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

A Present

Well, the above is a present from my daughter's gramma.
A pair of shoes by Dior. :o

Bought at Shinjuku Isetan.

I'm wondering if my daughter also loves shopping very much like her mother...
Sigh... :(

36th Week

This is a video snapshot of Skype.
Hum... it's difficult to find out what it is. :o
But, anyway my daughter is in her 36 week without any troubles.

BTW, it's my birthday today, and the good news is the biggest present actually. :)

A SEGV Storm Generator

Again, I wrote a stupid program mainly for trouble reproducing. :)

Recently, I've been working on a crash dump of an application server
taken under a heavy CPU load, especially high system activity
(i.e., %system of sar, mpstat or vmstat etc.)

After looking into the crash dump several days (as my after-5 activity :o),
I found that about 10 Java threads out of 3000 under 1 process were waiting for CPU with pending SIGSEGVs.
I'm not sure yet, but after reading source of the Linux exception handler routines,
now I'm feeling we would see a high system activity load like the above
if we had a situation like a segmentation fault storm.

Thus, I tried to write a small program touching invalid addresses repeatedly to reproduce the phenomenon like I saw.

The after-5 activity is still ongoing, and I'm facing with a more strange behaviour of SIGNALs. :(
But anyway, the SEGV storm generator would be public here soon.

Menya Tenho

Menya Tenho (麺や 天好) is another Ramen shop along Shin-Koganei Kaido avenue.

• http://tokyo.gourmet.livedoor.com/restaurant/info/305077.html
  

Tonight dinner was a very standard style half soy source and pork bones soup with sliced roasted pork. In Japanese, "しょうゆとんこつチャーシュー麺."

It's true that there are many good ramen shops along Shin-Koganei Kaido avenue that offer various kinds of characteristic ramens. Even Tenho does. But, the above ramen is with very simple and standard, and thus it fits for almost everyone.
Anyway, worth trying. :)

Taiwan Ramen, Tsurukameya

I had today's lunch at Tsuru-kame-ya (鶴亀屋) located very close to JR Musashi-Koganei station, Tokyo.



The above left ramen is Taiwan Ramen.
It's a very spicy one, and with a lot of chili.
I recommend that you would get into good trim before trying that...

BTW, Taiwan Ramen seems to be a specialty of Nagoya.
Strange! Isn't it?

Wikipedia taught me that it comes from a Taiwan cuisine restaurant in Nagoya in '70s.
You can find some literature at Wikipedia. The article says that Nagoya people like very spicy foods. But, I'm not sure if they really do. At least, a colleague of mine from Nagoya does not.

NOBEL DREAMS

NOBEL DREAMS --- Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment
Gary Taubes
ISBN 4-02-255929-2 (Japanese translation)

I majored in elementary particle physics theory in my graduate school days, and thus I naturally took this book when I found it in the bookshelf of my father-in-law.

After reading several chapters of the book, what I thought was not about Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, as is mentioned in the text, but about Dave Cutler, the father of WindowsNT and VMS.
That could be because I have lived in the IT industry too long.

Komeda Coffee

Komeda Coffee is a famous coffee shop chain in Nagoya and central Japan area.



I took the above photo at Komeda Coffee Toyohashi Fujisawa (map).
The left cake-like thing is called "Shiro-Noir."
Here, "Shiro" means "White" in Japanese, and obviously "Noir" means "Black" in French (I think). Yes, it's almost meaningless, but anyway, that tastes very good. :)

As you can see, it's a sweet Danish pastry with soft cream.
The above one is a small size version, but be careful. The standard size seems to be about 15cm in diameter and sometime too big for a woman. :o

You can find out some literature about "Shiro-Noir" here and here.
(Unfortunately, only in Japanese)

Baykal

Baykal is an Russian restaurant in Toyohashi city, Aichi, Japan.

Today, I had a lunch there and had a happy time waiting for the forthcoming baby with my wife and her mother. :)

My choice was Lena Course:

• Borscht
• Piroshki
• Russian Pot
• Salad
• Ice Cream

I like their dishes. :)

Almost 34 Weeks

Today is the last day of the 33rd week of my baby.

My wife is going to have our baby at her home town, and yesterday I took her to the city with a lot of baby goods by car. It's about 5 hours drive from Tokyo and at least for me a bit tough drive. I know that some colleagues of mine drive more than 12 hours to go back to their home towns. But, indeed I was nervous because there were two more people there in the car. :)

Well, today I took my wife to the hospital where she is having the baby to get a medical checkup, and the baby seems to be more than 2500 grams now. :o

She is due in this late October, but I guess she will come into the world at least two weeks ahead.
Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing her next month. :)

Deluxe Miso Ramen, Menya Kotaro

I will leave Tokyo about a week from Tomorrow, and here is the last supper. :o



Deluxe Miso (Beans Paste) Ramen at Menya Kotaro. :)
Standard thickness noodle, Miso (Beans paste) soup with sliced roasted pork and a boiled egg.

That could be a bit too salty for some people, but I guess it depends on one's physical condition if one feels so or not. I recommend that you would try the Ramen once. :)

Karuizawa Manpei Hotel

We made a trip to Karuizawa and stayed at Manpei Hotel in Karuizawa, Nagano where is very famous for also foreign people.

