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

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.