Monday, December 31, 2007

Day 84 : The Longest Journey

Today is the last day of 2007, and we set for my home town, Shizuoka to spend the winter vacation and see my daughter's gramma and an uncle. (And of course, great gramma and other relatives :)



Usually, it takes 4 hours by car if we don't have any traffic jam from Tokyo to Shizuoka.
But, today it was a 5.5 hours journey. :(
This would be the longest journey for my daughter (at this moment).
Anyway, she was almost asleep during the journey. :o

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Tha Last Ramen 2007


This is the last ramen of 2007. :o
The same choice with Oct. 14, I really like the special white pork ramen of Jinanbo. :)

COLD STONE CREAMERY

Today's teatime was at COLD STONE CREAMERY
in AEON MALL MusashiMurayama Mu. :)



I carelessly forgot to take a note of the name of above, but anyway
the strawberry and chocolate based ice cream is very good. :)

BTW, I didn't know that Diamond City sold stock to AEON MALL, and
now it's called AEON MALL MusashiMurayama Mu since last summer.

Friday, December 28, 2007

A Fire

Today is the last working day of 2008.



In this morning, I was surprised seeing a lot of firetrucks in front of JR Musashi-Koganei station.
There seemed to be a fire very close to the station, thus trains were stopped when I went there.
But the delay was not so bad, and I could get to my office about 10 minutes delay. :)

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

The Dignity of the Nation



The Dignity of the Nation (国家の品格)
Hiroshi Fujiwara
ISBN 978-4-10-610141-0

The book is one of the best selling books in Japan 2007.

Although the book contains several emotional keywords such as Bushido, the core message of the books is simple like the following:

"Logic is not almighty, what the most important is the sense of choosing principles."

A parallel translation in English and Japanese seems to be available.
I recommend that people interested in understanding Japanese people would read the book once.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Day 77 : Merry Christmas?

Today, we went to Aeon Akishima shopping center to buy new year gifts for my relatives.

Yes, it's Christmas Eve today. :)
I'm not sure why yet but anyway my daughter sleeps well when we go out, and
she was asleep when I and my wife had a very simple Christmas Eve party at StarBucks there.



BTW, I didn't know that there is a white Sachertorte. :o

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Yona Yona Ale



I bought the beer in Karuizawa about 3 months(!) ago and finally enjoyed. :)

"Yona Yona" is a Japanese phrase which roughly means "every night."
Not too strong and has standard taste, so I think it's also a good choice for the beer for every night. (But, of course, for summer season.) :)

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The Final Equipment Investment?

Today, I bought a 5 port GbE hub on my way back home in Akihabara.



Corega CG-SW05GTXB \6,180-

As I need to invest on my daughter from now, this would be the final equipment investment for the next two or three years. :o

BTW, some colleagues of mine asked me why there are needs of a GbE hub for home use.
Of course, I have several PCs at home and I often copy/move huge size files such as DVD ISO images. :)

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

A Stupid Perl Script

I wrote a stupid perl script (again?).

Here is an example terminal log and this explains everything.

| # xxxxx.pl 2007/12/11
| 0 Years and 64 Days (Day 64) since Xxxxx's birthday, 2007/10/9. :)

Of course, xxxxx is (masked) my daughter's name and helps me writing blog entries here very much. :)

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Day 69 : Wakaba Keyaki Mall

Today, we went to Wakaba Keyaki Mall, a shopping center in Tokyo by car.
Yes, it's the first short trip of my daughter by car (using the brand new child seat.)

At first, I was worrying that she might not like the child seat, but it was needless fear. :)


The shopping mall is like the following.



It's not a big nor gorgeous shopping center, but it has good atmosphere and what more important for us is very close to our room, about 20 minutes drive. :)

The below is my teatime choice at Cocktail-Do Coffee. :)


BTW, my daughter kept sleeping during the trip. :o

Friday, December 07, 2007

New Daily Work

I got a new daily routine work from December 3.

The above picture describes that well. :)

Well, one more thing, give my daughter a bath.
That means I have to leave office around 18:30 everyday.
Of course, I'm doing the new task perfectly so far, and
colleagues of mine say, "You've really changed." :o

Guin Saga 118



Guin Saga 118
Conventicles In Crystalby
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030911-4

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Pluto 5


Pluto, book 5
Naoki Urasawa
ISBN 978-4-09-181556-9

Urasawa is one of the most distinguished Japanese comic authors, I think.
Pluto is based on "The World's Strongest Robot" of Osamu Tezuka.
In a sense, Pluto is Urasawa's hommage to Tezuka, but it's not that simple.
Like other contemporary Japanese (difficult to understand) comic master pieces,
it's a very much thought-provoking story.
What is life?
What is justice?
Etc.
Anyway, I assure you that you can have interesting time with this comic.

