Today there were two tracks of sessions and I attended as much as I could. I guess I got enough inspiration for a few more episodes of the thousand and one reasons to Love Perl. So many cool things, so little time...

• Atsushi Kato: Glue: Separate Application Logic from Code
• Dan Kogai Perl 5.8 and Unicode: Myths, Facts and Changes
• Damian Conway: Perl 6 Update
• Dave Rolsky: Perl DateTime project
• Audrey Tang: Learning Haskell
• Chia-liang Kao: SVK: Version Control without the Headaches
• Marty Pauley: 混合語 (Kongougo)
• Damian Conway: Sufficiently Advanced Technologies
• Ingy döt Net: Wikiwyg
• Lightning Talks
  • Audrey Tang: Visual Basic Rocks
  • Dave Rolsky: What is a Data Model? The Relational Model; SQL is not Relational
  • Tokuhiro Matsuno: DebugScreen meets PadWalker
  • Shinya Hayakawa: 続my変数マニアックス(仮)
  • Masayoshi Sekimura: できる Perl debugger
  • Daisuke Murase: CPAN Recent Changes
  • Tokuhiro Matsuno: 曜日判定における言語の壁問題
  • Kazuho Oku: rapide - Remote Apache IDE
  • Kenichi Ishigaki: Let's play Sudoku
  • Yoshinori Takesako: ppencode for Perl6
  • Ingy döt Net: Template Toolkit + Javascript = Jemplate
• Larry Wall: Keynote

Trying to blog a conference without a laptop is difficult/futile, so here are just a bunch of links to the session schedule (there being only one track today, I did not have to choose between parallel sessions, and could attend all of them).

• Audrey Tang: Introduction to Pugs
• Ingy döt Net: Module::Compile - A Shrew(e)d Axe
• Leon Brocard: mightyv
• Yukihiro Matsumoto: Ruby on Perl(s)
• Lunch with @Larry, who just happened to walk into the Korean restaurant where I was sitting.
• Tatsuhiko Miyagawa: Plagger - RSS/Atom remixing platform
• Batara Kesuma: mixi.jp: ChangeLog
• Dave Rolsky: JSAN and AJAX
• Jesse Vincent: ♨ Jifty
• Masayoshi Takahashi: the first postmodern computer language vs the first Babel-17 computer Language: Ruby
• Damian Conway: Perl Best Practices

Thanks to the latest addition to our electronics department we are now able to beef up our social life by hosting weekend DVD screenings.

Sunday two weeks ago was the first such event, with an audience of seven (partly on the floor, we have to come up with better seating arrangement, I believe). With our current equipment we are still at the very low end of what can confidently be called a home theatre -- No screen (just projecting against the wallpaper), no sound system (just very cheap 2.1 speakers that also emit an annoying blue light), no means to block outside lights (and Tokyo is quite bright even at night), very cheap DVD player (I still have to find out how to set it to 16:9), and annoying colour wheel effects if you look for them -- but hey, it's big !

Casino Royale

A real train wreck. Star-packed ensemble (Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen), but quite incoherent, probably because of the large number of directors and writers involved. On the other hand, not worse than Austin Powers.
4 points

The Hudsucker Proxy

You cannot go wrong with the Coen brothers, and this one has Paul Newman, too.
8 points

And one more session today:

Ghost World

In the brief period of time between high school graduation and working life Thora Birch and Scarlett Johannson play a cruel joke on record collector Steve Buscemi that eventually back-fires. Goes to show that comic book movies do not have to involve super heroes in silly costumes.
7 points

Out of Sight

Solid Soderbergh with George Clooney as gentleman gangster (that seems to be his trademark role) and Jennifer Lopez as a US Marshall trying (and at the same time not really wanting) to catch him.
8 points

I would also like to point out that I had originally planned to present Infernal Affairs, but Cantonese with Japanese sub-titles just does not cut it.

Kitty took flight yesterday night: We left the apartment door open for a few minutes not to let the cat out, but to let some air in, and she used the chance to slip out. A search of all fifteen floors (for once I was thankful for them being illuminated so well all through the night) turned up nothing and we were worried if she could find back (cats are supposed to be good at that, but all doors basically look the same here) or if a potential finder would know where to return her (Kitty does not wear a necklace or tags of any kind). Fortunately Cissy discovered her on her way to work in the morning, hiding behind a nearby air conditioner.

