A Wedding Ceremony

Today, I attended at a wedding ceremony of a cousin of mine.



They had the ceremony at Happo-en (八芳園), Tokyo, and the hall is a very much gorgeous one.
My relatives were a bit surprised.

One thing impressive for me was that their ceremony hall has a mini shrine and there are priests from Izumo Taisha Shrine where I had my wedding ceremony.

A message I'd like to send them is, of course, "Baby Please." :)

A CEO Teaches Job for Junior High Students

"経営者、15才に仕事を教える"
Rakutaro Kitashiro
ISBN 4-621-07490-3

In English, the Japanese title would be translated like "A CEO Teaches Job for Junior High Students." The author is CEO of IBM Japan.
I read the book on Dec. 23, 2007.

Today, I had a small training course of discussion skill at work, and there we talked about how to develop human resource, especially our subordinates.

In my understanding, the essential point of the book is that there was a change of human resource type required by companies/society. Human resources not just suitable for catching up western countries, but have creativity.
But, the discussion was almost focused on mainly technical issues of human resource development those of coaching, mentoring or showing career path etc.

Of course, it's my fault that I couldn't explain the point well, but it was a bit surprising almost none of them expressed any interests in the view point.
My employer is sometimes called "A Beleaguered Giant", and obviously both the employer and employees have to change their working way. Obviously, desired human resource type should be changed.

That means we should have discussed not "how we develop human resource well" but "what kind of human resource type we should shoot for."

That's what I felt.

I'm still wondering if I should accept a promotion offer or not... :o

Day 101 : Need Crawlers?

We began to let my daughter lie on her stomach from yesterday.



I'm looking forward to seeing her holding up her head soon. :)

BTW, she does not crawl yet. I guess she needs one more month or so to do so.

Day 100 : Chier?

Finally, 100th day! :)



BTW, the title comes from a Japanese gag line, シェー (Shee).
I believe having a look at the page explains why I chose the title. :)

According to the Wikipedia Japanese page, there seems to be an explanation that Shee comes from a French slang, "fait chier".
I know that there is at least one French speaking reader here, and I'm expecting he would give me the answer. :o

Marufuku Coffe

Today, we went to Aeon Mall Musashi-murayama Mu again to buy several household things.

There is a Marufuku Coffee shop branch in Mitsukoshi building, and my wife wanted to have a cup of coffee and pancakes. According to her, their pancake is veery good. :)



Here is the pancake below, and left chocolate roll cake is my choice.


Both of them are very good. Especially, the pancake with maple syrup is worth trying. :)

BTW, I wrote about Komeda Coffee of Nagoya before. Marufuku Coffee was founded in Osaka.
Then, what is the most popular Tokyo based Coffee shop chain?
I talked about that with my wife, but what we came up with us were Cosy Corner and Renoir.
Does anyone have other ideas?

Quatre Quarts

We had guests on the day before yesterday.
They gave us cakes of Quatre Quarts in Koganei city.

I like the strawberry and cream cake below.
Of course the cup too. :)

Voice of God Weapon?

Today, I read an interesting article. :)

• http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/12/the-voice-of-go.html

According to the article, there seems to be a kind of microwave device can generate messages within a particular person's head. I'm wondering if it's already possible sending images to particular person's brain. If it's possible, it would be also possible to project computer screen like a HUD (Head Up Display) floating in the air like Ghost in the Shell. :)

BTW, the article also reminded me of a Japanese term, 電波系 (Denpa-kei). :o
Unfortunately, currently Wikipedia(en) doesn't have an entry of it, but anyway you can find some literature below.

• http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9B%BB%E6%B3%A2%E7%B3%BB

Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust

I watched "Bubble Fiction: Boom or Bust" on TV.
Its Japanese title is "バブルへGO!!" and was on screen last year.
It's a kind of time trip story and the details can be found in the following pages.
Anyway, it's like "Back to the Future" in a sense.

• Wikipedia English Page
• Wikipedia Japanese Page

What I felt first was a typical time travel paradox issue.
Like the case of "Back to the Future" where Doc also kept the original before-the-history-change memory, heroine's father who sent her to 17 years ago kept his memory. It's strange, but it's OK because the film is just an entertainment film.