This is a part of our travel series visiting classic hotels in Japan, and Manpei Hotel is the third one. The first one was Nikko Kanaya Hotel, and the second one was Fujiya Hotel.

My wife seems to love Manpei Hotel best because there is a big outlet mall close to the Hotel. Of course, this time she enjoyed shopping. For example, getting shoes of Prada etc... :o
In this October, our baby will be born, and I guess we cannot have time visiting other classic hotels for years. Thus, I wanted my wife to enjoy this trip, and I believe she did a lot. :)

Mr. Chen's Tanmen Shop

Mr. Chen's Tanmen Shop is unique even among many good ramen restaurants along Shin-Koganei-Kaido avenue.

• http://ramendb.supleks.jp/shop/8791
• http://www.hyorori.net/ramen/shop.asp?shop=1786

In Japanese, it's "陳さんのタンメン亭", and Tanmen is written as 湯麺 in kanji and seems to be different from Chinese Tanmen.
It also looks like Tantanmen (担担麺 (タンタンメン) which is very spicy and came from Shuan of the continental China but a different one.

Tanmen (タンメン) is a salty soup ramen served with a lot of vegetables.
In case of Mr. Chen's, it's served with some pieces of sliced roasted pork, and that tastes very good at any time.
Here, I mean we feel tastes of the same ramen differently depending on one's
physical condition or mood. But, their Tanmen has natural taste and we can enjoy it in various times. For example, a hot day, a cold day, when we feel exhausted or so.

I believe definitely it's a three stars ramen restaurant. :)



BTW, you can learn about ramen in the following Wikipedia pages. :)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramen (English)
• http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A1%E3%83%B (Japanese)

Taiyaki

This is one of Japanese traditional snacks, called Tai-yaki.
Tai means a bream, and Yaki means a something baked.

My dictionary says in English it's 'A fish-shaped pancake stuffed with bean jam,'
but this case it would be ' A fish-shaped pancake stuffed with custard cream'
by Yokohama Kuriko-An (横浜くりこ庵).

http://www.ekipara.com/html/Indication/ShopHtml/K1080R01_188.html



One thing this Taiyaki is remarkable is its thickness.
It's almost twice as thick as usual Taiyaki and cream inside it looks like spilling out. :o
Of course, tastes good for me. I like it. :)

Akihabara

Today, I got a half day off in the afternoon and went to Akihabara almost 1 year interval on my way back home.
I didn't know that now wide area of Akihabara, not only just around the JR Akihabara station but also the electric shop area, is under re-construction. But anyway, looking at a huge empty space where formerly a branch of Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi was there, I walked into the deep Akihabara. :)

Till the last time I was always there because I wanted somethings related to PC.
But, this time I went there to get some simple electric parts like the following. :o

• A 9-pin D-sub connector
• Cables with IC clips
  
• A Triple size AA battery case
• Straight single pin headers (40pins)
  

I bought them at Sengoku Densho (千石電商) in Akihabara, and it's 1,670 yen in total except the size AA batteries. As the cables are a bit delicate ones, 200 yen per one cable. :o

The photo below shows test run of a dsPIC board which I wrote before using the cables above.


The red LED left below is blinking and passed the initial power on test. :)

Transister Gijutsu '07/09

Again, a hardware technology related magazine, Transister Gijutsu '07/09.



This month issue includes an extension board for the dsPIC board of the last month one.
Well, what do I want to do?
It's not the time to write about that yet. :o

Ashiya Takatora, Cream Puffs

Ashiya Takatora (芦屋タカトラ) seems to be a very famous cream puff shop.



My wife was looking forward to having them and finally realized. :)
But, unfortunately they were under a bit wet condition and neither of us didn't feel it good. :(

Tokori

TOKORI (土古里) is a Korean restaurant in Ueno very close to the Ueno park.

After seeing "Treasure of the Topukapi Palace", we had a dinner there today.
I think Korean restaurants in Tokyo are very good in general and TOKORI is not an exception. :)

What was more than our expectation is the dessert.
My wife asked an ice cream, but it's served in a bowl. :o

Of course, it's also very good. :)

Treasures of the Topukapi Palace

I went to Ueno area to see the exhibition below today.



Two years ago, I visited the Topukapi Place and the exhibition really reminded me of the honeymoon. :)

Tachibanaya

Tachibanaya is another Ramen restaurant around along Shin Kogainei Kaido avenue, Tokyo.



Here is tonight dinner. :o
Tonkotsu ramen with sliced roast pork + Karikari powder.
Its noodle is thin , and the soup is a bit strong pork bones (tonkotsu) taste.

To tell the truth, I went there almost 2 years ago, and at that time I didn't have a good impression. By now, I cannot remember why, but anyway it's not so bad, and now I can understand why they get up on their legs. :)

Curry, Nakamuraya

Nakamura-ya is one of the oldest bakeries in Japan, and they are also famous for curry and rice.

Today, we went to one of their branches in Ikebukuro SEIBU and had Indian style curry and rice. I'm not sure if Indian people really have that style of curry, but anyway we enjoyed it. :)

31 Weeks

Wow, thatsdone 3.0 is now 2064 grams! :)



BTW, thatsdone 3.0 could be about 4000 grams when she will be born.
Maybe a giant child. :o