What better use to make of a a decidedly pagan holiday such as Vernal Equinox than indulging in epic fantasy. First the last third of the latest Harry Potter (see below) and then this Academy-Award-winning (Best Achievement in Makeup) adaptation of C.S.Lewis' book. I have not read any of the Narnia novels, and seen only parts of the BBC TV show, and that was a long time ago, so that I basically only remember that it features a bunch of kids that walk through a wardrobe (a similar thing, by the way takes place in said Harry Potter book) to meet fauns and the like, the upshot of which is that I had no idea where the story would go, and could enjoy the ride (except for the sudden appearance of Santa Claus, which did not really work for me).

7 points

Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts is over-shadowed by the war that is now openly raging between the wizarding world and Lord Voldemort's Death Eaters (other topics are love interests - they are all teenagers now - and of course Quidditch). While the Ministry of Magic is arguably not doing a good job at fighting Voldemort, Headmaster Dumbledore probably is, judging from his constant and secretive absences and the state he is in when he returns. Dumbledore arranges private lessons for Harry in order to teach him as much as possible about Voldemort in order to prepare him for the final battle that has been foretold to take place between the two. At the same time, Harry also receives training from a text book containing notes left behind by the unknown and somewhat suspect Half-Blood Prince, and spends his free time trying to uncover a Death Eater plot within Hogwarts that not even Ron and Hermione believe is taking place.

At the risk of repeating myself, the story continues to pick up steam and also become much darker and more serious. Half-Blood Prince, just like Order of the Phoenix, ends with a wizardry showdown between Death Eaters and the good guys, that leaves one of the good guys dead (and this time it is a central character) and the reader wanting to immediately dig into the next book.

A clear sign that spring is upon us is the arrival of strong, warm winds from the Pacific Ocean, the first of which is called haru ichiban. This morning must have been at least haru 4-ban, but that did not lessen its strength in the least, and it tossed around quite a few things around our block. Time to start looking for cherry blossoms.

I started to move my non-Mac machines (the Dell in office and Cissy's eMachine) from Windows XP to Debian this week.

• Linux has become very easy to install over the years. I am quite impressed with Debian's package manager that keeps track of every installed application and their dependencies, can also uninstall or upgrade them (downloading components as needed).
• Hardware detection and support is also comprehensive enough to get even KDE running with sound out-of-the-box almost everywhere. I did have trouble with Dell's integrated graphics chip-set, that without some tweaking in the BIOS would not produce resolutions bigger than 640x480, and the jury is still out on the video capture card.
• A scary step right at the beginning of the installation is repartioning the hard disk. Amazingly, Linux's partition manager can these days resize even NTFS partitions without data loss.
• iTunes running on Linux (using VMWare or Wine) cannot be used to manage an iPod.
• I tried to take the opportunity to escape the Java Trap at the same time. The central application for $DAY_JOB is Eclipse. Unfortunately, while Eclipse itself runs fine with the GCJ/Classpath runtime instead of Sun's JDK, some plugins that we need do not, and a few classes in our codebase rely on features that are not yet implemented in the free class library (mostly javax.imageio). Nevertheless, GCJ is a fine piece of technology.
• Oracle Database Express Edition has just recently gone from Beta to Production release, and they offer a Debian package. Installed like butter. Also includes the latest version of HTML DB, which is now called Application Express, and is starting to look really nice.
• Geekish moment of the week: Possessed by the dangerous spirit of curiosity, I tried to find out how self-contained the GRUB boot loader is in the boot record and deleted the /boot directory on the Linux partition. Turns out that this leaves GRUB completely dysfunctional, and the hard disk on my work machine unable to boot. In compliance with Murphy's law, I had already taken all of the install CDs back home, and this adventure would have ended with an embarrassing trip to the PC help desk, if not for my hitherto untested bootable FSF membership card, enabling me to boot, mount and repair.

Inviting you to a delightful tea time with the best confectionary of all to give sweet harmony to your heart. Yamazaki Chocoman is a traditional Japanese-style cake that has an original flavor of chocolate. You can enjoy the rich and savory taste at your relaxation moments.

Osumi-san and me entered the KabuRobo competition this week. In KabuRobo, sponsored by IBM DeveloperWorks Japan, you have to write stock market trading robots in Java. After uploading your program to the competition server, it is given the current stock market quotes (and a lot of other information that might be of interest, such as exchange rates and business performance metrics) and can place orders (using virtual money, of course). Our robot acts according to a set of rules that we generated with a Genetic Algorithm, a basically randomly generated behaviour that our simulations have determined to work reasonably well on last year's stock market.

This year's round started on December, 19th and will continue until March, 31st. Having joined the game for only its final month, unfortunately does not give us much time to catch up. Our first deal (44.000 Denso shares), though, already brought us down from 5.000.000 yen to 4.956.000 yen. Full trading history (updated daily) here.