I signed an agreement today about my next job. From the first of August, I will be working for DreamArts, a middle-sized Japanese software company. They use Perl, Java and Oracle to make Intranet-based enterprise information systems.

The downside is that work starts at 9. That means rush hour on Sobu line.

Last week, the American Film Institute has revealed its pick of the 100 best Hollywood movie quotes.

Due to licensing restrictions, there are no clips of the quotes on the AFI web site , nor will they be made available for purchase on DVD or VHS.

The nature of these licensing restrictions, and how else big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity is the topic of Free Culture by Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. It details how over the last few decades, copyright law in the United States has been extended to a degree where it now gives enormous control over ideas and technology to media cartels, and how this could stifle innovation and result in a loss of culture and even free speech.

Lessig makes it quite clear that he does not intend to abolish copyrights, and he condemns piracy, but he also points out (and illustrates those points with depressing case studies) how the current system increasingly fails to provide access to content that is not commercially interesting, how it restricts derivative works, and how it cripples emerging technologies.

Being the chair of the Creative Commons project, Lessig also distributes Free Culture as a free download.

Five years ago, the American Film Institute announced the 100 funniest Hollywood movies. If you can spare the time and bandwidth, please celebrate the public domain by downloading the nineteenth funniest movie, His Girl Friday.

Not wanting to go on my stint as a freelancer totally unprepared, I ordered three consulting books from Amazon: Janet Ruhl's Answers for Computer Contractors, Mick Cope's Seven Cs of Consulting, and Gerald Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting. I came up with this selection after a quick search for recommendations on PerlMonks, and the three titles are quite different from each other.

Answers for Computer Contractors is a fact book and a compilation of contents from a web bulletin board and results of online surveys. Published in 1999, it is essentially a list of answers to practical questions (most of which probably only fully apply in the United States) and a lot of figures about the effect of location, age, experience, technologies, taxation and other factors on income distribution.

The Seven Cs (Client, Clarify, Create, Change, Confirm, Continue, Close) represent my worst fears of what a consulting book would look like, and it brought back terrible memories of the marketing and business administration courses I had to take at university. I immediately put it down. From the first to the last page, it is filled with totally illegible Dogbert-speak and matching diagrams.

But the third book, Gerald Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting turned out to be trove of wisdom, and an entertaining read at that. The fact that it is already twenty years old does no harm, as it concentrates on the general principles of giving (and taking) advice. Weinberg also knows the value of a good alliteration, as can be witnessed in the naming of his consulting laws and rules (such as Brown's Brilliant Bequest, Ford's Fundamental Feedback Formula, Pandora's Pox, the Trade-off Treatment, or the White Bread Warning).

On a related note, I was much relieved to find out that the world's foremost Oracle consultant is a redneck after hours.

7 points

We will be in Aichi tomorrow and on Friday to see the 2005 World Exhibition. The main attractions (which I take to be the frozen mammoth, the android tour guides, and the maglev train) will be horribly crowded by the about 100.000 people that visit Expo every day (even on weekdays). Even if we cannot see everything this time round, however, we can hopefully gather enough clues to navigate the site most efficiently when we will go again with my parents and sister in August.

Thursday is Republic of Tunisia Day, Friday is Czech Republic Day.

Honouring the IT tradition to eat one's own dog food, I have reimplemented my Google Cache experiment in Parrot assembly language, using the Budgie framework. More importantly, this gives me an excuse to blog about this again, which has become necessary as Google steadfastly refuses to spider anything except the front page. Specifically, I would like to get GoogleBot to also visit the three pages I have set up for The T-Files, Polly, and Living in the Google Cache to monitor how people find these sites on Google (note that these three links do not work yet, we first need Google to copy them into its cache).

The official development environment for Apple's Mac OS X is called Cocoa. Cocoa, which has its roots in NeXTSTEP, is a collection of libraries that are used to create GUI applications. The native language for Cocoa is Objective-C, and since this is a language no one outside the NeXT community knew at the time Mac OS X was released, Apple is also offering a Java programming interface to it.

CamelBones is an open-source project that lets you access Objective-C libraries from Perl, and Perl code from Objective-C, allowing you to write native Mac applications in Perl. There are a lot of tricky technical details involved to make this work, but the creator of CamelBones has them all covered and you can basically access all the functionality available to Objective-C from Perl. For end-users, the applications you create are not different from "normal" Cocoa applications. Unlike in older versions, current CamelBones does not even have to be installed on the user's machine anymore: He can just run the application out of the box.

Objects and methods are all automatically bridged both ways, so that you can just refer to the official Cocoa documentation and use exactly the same patterns outlined therein. This is especially impressive (and a testament to Perl's excellent ability to act as glue code to native libraries) when you compare this to Java: Whereas every Objective-C framework becomes automatically accessible to Perl (without having to be registered with CamelBones in advance), the Java interface requires hand-crafted wrapper code, so that Cocoa-Java (an officially supported environment!) always lags a few months behind where new functionality is concerned.

Furthermore, you get to use Apple's official development tools (XCode), which are really quite nice. You even build your user interfaces with Interface Builder, same as you would do in Objective-C.

CamelBones, of course, is not a cross-platform environment. It pretty much ties you to Cocoa and thus the Mac. On the other hand, it apparently also works with GNUstep, so that it might actually get useful on other systems as well.

PerlPad, of course, is built with CamelBones.

