thirty-three Places of Edo or the Other Twenty-one Places Within Tokyo before I am done with either of them.

Yanaka also has a big cemetery. Cemeteries in Japan function as public parks, too, and as it is sakura season and perfect weather now, it was packed with people sitting on blue plastic sheets, having barbecue under the cherry blossoms.

We are moving! Not immediately, mainly because the house has not been built yet, but almost definitely in March next year.

There are many complaints brought forth against Perl. One of the few that is valid is the lack of a formal way to specify parameters when calling subroutines. It cannot be denied that this is a serious shortcoming, mainly because it prevents the compiler from checking the validity of your subroutine calls, which would catch errors early on, make debugging easier and save some coding effort on your part when checking parameters yourself. Since there is no official parameter passing convention, different styles have developed, which tends to confuse beginners, sometimes to the point that they stop using parameters and pass stuff around in global variables. Not good.

The upside of all this is that because you have to implement parameter passing yourself, you can do it according to your needs and liking, and the process becomes more flexible than in most other languages.

Simple (positional) parameters

sub foo{
    my ($a, $b) = @_;
    ....
}

Optional parameters
Since there is no parameter checking, you can call a subroutine with less than the full number of parameters. The subroutine will receive an undefined value (that is: the well-defined value called undef) and can be coded to act appropriately. So you can call above subroutine like

foo(123,345);
foo(123);
foo();

Variable parameter lists
The popular printf function takes a format string and a variable list of parameters to print according to that format. If you wanted to implemented it in Perl (which does not make sense, since Perl already has printf) you could write

sub printf{
    my ($format, @list) = @_;
    ...
}

Named parameters
If you have a lot of parameters, some of them optional, it makes sense to change from positional to named parameters. In Perl, this can be easily implemented using hashes (which are a core language element).

sub bar{
    my (%parameters) = @_;
    my ($size, $offset)  = @parameters{ qw [ size offset   ] };
}
# call this function like
bar( offset => 100, size => 22 );

Named parameters with default values
Setting up default values for optional named parameters is simple, just put the defaults in the parameter hash before the actual parameters, so that they will be overwritten as needed:

sub bar{
    my (%parameters) = ( size => 100, offset => 0, @_ );
    my ($size, $offset)  = @parameters{ qw [ size offset   ] };
}

The future
Perl6 (which should ship within the decade, maybe even before Duke Nukem Forever) will have a syntax to formally specify parameters (if you want, it will be optional) that will support all of the mentioned features (plus parameter type checking, return types and other goodies), so that you will be able to write

sub bar
    ( int +$size=100 , int +$offset=0) 
    returns Array of Str { ... }

Chances are that a browser visiting your web site has seen it before. In this case, some parts of your site are probably still stored in the browser cache. A few of those parts may have changed in the meantime (such as the writing on your top page) but others will be the same as before in which case there is no real need to transmit them again. Not transmitting things obviously reduces bandwidth usage. Loading large image files from a local hard disk cache rather than over the network noticably speeds up the display of web pages.

The way this idea is implemented in the HTTP protocol is called conditional GET. When a browser requests a file that it has downloaded before, it will send an If-Modified-Since header. If the document has not been modified from the indicated version, it is not retransmitted. There will be just a 304 Not Modified response from the server instead. For static files, this is automatically implemented by all common web servers, so unlike with content compression you do not have to do anything to use this feature. Dynamic files are a different matter. If you want to support conditionals GETs for them, you have to implement it yourself. This is not often done, and the effort does not really pay off most of the time (since dynamic pages have a tendency to change too often to be cached anyway). One case where it is worth to support conditional GETs, however, are RSS feeds. For the usual blog, they do not change more than once or twice a day, but they are polled much more often than that, often hourly.

During the last (admittedly not very busy) week, the T-Files RSS feed (about 5300 bytes at the time) has been requested 304 times. But it had to be transmitted only 17 times, and half of those transmissions have been compressed to 1900 bytes. This brings the average transfer size down 96% to just 195 bytes.

The first piece of serious literature I have read in quite a while, and it came in a heavily annotated edition, comprising the original short story published in an American magazine and the later extended British novel version, as well as examples of the discussions it sparked in the papers at the time it was published, extracts from the protocols of the trials that followed and essays about the book. The story itself was surprisingly interesting and the novel is full of witty aphorisms (which I find myself unable to remember in a quotable quality, however).

With Lost in Translation still not showing, the subtitled version of Innocence (somehow related to Ghost in the Shell) discontinued due to unavoidable production circumstances (?!), and having missed Once Upon a Time in Mexico by an hour, it is good to still have movies like Master and Commander or Paycheck to default to. It would have been even better, if Paycheck lived up to the standard set by Minority Report and Total Recall (other Philip K. Dick adaptations) or Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2 (decent John Woo Hollywood movies).

