The Cognitive Gene

The Cognitive Gene (考える遺伝子)
Yukihiko Makino
ISBN 4-7835-0204-8

Makino, author of the book, is a doctor, not an evolutionary biologist. But, he seems to have been fascinated by wonders of nature especially insects since he was a small child, and he covers wide variety of evolutionary theories. Readers might be a bit confused because he describes wide range topics of evolutionary theory and furthermore mentions his own philosophy repeatedly. But, I think the core message of his book can be summarized like the following:

• There must be some driving principles in origin and evolution of life besides mutations and natural selection.
  

I guess its title, the Cognitive Gene, comes from his perspective above.

I know that not a small number of Neo-Darwinists would attack the viewpoints like Makino's, but still I think the book is worth reading to get a overall perspective of evolutionary biology.

BTW, unfortunately there does not seem to be an English translation.
One more thing is that the book is out of print now. :(
Anyway, we have to look for the book at a library.

Day 442 : A Hat?

Oh, well.
What are you putting on? :o

Actually, the bag is for her toys. :)

Riddle of the Cambrian Explosion

Riddle of the Cambrian Explosion (カンブリア爆発の謎)
Yoshiyuki Usami (宇佐美義之)
ISBN 978-4-7741-3417-8

This book is about Riddle of the Cambrian Explosion which means an explosion of number of species on the earth about 530 million years ago.

Recently, I'm reading various books on evolutionary theory, and at first I expected detailed discussion about the reason why it happened. But, this book describes various creatures of those days and author's work on bionomics of anomalocaris based on numerical simulation.

Basically, I enjoyed the history of strange ancient creatures, but I'm looking for books concentrating on more detailed theories of evolution. :)

Day 440 : A Spoon

Recently, my daughter began to use a spoon when she has a meal, especially desserts like strawberries or apples.

At first, we expected that she would show us some kind of ritual like before. But, she didn't this time, and I'm wondering why... :o

In Memory of Akihisa Yamamura

Today, a friend of mine passed away.
He was only 41 years old.

We were class mates about 20 years ago in our high school days.
In those days, he was the hero of the school.

He played as the center midfielder of soccer football and controlled over the games.
It was like a magic for me when he trapped a soccer ball with a very soft touch, and it was unbelievable that he saw very much wide area of the field and created chances.
Among his team mates, there was Masashi Nakayama who got the first goal of Japanese national team at the FIFA World cup in France later.

Yes, he was really impressive man and stood well apart and above any crowd.

But now, we can't talk with him again anymore.

I pray for the repose of his soul.

Health Screening

Today, I had an annual health screening.

It was weight which was the most impressive among the results.
Last year, my weight was about 84Kg.
But, now it's about 76Kg.
8Kg down! :)

But the doctor said, "Well, it's OK. But, you need to lose 6 more Kilograms." :(

BTW, I didn't do any kind diet things.
One reason could be my daughter. It's really running out of gas taking care of her. :o

Guin Saga 124

The Worshipper's Way
Guin Saga 124
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030943-5

Google Infrastructure

Google Infrastructure (グーグルを支える技術)
Keisuke Nishida
ISBN 978-4-7741-3432-1

This book seems to be one of best seller IT books in Japan this year.
The English title above is not official one, but my translation.
I'm not sure if the wording has good sense or not, but anyway I think it describes the book enough.

The preface of the book says, "What Google has done is taking future computing in advance."
But, I do not subscribe to this point of view. IMHO, essential points of what Google has done are:

• Make good decisions on various trade-offs
• Concentrate on what they really needed
  

and that's all. It's depends on what kind of goal a company shoots for whether a decision is good or not, or what is needed for a company, I think.
So, I'm wondering if my employer can learn from Google's success now.

Day 419 : Shout!

Hahaha, this snapshot catches an interesting moment.
I'm wondering what she says looking at the above picture when she grew up. :)

Quantum Evolution

Quantum Evolution
Johnjoe MacFadden
ISBN 4 -320-03424-4 (Japanese Transration)

After finishing Dawkins' the Extended Phenotype, I wanted to know more recent results around evolutionary theory and chose the book. Mainly, it's because I studied elementary particle physics when I was a graduate student and felt it's natural taking quantum theory into consideration of origin and evlolution of life.

When I was a high school student, I read Oparin's book which explains an idea that life was created in primodial atomosphere. Here, the first life form must have been a kind of protains with self-reprodusive property.

Here, so far as we know a self-reprodusive protain is composed of at least 20 amino acids, and there are 20 kinds of amino acids. That means there are 20^20 possible combinations, and it's a 26 digits number...
The point is that it's extremely rare for a self-reproducive protain produced by chance.