While Japanese ATMs are still surprisingly limited in their core functionality, they innovate in unexpected ways. The one I used today has a shuffle button that rearranges the keys on the number pad randomly, making it more difficult for criminals to glimpse the secret number while you key it in. It also makes it more interesting for yourself to find and press the correct digits, especially since you can shuffle repeatedly and even after you have already started to type. I like that.

Part four: Endo-san

I am not good with phones, and they are not good with me. I probably have one of the lowest mobile phone bills in Tokyo (about 1500 yen / month), no fixed phone, no answering machine or voice box. And, as friends and family can attest, I hardly ever call.

I am also trying to make a point of not replacing my five-year-old handset. It cannot do anything (except make and receive calls), but it works. It's not a trick, it's a Sony (a real Sony, from back in the day, before they merged their operations with Ericsson).

The only problem are the batteries. An hour-long phone interview will be cut short after around 15 minutes. I actually own a USB recharger, having brought that along would have helped. So much for first impressions. That surely established me as a technology-savvy professional.

My farewell party at Gaiax (the third by now, I keep coming back, but I am trying to break the habit this time) on Friday had two highlights, the first one being a fried tuna head (which I did not touch and also avoided eye contact with, said eye being enormous, at least until someone finally ate it), the second one bowling until the last train (which turned out to be just one game unfortunately).

Frame: 9/X 3/- 6/X G/7 2/6 8/- 9/X 7/2 6/3 XX/7/X
Score:  13  16  26  33  41  49  66  75  84    104 

My server (the one that hosts, among other things, the T-Files) was unreachable for two hours today. Not having made any backups (in-spite of having experienced my fair share of disk crashes recently), I naturally feared for the worst, but when it eventually came online again, the logs indicate no problem on the server itself, so I assume it was a network problem. But the timing was memorable: It went off-line ten minutes before the start of the meeting in which I was supposed to run a presentation off that server, and it came back ten minutes after the end of the meeting in which I was supposed to run a presentation off that server. I conclude that my server likes meetings even less than I do.

Now that the long wait for the PowerBook G5 has come to an unexpected end, I hope that IBM is sorry for letting Jobs down on his 3 Ghz promise.

I used the rare opportunity of a free Friday to attend the final day of LinuxWorld in Odaiba. I spent most of the time at Japan Linux Association's conference, which was much more geeky than the more business-minded rest of the event.

In the morning, there was a panel discussion about full text search engine technology, with a nice mix of four presentations: First a namazu developer described how to port their application to Windows, including how to make a nice installer. Next, the maintainer of Hyper-Estraier gave an overview on the architecture and future directions (distributed P2P search) of that application, and he also explained the peculiar name (estraier is French for to stray). After that a duo from the Rast (Esperanto for to rake up) team explained some of the algorithms used for searching. And finally a web site developer described how they chose a search engine for their service, what problems that solved, and what problems it created. After that there were many clever questions and comments from the audience (including one of Slashdot's web masters).

After lunch I had a quick peek into a Novell seminar on desktop Linux (mostly because it was in English), but when they started to demonstrate how to change desktop themes and background pictures I left the suits alone and went back to the geek corner (there was also a stamp rally, but I failed to win an iPod Mini).

Back at the JLA Conference was a speech about how to find, join, manage, and promote Open Source projects, especially how to attract new developers.

Next up were Lightning Talks, topics varying from some kernel hackery that was beyond my understanding, setting up instant clusters with Knoppix, the never-ending fight against security holes, Google's Summer of Code, an object inspector for GTK+, and attempts to revive long forgotten software (such as Ristet) on current machines.

My FSF membership kit arrived today. While I am not too religious about free software, I think it is good that someone is, and especially in times like this, when huge international corporations are pressuring the mostly ignorant public to give up many of their civil liberties in order to protect their profitability against technological advances that threaten to obsolete their business models, it is important that organisations like the Free Software Foundation or the Electronic Frontier Foundation defend freedom of expression and privacy rights against evils such as the DMCA or software patents.

So, if you feel like joining, too, please tell them that Thilo sent you (membership number 3306). If I manage to sign up three people, my choice of FSF founder and president Richard Stallman or FSF counsel and scholar Eben Moglen will record a personalized greeting ready for use on my answering machine. Stallman speaks English, French, Spanish and Indonesian to some extent, and he would be glad to record a message in any of these languages.

The kit itself contained a thank-you-letter, a newsletter, the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, the bootable (!) membership card, and (in compliance with the GPL) a CD containing the source code of the programs on the membership card. I am kind of interested to see if the card can also boot Macs, but my Mini has a slot loader, and I am very wary of that technology (especially after what happened to Kojima-san's PowerBook), so I'd rather not try it until I find a drive with a tray.

In time with the end of the business quarter and year I retired from GaiaX yesterday. The plan, of course, was to directly start at the next job, but that did not work out, because my job-hunting so far has not been all that successful, and also because I still need to properly hand over the development of 72game to someone. So for June at least I will be a freelancer, working part-time at GaiaX (making documents, cleaning code, teaching the new guy the ropes) and probably at one more company. While this is attractive, as I can choose my projects and working hours more freely, and also make more money than as a salaried employee, I am not at all sure that I am organised enough to pull this off long-term. I do not even want to think about making a Japanese tax declaration. Ultimately, I should have a regular employment contract when I need to renew my visa (but that is still another two years away).

Well, we will see how this turns out, today is Day One, and after a slow morning at home I will go to office for the afternoon.