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

Labels!

Wow!
I didn't know that Blogger supported "Labels."
I've been waiting for that since I wrote this entry. :)

Eustace, Useless

Eustace, Useless.
If you read Chronicles of Narnia, you might know the phrase.

Esutace is a boy who appears in "the Voyage of the Dawn Treader",
the book 5 of Chronicles of Narnia. It's just a phrase that
creatures of Narnia teasing Eustace were shouting.

But, today at work, a co-worker of mine really reminded me of the phrase.
Goddamn! :(

2007/01/30

Tonkatsu Saki-Tei

Today's dinner.

Tonkatsu Saki-Tei, Shinjuku Isetan, Tokyo.
http://r.tabelog.com/tokyo/rstdtl/13010717/

Tonkatsu is 'pork cutlets' which is a very popular dish in Japan.
If you have a chance to visit Japan, try it. :)

2007/01/27

LinkedIn

Recently, I got two invitations to LinkedIn within a week.

Google gives me 210,000 Japanese pages about LinkedIn at this moment.
What is interesting is that LinkedIn is a business oriented SNS and there seem to be more than 8.5 million users according to an article which Google gave me. Building business relationships, recruiting, etc. This can be a powerful tool even for us Japanese...

BTW, one of the invitations I got was from Germany and the other was from Lithuania. :o
Obviously, there must be two waves traveling through the earth toward west and east from the United States. For me, the second one was faster than the fisrst one.
I guess this is a bit irregular case.

Oh my SO903i

Oops.

I dropped my cell into the water at the lavatory of my grama's house.
Of course it died... :(
I used the previous cell for more than 6 years, but this time only 1.5months.

In eastern agian coutories, men have unlucky 3 years called "Yaku Doshi"
which seems to be translated "climacteric" according to my dictionary.
Usually, we ask the priests of Shinto shrines to give us sort of exorcism,
in Japanese Yaku-Yoke or Yaku-Barai.
I should have had one at Ooi Jinja Shrine. :(

2007/01/03

Tomb

Today my family had the 13th anniversary of my father's deth.

I asked the priest (in casual Japanese Shizuoka dialect, Ossan) to have
a small funeral ceremony for my daughther together with the anniversary.
She got her posthumous Buddhist name, Shin-So-Sei Musoh-Gai-Shi.
In Japapanese Kanji, it's spelled like the following:

Roughly speaking the posthumous name means 'a baby of a dream
who pasted away very early', and it comes from directly from her name, Yume,
which means a dream in Japanese.

I hope she will have happy time with her granpa.

2006/12/09

Guin Saga 111

The Fiendish Fencer
ISBN 4-15-030872-1

The 111th anniversary(!?) book.

2006/12/07

Jumbo!

Kappa Ebisen Jumbo!

Today we went to Aeon Akishima Shopping Center and found (encountered?)
a strange object. :o

What my wife holds is an extra jumbo size Kappa Ebisen.
Kappa Ebisen is one of very popular snack food in Japan.
I like it very much. :)

BTW, she is 151cm tall. Please guess the size. :o

2006/12/03

Forbidden Colours

I really love this tune.
Lyrics here.

BTW, someone might say, "You just wanted to test an embedded object from YouTube!"
So what? :o

SONY SO903i

Until now, I've used a straight style 2G cell, NTT DoCoMo Panasonic P503i about 6 years.

Although I wanted new one with camera for a long time,
I love the track point of P503i whick is like ThinkPad's one.
But recently I've been attracted by SONY's new cell phone, SO903i,

http://www.sonyericsson.co.jp/product/docomo/so903i/index.html

and finally, I changed my mind.

Today is the sale date of SO903i, and got it! :)

2006/11/25

La Fete Tama

La Fete Tama, Minami Osawa

La Fete Tama is one of shopping malls in western Tokyo.
It's my wife's choice as the first trip via my new Impreza, but
compared to Gotemba Premium Outlets, La Fete Tama was not so interesting for her. :o



2006/11/12

Cars

I bought a new car, SUBARU Impreza again, and
it's delivered today!

Here are pics before and after :)

Gotemba Premium Outlets

Gotemba Premium Outlets is the largest outlet mall in Japan.
It was the last drive via my old Impreza.



There, my wife bought a plenty of expensive things, BALLY, LOEWE, etc. :o

As for me, Lego Store was my best favorite. I was about to buy a Lego Mind Storm box,
but the price was about 40K yen and that brought me back to reality. :o
Actually, the only a thing I bought was a cell phone strap at the Lego store...

2006/11/04

Ashes

Finally, my daughter, Yume, got back home today.
She was only 24 centimeters tall and 281 grams, but we could see
her strong resemblance to me at a glance, especially her eyebrow and
bridge of her nose.
I believe my grandpa up there will also find out the baby is his grandchild
instantly.