McFadden tries to solve the problem by using inverse quantum zeno effect, but the idea seems to be very much controversial, and even for me, a bad student of physics, it's unreasonable and Panspermia hypothesis sounds more likely.

Bought on 2008/11/03.

Day 412 : The First 5 Steps

Well, today is a memorial day for our family.
Our daughter finally walked by herself for the first time.
I love her proud look above. :)

This is a small step for her, but a giant leap for the family. :o)

Blue Screen

Oops.
I have not seen the blue screen in a long while.

Today I saw it when I was trying to connect a 17-inch external LCD to my ThinkPad X61 and make it dual-display system at work.

What the problem was that the primary display and the secondary one were exchanged after the crash. That is, I had to keep the external LCD connected to use my ThinkPad. :o
After struggling one hour or so, finally I could work out so that the primary display points to the onboard LCD panel.

But, one hour was a great loss today. :(

Day 408 : Peek-a-Boo

Recently, I play peek-a-boo with my daughter several times a day.
She really loves that. :)

The above is a snapshot when she (not me) did peek-a-boo this morning. :)
BTW, I'm wondering if it's better to say "Hide-and-Seek" this case...

A Strange Object

Today, I saw a strange object when I took a walk with my daughter.
The object was located on top of a fence along a street close to my house.
That thing itself is quite common in our daily life, but it might be better to say that the situation was strange.

Here are pictures of the thing. :o



Yes, it's a punpkin. :o

My wife asked me why I took the pictures, but I'm wondering how can one ignore that.
Almost irresistible. :o

Third Degree

Third Degree
Greg Iles
ISBN 978-0-340-92059-6

The latest paperback of Greg Iles.
I like Iles' books mainly because he has wide range and deep background knowledge and he develops plots nicely quick.

But reading this book, I felt its plot development is a bit slow. Maybe there are two reasons why I felt so. Firstly, the story is set mainly in one house and throughout the book tense atmosphere keeps going a bit monotonically. Secondly, Iles didn't write from a viewpoint of the male leading character at all. Here, I mean a doctor, the husband of another female leading character, by that.

Maybe the doctor is not the leading character, but still I'm feeling it better giving readers to understand the psychology of the tragic doctor.

Anyway, I'm waiting for his next novel, Devil's Punchball, in paperback which is scheduled in this July. Ah, well, it's because I usually read books mainly in trains, not because I want to save money. :o

Bought on 2008/09/22
Finished on 2008/11/07

Day 392 : Stand Up!

In these weeks, my daughter stood up by herself for a minute or so sometimes.

Today, I succeeded to catch the instant finally. :)

Hakodate Ramen Shio-no-Kura

Today's lunch at Hakodate Ramen Shio-no-Kura(函館ラーメン塩の蔵) in Kokubunji station building.



Actually, I don't like it well. :(

Day 390 : Preparation for Winter

Today, we went to Kokubunji and bought a lot of clothes for our daughter at GAP, again. :)



Especially, my wife wanted a down jacket. But above black one seems to be a bit too big, and looked like the down jacket was walking, not our daughter. :o

The Extended Phenotype

The Extended Phenotype --- The Gene as the Unit of Selection ---
Richard Dawkins
ISBN 4-314-00485-1

This is the second book of Richard Dawkins, and it says basically the same thing with his first book: the primary unit of natural selection is the gene. The essential new point of Dawkins in this book is that a phenotype of a gene can appear in other individuals which actually do not carry the gene. In other word, genes can cause effects remotely.

At first, I thought that this could relate genes and memes, but it was a hasty conclusion.
Meme does not follow even the central dogma of biology. Here I mean that in case of Meme acquired characteristic can be inherited against the case of Gene. Thus, there must be different theories from the ones of Gene. Anyway, I need to read some literature on Meme, for example, ones by Susan Blackmore.

Day 386 : Ritual of Mouse

Hahaha, here is another shot of my daughter's rituals. :)

I'm wondering when I should give hear a PC and show her the Internet world...

Day 377 : Ritual of Cellphone

This is another version of the Ritual of Cellphone. :)

Last time, she did the first version of cellphone ritual when we visited her granma's house.
It's was actually a toy cellphone (precisely speaking, her granma's old one) at that time. But, this time, she found her father's live one which means the cellphone emits lights responding various operations.

Thus, she looked happy like the below. :)

BTW, her father was anxious looking at the ritual of course. :o

Nishi-Dori Pudding

Today, I met old friends about 5 years interval and had a drink with them in Tachikawa.