5 points

BeanShell is a small, free, embeddable, Java source interpreter with object scripting language features, written in Java. BeanShell executes standard Java statements and expressions, in addition to obvious scripting commands and syntax. BeanShell supports scripted objects as simple method closures like those in Perl and JavaScript(tm).
You can use BeanShell interactively for Java experimentation and debugging or as a simple scripting engine for your applications. [...] you can call your Java applications and objects from BeanShell; working with Java objects and APIs dynamically. [...] you can freely pass references to "real live" objects into scripts and return them as results.

Very, very useful (for projects where Perl is not an option and you have to use Java). It gives you great rapid prototyping capabilities, speeding up your development (especially the testing and debugging part).

BeanShell is also used internally by the JEdit text editor to write macros.

I am putting together a campaign page for Kill Bill 2 (we are actually selling officially licensed avatars!) and I could not help but notice the strange tag line.

Kill is Love? This is probably (hopefully?) only used in Japan and another perfect example for Engrish.

We saw Cirque du Soleil yesterday. Exotic costumes, disturbing images, great music (although we were somewhat at a loss trying to figure out in what language the songs were), and of course fantastic acrobatics. Unlike Holiday on Ice or the acrobatics show we saw in Shanghai, they also had clowns, which is generally a good thing, and people entering the stage from holes in the ground.

From Tokyo to all over the country since 1991:

People gather to TOKYO from here and there with memories of their home. And then, Tokyo gets the everyone's home town.

Perl (Practical Extracting and Reporting Language) was originally designed to work with text, and as such has plenty of nice features to work with strings. A very basic element is how you can specify string literals (constants) in your program source code, and Perl offers unmatched flexibility and convenience here. Those are simple things, sure, but why not get the simple things right?

Simple string literal
Well, every language can do that...

my $foo = 'A string';

String literal that contains quotes
If you want to include the quote character in your string, you usually have to escape it. Otherwise the parser will think it terminates the literal string. You can do that in Perl, but you can also simply choose different quote characters that are not contained in the string. With the qx operator you are fairly free in choosing the delimiter.

my $foo = q{A string with ' " quotes};
$foo = q[blah blah];
$foo = q=blah blah=;

Simple multi-line string literal
Many languages do not allow you to spread a string literal over more than one line. Perl does.

my $foo = 'A string
with two lines';

Very long multi-line string literal
There is an additional syntax called here-docs that is specifically designed for long multi-line strings which can also include all kinds of quote characters, that you would normally have to escape. It starts with <<MARK where MARK is the end-of-string mark of your liking. The string starts on the next line and continues until you put the MARK on a line by itself.

my $foo = <<RAVEN;
 Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
 Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
 While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
 As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
 `'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
 Only this, and nothing more.'
RAVEN

Interpolation
Just like a command shell (but unlike most other programming languages) Perl allows for convenient interpolation of variables within strings:

my $name = 'Tyler Durden';
my $greeting = "Hello, $name!";                      # note the double quotes
my @numbers = qw( one two three four five );         # nifty way to quote an array of words
my $foo = "I can count: @numbers";                   # interpolate the array
$foo = "3: $numbers[2]";                             # or just an array element
$foo = "even: @numbers[1,3], odd: @numbers[0,2,4] "; # or some array elements

Last Wednesday I joined Natasha (and Marek, and Roberto, and about 60 other foreigners) for the recording of a segment of SMAPxSMAP, so if you have a chance to see Fuji TV tonight at ten, by all means do, as you might catch a glimpse of yours truly.

Part of SMAPxSMAP is The True Show, in which a celebrity has to disclose a well-kept secret. In this case it was SMAP member Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, who has also become known as Choran Kang since he started his own Korean language TV show three years ago. He has become very popular in Korea, made a few albums, and promised the prime minister to make a movie (which, surprise, surprise, happens to be premiering these days). The confession he made to show master John Kabira (speaks native American, native Japanese, DJs, comments play-by-play on the Japanese national soccer team for TV and video games) was that he did not speak Korean at all in the beginning, but just memorised the pronunciations.

TV shows all over the world work with premeditated cheers and jeers from audiences, but Japan takes it a step further. Not only was the whole studio audience paid to be there on Wednesday, and every one of their reactions carefully rehearsed (so that a three minute segment took four hours to shoot), the audience also consisted wholly of foreigners, most of them could not follow the confessions they were supposed to spontaneously react to. Two of us even had to shout scripted questions. Note the ironic twist that made Kusanagi confess about faking an interview in a language he did not understand to a jury that could not understand him either.

Consider this: You have to add support for some electronic payment system to your shopping website. You have to access the payment gateway using a vendor-supplied C library. The documentation suggests you write a CGI script in C, or use the Java Native Interface. Well, Perl to the rescue!