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Day 54 : Baby Buggy and Child Seat

Today, we went to Babiesrus at Fuchu and bought a baby buggy and a child seat.



Yes, Ready to go out. :)

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Day 48 : New Home

Finally, my daughter got back (?) from my wife's home town to Tokyo.
I'm not sure how long we will be here, but anyway it's her first home town. :)



BTW, this time my daughter moved with her mother and grand mother by Shin-Kansen.
There are several reasons. For example, I don't have a child-seat yet.
But, the most important one is that I had to convey a lot of things and thus there was no room for passengers as the picture below shows.



Yes, I was a truck driver. :o

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Day 47 : Great Grand Mother

My grand mother lives in Kakegawa city, Shizuoka.
Very close to my home town.
Since I knew that I would have a child, I wanted to let gramma see her great grand child.
Gramma is now 95 years old and recently sometimes hard to recognize even her grand child.
Oh well, the grand child is me, by the way. :o
But, today she was conscious and seemd to recognize the great grand daughter.
People of 4 generations had a happy time. :)

The next task is going to Izumo city, Shimane where my wife's grand parents live and
we had the wedding ceremony. We need to take an airplane to get there. So, I'm planning
the trip in the next May, I mean Golden Week. :)

BTW, pictures?
Again, please contact me. :o

Friday, November 23, 2007

Day 46 : The First Visit to the Shrine

Today, I took my daughter to the Ooi Jinjya Shrine in my home town for "お宮参り." (Omiya-Mairi, "The first visit to the shrine")

Omiya-Mairi is a kind of Japanese Shinto based ritual.
Roughly speaking, the purpose is reporting baby's safe one-month growth and conveying appreciation to the (Shinto) God.
As it's a very good day today for celebrations, there were lots of families for not only Omiya-Mairi but also Shichi-Go-San which is another Japanese traditional ritual for children. :)

Well, pictures?
Ha ha, they are not public. If you'd like to see them, please write to me. :)

Friday, November 16, 2007

ThinkPad X61 : USB HDD Case and Full Backup

Well, it's a real better safe than sorry thing. :0

As I didn't have an USB 2.5" SATA HDD case so far, today I went to Akihabara on my way back from a small business trip within Tokyo area.

Right below is the USB HDD case I bought. Century COM25EU2B, \2,980-.



BTW, left above is not a 2.5" HDD, but a 3.5" one. Seagate ST3320620AS(320GB,SATA) \10,300-
Actually, my desktop PC also had an HDD trouble recently, and it's a replace. :)

Well, I wrote "better safe than sorry" at the front.
What I wanted to do is of course full HDD image backup and the below is a terminal log.
| [root@zorac ~]# dd if=/dev/sdc of=/mnt/sdb1/x61-initial-hdd-160g.img bs=10240
| 15629090+1 records in
| 15629090+1 records out
| 160041885696 bytes (160 GB) copied, 5464.87 seconds, 29.3 MB/s
/dev/sdc above is the ThinkPad HDD connected by the USB case, and the image file is saved onto the 320GB new HDD.
It took about 1.5 hours. :o

Monday, November 12, 2007

ThinkPad X61 : Breakthrough

Well, finally the recovery process succeeded.

I think the key point was that I loaded default settings of BIOS.
I'm not sure why, but anyway this time I didn't see "Unknown hard error..." message.

BTW, ThinkPad recovery process takes veeery long time, several hours. :(
According to a colleague of mine, Panasonic does recovery very fast, only an hour.
I'm wondering what is the difference...

Anyway, after seeing the first installation process screen of Windows, I turned off the switch and went to bed. :o

Thursday, November 08, 2007

ThinkPad X61 : A Spare HDD

As I wrote before, Windows complains that there are hardware errors.
Although I was doubtful, anyway I bought a spare HDD.



But, still the recovery process does not work reporting the same errors even after I updated BIOS. :(

Any kinds of clue needed...

Guin Saga 117


Guin Saga 117
The Departure at Dawn
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030906-0

Saturday, November 03, 2007

ThinkPad X61 : A Big Trouble

After more than 4 months hibernation, finally I began to setup my ThinkPad X61.