Guin Saga 110

The Capital of Corruption
ISBN 4-15-030863-2

The 110 th book.
Found that at Maruno-uchi Maruzen, and finished it within the day.

20 weeks and a great loss

I didn't know my baby was a boy or a girl yet, but the baby past away.
I hope he (or she) meets with his (or her) granpa up there.

Guin Saga 109

Guin Saga 109: Playacting the Panther-King

Ho-ho, 109!

ISBN 4-15-030857-8

Chimney

My Office is in this building.
The only smoking area is its under ground level open space.
So, actually the building is a very huge chimney.

BTW, in that sense this building could be the most famous chimney in the world. :o

9 Weeks and EDC

Now, my baby is 9 weeks and seems to be 24.5mm tall(?) now.

BTW, I thought I can say 'due date of birth', but
the correct saying seems to be EDC (expected date of confinement).
I didn't know...

Well, anyway I seem to be a papa on February 18, 2007. :)

Birthday Alert

Today, I got an unreadable message.

Well, it's not garbled but almost encrypted for me cause it's
written in Polish. :o
Of course, I asked a Polish friend of mine to help me.

After all, the message turned out to be a kind of reminders from an
SNS service, a birthday alert. In addition, reminding me of the friend's
birthday. :o
I should have consulted dictionaries at least once. :(

Anyway, Happy Birthday, 'k'!

7 Weeks

Now, our baby is 7 weeks old and 4.3mm tall(?).

Finally, he (or she?) got the heart.
My wife saw it's pulsing by an ultrasonic imaging.
So, we were happy today. :)

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

User Space Probe!?

http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/5/9/25

Interesting...
But I'm not sure if Linus accepts this.

Why not label?

After moving here, I'm wondering why Blogger doesn't have a mechanism
to classify users posts such as "label" of GMail.

Classification of web contents is a central idea of Semantic Web, I think.
My guess is that Google is against Semantic Web philosophy.
Of course, I can understand "label" of GMail is a way of classification for each user,
not general readers. But, still I feel it convenient if we have "label", "caterogy" or
something like that. Furthermore, it could be interesting if both Blog authors
and (possibly registerd) readers have "labels" independently and
there is a mechanism which allows them interact each other.

I'm wondering what other people on the Net are thinking about...

Blog Systems

Finally, I finished to migrate my blog contents from Livedoor Blog to Blogger.

I don't care about Horie-mon issues which was one of the hottest
issues in Japan, but Livedoor Blog has several critical (at least for me)
problems.

First of all, I wanted a completely English blog system.
Second, Livedoor Blog gets too heavy when I want to post new entries,
I mean night time in Japan.
Third, we cannot change timestamps of entries there.
As I often write entries asynchronously, I need the feature.

As for Blogger, I'm still feeling some inconvenience at this moment.
For example, Google Blog Search doesn't seem to be working correctly
at this moment. But anyway they would be resolved soon,
and basically I like the system. :)

BTW, this is the second move of my blog location.
Formerly, I used Doblog because of a special reason which I cannot
disclose here. :o
It's a really inconvenient and poor system.
For example, Doblog seemed to have stopped for 4 days(!) two weeks ago or so
because of their regular and planned maintainance.
I cannot believe what they are thinking about important IT industry
terms such as SLA or CS. :(

Koganei Festival

I live in Kodaira City, Tokyo, Japan.
The nearest station is Musahi-Koganei, and it's
in Koganei City, neighbour of Kodaira.

Today, they seemed to have a festival around the station,
and I had to walk two bus stops . :(
But, everyone seemed to have a happy day, today.
I also enjoyed a little walk. :)

Debian/GNU kFreeBSD

Debian/GNU kFreeBSD

I tried 'debian-20060402-kfreebsd-i386-install.iso' on my VMWare box.
But, the only thing I got after installation was
"F1 FreeBSD" and beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Indeed Debian is a unique distribution becase multiple kernels are available,
they need more man power.

Me? :o
I want spare time.....

LINKED:The New Science of Networks

"LINKED:The New Science of Networks" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

ISBN 4-14-080743-1

Interesting!

You can find a lot of technical resources at:
http://www.nd.edu/~networks/

Kami gari 2

"Kami-gari 2 : Lipper" by Masaki Yamada.
ISBN 4-19-861990-5

Roughly speaking "Kami-gari" means "Hunting the God" or so.
It's about 18 years ago when I read "Kami-gari".
In those days, I felt the book was imcomplete.
This time, indeed description of the background world was improved and
there are many new ideas, but still I had the same feeling. :(

Guin Saga 107

After two months interval, 107th. :)

Guin Saga 106

Hoho, 106th book. :)

The Hobbit

Finally Finished this book. :(

Lion Boy : The Truth

Enjoyed.

Guin Saga Extra 20

I have to buy the new books of Guin Saga automaticalliy. :o

Birthright

I finished Birthright by Nora Roberts.

Howl's Moving Castle

Finished Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones.
Her English was a bit tough for me and took about two weeks.

