3-46-130-L-N-10-33-19-4-58-22-41-13-2-U-9-U-32-
8-89-6-H-14-B-44-60-49-5-118-L-1-11-51-U-79-82

Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.

Unfortunately, the movie's official tag line is invoked almost at the end, which nicely sets the stage for the next volume, so I had to go and buy Order of the Phoenix, my first Harry Potter book.

7 points

Terracotta Warriors. Audacious taxi drivers. Cold weather. Daytime fog. Bell and Drum Towers. Riding bicycles on the city wall. My niece (!) Susan (studies music composition and plays the violin). Chinese food that I actually like.

Pi, who was originally named after a swimming pool, but renamed himself after the irrational number (or maybe the Greek letter), grew up in a zoo in Pondicherry, India, and astounds friends and family with his active interest in religion at a young age, especially as he practices Hinduism, Islam and Christianity all at the same time, much to the dismay of the respective priests. His life takes a dramatic turn when his father decides to emigrate the family to Canada and their ship sinks, leaving Pi stranded in a lifeboat, together with a female orang-utan, a spotted hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg) and an adult Bengal tiger.

Terry Gilliam seems to like German folk stories. First Baron Muenchhausen, and now the Brothers Grimm, out of which you can get a reasonable amount of entertainment if you enjoyed films like Monty Python, Ghostbusters or Sleepy Hollow.

Heath Ledger, whom I do not remember having seen before, is great as Jakob Grimm and his performance reminds me a lot of Johnny Depp, who I think would have been an equally wonderful choice for the role. Incidentally, IMDb notes that Depp was originally set to star as the more energetic brother Wilhelm (now being played by Matt Damon, but only after he and Ledger petitioned to have their roles switched). Go figure.

6 points

The CissyPod has a 30 GB disk space, but without resorting to some more esoteric third-party tools we will probably be limited to just 5 GB, because of the wasteful way iTunes manages disk space.

Filesystem                Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s3               37G    34G   2.8G    92%    /

The iPod, iTunes and iPhoto are really easy to use, but you pay for that convenience with gigabytes of disk space.

All synchronisation with the iPod is done through iTunes, even when movies or pictures are concerned. Synchronisation is one-way. iTunes can only copy files onto the iPod, but not download files from the iPod back to the computer. I assume that this is a concession to the music industry. Automatic synchronisation will add and delete files on the iPod to create an exact replica of your iTunes library. As a result you have to have a copy of every song or video on the computer hard disk as well. This stops being convenient when the storage capacity of the iPod is big enough that you cannot afford to just reserve that much space on your computer.

One measure would be to turn off automatic synchronisation and manage files manually. That eliminates a good deal of convenience, but we may be forced to do just that. But even with manual synchronisation, you cannot copy media files directly onto the iPod. Everything has to go through iTunes first, which leads to extra steps and often redundant copies of the same file. So when copying a CD, you cannot put it directly to the iPod, it has to take up disk space first that you need to clean up later. A CD in MP3 format is not all that huge, but it gets worse with DVDs. iTunes cannot import DVDs directly (this is apparently illegal nowadays), so that you have to use some other software to read the DVD and convert it into a file that the iPod can play. That file first goes to your hard disk, then needs to be imported into iTunes, making another copy of the same file (a file that takes up several hundred MB), and can then finally be uploaded to the iPod.

iTunes can also put your photos on the iPod. In order to save space on the iPod, and probably because it cannot handle files above a certain resolution, the pictures are first reduced in size. For some reason copies of these thumbnails are also cached on the computer. You can delete the cache, but it will be recreated. In our case, that cache is actually bigger than the library it represents. Another 2 GB to write off.

1.8G    iPhoto Library//iPod Photo Cache
3.3G    iPhoto Library/

Time to look at third-party tools or my external Firewire disk.

Many things can be said about Enterprise Java, but most of them will be very, very boring. And as the exhibition floor with its vendor booths is not open yet on Day 0, my hopes for today are riding on the Birds-of-a-Feather session Research and Collaboration on the next JDK later tonight. Or maybe I will just take some snapshots with the larger-than-life Duke mascot.

Goldberg was tired. It was already getting dark, and the evening cold rolled in. Years ago he would not have had to put up with this. Back then, when he had been young and strong and could run like the wind, he would have been allowed to rest instead of running circles under floodlights. For sure, he would be running circles, but it would be in bright daylight. There would be an ecstatic crowd cheering him on. He would be carrying a much lighter and more skilful rider who could move in perfect synchrony with the rhythm of Goldberg's full gallop, instead of these strange city people in their awkward positions that always bounced the wrong way, making every step uncomfortable. He would most certainly not be trailing Shredding in a slow trot, he dash past that arrogant fool and make sure he never caught up with him again. At least the nearby fire kept the flies away. And there would be hay and apples later. Maybe retirement was not all that bad. Much better than what had happened to many of his old friends. Goldberg shivered at the thought. Still, he missed the old days.

What really happened was that Cissy's friend's friend gave us a pair of tickets for a trial course at the Olympic Club horse school in Chiba (very close to Narita Airport, you can see planes landing and taking off). For both of us, this has been the first time on horseback (not counting donkeys, elephants, camels, or petting zoos), and it was fun. Actual riding time was two half-hour sessions (mounting, dismounting, stopping, turning, walk, trot), in addition to that some classroom basics (Horse Anatomy 101), an introduction of the various membership plans, and quite some time on the bus. The course spans two days, so we will go again next weekend.

More cat pictures for you. Isn't that what blogging is all about ?

I attended Shibuya.pm's Tech Talk #6 yesterday. As far as I can tell the audience was made up by the same crowd that went to Blog Hackers Conference earlier this year, and the Takahashi method remains popular. It was also a good chance to meet up with former co-workers from both Gaiax and Dreamarts.

The six talks were about life at Six Apart (company culture, development process, the software that they make and the software that they use), Catalyst (a Perl web framework that looks like a cross of Struts and Rails and was the topic of two talks), prototype.js (my favourite function therein received mention), Perl at the ICFP programming contest, and an introduction to Perl6/Parrot/Ponie/Pugs.

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition. Free to develop, deploy, and distribute. Now in Beta for Linux and Windows. Limited to 4GB of user data, 1 CPU and 1 GB of memory. Includes HTML DB and Oracle Text. Uses native installers instead of Oracle Universal Installer. Self-managed. Ready to run within two minutes after download. Did I mention free (as in beer, of course)?