I resized the Windows partition and created Linux partitions 4 months ago, and so it's ready for installing a Linux distro. But, I did recovery before moving on to the production phase.
Yes, it's better safe than sorry. :)

Well, of course I created recovery CD and DVD without any troubles and kept the hidden recovery data partition intact. Thus, I never imagined that I would have difficult troubles.
  1. When I tried to do recovery using the system recovery disk, its installer complained that there was not enough space.
    Even the partition which the installer was trying to copy files was created by the installer itself! :(
  2. After restoring the recovery data partition and did recovery booting from it, Windows reported "Unknown hardware error..." :(


Thus, at this moment, even Windows does not boot. :(

BTW, I guess some guys say, "Abandon Windows!" (Hey Sam, it's you. :o)
I know.
But, I need Windows because of my office works. :(

What can I do....?

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Hageten

This week end, I had a trip to my wife's home town to see my daughter. :)


The above is a lunch today.

Hageten (ハゲ天) is a famous tempura restaurant chain, and they have a branch in Toyohashi city too. They offers very good Japanese traditional foods mainly tempura related dishes. :)

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Day 16 : Japanese Citizen

Today, I received a notification that the municipal office assigned a resident card number for my daughter. :)

Yes, finally my daughter becomes a Japanese citizen. :)

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Tenjin



Different from other Ramen restaurants I wrote, Tenjin (天神) is along Ome-Kaido avenue.

Today's my choice was Ramen with green onion and sliced roast pork (ネギチャーシューラーメン).
It's an average level ramen, but their potsticker seems to be famous and Tenjin is alwasy crowded.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Day 8 : Ready to Go Home



Finally, my wife and my daughter left the hospital without any troubles.
They will stay at my wife's home town about one more month, and I cannot wait for the day I can live with them. :)

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Special White-Pork Ramen, Jinanbo



Well, tonight dinner. :o
Special White-Pork Ramen at Ramen Jinanbo which I wrote before.

As I wanted to have a less oily but strong Ramen, it's a good choice.
Especially, the soup is surely special. :)

Friday, October 12, 2007

A Lunch

I'm not sure if the label of this entry is appropriate or not.
But, anyway it was a lunch time thing.



The above guy is a colleague of mine, and he loves sweets veeeery much.
Please note his choice for the main dish is a pudding. :o

Also, the colleague, say Mr. X is going to get married soon(?).
Thus, his caption is "Happy Guy." :)

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

A Newborn Baby




Finally Delivered!

Stay tuned for the details!

Monday, October 08, 2007

Interface Magagine '07/11



I bought the Interface Magazine, issue 2007/11, today.

http://www.cqpub.co.jp/interface/
http://www.cqpub.co.jp/interface/contents/2007/200711.htm

Yes, it's an well-known hardware technology magazine in Japan, but this issue focuses on programming in multi processors/cores environment. Anyway, it's a good timing for me. :)

Friday, October 05, 2007

Almost 38 Weeks



Today, my wife had the semi-final (?) medical check before the Caesarean section on October 9.
My daughter was still a breech baby, and that means her birth date is almost fixed.
Anyway, the only thing I hope is that she will come out without any troubles. :)

Tomorrow, I'm going to my hometown where our first miscarried baby is sleeping with her grampa and hold a mass for them, then I'll get ready for the upcoming baby the day after tomorrow in my wife's hometown. :)

Guin Saga 116



Guin Saga 116
The Final Fight
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030903-9

Ho-ho, 116!

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

A Signal Profiler

As I wrote last week, recently I'm looking into SIGNAL handling of Linux, especially SIGSEGV.

I have some crash dump files to see, but I thought it better if we have a new but simple mechanism giving us statistics of SIGNALS sent in a running system.

At first, I thought 'sar -B' could be used to see how many segmentation faults were generated in a system. But, that didn't work well for me, and I wanted to see more direct information that how many SIGNALs were sent in total at each sampling time.
Thus, I wrote one. :)

There are some more TODOs to make it public, and it's a homework of this weekend. :)

Here is an example of the profiler.
# head -15 /proc/sigprof
SIG COUNT
[ 0] 0
[ 1] 4
[ 2] 52
[ 3] 0
[ 4] 0
[ 5] 0
[ 6] 0
[ 7] 0
[ 8] 0
[ 9] 0
[10] 4
[11] 70384086 <== SIGSEGV : 70M SEGVs!? Because of the SEGV storm generator. :)
[12] 12
[13] 0

Monday, October 01, 2007

37th Week



Finally, it's 37th week of my daughter.
She will be out on the next Tuesday, and I need to make a decision as soon as possible.
Her name. :o

Sunday, September 30, 2007

A Present



Well, the above is a present from my daughter's gramma.
A pair of shoes by Dior. :o

Bought at Shinjuku Isetan.

