I'd have thought them too salty for that, but Kitty just had a bowl of Nissin tonkotsu ramen (well, not the whole bowl). She even slurps them in the way they are meant to be eaten. I can never make myself do that.

Count me out on cockney. The festival has English subtitles, but of course not for the English-language films, and I dearly missed them here. I could understand Oliver himself (who by the way made a stage appearance before the screening, together with producer Robert Benmussa), but only have a vague idea of what Fagin and Sykes were talking about.

6 points

Or rather, again failed to do it.

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.

Wed, 13 Oct 2004

This year it took an email from my mother to remind me about it. Two weeks after the fact. Ouch.

With everyone's attention turned to JavaScript these days, people are really pushing the envelope now and amazing things come up all the time.

Last week, someone proposed AMASS, the Ajax Massive Storage System, which gets around the problem that browser-side JavaScript cannot store persistent data on the client system (other than 4K of cookies) by using the Flash player (readily available in most web browsers), which apparently can save any amount of data. This week, someone else combined it with the TrimQuery SQL-like query engine to create a Simple JavaScript Database. Both techniques are still brand-new and AMASS apparently only works on Windows for now, but as proofs-of-concepts they clearly hint at what is possible.

And while we are at it, yesterday's discovery combines bookmarklets with a web service to dynamically load useful widgets into any given page. Bookmarklets can apparently access any remote web site using XMLHttpRequest (JS embedded in pages is limited to load from the same domain for security reasons), so I am not sure that I would actually want to use it considering the enormous potential for abuse, but Blummy is certainly worth a look.

My list for this opening weekend of the 18th Tokyo International Film Festival: Divergence, Wallace and Gromit, Chandramukhi, The Catch Man, maybe The Brothers Grimm (mostly for the Q-and-A-session with Terry Gilliam), and Silentium, the Austrian competition entry. Unfortunately, a lot of people had the same idea, and I could get tickets for only Silentium (and for Oliver Twist next weekend, thanks to Imai-san's sister).

This black comedy/crime-thriller is set in Salzburg where low-life private investigator and ex-cop Simon Brenner and his ambulance driver side-kick Berti start to investigate an apparent suicide and get caught up in the very dark secrets of the very high society (the Catholic Church and the Music Festival Direction). Imai-san, who accompanied me, was quite disappointed with how at the end the heroes were kicked out of town and not all villains brought to justice, but I suppose there lies the difference between Salzburg and Hollywood. Another difference could be that while Terry Gilliam came to present his movie at the festival, and there have been (unfulfilled) hopes for Matt Damon as well, the Austrian production company just sent their overseas sales representative instead of director or cast.

7 points

Me having too much fun at the Apple Store:

I have recently finished listening to my first audio book or, as the author likes to call it, my first podcast novel. EarthCore itself is pretty much your usual off-the-shelf B-sci-fi novel (think airport book store), and provides easy entertainment complete with mature situations, language and violence.

What is interesting, though, is that it illustrates how authors, artists and other content creators that have been ignored by traditional media outlets can use the Internet to bypass those outlets and directly reach their audiences. It seems to involve quite a bit of self-promotion, but at least for Sigler it has paid off: EarthCore has originally been published by AOL/TimeWarner as an eBook in 2001 in an effort to generate interest in a paperback release that never happened. Sigler regained the rights to his book in 2003, but has been unable to find another publisher. So he took it upon himself to get the word out, and created an audiobook, performed by himself, which he makes available as a podcast (for free). The podcast has been quite popular and he has been able to find a publisher for the paperback now.

I am now looking for the next podcast novel. It will most likely be either Sigler's next one (Ancestor) or Mark Jeffrey's The Pocket and The Pendant (which is already available as a book, thanks to another exciting new distribution channel, Lulu). I am also trying to find radio plays (which feature multiple actors and sound effects, the lack of which, by the way, surprisingly does not detract much from an audio book), and my best bet at the moment is Spaceship Radio.

Kitty likes to dig her claws into furniture. Our inflatable sofa turned out to be particulary vulnerable.

