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.