I'm wondering if my daughter also loves shopping very much like her mother...
Sigh... :(

Thursday, September 27, 2007

36th Week



This is a video snapshot of Skype.
Hum... it's difficult to find out what it is. :o
But, anyway my daughter is in her 36 week without any troubles.

BTW, it's my birthday today, and the good news is the biggest present actually. :)

A SEGV Storm Generator

Again, I wrote a stupid program mainly for trouble reproducing. :)

Recently, I've been working on a crash dump of an application server
taken under a heavy CPU load, especially high system activity
(i.e., %system of sar, mpstat or vmstat etc.)

After looking into the crash dump several days (as my after-5 activity :o),
I found that about 10 Java threads out of 3000 under 1 process were waiting for CPU with pending SIGSEGVs.
I'm not sure yet, but after reading source of the Linux exception handler routines,
now I'm feeling we would see a high system activity load like the above
if we had a situation like a segmentation fault storm.

Thus, I tried to write a small program touching invalid addresses repeatedly to reproduce the phenomenon like I saw.

The after-5 activity is still ongoing, and I'm facing with a more strange behaviour of SIGNALs. :(
But anyway, the SEGV storm generator would be public here soon.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Menya Tenho

Menya Tenho (麺や 天好) is another Ramen shop along Shin-Koganei Kaido avenue.
  • http://tokyo.gourmet.livedoor.com/restaurant/info/305077.html


Tonight dinner was a very standard style half soy source and pork bones soup with sliced roasted pork. In Japanese, "しょうゆとんこつチャーシュー麺."

It's true that there are many good ramen shops along Shin-Koganei Kaido avenue that offer various kinds of characteristic ramens. Even Tenho does. But, the above ramen is with very simple and standard, and thus it fits for almost everyone.
Anyway, worth trying. :)

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Taiwan Ramen, Tsurukameya

I had today's lunch at Tsuru-kame-ya (鶴亀屋) located very close to JR Musashi-Koganei station, Tokyo.



The above left ramen is Taiwan Ramen.
It's a very spicy one, and with a lot of chili.
I recommend that you would get into good trim before trying that...

BTW, Taiwan Ramen seems to be a specialty of Nagoya.
Strange! Isn't it?

Wikipedia taught me that it comes from a Taiwan cuisine restaurant in Nagoya in '70s.
You can find some literature at Wikipedia. The article says that Nagoya people like very spicy foods. But, I'm not sure if they really do. At least, a colleague of mine from Nagoya does not.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

NOBEL DREAMS



NOBEL DREAMS --- Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment
Gary Taubes
ISBN 4-02-255929-2 (Japanese translation)

I majored in elementary particle physics theory in my graduate school days, and thus I naturally took this book when I found it in the bookshelf of my father-in-law.

After reading several chapters of the book, what I thought was not about Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, as is mentioned in the text, but about Dave Cutler, the father of WindowsNT and VMS.
That could be because I have lived in the IT industry too long.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Komeda Coffee

Komeda Coffee is a famous coffee shop chain in Nagoya and central Japan area.



I took the above photo at Komeda Coffee Toyohashi Fujisawa (map).
The left cake-like thing is called "Shiro-Noir."
Here, "Shiro" means "White" in Japanese, and obviously "Noir" means "Black" in French (I think). Yes, it's almost meaningless, but anyway, that tastes very good. :)

As you can see, it's a sweet Danish pastry with soft cream.
The above one is a small size version, but be careful. The standard size seems to be about 15cm in diameter and sometime too big for a woman. :o

You can find out some literature about "Shiro-Noir" here and here.
(Unfortunately, only in Japanese)

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Baykal



Baykal is an Russian restaurant in Toyohashi city, Aichi, Japan.

Today, I had a lunch there and had a happy time waiting for the forthcoming baby with my wife and her mother. :)
Link
My choice was Lena Course:
  • Borscht
  • Piroshki
  • Russian Pot
  • Salad
  • Ice Cream
I like their dishes. :)