English Spams

I receive a lot of spams in both English and Japanese every day.

There is an interesting difference between English spams and Japanese ones
recently.

In case of Japanese spams, usually they are written in conventional text or html body parts and most of them are trying to lead me to meet-a-mate kind of sites.

I'm feeling that English spams are more advanced in terms of breaking spam filtering.

Here is an excerption from a spam that I received today.

|Subject: linked or
|
| Title was invalid empty an linked! Was invalid empty an linked?
| Main from special toolssign.
| An linked or interwiki contained, main. Invalid empty an linked or?
| Title was invalid empty an linked, or interwiki.
| Error bad titlefrom wikipedia, the free to navigation searchthe. Bad
[snip]
| Titlefrom wikipedia the, free.
| Special, toolssign in create.
| An linked or interwiki contained main from special.

In short, the above lines are nonsense.

At first, looking at the first several words, I thought this might be a linkedIn releated notification or something.

But, the below image was the true body part of the spam. :o
What I thought cool is that it's not only an Ad. just simply written
in a graphic image format but the lines are on the angle.
I'm wondering if there are effective text mining(?) tools which can
retrieve text information with such kind of (in the very near future, non-linear) transformation.

Image:

thatsdone 3.0

Well, thatsdone 3.0 seems to be appearing at October 24, 2007.



Of course, thatsdone 2.0 is this girl. :)
I won't forget her.

Guin Saga Componential Analysis

http://seibun.nosv.org/maker.php/GUIN/

This is interesting.
If you're a reader of Guin Saga, you must try! :)
FYI. Amazon.com search result of "Guin Saga".

Here is an example of my real name.

# Original Japanese result start
グイン・サーガ成分分析による (my name) の解析結果

• (my name) の95%はマリウスの歌声で出来ています
• (my name) の3%は大食らいのよだれで出来ています
• (my name) の2%はアル・ディーンの優柔不断さで出来ています

# Original Japanese result end

# Translation start
Report of (my name) by the Guin Saga Componential Analysis

• 95% of (my name) consists of singing voice of Marius
• 3% of (my name) consists of drool of big eater
• 2% of (my name) consists of effeminacy of Al Dean

# Translation end

As Al Dean is the real name of Marius, 97% of me seems to consist of Marius.
Well, how can I interpret that? :o

Rydeen

When I was a junior high school student, I was crazy about YMO.

Today, on Saturday, I was at work and had a bunch of troubles. Besides, some of them were unrecoverable. So, on my way back home, I was a bit depressed.

After coming back home, I saw the above CM and felt some kind of healing.
Maybe it's nostalgia...

Turning Angel

Turning Angel
Greg Iles
ISBN 1-4165-1703-0

Compared to the author's previous work, "Blood Memory", I had a bit "subdued" impression on this book. But anyway, high quality mystery (or suspence?) story.

Bought on June 21, 2006.
Finished on February 21, 2007.

Xen resource monitoring

Recently, I'm working on Xen using RHEL5 Beta2 at work.

The biggest headache of mine with respect to Xen is lack of practical resource monitoring utility of the VMM like sar or vmstat.

Today, I found an interesting message on the xen-devel ML.

That's it!
I wanted that one. :)

I'm wondering if one of my colleagues would find the message and try it.
Also, what I'm curious about is that why he and his colleagues (except myself)
do not know about the work while 5 of them went to OLS last year cause the work was presented at the Ottawa Linux Symposium.
What were they doing there!?

PMBOK

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 3rd Edition
ANSI/PMI 99-001-2004
ISBN 1-930699-75-1 (Japanese Edition), 1-930699-50-6(CDROM)



This is the book I've worked on recently.
It's Japanese translation is terrible. :(

There seem to be many online pdf files of the book in English.
For exeample,

http://www.stocktonlabor.com/PMBOK3.pdf

I'm going to have another exam around the end of this May, probably.

Failed!

Today was the PMP day.
Of couse, FAILED! :(

I should have:

• left home earlier because I had no time to have lunch. PMP exam takes 4 hours!
• Studied more overall PMBOK areas. My score was about 60% on average.Especially project finalization process groups.
• Bought another PMP exercise book and work on that.I think the text books provided by the consultant who gave me the PMP training course was very good. But, exercises accompanied with them were not enough. There were many questions which I was not familiar with.

Anyway, it depends on my employer if I take a revenge test or not. :o

BTW, today there was the TOKYO Marathon 2007, and I had a trouble
to pass a crossing on the way to the test center. :(

Here is a picture.

TOEIC Result

Today, I received result of the TOEIC exam that I took about two weeks ago.
A bit surprised because it takes usually one or two months to receive
the score sheet. At least till the last time.

I got 60 points down, but it's not the point today.

Here are two interesting graphs which I draw using my TOEIC score data.



The right one above is a time series Listening versus Reading scores ratio.
A value greater than one means I got better Listening score than Reading.
In general, it's often said that usually practical English speakers
are better in Listening than Reading. As for me, I'd been good at
English classes during my school days. I'm not sure the current
school English teaching system well, but anyway in those days the English
classes were Reading and Writing oriented. I mean it's not oriented
for oral comprehension in English.
I think that's why I got better result in Reading than Listening
in the first two years when I was not used to communicate with foreign people
in English. I didn't speak English almost at all last year, thus a bit
surprised. Maybe it kept my Listening score that I listened to reading
of my favorite books such as Narnia Chronicles on my way to office
and back to home.