Perl is written in C (Perl6 will be, too). There is an mechanism to create Perl extensions in C, providing access to native libraries. This is frequently used to make Perl interfaces for things like XML parsers, database drivers, OpenSSL, or efficient mathematical algorithms. Using that mechanism is not for the faint of heart however, as it has a steep learning curve. But in Perl, there is always More Than One Way To Do It (tm), and in this case there is Inline::C.

Inline::C is a module that allows you to write Perl subroutines in C. You can just place them in the middle of your Perl files (hence the name, Inline). You can also access external libraries. All of this is surprisingly hassle-free with compilation and linking going on behind the scenes.

use Inline C => Config =>
    ENABLE => 'AUTOWRAP',
    LIBS => 
        '-L/usr/local/edy/lib -L/usr/local/ssl/lib -lssl -lcrypto -ledymallapi',
    INC => '-I/usr/local/edy/include';

use Inline C => <<'EDY';

#include<edymallapi.h>
#include<edyerrcode.h>

# just declare the function headers, wrappers around the
# C functions in the edymallapi library will be automagically
# created

int edygeterrorcode();
char *edygeterrormessage( int );
EDY

# and now I can call the C function from Perl
# just like that

print edygeterrormessage( edygeterrorcode());

Have a look at the Inline::C cookbook.

The foreign language section of the Shibuya public library has some rather annoying gaps. There is for example not a single volume of Philip K. Dick, Douglas Adams is limited to Mostly Harmless, no sequel to Hyperion and no Mrs. Dalloway. They make up for this by having what seems to be a complete collection of Stephen King, Danielle Steele, and John Grisham, supplemented by sports biographies and adaptations of Star Trek, Star Wars, comic book, and TV shows. I can only hope that those tumbled out of an expatriate bookshelf in the form of a donation, rather than being the result of tax yen spent (in this case, building superfluous bridges and roads instead does seem a good choice).

Stern's novel is the write-up about the events leading to Superman's death and rebirth in 1992/1993. It is based upon the comic books published during this period, with additional material drawn from other volumes of this long-running series. So if you want to learn about Superman's encounter with Doomsday, his dealings with Lois Lane, his foster parents in Kansas, the people and police of Metropolis, Lex Luthor, Supergirl, the Justice League, the media, Superboy, several clones, impostors, and aliens, but you do not want to read the comics itself, this book is for you. I said if.

If you are even a little into science fiction you should read this 1990 Hugo Award winner. It is about a diplomat, a soldier, a Catholic priest, a spaceship captain, a private investigator, a Jewish scholar and a poet who have been chosen to undertake a mysterious pilgrimage. There is not much introduction about any of this, but the details about their mission and the universe the book is set in (humanity split into two opposing factions, spread out among many planets after Earth was destroyed, with sentient AIs that follow their own agenda) unfold as one by one they start telling their life stories (to each other and the reader). Each of these accounts is completely different and good enough to make for an interesting short story in itself.

A lot of science fiction's topics are touched upon, but the main theme is time: The destination of the pilgrimage are the mysterious Time Tombs, a place that is said to travel back in time. A girl starts to grow younger every time she falls asleep. Relationships are strained when people travel a few months on spaceships (most of these months in cryogenic sleep), but when they return many years have passed on their home planet. Medical procedures extend the life-spans of (rich) people. A reclusive tribe does not appear to age at all.

The only problem is that Hyperion is only half of a book: After the pilgrims have told their tales (which makes up most of the book) and are ready to start their pilgrimage, the book abruptly ends, and you have to get The Fall of Hyperion.

I did not buy an iPod today, but it was close. I am pretty sure now that my iBook is not going to last the one more year I intended it to. Yesterday, my hard disk started to make very loud clicking noises from time to time. And since it is clearly not designed to have its internal disk replaced, I got myself an external Firewire disk. There were basically three options: non-portable (160 GB, 20.000 yen), portable (60 GB, 30.000 yen) and iPod (starting at 15 GB and 30.000 yen). I went for a Logitec LHD-PBA60FU2 portable. I am now booting and working off the external drive with a freshly installed OS and a still completely useable copy of my home directory (all my settings are still there).

Blosxcss ( pronounced "Blah - six" ) is a framework to create intercompatible Blosxom web sites. By intercompatible, I mean that you could take the CSS stylesheet from any Blosxcss-Compliant website, and use it for another website, without any changes.

Now that is definitely a good idea. I have to investigate if I cannot transform my HTML and CSS to become compatible with it. And I do not see why this needs to be limited to Blosxom.

Ingo has been at it again! Check out his latest stylesheet Springtime. Sweet and green and with rounded borders on Mozilla-based browsers.

Mitake-jinja in Shibuya is very close to our office. I went there during lunch break. The main feature are the two guardian lion-dogs (koma-inu) which take the form of Japanese wolves, which is said to be unusual. The stone originals, which have been badly damaged during war, are enshrined here, and two faithful bronze replicas have taken their positions.

