Daily Musings
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Thursday 30th January 2003
Ninjava Meeting: Tonight's main presenter was our own Dan and he talked about beanshell scripting. Java is not really my topic, but the presentation was really interesting. I forgot to ask him if it would be useful in system administration, but I doubt thats true.
I took a couple of photos, but they caused so much distraction, that I decided not to try that again.
After that, Sam Joseph talked a bit about code testing, which is even less interesting to me, but again the presenter made it worth paying attention to.
Tuesday 28th January 2003
Persian Food: Finally managed to eat at the Aladdin restaurant. Had various kinds of kebabs, Iranian rice, nan and pomegranite juice. Delicious. The others liked it a lot too.
Dave and Stuart |
Stuart and his camera |
Dan and I |
Dave acting strange |
Almost done |
Dan wants more |
Monday 27th January 2003
MS-SQL Worm: It seems to be wreaking havoc across the internet, though its not as bad as its hyped up to be by the media. Should die out soon as people start blocking the packets or patch their servers.
.org TLD on PostgreSQL While on databases, the .org registry is now switching to PostgreSQL from Oracle. Im interested in what kind of setup they have.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/idg2.nsf/All/2ADD84E6EBCEADE9CA256CB30075FA01!OpenDocument
Sunday 26th January 2003
Rodeo at Zest: Met Dan and Tim for dinner at Zest and realised that it was rodeo night. The mechanical bull they put up was quite impressive (and violent), but by the time I got to the front to register for the bull riding, they had filled all the places. Maybe next time. Also forgot to bring my camera or would have gotten some great shots.
Saturday 25th January 2003
Farewell party: Two of my neighbours, who I had sushi with this afternoon, are leaving Japan soon so we had a surprise party for them. It was a nice traditional Japanese place in Shibuya, but unfortunately, the food wasn't too friendly with me.
Ivana |
Sergio |
Sushi in Harajuku: Had 'kaiten zushi' for lunch in Harajuku with some friends. It was very nice weather, though a bit chilly.
Thursday 23rd January 2003
Jim's SpamBayes notes: Jim kindly put up his spam and Bayesian filtering notes from Saturday's meeting:
http://www.onjapan.net/notes/spam/
Overnight research: Spent the whole of yesterday, last night and this morning tweaking web servers, databases and servlet engines for better performance. Also tested newer versions of the above and had very good luck. Now I can add Tomcat4 and Resin to my abilities.
Sunday 19th January 2003
Iranian food (not): Today, I was going to go to an Iranian restaurant with Dan and Tim and was hoping to consume some meat for the first time this year, but it was closed for a private party. Disappointment.
Fellowship of the Ring, Extended DVD: Started watching Stuart's DVD with about half an hour of extra footage. I thought it was great and felt closer to the book, but had to force myself to stop after reaching Rivendell.
Saturday 18th January 2003
TLUG Meeting, Spam Filtering: Today's meeting was going to be very informal with Jim Tittsler doing a small presentation on spam filtering. It turned out to be very interesting and informative. The tool that he mostly talked about was SpamBayes. Stuart has been using Bayesian filtering for a while so I knew what to expect, but this was at the server level.
Pictures here.
Elections: Mauro Sauco, last year's VP, was elected president of TLUG after Ayaka-san stepped down. We had some trouble finding a VP so Baba-san, who is also the webmaster, will now play 2 roles. I will remain the sysadmin. It seems that I will also be the speaker at the next meeting. Topic: SSH
Friday 17th January 2003
Folding@home: Lately, I have heard too many arguments against running Seti@home, mainly that the probability of finding a meaningful signal this way is *very* small. Now, I am slowly switching to folding@home.
"Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases."
They have already had a few successes and it sounds like a worthy cause. The progress for the TLUG team that I joined can be seen here:
http://folding.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/teampage?q=13160
Thursday 16th January 2003
15:25 Finally have my first RSS feed up, thanks to Jim and Stuart, though Im still updating it by hand.
11:45 Last night's meetup went really well. A record 7 people showed up which led to some interesting discussions. I'm too comfortable with Vim and ssh for posting entries, but really should start looking at other tools.
From left: Tony, Siddharth, Ian, Sajjad, Kevin, Stuart and Jim |
Wednesday 15th January 2003
The blog meetup is tonight. I hope to make it.
Sunday 12th January 2003
Dogsledding and more powder. Click here.
Saturday 11th January 2003
Sun, powdered snow and a great view. Click here.
Friday 10th January 2003
Had set my clock and phone alarm to about 4am, but missed both. Good thing Rainer called me and I was up at 5. The flight to Hokkaido was at about 7:30am and I was still a bit sick.
More details of the trip here.
Thursday 9th January 2003
Woke up at about 4 am this morning feeling terrible. Must have been the spicy curry I had last night at a friend's house. Hope I can recover in time for Hokkaido.
Monday 5th January 2003
First working day of the year for most people in Japan. We had our monthly meeting and then went to a Shinto shrine. I coudln't take any photos because the battery ran out just then.
Lunch was provided by the company in the main meeting room. Lots of sushi and pizza. I decided to get back to work when people started giving speeches and getting drunk.
Played my first game this year and the first in months. 'No One Lives Forever 2'. Its a first person shooter, but is loosely based on spy movies and requires lots of stealth techniques. Reminded me of 'Thief'.
Sunday 4th January 2003
The first of my neighbours who were on holiday returned today so it won't be as quiet now. Spent a gruelling 4 hours at the gym and then met a friend, Tanaka-san, for sushi.
On the way home wanted to pick up milk, but the first four of the 24 hour stores that I visited had run out. The last one ran out after I bought it. Didn't think the holidays would have such an effect on these stores.
Friday 3rd January 2003
Spent most of the day helping Asmat with his network and discussing various things. Right now, I'm working on improving this site and learning more about RSS.
Thursday 2nd January 2003
Went to the embassy and met lots of people. Stayed at Asmat's place tonight and watched The Matrix (again). Can't wait for the sequel this year.
Wednesday 1st January 2003
Celebrated the new year by having dinner at an Italian restaurant with some friends. Met an Italian celebrity there, Girolamo Panzetta. They also had a game of Bingo, but unfortunately, I didn't win anything. My friends won some nice things though.
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| Me and Girolamo | Asmat and Girolamo |
In the evening had some very nice Sushi in Harajuku with my really nice Italian neighbours. Will post photos of that too.