Guin Saga 105

105!

Banjo no Teki

"Banjo no Teki" by Kaoru Kitamura.

In English, the title means "Enemies on the board" (in a direct translation).
Kaoru Kitamura is one of very popular mystery authors in Japan.
The book is a bit different from other Kitamura's works, and I was a bit surprised.

Lionboy The Chase

"Lionboy the Truth" by Zizou Corder.
ISBN 0-14-138055-1

The 2nd book of Lionboy series.

Blood Memory

"Blood Memory" by Greg Iles.
ISBN 4-4165-0780-9

Like his former work, "The Footprints of God", this is a very good work
but could be a bit tough story for some kind of readers because
child abuse is one of the most important theme of it.

Reset

"Reset" by Kaoru Kitamura.
ISBN 4-10-406604-4

Lionboy

"Lionboy" by Zizou Corder.
ISBN 0-141-31726-4

Guin Saga 104

104!

ISBN 4-14-030818-7

Machi no Hi

"Machi no Hi" by Kitamura Kaoru.
ISBN 4-16-321570-0

The title is of course Japanese, and roughly speaking
that means "City Lights" or like that.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J.K. Rowling

ISBN-0 7475-8108-8

I bought this book on July 16, 2005.
But, I cannot remember when I finished that.
Anyway, it must have been in July or August, 2005.

BTW, I'm wrting this note on June 23, 2006.
It's about a year since the last book (this 6th book) was
released. I'm wondering when the last one will be available
and what sort of finale we can see.
That must be a tough work to the last book anyway.

OpenSolaris Again

Today, I installed "Solaris Express: Community Release, Build 16" on a
VMWare guest.

Here are some notes.

* OpenSolaris doesn't recognize SCSI cards available in VMWare environment.
* OpenSolaris requires about 8GB of disk space for the entier distribution installation. :(
* The build 16 doesn't contain the language disk, and StarOffice displayed messages written in Chinese. :o

Ether Fabric

June 24, 2005

I didn't know Etherfabric to date.

According to the Ether Fabric web page, especially a paragraph titled
"Binary Software Compatibility", they insist on that Ether Fabric
doesn't require any new protocol software. But, other paragraph titled
"How Ether Fabric Operates" says all socket and MPI operations invoke
functions in a special library of Ether Fabric.

In short, that looks like a hardware (and perhaps software assisted)
implementation of TCP/IP invoked from the user space. If this is
correct, I don't think EtherFabric can be a competitor of InfiniBand
nor iWARP. It's just like an yet another TOE. They need to care about
overall costs especially from a view point of the relationship between
socket API semantics and system bus workloads. (In this sense,
asynchronous operations of MPI could be improved efficiently.)

OpenSolaris

Finally OpenSolaris was released.

When SUN made Solaris8 source code public, many important files were
missing. I hope this time we can see enough files.

Got married

Finally I got married.
I'm not sure if it's really the beginning of happy life or not.. :o

Isanbul

April 24, 2005

Arrived in Istanbul, Turkey around 8:00pm (in local time).

Actually, this is a honeymoon. :o

# To be updated later.

Posted by thatsdone at 23:55

Guin Saga 100

April 09, 2005

Finally, I got the 100th volume of "Guin Saga". :)
It's about 20 years ago when I began to read the books.
it's been a really long time...

But, according to author's notes, she has already finished
the 101st and 102nd books. :o
The story seems to continue more.

I want her to concentrate on the "Guin Saga" more. :o)

Johnnie Walker'CM

In Seoul, I saw an impressive TV CM while I was watching CNN.

In the film, hundreds of naked humans are swimming like flying fishes.
Actually, some of them jump out of the surface of the sea, and they
looked like the hero of "Man From Atlantis".
Eventually, they reach a seashore of somewhere and go ashore.
The ending message is "Take your first step." or something like that.

Its scenene was really beautiful and impressive.

Seoul

March 13, 2005

Now, I'm in Seoul, Korea to attend at this conference held at this hotel.

It's minus 3 degree in Celcius in Seoul and very cold. :(

Sonoma

I'm attending at this workshop and booked "The Lodge at Sonoma Renaissance Resort & Spa."

Of course, this is a business trip. But, it must be one of my happiest trips. :)

Windstruck

I watched a Korean film, "Windstruck".
Its Japanese title is "Bokuno Kanojo wo Shokai Shimasu", and in English
that means "I'd like to introduce my girlfriend". The English title comes
from a beautiful scene in the film and I think the choice is also a good idea.
(Can anyone tell me what the original Korean title means?)

The heroine is a cute and veeeery daring policewoman. :o) You will see
a tragic incident in film, but the story is on the whole romantic and
a bit comical. I assure you that you can go home with happy
impressions.

BTW, the actress, Jeon Ji-Hyeon, is the same with "My Sassy Girl"
which made a hit about 3 years ago.

