There are about two thousand Chinese characters (kanji) used in modern Japanese, and while I can read only a select few (and I think that I am not up to JLPT-2 this year as well) and hand-write almost none, things are much easier with a computer. You can copy-paste them into a dictionary (a lookup using a traditional dictionary without having an idea of the pronunciation is not easy) and typing also works fine. The problem with typing, of course, is that if you only barely know what you are doing, you end up with much more devastating spelling mistakes than you could in a Western language. A single character can make a huge difference, such as turning the topic of my closing remarks in the self-introduction slides for the new job from my hobbies to my offensive odors. Ouch.

My parents and sister arrived from Germany yesterday, just ahead of the typhoon that limits their sight-seeing options today and tomorrow. Hopefully, the weather will be better over the weekend when we are all going to Nagoya for the 2005 World Exhibition. Come to think of it, these typhoons regularly shut down the train system for hours, so if we had planned to go today, we might not have been able to get there at all. After Nagoya, they will go on to visit Kyoto on Monday (without Cissy and me, who have to work), return to Tokyo on Tuesday, and fly back home on Wednesday.

Most of the time when I go to see a movie, I already have a good idea what I am about to see, mostly from watching trailers and reading (or listening to) reviews. Not this time. Armed with only an totally incomprehensible flyer, and good faith in both the Ebisu Garden Cinema selection and in Jude Law (who is the centrepiece in promoting this film in Japan, even though he is more of a supporting actor in the movie itself), we went to see the film with the tricky title, and it was quite a ride.

Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are existential detectives. They are hired by Jason Schwartzman, who needs to find out why he keeps running into a young Sudanese refugee, but who wants the investigation to stay clear of his delicate work situation, where his position as chairman of the Potomac Chapter of the Open Spaces Coalition is threatened by Jude Law, a marketing executive for the Huckabees Corporation, who has his own agenda when pretending to try to protect nature's wetlands, and who furthermore believes that running a star-studded campaign could more effective than reading poetry. That he envies him for his girlfriend (Naomi Watts) does not help, either.

What could help is to meet someone with similar issues, such as his other. Mark Wahlberg, a fire-fighter (not a hero) with a fierce petroleum aversion. The problem here of course is that Wahlberg has now subscribed to the competing existential theory developed by Isabelle Huppert, who gives everyone a lesson in human drama.

8 points

2005/2006 is the German Year in Japan, featuring a lot of cultural and other events. Sadly, I have not been able / found the time / been interested to take part in any of them. But today we went to Deutsch-Land in the Shinagawa Prince Hotel. The main attraction is a big collection of Steiff stuffed animals. In addition to that, there is the Deutsch-Market, consisting of a car dealer, and a few booths selling imported food, character goods (Janosch, and the Maus, who is the mascot of the German Year and even has her own Japanese blog ), and World Cup 2006 merchandise (including some seemingly unofficial Beckenbauer T-shirts with a characteristic spelling mistake).

First game (8 sets count-up):

    2   13  T-18 T-15  T-20 T-20 OUT   13
    2    1     2   10     6  T-1  13 T-15
   10    2     2  OUT     1    3   1    1
=========================================
   14   30    88  143   210  276 290  349

Second game (8 sets count-up):

    5    6    18    3  T-18   20  17    4
   13 T-20   OUT   17    18 T-10  20    4  
    1  OUT    11    1  D-18    4  18 D-20 
=========================================
   19   85   114  135   243  297 352  400

Third game (counting down from 301):

   14    3   15    13    4  T-17 OUT  OUT   4
  T-1   20    2    15   13     9  19    7 OUT   
 BULL   15    1      7   3     5 OUT BULL   3 
=============================================
  234       196  178 143  123  58 39 BUST  32


Fourth game (counting down from 301):

    3  OUT  OUT     6 BULL    5   10  
    7   20   11     7    2    5    2     
    3    2   19    10 T-19   12    7   
======================================
  288  266  236   213 104    82   63                          

I wonder if I can just post tricky questions on my blog and expect answers. Probably not. Anyways, this one is for the algorithm gurus (I cannot even remember how quick sort works anymore, and my Knuth Bible is about eight timezones away right now):

I want to sort a rather largish amount m of items, but because I only need to first n items, I would like to terminate the algorithm once these n items have been found and not bother to sort the whole rest (because n << m).

That would be Step One. Step Two would be an algorithm that can be put in streaming mode, so that I can iterate over the items in order, without knowing how many I need in advance (because the items will go through a filter that discards some of them. Running the filter before the sort is not an option, as the filter is very heavy and should only be invoked for n' << m items).

Thanks.

Part five: The optician

Have a look at the cash cards issued to me by Tokyo Mitsubishi bank:

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the Aryth Ocean. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

Winter's Heart is Book Nine in Robert Jordan's epic Wheel of Time fantasy series. And epic it is. The series consists of ten volumes of about 700 pages each (plus a thinner prequel that I have not read) and is still unfinished. Unlike some other expansive fantasy works, these books are not just loosely connected episodes but all parts of the same grand story. That does not mean that Jordan does not make new things up as he goes along, I am sure he does, but those would be just details and minor subplots, whereas the overall story ark that spans everything must have been sketched from the very beginning. In fact, I remember reading an interview somewhere where Jordan admitted to having the final chapter already fleshed out, but was unsure how long it would take him to get there.