A rare chance to see a German movie here (I hope Das Wunder von Bern will be next). Good bye, Lenin is the sometimes sad, sometimes funny story of an East-German family whose mother falls into a coma after a heart attack. During the eight months she misses, the German Democratic Republic, of which she was a model citizen and in which she invested all her energy, disintegrates. As her condition is still unstable and any stress or shock would be life-threatening, her son decides to hide the changes from her and creates an elaborate Socialist illusion.

7 points

There are big shrines and there are small shrines. Ebisu-jinja is definitely a small one. The caretaker is also running (from the same building on the shrine grounds) a car rental agency, which is why I got a business card in addition to the red ink seal.

We went hiking today. We first went by train to Nishi-Agano (Seibu Ikebukuro line) and climbed the mountain from there (which is unusual for the Citibank hiking club, all the other times we had an hour-long taxi ride first). There was a surprisingly large Buddhist temple halfway up the top, but the monks were out, so I could not get their seal. The top of Takayama Fudo was 771 metres above sea level.

In order to accomodate the iChat crowd, I signed up for an AOL Instant Messenger account (of course, I will still be available via both ICQ and MSN Messenger). When choosing a screen name I had to find out (in horror) that both Thilosopher and the German equivalent Thilosoph were already taken. Enter the Thilorist.

Quoth the cookie:

The spirit of OKASHI. It is what gives a peaceful and pleasant mind to the human race. All the time, man seeks romance in the OKASHI. We have been working hard and carefully, and work on. To weave the romance and the fancy into each OKASHI. This, at last, we have made up The HAKATA SEIYO-WAGASHI. If you taste the feeling and the spirit of the OKASHI which value tradition and living in the times, there is no pleasure better than it.

When you are running a web site, you have to pay for the network bandwidth that sending your pages to visitors consumes (of course, the T-Files are way too small for this to have any effect, so by all means do not let this consideration stop you from frequently visiting).

One way to cut down on bandwidth usage is to compress the pages before sending them out. The visitor's browser can then decompress the data before displaying it. All modern browsers support this method, but not all web sites make use of it, which is surprising because it can save real money for popular sites (it also reduces the page load time on slow connections). Sites that do make use of content compression include Google and Slashdot. One reason why it is not omnipresent could be that it is not set up by default in the popular Apache web server. You have to install the optional mod_gzip (Apache 1.x) or mod_deflate (Apache 2.x) module and configure it. You have to tell it, for example, what to compress and what not (it basically only works for text and does not make sense to try to compress images, which are already optimised in this regard).

So when you get the top pages of the T-Files (26546 bytes) and Weblog Japan (4044 bytes) I am actually sending you much less (9144 and 1570 bytes).

I went to the post office to send a letter just now -- at 9 pm. The Shibuya post office (a state-run business!) is open 24 hours a day.

The 'book is back! They said it would take a week at least and maybe two, but after less than two days my iBook (complete with a new and free logic board) is sitting on its desk again. Which is funny, since the VersaPro was displaying some really weird display problems today, too, which made me reboot in panic. So to finish my report about this week, here is my opinion about the best feature of Mac OS X (the fonts look so much better, especially the Asian ones) and the list of programs I had installed so far:

• Thunderbird (email client)
• Firefox (web browser)
• SharpReader (a newsfeed aggregator, I cannot live without those anymore)
• JEdit (my favorite text editor, Notepad is just useless. Had to install Java first which does not come with Windows.)
• Cygwin (bash, vi, perl, ssh, tar, gzip). Cygwin is a really wonderful project. It is a compatibility library that brings large parts of the Linux API to Windows and a huge collection of Unix applications building on top of that. And installing it has become very easy.
• StuffIt Expander (uncompresses files, but did not work, maybe because I refused to reboot after installing it)
• WinSCP (secure file copy program, but I had problems with it, so I used Cygwin instead)
• PuTTY (ssh client, to connect to Unix servers, but I switched to Cygwin after I had installed that anyway)
• Gaim (a multi-protocol chatting client, quite impressive feature set and the most popular project on Sourceforge)

I was lucky that Itoh-san, our tech support guy, could fix me up with his spare NEC VersaPro (Pentium III/700, Windows XP), which is quite decent. So here are some good points about it:

• There are more applications available for Windows. While this situation has improved a lot in recent years and you can get good Mac applications for almost everything you need to do, there are still a few gaps. This week I can use Oracle Enterprise Manager and Symantec PC Anywhere.
• Some applications are better in their Windows versions. OpenOffice sucks on the Mac, but runs fine on Windows. Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection can open only one simultaneous connection on the Mac. Firefox can go fullscreen on Windows.
• I can make new folders and documents with a single mouse click.
• The login/logout fadein/fadeout effects are cool.

I admit that this list ended up a little short and unconvincing (maybe I should add mention to this helpful little doggie that pops up now and then to explain things) ...