BTW, I like this actress co-starring as a TV report in the film. :)

Mentoku

Today I had lunch with a colleague of mine at a Ramen shop in Senzoku, Tokyo.

Mentoku (Senzoku) seems to be called as 'Jiro Inspired Ramen'
http://ramendb.supleks.jp/shop/12305

Jiro is a famous Ramen shop chain in Tokyo, and they offer a bit different Ramen from others.
First of all, their noodle is very thick. It's like Udon. :o
Second, their soup is very strong soy sauce based soup.
In case of Mentoku, the soup was with plenty of oil.
Thus, their Ramen was a bit too strong for me. But, according to the colleague, their Ramen is habit-forming one. There is a Ramen shop under Jiro franchise, and I'm wondering if I should go to the Jiro franchise Ramen shop or not. :o

The Really Final Equipment Investment?

As I wrote last week, I needed category 6 ethernet cables, and finally I went to Akihabara again.

These are flat type 0.5m/1.0m/2.0m category 6e cables. :)

A SIGNAL Profiler Published

Today, I uploaded my SIGNAL profiler for Linux kernel which I wrote (a bit) before to my SourceForge project page.

The package name is sigprof-0.4.tar.gz, and it contains kernel patches for 2.6.23, 2.6.22, 2.6.18, and 2.6.9-42.EL (RHEL4 U4 kernel).

At first, I thought this idea was not so bad. But, after looking into Systemtap to do some other trouble shooting works, I found that there are more comprehensive scripts for SIGNAL related research in Systemtap scripts page.

So, now sigprof is public but also hibernated. :(

Emacs .NET?

There seems to be a rumor that Microsoft is developing Emacs .NET, and the source seems to be the following blog entry.

• http://www.douglasp.com/blog/2007/12/27/EmacsNet.aspx

What I thought at first is, "Why not Meadow?", but I guess it would be a kind of IDE that is extensible using some language suitable for interpreters.

Anyway, we would see one more (hopefully) interesting programming environment.

XWay and XenSockets

Recently, I felt deja vu reading messages on xen-devel mailing list.
Now, there seems to be two implementations for Xen hypervisor which enables low overhead communication between two VM guests on a single server, XWay and XenSockets.

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/xway
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/xvmsocket/

According to their presentations found in this page, both of them have roughly 10Gbps bandwidth keeping standard socket API binary compatibility, and their results were derived under xen-3.0.3 or prior based environments. As the VMM scheduler of Xen seems to have been improved around xen-3.0.4, maybe we can expect better peformances because there are some more rooms of memory bandwidth.

But, anyway both of them are based on the similar ideas of HiperSockets of IBM zServer.

• http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246816.html

Actually, I also did a similar high performance socket communication research work on SPARC/Solaris about 6 years ago.

BTW, I didn't know IBM people spelled HiperSockets not HyperSockets.
Surprisingly, searching IBM web page HyperSockets gives me several pages. :o

More Equipment Investment Needed

Since I bought a GbE hub, I've been busy and already 18 days passed.
Today, finally I replaced old FE Hub via the GbE one. :)

But, I was astonished to see when I saw the network connection of my note PC linked up as 100Mbps. It slipped my mind that I had only category 5 cables... orz

That means I need to do some more investment in equipments. :(

The First Ramen 2008

Today I had dinner at Mr. Chen's Tanmen Shop, the first Ramen 2008. :o
I wanted a plenty of vegetables and weak (not too strong) soup Ramen today,
thus this is a very good choice. :)

Day 88 : A Balloon

We got back from Shizuoka today.

It took more than 7 hours! This return journey is the real longest journey of my daughter. :o

BTW, there were several things left behind at home town this time. :(
One is a baby bottle, but it's recoverable cause we have spare ones.
Another one is a Hello Kitty balloon which my mother bought for her granddaughter.
Of course, we checked repeatedly if there were things that we forgot to pick up, but
the balloon was not on the floor.

Floating around the ceiling. :o

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

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.

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. :)

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.

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

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.) :)

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. :)

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. :)

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

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

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.

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. :)

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

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

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. :)

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

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

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

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....?

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. :)

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. :)

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.

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. :)

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. :)

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." :)

A Newborn Baby

Finally Delivered!

Stay tuned for the details!

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. :)

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!

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

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