What this means is that all these prophecies and puzzle pieces slowly fall into place one after the other, which is fascinating to follow if you fancy fantasy epics at all, and it makes you want to pick up the next part of the series immediately after finishing one book. The problem here, of course, is that it takes Jordan about two years to write it, which is more than enough time to forget the finer points about all the many characters, places, plot lines, countries, cultures, and even words that have been created and continue to be relevant in this ever-growing world (and let me tell you, the included glossary is useless). So, while I bought Winter's Heart about three years ago, it has been shelved until I finally had the courage to get into it again this time (my third attempt). Because of the long break, there are many things I could not completely understand anymore, but at least I can go on reading two more volumes without intermission: I got Book Ten from the Shibuya public library yesterday and Book Eleven (the penultimate !) will be released next month. After that another possibly long wait for the final instalment. Time to start over again from Book One ?

Update: There are many reviews on Amazon that are very negative about the slow pace of the story in the later books, and they definitely have a point. Nothing much happens in Winter's Heart outside of the last chapter. But on the whole, this is a great series, and let us hope the conclusion lives up to the exposition.

We do not have a fixed line telephone here, and did not have one in our previous apartment either, mainly because getting one is (or at least was, this is being deregulated now) insanely expensive. Both of us having mobile phones, this is not a real problem, but now that we are living in a Broadband Mansion, we are looking into Internet telephony to eliminate the occasional inconvenience of having to find a public phone to place long or long-distance calls.

So, yesterday I bought a USB microphone adaptor for the Mini and signed up for Skype. That expensive adaptor was not absolutely necessary, as it turned out that my old iBook with its built-in microphone works fine. On the other hand, the iBook is always on the verge of completely breaking down (last week it refused to power up until after a full day of rest), so having a more reliable setup is a good thing.

Unfortunately, Skype has been a disappointment so far. While Skype-to-Skype calls work fine (tried that from living room to bed room, and also from Japan to Germany), Skype-to-phone (called SkypeOut) failed consistently, and that is what we would be using most of the time anyway. The problem is quite strange: It works great for about a minute, but then the people on the other end cannot hear us anymore (while we can still hear them). Redialing would give us another minute, but this is obviously a show-stopper. And it happened on every single call we made (to Japan, China and Germany).

I am wondering if the problem is on our end, but since Skype-Skype works fine, even SkypeOut does okay for the first minute, and the Skype forums are full of complaints about SkypeOut (though not exactly about this particular situation), it looks like an issue in their network. Nonetheless, I will try it on other machines ( at work or Internet cafes). Hopefully, this is only a temporary problem so that we can at least use up the 10 Euro we deposited.

The next service I tried is Gizmo. Its rates are much higher than Skype's (China 4.9 US cents/minute versus 1.7 Euro cents, Germany 2.9 v. 1.7, Japan 2.9 v. 1.92) but of course still cheap, and most importantly, I did not have any trouble making calls with it so far.

Unlike Skype, Gizmo gives you 25 cents free credit after the user registration, so that you can test the service for about eight minutes before making a (10 dollar) deposit. Considering that it took about three minutes to figure out that SkypeOut does not work for us, that is a very useful offering.

With both services, computer-to-computer calls are completely free of charge, and neither company has a monthly or a setup fee, so that I will definitely keep registered in case someone feels he needs to have a word with me.

I was very lucky this morning to run into Ted and a couple of his friends in front of the new Shibuya Apple Store, because one of them took it upon himself to get in line for the Grand Opening at half past five in morning (and photo-blogged about it from his mobile phone, unfortunately to Mixi, so that I cannot link to it), and the rest of us joined him there at more humane hours. So we started out much closer to the pole than what Ingo and me had back in Ginza. This is probably not the most social thing to do, especially since the number of free T-shirts is limited (I got one, and also a coupon for a one-song-download from the iTunes Music Store Japan, which has been launched earlier this week), but did a little shopping to deserve the freebies: a Griffin iMic (for Skype, more on that later) and the new Mighty Mouse. Speaking of Mighty Mouse, hands-on demonstrations were limited to a few PowerBooks, because all the desktop Macs in the store were Bluetooth models and the Mouse only comes in a USB version. Side question: I have always wondered how Bluetooth works in a room filled with dozens of machines? How does the mouse figure out which one it is supposed to work with ? What stops you from typing into your neighbour's files?

TiddlyWiki is a Wiki system implemented completely in JavaScript. The whole Wiki plus the script is contained in a single HTML file, so that it is very easily distributed. No need for anything server-side, or even for a server at all (you could put it on a disk or send it around by email). It is also surprisingly feature-rich: You can edit the content right in the web browser, save the updated file to disk (requires IE or Firefox, but support for other browsers is planned), you get the usual text formatting tricks, there is support for using it to run a weblog (including creation of an RSS feed), and even a built-in search engine, a user-extensible macro system, animations, a timeline and tags.