I was not in office when they took my iBook away. It seems pretty certain that it is suffering from the well-known logic board issue (I hope that is the case, in fact, because if it is, Apple has to repair it for free). In any case, it will take about two weeks to get things fixed, so during this time I will be using a Windows XP notebook in office. And since the T-Files are a friendly and open-minded Mac blog (unlike certain others, who slam everything without the Apple logo and even make fun of people who are not happy with their failing iPod batteries or the fact that Apple applications always tend to require the latest OS version) I will start with some things I like about it --- tomorrow.

The name of Heihachiro Togo is world-famous and ranks alongside that of Lord Nelson as one of the world's greatest Admirals. At least that is what they say at Togo-jinja in Harajuku, which was built in 1940 (destroyed in 1945, rebuilt in 1964) to enshrine the soul of the admiral (1847-1934). As often happens at weekend visits to shrines, there was a traditional Japanese wedding ceremony going on when I went there.

I am writing on Cissy's Hitachi Prius today. My iBook does not boot anymore. It makes the startup sound and the disk seems to spin for a second, but that's it. Screen remains dark, no way to even tell if it is on or off. Removed the battery to make sure about that. Tried many things, no good. Not good.

When the Lord of the Rings is released in Japan in February, that is unfortunate. But Valentine's Day or not, this British comedy about one week in the lives of eight loosely related couples is a Christmas movie, and should have been here then. Inspite of director/writer Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary) and lead (among about a dozen others) Hugh Grant (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary) there are only one wedding and a funeral.

7 points

This shrine is typical of Tokyo in that it is hidden away in a modern city quarter (in this case actually right next to the infamous Kabuki-cho red light district in Shinjuku) and quite unexpectedly appears between office buildings.

Hanazono was the second shrine we visited today. In the first one, our request for the red ink stamp was turned down because the head priest was not in. And as I could witness at Hanazono it does take a calligraphy master to issue the stamp: First, an inscription is done with black ink and a big brush. After that, the seal is stamped in red.

Gyudon (strips of beef on a bowl of rice) have become a cornerstone of my diet, but there could be an end to it: Yoshinoya, the biggest chain of gyudon restaurants, imported all of its beef from the United States, which have been slapped with an import ban because of the mad cow disease at the beginning of this year. Today or tomorrow, Yoshinoya will run out of stock. They already changed their menu to include salmon, roe, pork and chicken (in another unlucky turn of events, shortly after the introduction of chicken meat, the bird flu struck, sending Yoshinoya even deeper into trouble), and from Thursday gyudon will no longer be available in Yoshinoya's 986 outlets (except for its original shop in Tsukiji which for historical purposes continues to sell Japanese beef, just like it did back in 1899). It is not without irony that the 80 shops Yoshinoya West operates in the United States will still be serving the same American beef that is now banned in Japan.

I cannot help but wonder if Yoshinoya's announcement to stop making gyudon is not just a marketing stunt. They say they cannot use Australian beef because it is not suited for gyudon. That has not stopped Matsuya, the number two chain. At the moment, Yoshinoya is enjoying great sales as everyone is rushing to place their last orders. Official numbers put sales 20% above usual levels, and the shop was crowded when I went there for lunch today.

So maybe there is hope.

Stamps are important in Japan. Instead of signatures, people and institutions use name stamps (hanko or inkan) to sign contracts and other legal documents. All railway stations and all sites of touristic interest have a stamp which can be collected in albums to document the visit. Many shops issue stamp cards which result in discounts for frequent buyers. And yesterday I engaged in the ultimate stamp rally.

Both Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples issue stamps (goshuin) to visitors, as a proof of having worshipped there. They have been doing this for hundreds of years. The stamps are collected in special albums, and there are also official pilgrimages in which the stamps of the participating shrines are put on scrolls.

The Meiji shrine in Harajuku was constructed to commemorate Emperor Meiji (Japan's 122th emperor, born 1852, reigned from 1868 - 1912) and Empress Shoken. While their souls have in fact been enshrined there on November 1st, 1920, their mortal shells are buried in Kyoto. The temple area also contains an evergreen forest with 365 different species of trees, donated by people all over Japan.

While no one is visiting Weblog Japan, if they did they would be presented with 100% validating XHTML now. The T-Files, on the other hand ...

Wow. It seems not everybody was happy with yesterday's Google celebration of Gaston Maurice Julia's birthday. So it is actually dangerous to be listed prominently on Google ...

We have a variety of logos commemorating holidays and events. We've put them in this online museum for your amusement. Please do not use them elsewhere. And please, don't feed the kangaroo.

Having Google search built into Firebird, Safari, Camino, Mozilla and just about everything else is a wonderful thing, but it has a downside: You miss a lot of their wonderful holiday logos. Did you see the fractal logo today?