On my way back home, I found a nice pudding shop within JR Tachikawa station.
Nishi-Dori Pudding ('西通りプリン') seems to be a Fukuoka based hand made pudding shop. It looks like the shop I saw does not regularly open there but now they are placing a limited time branch shop in various areas around Tokyo.
So, I was lucky. :)

Day 371 : Studio Alice

Today, we went to Studio Alice with our daughter and took commemorative photos.
The below is a sample shot.

Ha ha, 1 year old! :)



BTW, today was a good day for taking pictures of the Shichi-Go-San festival, and there were lots of families at the studio. Of course, my daughter wept copiously because of fear for strangers, and the above smile is a lucky snapshot. :o

Day 369 : Ritual of News Paper

As I wrote before, our daughter does a kind of rituals (or dances?) when she gets something intersting. :)

In the below picture, she performs the Ritual of News Paper. :)


I'm wondering when we should begin to teach her how to reading and writing. :)

Day 367 : Happy Birthday!

Finally, my daugher reached the first birthday. :)
Today, her granma (my mother) visited our house, and celebrated her together.

Guin Saga 123

Signs of Storms
Guin Saga 123
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030938-1

Summer Festival 2008

Ha ha ha, it's the Summer Festival Season again!
Finally, my daughter saw the festival. :)

Day 339 : Pulled Herself Up!

Finally, my daughter pulled herself up. :)

BTW, it happened during our stay at her grandpa's house.
I guess one reason would be that there are more flat furniture which she can use to pull herself up compared to our house. Now, I'm wondering if she would do it again in Tokyo...

Pomegranate Soup

Pomegranate Soup
Marsha Mehran
ISBN 4-560-02746-3

Day 320 : A Duck

Recently, my daughter loves playing with toys of ducks when she takes a bath (with me). :)

In Japan, there is a famous duck.
It's not Donald duck but 'アヒル隊長' (Ahiru-Taicho) which roughly means the Captain Duck.
The duck appeared in a TV show, 'ザ! 鉄腕! DASH!' (Tetsu-wan DASH). Literally, the title means the Iron-Arm DASH. But anyway, it's one of popular varaiety showｓ in Japan, and the duck appears there. I like the show, and I'm wondering if I can enjoy it with my daughter someday.
Well, one reason why I'm worrying is that the show features TOKIO, a Japanese idol band and their leader is almost 40 years old now. :o

Java World Day 2008

Today, I went to Java World Day 2008 held in Shinagawa, Tokyo.
Actually, I wanted to listen to a talk by Gregor Hohpe of Google, which is titled "Programming the Cloud : Internet as a Platform."

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/gregor-hohpe-conversations

Basically, he talked about fundamental technologies constructing Google
those of Google File System, MapReduce, sawzall and so on. He introduced also
Google App Engine and furthermore gave us a small live demo using that.

Among his presentation, what was impressive for me was new ACID idea.
(Ha ha, I knew the new ACID thing for the first time at the conference at this time of day...)

• NewACID
• A - Associative
• C - Commutative
• I - Idempotent
• D - Distributed
• OLD ACID
• A - Atomic
• C - Consistent
• I - Isolated
• D - Durable

Under the Internet environment where unpredictable amount of transactions
arrive at a web site, I can understand that application must have the new
ACID property in order to scale out. But, I'm wondering what we can do to run classical multi-tier web systems with RDBMS on cloud computing environment...
Maybe it's an open question...

TOEIC '08 Summer

I had a TOEIC test again about two weeks ago, and today I found the result notification in my mail box.
Last time I had the test I got the best score and this time 45 points down.
But anyway, the score matches well with my expectation which I had after finishing the test.

BTW, above graph says that my Listening/Reading scores ratio again goes down below 1.0 which means my reading section score was better than listening section one. One reason would be that I didn't speak English almost at all except the business trip to New York in June. I'm wondering what my employers want me to do...

Day 312 : A Cell Phone

In Japan, mid August is the season of lantern festival.
Of course, I took this year's summer vacation in this season and stayed at my home town.

The above is a snapshot when my daughter got a (toy) cell phone from her grand mother and was doing some kind of ritual(dance?) to express her pleasure. :o

BTW, in the lantern season, it's believed that ancestors visit their homes and stay there several days. The altar behind her is her (late) grand father's one, and I hope that he enjoyed the stay of this year well. :)

Day 308 : Tachikawa

Today, we took our daughter to Tachikawa. It's her first trip by train except the one when she got back to Tokyo from my wife's home town.



The above is a snapshot when we had dinner at Din Tai Fung, a Chinese restaurant there.
She looked like enjoying the small trip, but her mother was enjoying window shopping at department stores more. :o

A Small Everyday Innovation Goes a Long way!

