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...