To kick off the second half of Financial Year 2005, DreamArts held a staff bowling tournament today. Apparently, there was a big bowling boom in Japan in the sixties and seventies, so that a lot of people who were in their teens then are still really good at it now.

Not that I had anything to do with that end of the competition, my rather miserable results placed me firmly in the bottom quartile.

Frame: G/6 7/- G/- 6/- 8/- 5/2 9/X  XX 7/- 1/6
Score:   6  13  13  19  27  34  54  71  78  85

Frame: G/- 8/- 5/X 8/- 3/3 7/- 9/- 8/- 3/- 6/-
Score:   0   8  26  34  40  47  56  64  67  73   

Didn't like it much. Fans praise Robert Rodriguez for delivering a faithful, almost frame-by-frame reconstruction of Frank Miller's graphic novels (Miller himself is credited as co-director, and Quentin Tarantino as special guest director, whatever that means), but I am not impressed with how that approach works on the silver screen. Sure, it is visually stunning, but the constant, casual, over-the-top, mostly sadistic violence completely overshadows the potentially interesting rest of the film (and gets boring after a while).

5 points

In order to get some tangible data for the employees' performance review meetings, DreamArts (where I work) is using a Mutual Assessment & Realisation System, where everyone has to pass judgement on his peers. MARS is a very formal process, at the centre of which sits a software application designed specifically for the task of gathering and aggregating this assessment data.

I am not very fond of the procedure, not only because it takes a lot of time (and Friday was probably my first working day that I spent more time in meetings and with administrative work than hacking away on my keyboard -- and I have not even written my weekly report yet), not only because it goes against my Dilbert mindset, not only because I am not comfortable with grading others and would much rather leave that task to the management, but mostly because it is plain impossible for me (and for many others, too, I would presume) to come up with meaningful rankings of more than ten co-workers in twenty (!) categories (ability to prioritise, persistence, proactivity, communication skills, ability to create constructive dissent, cross-departmental co-operation, versatility, ability to acquire new skills, leadership, problem solving, self-motivated learning, accepting advice, risk taking, positive thinking, discipline, creativeness, flexibility, customer orientation, cost-consciousness, being a team player). I just don't know everyone that well (and vice versa). Certainly not after two months on the job.

I was quite surprised to see this code pattern in a JavaScript file recently. How could I have missed this useful and elegant $(id) syntax to look up a DOM element? Was this something new, invented recently by the browser makers? Maybe Mozilla-only? I definitely did not recall it being mentioned in the Rhino book, or anywhere else for that matter.

Turns out it is just an ordinary function, declared in the popular prototype library (which the file I was looking at was built upon). For some reason, the JavaScript syntax allows for the dollar sign to be used in identifier names, and even for their first character, so that they can write very clever function definitions:

function $() {
  var elements = new Array();

  for (var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i++) {
    var element = arguments[i];
    if (typeof element == 'string')
      element = document.getElementById(element);

    if (arguments.length == 1) 
      return element;

    elements.push(element);
  }

  return elements;
}

There is also a function $F(name), which looks up form element values.

Now it came about in those days that an order went out from Caesar Augustus that there was to be a numbering of all the world.

Luke 2:1

The Caesar is called Akihito, and is probably only very indirectly responsible for the Statistics Law that decrees a population census be conducted every five years to clarify the actual conditions of the population and households in the country.

The procedure must be terribly expensive: Every single household is provided with a questionnaire (and a pencil if necessary), which is not delivered using the postal system but by municipal staff (Census Enumerators, a timeless title that sounds as if it really was Caesar Augustus who sent them) who distribute (and collect) the forms door-to-door.

The 2005 questions are

• For each household member
  • Name, gender, year and month of birth
  • Relationship to the household head (that, by the way, is me, at least on paper)
  • Marital status
  • Nationality
  • Employment status, type of work (or study), place of that activity (in the household, in the same city, in a different city), name and industry of the employer/school, working hours during the last week
• For the household
  • Type of household (owned or rented)
  • Number of household members
  • Size (square metres or tatami mats)
  • Building type and size (number of floors)
  • Floor number in the building