Termsphere

This is cool!

Especially, I didn't know 6th point of perspective described here.
I'm wonderling the world of chameleons look like termspheres. :)

BTW, at a first glance of the creator, I thought of professor Dumbledore. :o

The Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
ISBN 4-314-00556-4

Finally, I finished this book after several years since I bought it.
The primary reason I thought to work on this book again is that
there was interesting discussion on the Yokohama Linux Users Group ML
about Windows dominance in the share of operating systems.

There, a guy mentioned if it's possible to achieve a breakthrough
in challanging the Windows dominance if each of us got more cleverer and
shoot for the collective optimization of the society.
The essetntial point of the opinion is that it assumes hehavior
of us orienting toward NOT oneself BUT society.
In a sense, it's altruism.
Another point is that it's an idea about activities of open source software
development and promotion of them.

Then, another guy pointed out that's against the theory of evolution
by Dawkins. The point of the opposition is that altruism cannot survive.
In other word, a gene which drives its carrier into altruism cannot
compete with selfish genes and will be culled.

At first, I felt their points are somehow crossed. But, I couldn't figure out
the idea which explains the gap.

After reading the book, I came to "Meme."
At this moment, I'm not sure if there are established theories
of memes evolution, but anyway I got some more books and online articles to read . :)

Green Tea in Thailand

In Thailand a very sweet green tea, named Oishi, seems to be
polular on TV. The green tea seems to be twice as sweet as Japanese
black a popular English tea drink.
It's not green tea anymore!

Among colleagues of mine, there is a guy who got love Thailand and Thai foods.
I'm going to ask him if he loves the sweeeeeeeeet green tea tomorrow. :)

Got a baby!?

Seems to become a dad. :o

I'm not sure if the baby is a boy or a girl, anyway the baby
will be born in the next February.

I and my wife was talking about that issue for a week recently, but
I couldn't feel it is real. Today, after seeing a sonography photo of
our 4.8mm tall(?) baby, finally I realized....
Oh, my gooooood!

Oops, loop(s)?

Recently, I was thinking about writing a new Linux device driver
which enables us using a file as a HDD, not a partition.

But, I was stupid.
Use losetup(8) , and that's all.
One more stupid thing is that I was reading KENREL_SRC/drivers/block/loop.c
and thought it perfect. After wondering why there is not any utility to use
its features two days or so, I got to know that just I was ignorant. :(

BTW, the reason I wanted such a driver is that I wanted to manipulate
disk image files of QEMU and VMWare on the host servers as normal
block devices. In this sense, as loop device has a pluggable filter
mechanism of (mainly encyription) kernel modules, still there could be some
room for my hacking. :)

Polish SNS

I got an account of a Polish SNS service like Mixi.

It's completely written in Polish and I'm straying in the
unknown world consulting an online Polish-Japanese dictionary and a Polish Language Course.
It took me more than 30 minutes for just the initial sign-up procedure. :o

BTW, surfing in the Polish world reminded me of Mamoru Oshii, a famous
animation director. He also loves sound of Polish language, and one of
his films, "Avalon" was taken and spoken in Polish.
It's very difficult to understand like "INNOCENCE" as was expected. :o

World Fastest NTP!?

NICT, a Japanese governmental organization launched a new public NTP service.
According to this article, their new server can handle one million NTP
requests per second and its precision seems to be less than 10 nano seconds.

What impressive for me was that they made a special hardware accelerator
card specialized in NTP. That reminded me of GRAPE and PhysX,
and I'm wondering if it's possible to construct a kind of general purpose
meta hardware accelerator card using reconfigurable chips.

Self-contradiction?
So what? :o

Guin Saga 108

Guin Saga 108: The Path to the Perpetual Parros
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN4-15-030851-9

108!

Chapter 2 and 3 are interesting.
They give us a new perspective of its huge background world.

Amazing!

Today, I was surprised on my way home.
It's an elementary school Japanese girl who sat next to me in a train.
At first glance, she looked like 8 or 9 years old or so.

She was reading The Da Vinci Code of Dan Brown "in English". :o

I also read that book in English. It took me about two weeks and
I think that at least for us, Japanse, we need to study background
issues especially knowledge about Christianity.
Of course, it's possible that she spent some years abroad and speaks
English as bilingual. But, still it's amazing such a small girl enojoy
the story.
She was with a friend and the other girl was also reading a book.
But, it's a common book for children.

I'm wondering if it will be a common situation in the near future also here,
Japan.

VT Enabled!

In the end of the last year, I wrote a short article for a managine.

In those days, there seemed to be some changes of their editorial plan
and my article didn't appear.
But, on the last Friday, I got a notification from the editor and
they seemed to have re-used my draft. Thus, I got some money and upgraded my PC. :)

Till now, my PC was a dual PentiumIII system using Tyan Tiger 230. It was a really good motherboard but nowadays completely outdated . No NIC, no sound, no USB etc. Thus, I had to install many PCI cards as you can see in the right side photo.

This time, I wanted to play with Xen and needed a VT enabled machine. As for highend graphics cards or up-to-date CPU, I don't need them and
all I need is a cheap and stable system.

So, my choice was like the following:
PentiumD 930
Gigabyte GA81945G Pro
DDR2-667 1GB (Transcend) x 2

As all of GbE, USB, IEEE and sound are on-board, now inside of the case is very simplified. :)

Here is a picture of BIOS setup screen. VT Enabled!

To be continued. :)

Wireless Lan

Today, I was waiting for departure of train at Tokyo station and
writing a report with my laptop on my way home.
I knew there are many un-protected Wireless LAN access points, but
I never tried to connect to them so far. Today, although I'm not sure why, I
pressed "connect" button and succeeded. :o
It's about 2 minutes or so, but I became curious about WILLCOM.

Why not public wireless lan?
That reminds me Ghost in the Shell rather than my real life. :o