The left one shows time series development of my *relative* TOEIC scores
where 1.0 means the first score I got. The red line is a fit curve using
a quadratic function, y = a*x^2+b*x+c. The point is, the first coefficient 'a'
is minus! The graph says that I have already passed my peak around autumn
of 2005. :(

Oooooops.....

2007/02/14

Ms. Dewey

Recently, there seems to be a new kind of search engine.

http://msdewey.com/

Umm....
I like this idea, an entertainment search engine(!?), but Ms. Dewey gives me boring answers. :(
At this moment, most of the answers to my questions are links to Wikipedia.
Is she really going to rule the world? :o

Guin Saga 112

Guin the Gladiator
ISBN 4-15-030878-0

112!

BTW, according to the author, we can enjoy monthly guin saga two times this year.
She also mentioned in the postscript she had already finished writing up the 114th book in the beginning of this year. :o
Really amazing!

2007/02/08

PMP

Finally I had a reservation of PMP test today
after almost one year hibernation days when my boss first asked me to have that.
Anyway, I will have the test on Feb 18, 2007.

Oops, I have only 12 days left. :(

2007/02/06

Google Maps

I was wondering why we cannot embed maps from Google Maps
here since I wrote this entry.

Blogger simply says you cannot include <script> tag in the entries, and
that means we cannot use Google Maps API there.

I know of course it's because Google organization is now very huge, and there are various
independent teams there. But, recently sometimes I feel the situation is now like Microsoft. :(

TOEIC

Today, I took the TOEIC test after one year interval.
The test was not a public one, but a private called IP (Institutional Program) test held by my company. Yes, my company pays for me. That's good. :)

But, today I had to work not only as an examinee but also as an examiner.
Here, an examiner just means a helper at the examination halls for the supervisors
sent from the ETS.
At my company, usually the work is assigned to second years.
This time, I had a reason which I cannot deny the assignment by my boss.

In Japanese, sometimes we say such situation 'Batsu game'. It can be translated as
'punishment game' if I do direct one-to-one mapping translation. But, I think
the nuance is different, and I'd be happy if anyone can tell me the correct the expression. :)

BTW, I found a good article for people shooting for good TOEIC scores.
Hey you, Takeuchi-kun and Furuta-kun, are you reading? :o

2007/02/04

SO903i Again

Since my new cell, SO903i, died in the beginning of this January, I used a Panasonic P900iV by just putting my FOMA card
(it's like SIM card in the GSM world) into that.

Actually, P900iV is cool for me. For example, good mechanism for taking pictures, or so. But, as it's a bit outdated one, its response time of Japanese input method was
beyond my patience. So, I bought another one. :o

Here is a museum of my cells history. :o



From left,
NTT DoCoMo
Mova P503i --- Panasonic, worked for me more than 6 years
Foma SO903i -- SONY, drawn after 1.5 month:(
Foma P900iV -- Panasonic, second hands from my wife :o
Foma SO903i -- SONY

2007/02/03

Korean Restaurant

We went to a Korean restaurant tonight.
It's about 10 minutes walk from our room, and
we can enjoy very good Korean homestyle dishes. :)

Here are details of the restaurant.

http://tokyo.gourmet.livedoor.com/restaurant/info/14772.html

The restaurant's name is in Korean '다람방', and in Japanese 'ダラッバン'.
According to the Japanese notation, it's pronunciation would be like 'Darabban.'
But, I'm not sure if the alphabatical notiation is correct or not. :(

BTW, according to an online Korean-Eglish dictionary,
'다람방' means a garret or an attic. Good naming.

Here is the main dish of tonight. :)



In Japanese Kanji notation, it's '部隊鍋', pronunces like 'Bude Chige'.
In English, roughly speaking that means something like 'corps hotpot.'
So far as I know, it comes from how it's invented.
That is, after the Korean War around US Forces bases
some Korean people tried to put instant noodles which they got from the bases
into hotpots, and that tasted good. Thus, people seemed to call it corps hotpot.

Anyway, it's not so spicy and very good. :)

2007/01/20

Mixi

Mixi is the biggest SNS in Japan.
Similar to other SNS systems, Mixi has its original built-in diary system.
We can have notifications when our direct friends added new entries via e-mail daily or weekly.

Of course, we can use other diary / blog systems outside Mixi.
In this case, it's OK just filling in RSS feeds URL to the profile form.
Currently, Mixi supports only RSS format, not Atom, and here was my problem.
Actually, I didn't know Blogger supports RSS 2.0 format feed untill recently.
It finally worked, and I was a bit surprised seeing a lot of friends of mine on the access list there.

BTW, I'm wondering why orkut doesn't have one. Does anyone have any idea?

2007/02/02

Binary Hacks

I know one of the authors and one of the contributors of above.
They are really excellent and the book is too.
The book should be translated as soon as possible!

ISBN 4-87311-288-5