I think it's not just a coincidence that the character of the heroine
of "My Sassy Girl" is a bit similar to the one of "Windstruck". At
least in Japan, she is popular only through her films for now
different from other Asian countries, and thus she seems to have
acquired something strange impression like Audrey Tautou who played
"Amelie from Montmartre" and "He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not".
I hope she can get more good impressions like other Korean actresses in Japan.

Dark Blue World

I have several DVDs I've not watched yet.

As I had no appointments in this week end, I wached "Dark Blue World".
It's a story of two fighter pilot and a woman during the second world
war, and in a sense, it's a sad story with a lot of air combat scenes.
Some people might feel it like "Perl Harbor" or "Top Gun", but the
film has a bit different atmosphere from them.

One thing interesting about this film is that in Japan it's
distributed by the studio GHIBLI which is well known as
Hayao Miyazaki's studio. Perhaps, it looks like strange that GHIBLI do
that, but it's well known that Miyazaki loves very much weapons and
stories about them specially the ones before WW2. In this sense, we
could say that Mamoru Oshii has a similarity with Mr. Miyazaki. :o)

I think it undoubted that both of them influcenced a lot of media
creators in the world like Wachowski brothers. But, I'm not sure if

they share the same preferences with Miyazaki and Oshii.

Perhaps, this can be one of the peculiar aspects of Japanese animation
creators. :o)

psqlfs

I found an interesting project, psqlfs.

psqlfs uses an RDBMS, PostgreSQL, as its physical data storage.

To tell the truth, I'm not interested in psqlfs itself so much, but
its base feature, LUFS, is interesting. LUFS reminds me of former user
land filesystems such as UFO of UCSB.

When I saw lufs for the first time, an idea came to me in a flush, but
I'm going to write it after some hack. :)

Onaji Sora no Shita

"Onaji Sora No Shita" is a short but very interesting TV program. :)

The title means "Under the same sky" in English, and it's a series of
short introductions of charming, adorable, intelligent and beautiful
women. I wish I could have a HDD recorder...
Perhaps, I should buy one right now!? :o)
In addition, its BGM is cool. :)

Recently in Japan, we often hear covers of a classic tune "Jupiter" by
Holst. For example, Ayaka Hirahara. Also, a CM film BGM of Nomura
Securites has been very popular. It's by Kirite Te Kanawa.

But this time, we have one more Jupiter by The Eccentric Opera. It's astral, and I like their Jupiter best. :)

Mona

Yet another new OS topic, Mona.

Mona is a new multi-server model microkernel based operating system
written in C++. One thing interesting about this OS is that the
project began through a discussion in a really really big Japanese BBS
system, called '2ch'. Thus, the projects seems to be going on using an
ideal(?) bazaar model. :o)

Different from OSASK which I wrote about yesterday, now networking
supports seems to be one of hot topics of the Mona team. At least for
now, Nov. 3, 2004, only ARP and ICMP seem to work, but I'm expecting
TCP/IP works not so far future. :)

BTW, the project has several design documentations.
I found some sequence diagrams (of UML? possibly) among them and
a bit surprised. Sequence diagrams of OS! Amazing, isnt't it? :o)

One more thing is the following panic. :o)

Of course, I was kidding while trying a demo floppy. But, I think it's questinable that we can kill the 'idle' process. :o)

Apart from that, anyway GUI works and many OS geeks are joining to the
project. So, I expect they will make a good progress.

OSASK

Today, I found some interesting OS development projects.

For example, OSASK.
(Unfortunatelly, the pages are written in only Japanese.)

Multitasking and GUI seem to have worked already, but I couldn't
find any networking support for now. :(

According to literatures among the web site written in Japanese, this
guy seems to have studied physics, not computer science. (The
background situation is the same with me by occasion!) It's amazing
that it looks like he's gotten inspirations independently about
concept now widely exploited by many commercial and free operating
systems. I think all he needs to do is to make time and study more
about operating systems and possibly writing in English. :o)

TOEIC

I received the result of TOEIC test which I had about a month ago today.
As I've been good at *paper tests* of English, I tend to get higher
scores than my actual English communication ability, I think.

Since this April, I'm going to an English conversation school
about two or three days a week and thus expected that I might get
my new peak score this time.
Actually, I got the one. But, the score I got was a very spacey one.
So, I decided not to believe in TOEIC test results anymore. :(

As I lost one criteria of my English, the only one rest for me now is
CAT Level certification. But, there is a long long way to the next level. :(

The Step Test?
I like a world wide certification. :(

UNATE?
It could be a good idea, but I'm not interested in UN. :(

TOEFL?
Currently, I have no plan to go abroad to study. In addition,
TOEFL is operated by the same organization of TOEIC, and I'm not sure
if I can know actual level of my English by TOEFL. :(

Does anyone have any other idea?