An Oracle database is a highly tuneable system. In order to find proper settings for its many parameters and options, you need to have an understanding of how things work internally. In addition to this general knowledge, you need to find out how your current installation is faring by observing the database, reading logs, analysing trace files and doing measurements (an Oracle database is also a highly inspectable system, allowing the DBA to see all its internals). Once you have an idea what can be improved, tuning efforts can take place at completely different levels: You can change SQL code, create different types of indices, set storage parameters for data tables, assign different kind of data to different memory areas, size those memory areas, move physical files around on hard disks, and so on. This was a very interesting exam.

I hate waiting, even in front of a movie theatre. This makes me likely to show up just in time for a movie to start, sometimes even too late for the opening credits (although I hate missing those, too). Well, this strategy does not work with the Ebisu Garden Cinema, at least not on a weekend. The Ebisu Garden Cinema seems to be independent of the big chains that run most of the theatres in Tokyo, and they usually show movies that the others do not. And since those are still pretty mainstream (and not totally obscure art flics), it tends to be sold out early. So when we arrived at 3:15 for our 4:10 show, there were no tickets left. This was the second time this happened, and we ended up arriving at 3:15 for our 7:00 show.

New York. Edward Norton is a convicted drug dealer on his last day in freedom before starting a seven-year prison term, which he spends saying good-byes to his buddies, father, girlfriend, and dog. The film has a very credible cast and interesting characters, but it suffers from too much 9/11 symbolism.

7 points

I checked my web mail account (from which I am normally downloading all mails with Apple Mail and hence almost never get to see the site) and there was the spam message that I saw being downloaded and then disappearing. It was still sitting in my inbox there, marked as unread. So I guess it was just repeatedly downloaded every few minutes, causing that error message to appear all over again. After deleting the email through the web interface, the error disappeared (relief!). So what was wrong with that email? It did not display in the web interface either (although it had a few KB listed for its size), so it was probably seriously broken (perhaps intentionally to trick spam filters), which means that I am not losing mail.

At least I am not losing mail because of my mail application. I sometimes think that emails which I write disappear on the way to their recipient, especially when posting to mailing lists. I do not want to think too much about that.

In the train on the way to work this morning (and just about ten years after the game was originally released) I finished the first episode (Knee Deep in the Dead) of Doom. So can someone please port Duke Nukem 3D to GP32 (ideally before Duke Nukem Forever comes out) ?

This must be an Internet addict's worst nightmare.

Recently I noticed Apple Mail fetching some emails and then I could not find them in my inbox (or in any other folder). Instead I have this in the console log:

2004-01-29 20:12:17.167 Mail[923] failed to append message  (_rangeOfBytes: Out of bounds)

In fact, I have a lot of these error messages. The mails I watched disappearing have all been spam (Mail displays the subject line while fetching), but this is not the spam filter at work (it just files spam away, not makes it disappear). I am trying to comfort myself by assuming that those spam messages were somehow malformed and this does not happen to normal mails.

I am worried.

Breakfast

Half of a cake made from apple and sweet potato (the whole cake was 714 yen). Jasmine tea.

Lunch

The second half of the apple cake.

Afternoon

Three Cissy-made waffles with baked-in banana slices.

Dinner

Cissy cooked chicken filets (spiced with some herbs and lemons) and green paprica (combined material cost around 300 yen). A piece of chocolate pie (100 yen). Some sour jelly gums.

Night

During the 9 o'clock movie (The Faculty, viciously cut for time, I hate TV) a pack of potato chips (120g, 180 yen)

When I first came to Japan I had never had a mobile phone and had never wanted one. However, having such a contraption is almost a necessity here, and frankly, quite convenient. So one of the first things I did during my second coming was to get a prepaid phone (since the stay was short I could not get involved with a lengthy contract obligation), and I use that same phone until today, which puts me on the way to become the owner of the oldest handset in Japan. There is no reason to switch from prepaid to contract, because with my usage patterns (basically only to receive calls) prepaid is fantastically cheap (1500 yen/month). So far, I have also stubbornly resisted the pressure to upgrade for any of the nice features that Japanese phones are so famous for. I have none of the following: colour display, dial tone polyphony, Internet access, email, digital camera, music player, GPS (including live map display and route guidance), TV reception, English-language user interface, games, Java, dictionary.

But this week I was tempted to get the latest innovation, mainly because it is just too weird to not want to have it: Sanyo introduced a new handset at the beginning of this year which you do not have to hold to your ear to listen. Instead you can press it against any bone in your head, which will cause vibrations in your skull that allow you to hear voices in your head. I ended up not buying it after all, because

• it would have been quite expensive for me to keep my number,
• it did not work all that well. You have to shut out normal hearing (which is fine if you work on a construction site and wear one of those protective headsets, but otherwise completely negates the usability gain) and even then, the volume was quite low (probably higher volumes would be unhealthy, who knows),
• the look of the handset is not so great,
• and finally, going from Sony to Sanyo does not feel like an upgrade, really (I am becoming kind of a brand person, at least in electronics).