A Small Everyday Innovation Goes a Long Way! (なぜシリコンバレーではゴミを分別しないのか)
Noriko Takiguchi
ISBN 978-4-8334-1874-4

This book is a collection of columns on Nikkei BP, PC Online.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure if "A Small Everyday Innovation Goes a Long Way!" is really the correct English title or not, but anyway it's on the cover page.

BTW, the Japanese (original) title can be translated (literally) like "Why they don't separate the trashes in Silicon Valley?", and I like the reason. :)

Ichiro Ramen

Today, I went to Menya Tenho after a long interval.

My choice of today is Ichiro Ramen, a pork bones soup with sliced roasted pork ramen.
But, I'm not sure if the name comes from Ichiro. :o

Day 306 : A Swing

Today, my daughter got on a swing for the first time.
Of course, precisely speaking, I got on the swing holding her, but anyway she looks like she loves it. :)

BTW, there were only I and my daughter, thus unfortunately I couldn't take a picture of her first ride. :(

Day 304 : Melon

Today would be a memorial day for my daughter.
She had a piece of sliced melon for the first time today. :o



Well, she looks like eating something strange in the picture above, but anyway she seemed to enjoy melon. I'm wondering what she would say looking at the picture years later. :)

Guin Saga 122

Panther-King In Pain
Guin Saga 122
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030931-2

Pluto 6

Pluto 6
Naoki Urasawa
ISBN 978-4-09-182127-0

I was really looking for the 6th book of Pluto by Naoki Urasawa.
This story is based on a sub story of the Astro Boy, "The Greatest Robot on Earth" by Osamu Tezuka as you can find it out in the link above, and in this 6th book Urasawa's story turned the corner.

Note that Urasawa's story is not just a simple remake of Tezuka's original story. Urasawa is one of the best manga authors in today's Japan, and because of the difference of historical backdrops he focuses on other point of view than Tezuka's original works, humanity. Here, I don't mean Tezuka's work does not contain the view point of humanity, but I think Tezuka focused on more social view point such as citizenship of robots.
Anyway, it's worth reading, and I think it's a good time to begin reading the series. :)

68th Birthday

Today, it's the 63rd memorial day of Hiroshima.

But, for me it's 68th birthday of late my father who past away 8 years ago.
My father was very much looking forward to attending at my wedding ceremony and seeing grandchildren.

On this day, I always pray for him that he would enjoy his next life calmly since 8 years ago.

On this day, I always think about my father and my lost first daughter buried in our family grave since 3 years ago.

On this day, I feel that it's a great pity that he could not survive the 20th century nor hold his grand daughter on his birthday since last year...

Interface Magagine '08/09

Hahaha...
Again, I bought Interface Magazine almost automatically.



This month issue, '08/09, includes a FreeScale ColdFire board as a supplement.
Especially, its chip, MCF52233 has an Ethernet controller! :o

BTW, there are NEC V850 board, dsPIC board, Fujitsu FR board and this time FreeScale's board in my toy box. Anyway, I have to make time to play with them. :(

Day 301 : Stand Up!

Well, actually it's not yet. She needs her parent's help.
But, anyway here is a piece of memorial and happy photo of my family. :)

A Simple SysV Shared Memory Load Generator

Again, I wrote a stupid program.

This time, I wanted to see the so called memory access cost under virtualized environments like VMware or Xen.
From another point of view, I wanted to see if large page support really improves business application performance such as PostgreSQL running on top of VMware especially.

Thus, I read LINUX_SRC/Documentation/vm/hugetlbpage.txt and began to write a (stupid :o) program which generates various memory work load using SystemV IPC shared memory.
The program, shmload, is available here as usual, and I was a bit surprised comparing results of large page enabled and normal ones on top of Centos 5.1 and VMware Workstation 6 running on WindowsXP.
In the ultimate case where the whole share memory segment is accessed via only one memset() API call, a large page enabled test with a 4MB share memory segment performed 20% better than a test without large page. Here, 20% means that the elapse time was shorter than the test without large page by 20%.

This could explain the performance degradation I saw at work, and I'm going to try the program there next week. :)

BTW, here are other issues I felt working on the stupid work.

• I want to use PostgreSQL for RDBMS at first, and it does not have large page support at this moment. :( Thus, my next work could be a patch for enabling large page support in PostgreSQL (on Linux).
• Xen does not have large page support at this moment. Thus, the only resolution is buying servers with AMD RVI enabled processors. I'm wondering why they do not support large page.
• Note on 2008/08/09. I found patches adding large page support on xen-devel ML.
  