New HDD for ThinkPad X31

My note PC is a customized model of ThinkPad X31.
When I bought it, I thought 30GB(default) was enough, but soon
I regretted. My mail box is now about 3GB, photo folder is
about 1.5GB, and VMWare disk are huge. :(
Thus, I bought an 80GB Hitachi Travelstar 5K80(HTS548080M9AT00) today.

It's easy to migrate the whole data using RRRR (Rescue and Recovery - Rapid Restore). But, in case of ThinkPad X31 the recovery data is stored in a hidden area called HPA, and it took time retrieve that
from the old HDD. My problem was that after taking a system backup
using RRRR, I couldn't run the pre-boot recovery program by pressing
the "Access IBM" blue button which is needed to access the HPA area.
After struggling some time, I succeeded to retrieve the HPA data like
the following:

1) Create a bootable CD of RRRR.
2) Install the old HDD again.
3) Ask to restore the system to the initial shipped status.
4) Interrupt the system restoration process by pressing F4.
5) Format C: so that I can save content of the HPA area
about 3.5GB.
6) Use 'FWRESTORE' stored in a:\recovery like,
fwrestore -file imgset c:

Here, ThinkPad X31 uses a utility called FirstWare by
Phoenix, and the HPA area is hidden by the Phoenix BIOS.
That means the area doesn't have a partition table entry.

I can understand the choice of IBM engineers, but I don't like it. :(

Oops...

My car's Battery died.
What is worse, I had to return to my home town today. :(
I didn't imagine that I got on Shinkansen this week too
in addition to the last week. :(
But, anyway it'd be better to consider buying a new car
cause it's almost 7 years old.

Nobel Prize, 2004

I studied quark confinement mechanism when I was a graduate student.
The phenomenon is described by a theory of physics called QCD:
Quantum Chromo Dynamics. Chromo comes from the central idea of QCD that
quarks have a property similar to color, RGB, and they can be observed
only in a conbination state in 'white'. This means only conbinations
of three colors, blue, green and red, or two complimentary colors
can be observed.

Three scientist who founded QCD received the Nobel Prize this year,
and I was deeply concerned with their beeing awarded the prize.

Connecting two VMware guests

October 05, 2004

I didn't know that two VMware guests can be connected by virtual serial line connection on top of Windows named pipe.
Foremerly, I tried to debug a 2.6 kernel using kgdb over ethernet connection, but failed. I should have read the manual carefully. :(

Now, I'm re-building the kernel looking forward to kernel debugging
that on my note-pc. :)

I'm feeling Lucky! :o)

JAL Oto Butai

Tonight JAL Oto Butai was an impressive TV program.
(Sorry, the URL seems to be available only in Japanese.)
Here, JAL is Japan Air Lines, just its sponsor. "Oto" means "Sound" and "Butai" is "Theater" in Japanese.

This show began in 1989, and it's 17th show since then.
It's a collaboration of eastern and western culture, especially music and play. Usually each show has some particular theme as a feature.
Also its "theater" is unique. Every year another temple is chosen, and
the theater of this year was "Yakushi-ji".

The theme of this time was a story of a chinese monk who went to India in order to get Buddhist scriptures. (if you are a Japanese, it's "Sai Yu Ki").
Thus, it makes sense that "12 Girls Band" was choosen as one of the featured artists.
Their peformance reminded me of their "Reel Around the Sun" and
River Dance company's one night special show at Sengaku-ji temple.
Actually, I was wondering about a collaboration of 12 Girls Band and
River Dance company at a Japanese temple. It must be incredible. :)

Birthday present

I don't want to talk about how old I am. :(
But, I got a surprising birthday present from my uncle this year.
You can understand why if you see the picture. :o)

PearPC

September 24, 2004

Recently, I attended at a lecture on coLinux,
Cooperative Linux, by Dan Aloni in Tokyo.
It's a really interesting lecture.

But, strange to say, I developed a passion for emulators those of
Bochs, QEMU and PearPC since then.

The first two emulator are mainly intended for x86 architecture, but
PearPC emulates PowerPC platform. Formerly, I tried to run MacOS on a
680x0 emulator and failed. Furthermore, there was no PowerPC emulator
in those days. Today, I succeeded to install OpenDarwin 7.2.1/PowerPC
on PearPC on my ThinkPad. Another microkernel on my note-pc. :o)

I'm going to look into its debugging
facility, and I might work on that if needed. :o)

Golden Week

In this season, from April 29 to May 5, we have successive holidays,
and it's called "Golden Week." :) I heard that in China they also have
similar big holiday season.

This year, I have 12 days holiday, and my golden week have just
begun. So, I'm very happy. :)

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Today, I saw "Girl with a Pearl Earring."

What the heroine, Griet, the model of the painting said when she saw
her master's work for the first time, "You looked inside me."
represents the relationship between Vermeer and Griet fully.

Their subdued passion didn't lead them to physical affairs, but
therefore Vermeer could all his strength to the painting.