Our strawberry-flavored milk drink is the smooth and tasty way to freshen up your day.

Koiwai Farmed Since 1891

Breakfast

A glass of (you can guess it by now) grapefruit juice. Later a pack of strawberry milk (250ml, 90 yen, see above).

Lunch

Spaghetti with potatoes from Hokkaido, sausages and basil. Two (small) glasses of Coke. Salad. A piece of layer cheese cake and a cup of orange pekoe tea (all together 814 yen). A Japanese sweet bean bun (anman).

Afternoon

Kaiten (rotation) sushi: three plates of tuna, two plates of egg, with green tea (together 525 yen)

Dinner

Jasmine tea. Half a sweet potato cake (the whole cake was 1050 yen). A strawberry yoghurt (Danone, 85g, 207 yen for a pack of four).

Viking is another good example of Japanese English. It does not denote a pirate from among the Northmen, who plundered the coasts of Europe in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. The term is used for an all-you-can eat buffet (which you can hence plunder at will, so a Viking would probably enjoy it, too)

Breakfast

Three mandarin oranges and a glass of grapefruit juice. A sandwich (just cheese, ham was out, my fault).

Lunch

A lot of food and fruits and juice at the Oslo (1150 yen, 31st floor, great view). The Oslo being a Scandinavian restaurant makes viking a good choice of words, actually.

Afternoon

Two Xylitol, one Werther's Original and a similar Meiji Chocolate candy.

Dinner

Two xiao long bao and eight shaomai (both are kinds of Chinese dumplings, filled with meat, together 840 yen). Two glasses of grapefruit juice.

Dirk Gently, hired by someone he never meets, to do a job that is never specified, starts following people at random. His investigations lead him to Los Angeles, through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos. Jokes, lightly poached fish, and the emergent properties of complex systems form the background to Dirk Gently's most baffling and incomprehensible case.

This is what Douglas Adams described the unfinished Salmon of Doubt to his agent at one time. Later, he said he lost touch with the character and is more likely to turn the story into a new Hitchhiker novel. Unfortunately, his untimely death prevented him from doing either.

This book contains material about life, the universe, and everything that was culled posthumously from his fleet of beloved Macintosh computers (the guy had PowerBooks long before they became affordable to ordinary mortals): The unfinished Salmon only makes up less than one third. There are two (previously published) short stories (Young Zaphod Plays It Safe and The Private Life of Genghis Khan), and dozens of articles, interviews, letters, speeches, notes and quotations about science-fiction magazines, Paul McCartney's birthday, school trousers, the alphabet, word games, his nose, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, dogs, driving in foreign countries, Procul Harum, New Year's Resolutions, drinks, writing new introductions for old books, The Sound of Music, his dream team, inspiration, travelling, scuba diving with manta rays, favourite authors, tea, climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in a rhino costume, phonetically close nouns, the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, plug-and-play, web sites, technology, atheism, e-mail, predictions, office chairs, palm top computers, power adaptors, Internet publishing, insurance contracts, science, statistics, an artificial god, and trying to make a movie.

So remember to bring your towel when you go out and buy this book or at least follow these links.

Today was rather irregular, since I worked overnight yesterday (Oracle server hardware upgrade) and slept through most of today.

Breakfast

Half a pack of boiled pork wieners. Cooked them myself (yeah!), no side dishes.

Afternoon

The second half of the wieners (the whole pack had 291g and cost 298 yen). Four mandarin oranges.

Shakey's Pizza quickly be came known as the world's greatest pizza. But we wanted to grow beyond a beer and pizza joint. We were determined to become what we are today. A fun family restaurant with a varied menu. but we still prepare our own dough fresh every day and use only the finest of ingredients. Shakey's does serve the world's greatest pizza.

Breakfast

Two mandarin oranges and a glass of grapefruit juice.

Lunch

A sandwich and some mint chocolates.

Afternoon

Mint chocolate from England, several Kit Kats, a pork sausage on a stick (am-pm, 105 yen), a milk drink called Nissin Pirkle(500ml, 105 yen)

Dinner

Half a pizza (ham and pineapple) and a glass of Coke at Shakey's (1218 yen)

I am feeling Heisenberg effects here. I am kind of tempted to eat unusual and interesting things for the sake of this report. On the other hand, I am also tempted to eat as normal as possible, which would also cause some distortion. I will try to ignore this.

Breakfast

A glass of grapefruit juice. A sandwich.

Lunch

A chicken filet with some vegetables and fried potatoes (cold and few), miso soup, a bowl of rice and a cup of oolong tea (all from the office cafeteria for 400 yen). A can of Tropicana mixed fruit juice (peach, orange, grapes, strawberry, 280g, 100 yen).

