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.
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
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.)
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.
Finally I got married.
I'm not sure if it's really the beginning of happy life or not.. :o
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
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)
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.
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. :(
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. :)
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.
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)
they share the same preferences with Miyazaki and Oshii.
Perhaps, this can be one of the peculiar aspects of Japanese animation
creators. :o)
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" 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. :)
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.
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)
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?
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. :(
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.
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.