I think the film could be one of the best love stories of the twenty
first century. I strongly recommend that you would see it. :)

The Footprints of God, and Digital Fortress

Recently, I read two novels on super computers and cryptgraphy.

One is "The Footprints of God" by Greg Iles, and the other is "Digital Fortress" by Dan Brown.

Iles' one is about a next generation super computer that can break any codes. On the contrary, Brown's one is about an ultimate code that cannot be broken by the most powerful computer in the world.

As a lover of Sci-Fi novels and software engineer, I have to admit that I would prefer Iles' book to Brown's because the super computer is also described as the world first successfully build Artificial Intelligence.
I felt that Iles' book is, in a sense, like "Childhood's End" by Arthur C Clerk. His perspective of
A.I. evolution is interesting because it includes various aspects of humanity such as phychogy, gender or so.

So far as the Brown's book, technology and science are just gadgets.
Brown is one of the best story tellers, and the story is thrilling very much. In addition, IMHO, he is implicitly pointing out a problem that USA is now facing, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes." It's "Who will gurds the gurd?" in English. Thus, I guess the book could be one of best sellers.

Meanwhile, one thing by which I was turned off is that proper nouns such as the creator's name, Tankado, and adages used in the book sound strange. I wish Brown could have asked native Japanese speaking people if they are really natural Japanese phrases. I guess when the book is translated into Japanese the translator would ask Brown what Brown really means. :(

One more thing.
I broke the second last code of the Brown's novel in 10 seconds. I guess even a junior high school student would do so, and what other readers would feel about that. :o)

Spanish Apartment

I watched "Spanish Apartment" on Saturday.

I have to admit that I went there because I wanted to see Audrey
Tautou of Amelie again, and that's all at first. It turned out that
Tautou was a supporting role, but the movie still is worth
watching. :)

The protagonist of the film is a french graduate student who goes to
Barcelona to study Spanish Economics leaving his girl friend in
Paris. (Tautou played the girl.) There in Spain he shared a room with
6 student come from various countries including Germany, UK, Italy and
Belgium or so.

When he set for his one year stay in Spain, he was a bit
faceless. But, after his various experiences with his room mates in
Spain, he remembered his dream, what we wanted to be, from his
childhood, and he broke out of his shell.

His colleagues are also nice and funny. :)
In a sense, there is Europe.
Sometimes quarreling, sometimes having parties.

I wish in Asia we could have such good international friendly
relationship. (Perhaps, Japan is the only exception in Asia? :o)

The Da Vinci Code again

Today, I found an interesting article about "The Da Vinci Code" in San
Francisco Chronicles.

There seems to be a book very similar to "The Da Vinci Code" published
20 years earlier than that, and the author, Lewis Perdue, seems to be
going to sue Dan Brown.

Although I'm not sure if Dan Brown really helped himself to books of
Perdue because I haven't read his books, there seems to be a lot of
books based on similar theme and plot. After reading the article, I
began to think that the story might have been typical and not so
unique one. I was a bit turned off by the controversy. :(

But anyway, now I'm working on another book, "The footprints of God"
by Greg Iles and enjoying that, and I'm feeling happy. :)

OYSTER BAR

On Sunday, I had a dinner at Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant,
Tokyo in Shinagawa. :)

As you can see among general web pages and magagines, it's been
extremely crowded in the dinner time of weekend days. Today,
fortunately I had a reservation, but I heard that some people are
saying "Oh my god! Two hours wait!" Anyway, it seems to be better to
have a reservation. :)

Today, I tried raw "Steller Bay" Oyster from British Columbia,
Canada. Compared to Japanese oysters, I felt it a bit bland. But,
there were some more kinds of oysters and they are apparently imported
ones. I'd be better to try them in New York, and I will do so
someday. :o)

As for other dishes, I like NY style fried oysters and oyster stew.

Meanwhile, it's often said that there is a great difference in amount
of foods for one person. I realized again that when I had a dessert,
raspberry sorbet. :o)

Guin Saga 94, FLIGHT TO FOEVER

I bought the 94th book of Guin Saga today. :)

I began to read the series when I was a high school student and keep reading more than 15 years. The series consists of 100 books, and the story is now getting closer to the climax finally.

Originally, Guin Saga started as a sword and soucery style heroic fantasy, but as the author created a tremendous scale of imaginary world extending the universe, the author needed to tell the story as a Sci-Fi.
There seems to be not a small number of Guin Saga readers who don't like the change. I guess they like classical heroic fantasies such as Conan. But, it's predestinate because of the nature of this story.

Different from such accusing readers, I'm enjoying the story's convergence after over twenty years history as is. Meanwhile, it's amazing that in the story only 6 years have passed against the nearly quarter century of publication history, isn't it? :o)

FYI.
Some earlier books are available in also English here.

Do you like beautiful women?

In Japanese, I want to say "Kirei na Oneesan ha suki desuka?" Here,
Oneesan means primarily a elder sister, but in casual Japanese
conversation, it's often used to mean just a woman.