Afternoon

One litre of milk (207 yen). Some Bahlsen cookies and Katjes fruit gum pilfered from co-worker's desks (interesting that Japanese shop German for sweets). One Giant Pocky.

Dinner

Three mandarin oranges and a waffle.

If I was told I had to choose the cuisine of one country and eat only that for the rest of my life, I'd choose Japanese.

Douglas Adams, in an interview with The Observer, March 1995

While I feel that I cannot concur with Mr. Adams here, it turned out that I could also not adequately answer the many questions tossed at me during our recent return to Germany, as to what I eat every day, what I like most, if it is expensive, if it is enough. To be better prepared in the future, I will record all that goes down for one week.

Breakfast

A glass of grapefruit juice and two Cissy-made waffles.

Lunch

Two Cissy-made sandwiches (ham, cheese). A bowl of beef strips on rice with raw egg (gyudon), a cup of miso soup, a potato salad (all from Yoshinoya for together 500 yen). Two Xylitol mints.

Afternoon

A pack of strawberry milk (250ml, 90 yen). A Kit-Kat (99 yen)

Dinner

A small bottle of mandarin orange juice (350ml, 150 yen). An apple and two more waffles.

In order to make more use of my new server, the domain I bought last year and to experiment with wiki technology, I am about to launch Weblog Japan. If it works, it could become a good source of information for people travelling to or living in Japan. For that, it needs to have some initial content (it is empty now). I intend to toss it at the Kanto Trainee list, but before they can play with the site it needs to be a little more polished (especially concerning explanatory pages), and maybe some more features (such as search). But the basic features are already working. See it at http://www.weblog-japan.com/.

It is also a social experiment. I want to see how long such a site can exist without any kind of access control.

Clint Eastwood directs Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon (and he also composed and arranged the music) in this tragic story about three boys whose life gets derailed after one of them is abducted by perverts, and how they meet again 25 years later on different sides in a murder case.

7 points

Christian and Michaela's wedding started with a small religious ceremony at the visitor's centre of the Baha'i European House of Worship (it was unfortunately not held directly in the impressive dome itself). There was not much ceremony, just a few wise words from the priest and two reciters with perfect voices that led up to the pair taking their oaths (to always obey the wishes of the Lord). Afterwards, everyone relocated to a rather expensive (and over-crowded) restaurant on a mountain top (since no one really knew the way there, this was a fun trip). There was plenty of fine food and juices (totally non-alcoholic, nice touch). It was great to meet some old friends and a good opportunity to wear my green Chinese wedding suit again (which did not especially stand out, since the bride wore oriental gold, there was one more China dress and some other rather strange apparel around).

My parents took Jutta, Cissy and me to see Holiday on Ice in Frankfurt. The show was called Diamonds and consisted of a dozen of unrelated scenes with completely different themes (such as the 1920s, a medieval tournament, and an oil painting). But the skating and especially the costumes and light effects have been terrific (for example in the underwater scene which also involved kites and some acrobatics with a trapeze hanging from the roof.

We took Austrian Airlines to Frankfurt and since the flight was via Vienna, we decided to stop by for three days and take a look. We saw the Schönbrunn Palace (sans Labyrinth and Imperial Garden, both closed in winter), the Coach Collection, Mozart's Magic Flute performed by puppets, the Imperial Apartments and Silver Collection, Secular and Ecclesiastical Treasuries, the Butterfly House, the State Hall in the National Library, the Esperanto museum, the House of Music, the Hundertwasser Village, and loads of snow.

Now I want the DVD boxed set. The problem will be finding the right one, there are bound to be many different editions.

7 points

Because of their experience in slaughtering Indians, a team of US army officers is hired by the Japanese government in 1876 to train Japanese troops in putting down regional rebellions, in this case samurai who oppose the Westernisation of Japan. The samurai capture Tom Cruise in their first encounter, but impressed with his bravado they keep him alive and take him to their village in the mountains, where by the end of winter he has come to appreciate the Way of the Samurai and turns against his employers to join the samurai in their final battle. All of this makes me want to watch Shogun again.

8 points

Probably the biggest of the numerous festivals of the Japanese year is New Year, and an integral part is sending out postcards with New Year messages. The post office prints over 4 billion special postcards, whose postage includes a three-yen donation to charities and a national-lottery ticket (all cards are individually numbered and winning numbers are announced in mid-January). The cards are themed according to the Chinese calendar (although the Chinese year does not start on January, 1st), which assigns one of twelve animals to each year. 2003 was the Year of the Sheep, 2004 is the Year of the Monkey. Statistics show that each household sends an average of 100 cards. Businesses easily surpass that.

We wrote about sixty cards this year. Unfortunately, we could not send all of them so far, because we are having some special stamps printed, and those are taking longer than expected and have not arrived as of today. Since we are leaving for Europe tomorrow and cannot send them until we come back, about a third of the cards will be awfully delayed. Well, they should still be in time for the Chinese New Year....