• In case of Linux, a large page is handled as an unpageable page. In other word, a large page is locked down. Oracle looks like using large page, and I'm feeling it could potentially cause peformance problem.
  

VMware ESXi for Free

As I wrote several times, I'm working on virtualization at work recently.

Two days ago, VMware made an announcement that they will provide VMware ESXi for Free.
According to their press release, ESXi seems to be the next generation hypervisor. But, so far as I know, ESXi is a subset of VMware ESX Server and the only difference is that ESXi does not contain the service console which is actually RHEL3 based Linux dedicated for management.
In other word, ESXi is the same as Virtual Infrastructure 3i. Here 'i' stands for 'Installable', not 'i' of something cool or superior like the 'i' of iMac.

I'm wondering what kind of revenue model they are thinking about from now...

Xen Summit 2008 Fall

I didn't know that the next Xen Summit (2008 Fall) would be held in Tokyo, Japan.

I was wondering it would be difficult going to both VMWorld and Xen Summit in this fall, but that means it's not impossible doing so because I do not need to making business trip abroad twice in one quarter. :)

In addition, yesterday I got an idea about a DBMS performance issue on top of virtualization environment, especially Xen hypervisor. :)
So, the only problem is that if I can really make time working on the idea...

Day 294 : First Clinic

Today was the first day she went to a clinic except regular health checks.

Recently, my daughter had a runny nose and we thought she caught a cold.
But, it turned out that she had a glue ear. :(
Anyway, it's lucky that we found the glue ear got correct medicine.

BTW, she cried out loud at the clinic, and I think she got tired there. So, she fell asleep just after finishing the last milk tonight. I hope she has a lovely dream tonight. :)

Day 293 : Growing Chair

I wrote about the first chair for my daughter in May, but actually we rent the chair at that time.

Recently, my wife found a good wooden chair, and it looked very cool for me too.
So, we bought it. :)

Here is a piece of picture of my daughter enjoying(?) the chair.


The chair is 'mobo' by 'Timkid', a German company.
'mobo' is a kit of knock-down chair, and the below are pictures during the assembly process.
Actually, the chair is highly flexible in adjusting its height, and so it seems to be usable from 7 month to 10 years old. Actually, the chair also grows with babies. :)

One thing I felt happy is not the do-it-yourself activity but that my daughter crawled to me and pecked my arm. :o

Day 293 : Stand Up! (Soon)

Well, recently my daughter shows surprisingly rapid progresses. :)



I'm looking forward to walking around with her soon. :)

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

I have to confess that I didn't know about Professor Randy Pausch in neither his speciality area nor his last last lecture. :(

Today, I read that finally he past away in a news paper and listened to his last lecture at CMU, "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."

Here is an excerption from his slides, "Important Advices":

• Be good at something: it makes you valuable
• Work hard... "what's your secret?"
• Find the best in everybody; no matter how long you have to wait for them to show it
• Be prepared: "luck" is where prepration meets opportunity

I like the first one best, and now I'm wondering what kind of advices I can give to my daughter. :)

Time to Say...

Today, I heard that one of my colleagues would leave our workplace next month.

I'm working for a special organization for one of the most bureaucratic and legacy company in Japan, and its purpose is putting together engineers working on the same kind of technology area from its subsidiaries and make their activities more efficient for all of the group companies.

The colleague is excellent in terms of skill driving an organization for a practical direction. Furthermore, he understands wide range of technologies sufficiently including from emerging ones without working on the new ones by himself to legacy ones. But, sad to say, according to traditional way of career track of the company, a person especially on the fast career track would stay at one place at most five years or less, and he is. Thus, he was also to move to other workplace. In a sense, it's time to say good-by for him.
Anyway, I hope he can get a challenging workplace from next month.

Here, recently I'm wondering what kind of actions should I do in my career path.
I quit a company about five years ago, and one reason why I did so was that there was actually no career path being an engineer not a manager in the company, and one of my bosses who interviewed me told me that they were trying to design a career path for those engineers. But, after all I'm feeling it's was an illusion.

Thus, I'm wondering if it's time doing something also for me recently.

Day 288 : Crawling

Hoho, my daughter finally began to crawl around the room. :)

One thing I and my wife are talking about is that we have to do up our rooms.
Especially, there are a lot of cables and PC related things in my room. So, it's the most dangerous(?) area in our house. But, my room is also a lumber room, and I'm wondering if I really can find any room for gadets there. :o

Day 288 : A Tooth

Finally, my daughter got a tooth. :)



To tell the truth, we found the tooth yesterday at Aeonmall Musashi-Murayama, but it was difficult to take pictures of that. The above picture was taken when she was in a good humor after taking a bath and had milk enough. :)