There is a famous TV CM film series of Panasonic using the phrase
above, and nowadays it's a well-known phrase.

Meanwhile, there is a facility of ANA, All Nippon Airways, mainly
intended for education close to my room, and it's also used for their
enployment examination. My point is that the target of the
examination includes flight attendants. :) Since the beginning of
April, season of the exam has begun, and there are so many beatiful
girl students challanging for the exam and walking along streets
around my room. :o)

I've lived in this town about 4 years.

In the first year, I enjoyed the atomosphere, but nowadays my
fascinations had gone because their dressings are almost the same.
Thousands of beautiful girls made me feel so.

But, I still like cute and unique girls. :o)

Cut off baby's ....?

TV Asahi says a mother lives in Osaka cut off her 4 months months old boy's .... penis in the beginning of of March. :(

According to testimonies of her neighbors, she seems to have wanted a girl. I can understand it's extremely hard to bring up a baby and presumably she was under strongly
stressed state, but still it's shocking. :(

This news is available in also Asahi News Paper (So far as I know, Japanese page only), but they don't say which part of the boy's body his mother hurt.

Humm....
I'm wondering if there are this kind of incidents also outside Japan.

Earthquakes in Tokyo

Recently, we often have earthquakes in Tokyo.
So far as I remember, on the last Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

It's been about 80 years since Tokyo had an enourmous inland earthquake last time. It was with the magnitude of 7.9 and made tremendous number of victims in those days.
Scientists say there is no wonder if it comes today, right now.

I live in southern part of Tokyo that's said to be the most dangerous area. In addition, I go to my office using subways every day. :(

In recent years in Tokyo, there are many newly built condos, and I'm wondering what the owner habitants will do if their brandnew condominiums collapse. :o)

Fish and Chips

Today, I went to the Dubliners' Irish Pub in Shinjuku, Tokyo, and experienced Fish and Chips for the first time. :o)

In Japan, it's often said that English meals are not so good. A coleague of mine who worked in England about an year also told me so. But, I have not been sure if it's really so since now.

Unfortunately, the Fish and Chips was not so good for me. The fried fish was too well-done and the vinegar with the dish was a little bit strange for me.

But even so, I'm looking forwared to enjoy genuine Fish and Chips in UK or Ireland, and
my quest for Fish and Chips will be going on. :o)

Meanwhile, I like 'Jameson' very much. :)

New Fridge

Today, I bought a new refrigerator at Shinjuku Yodobashi Camera. :o)

My refrigerator have been out of order for these two years, and I could not chill cans of beer nor bottles of wine. Actually, there was no problem because there are several convenience stores around my room and they are selling beers since now.

But, recently I began to enjoy Belgian Beers and I was feeling difficulty when I want to buy them at department stores or so.
Thus, I decided to have a new one, and I'm looking forward to its beeing delivered to my room on this Saturday.

It's a Beer driven decision. :o)

One thing that reminded me a poor Japanese law is that nowadays we have to pay quite a few money to throw away 4 kinds of electric home appliances including refrigerators, TVs, laundry machines and air conditioners.
I had to pay about 5,000- yens this time. :(

12 Girls Band

On the last Saturday, I bought 2 CDs of "12 Girls Band".

One is a CD and DVD combo package of a live concert in Tokyo, and its title is
Shining Energy.

http://global.yesasia.com/en/artIdxDept.aspx/aid-523537/code-j/section-music/

Recently, they are very popular not only in Japan but also eastern asian countries. All of them have established techniques of Chinese traditional musical instruments, and in addition they are slender and cute. :o)

Aside from that, I was surprised because the album contains their performance
of a tune from Irish dance music, "Reel Around The Sun",
famous for River Dance show.

Since I watched the River Dance show last year, I really love Irish dance
and music very much. And I love also folkloric music.
Thus, The 12 Girls Band version of "Reel Around The Sun" grabbed my heart
in two senses. But, what comes at the true reason might be that both of them,
I mean River Dance and 12 Girls Band, appeal to our primitive feeling
in common.

Note that both the CD and the DVD contain "Reel Around The Sun", and
my recommendation is definitely DVD. :)

I hope their world wide success.

Irish Shock

Ireland bans smoking in workplaces from today. :o)

Although I am a smoker, I agree to make such bills.
In also Japan, some local governments began to ban smoking on the street
such as Akihabara or so.
But I was shocked when I heard that the workplaces above include pubs.
I heard also that Irish people really love smoking not only cigarettes
but also pipes especially at pubs, I'm afraid that there might be a log
of outbreaks of anger of tobacco lovers. :o)

Meanwhile, today a coleague of mine from Spain told me that Spanish young
people like weeds. :o) According to his story, in Europe the more southern
we go the more smokers we will see. I'm wondering why southern European
people like smoking.

Orkut and Mixi

Recently, I was finally invited to join to Orkut and Mixi.
Mixi is, in a sense, Japanese version of Orkut.
There are at least two major differences between them.
One is that Orkut has "Community" but Mixi does not.
The other is that Mixi is rather "diary centric" design.
Of course, a user can put a URL in own profile page at Orkut, but Mixi asks what kinds of blog or diary system members use and checks their update by RSS!
Presumerbly, it's because Japanese people love making their diary be public and reading others so much.
Here, please don't ask me why Japanese do. :o)
In general, Japanese people tend to surpress to express their own opinion or thoughts.
In this sense, you might feel it's strange.
Here, I belive that they don't want to be silent but they just don't want to
ehave differently from others in company. This comes from cultural background
of Japan. As you can easily understand my point now, we can behave anonymously
in the Internet and that's why so much of Japanese love to express themselves
there."Community" of Orkut meanwhile doesn't seem to be functioning
as good as expected for me.
I think it has two aspects. That is, both encouraging participants to make
new friends and talk about partcular topics to their heart's content.
My point is that not so many communities are active, and I'm wondering
why they don't exploit that.
Do you have any idea?

The Da Vinci Code

We had three succesesive rainy days in Tokyo.
I don't like a rainy day because I'm discoraged and often cancel plans to go
out somewhere or to do something outside. :(
On such a day, it's a good idea to spend time reading books.
In these days, I'm working on a mystery novelby Dan Brown,
The Da Vinci Code.

I'm a buddist ;o) as is common in Japan and not familiar with Christianity.
ut, this novel is interesting because it focuses on the hidden history of
the Christianity. This book has more than 100 chapters and about 500 pages,
but it took me only two weeks to have done about two third of the book.
For my case, this is as fast as the case of Harry Potter, and I'm going to
study the history of western Christian world again after finighing this book.
There seems to be a lot of communities on such topics including
the Holy Grail or ancient secret society in Europe.

Meanwhile, Dan Bowns plain English helped me as opposed to J.R.R. Tolkien
case (except many French proper nouns). :o)

Belgian Beer

Last year, I had two things burnt with passion. :o)
One is River Dance, and the other is Belgian Beer.

My favorite beers are Timmermans Casis, La Guillotine, Pawel Kwak, Chimay Blue, Hoegaarden White, and many. :)
Especially, Lamvick beers are fruity and not so strong (but some beers are
extremely sour), so they are good for girls too.
Meanwhile, some girl friends of mine are heavy drinkers, and they expressed
little interest in Lamvick. :(

FYI.
Here is a brief list of bars we can enjoy Belgian beers in Tokyo. :)

+FRIGO (Shinjuku)
+BELGO (Shibuya)
+FAVORI (Ginza)
+Brussels
(Kanda, Kagurazaka, Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Omote-Sando, Kamiya-cho)
+Champ de Soleil (Kanda)

+AGLIO(Shimotakaido)
+Billy Barew's Beer Bar(Ebisu etc.)

INNOCENCE

I watched "INNOCENCE" by Mamoru Oshii yesterday.
I'm not sure if there are readers of this blog, but
still I'd like to asｋ reader's impression of the film.

Its visual effect is really really fascinating. In this
sense, the film is great. Better than even compared
to "LAST EXILE" which was available recently
in Japan.

But what about the story?
Is it a love story?
Or, a speculative story about near future society? Presumably both.

But from the latter point of view, I'm not satisfied by
the plot and conclusion. Although I cannot disclose
the conclusion, but if you watched the seventh
story of S.A.C. at least, we might share the same idea about the difference
between a human and a machine. I'm still feeling
there might have been another kind of truth about
the murder by a doll in the prolog of the movie.

Meanwhile, there were many empty seats around
me. I wonder "INNOCENCE" also might be accepted
better in USA than in Japan like "Ghost in the Shell".

Title of this Blog

In Japanese, the title of this blog reads "Gin no Saji ha Nagerareta".
The title line of this page is not garbled :o), and it's written in Japanese Kanji and Hiragana characters.

It's a little bit difficult to explain the sense of the wording for non-Japanese speaking people, but
it's a compound phrase consists of the following.

(1) A famous book titled, "Gin no Saji" in Japanese by Kansuke Naka (1885-1965).
An English translation is available, and its English title is "The Silver Spoon."

(2) A famous words of Julius Caesar, "The dice is cast". In Japanese, we say
"Sai ha nagerareta", and "Sai" means "a dice".
Now, I believe it's obvious there is resemblance in sound.

(3) A Japanese phrase "Saji wo nageru".
Accurately speaking, the proper sense of the phrase is
"give up as hopless". I mean, relatively serious sense.
But, nowadays it's often used more light weight situation such that
one has a friend who is always acting up and the only resolution
is to accept the friend's behavior as is.

When the title came up with me years ago,
actually I was under complicated situation, and
the phrase expresses my feeling of those days well.