James’ World

I had lunch with a friend at Michi Japanese Restaurant in Campbell.

The chef/owner is Sheen Michi Shin.

We sat at the sushi bar, and I ordered the beef bento box (which comes with several tempura vegetables) with an order of California Rolls, he the sushi assortment.

The food was fresh and delicious. The portions were rather large for lunch, but we managed. Price was about $20 each plus tip.

Michi Japanese Restaurant
2220 S. Winchester Blvd, Campbell, CA 95008
Phone 408-378-8000

Stephen Zilles, Standards Architect, Adobe Systems, gave a talk tonite at IMUG on “Vertical Text on the World Wide Web” about W3C text formatting standards, such as CSS, SVG and XSL, for various languages.

Some interesting examples are Mongolian, which is written top to bottom, and Japanese, which can be written top to bottom or right to left, or tate-chu-yoko (horizontal within vertical), commonly used with numbers. Line-breaking may be codified in JIS X 4051. Ogham and Batak are bottom-to-top languages, which is not specifically supported.

Text formatting can include direction, rotation and transform properties, glyph orientation, line height and width.

Asian printing often uses rotation of English characters to conform to the block progression that started with vertical Chinese or Japanese, for example.

Thanks to Apple for hosting the meeting.

W3C Documents (Membership Required)

I saw “Blade Runner: Final Cut” at the Camera 7 Pruneyard tonite. The adventure started with a $10 ticket price - pretty steep for any film, especially a 25 year-old re-release.

Overall the appearance feels dated now, though still an intriguing story. Having spent some time in Japan, I don’t understand why the location is a mixture of Japanese and American cultures - since they really don’t mix in real life.

This cut is definitely an adult version - Zhora is nude most of her time on screen, and the Batty and Tyrell scene is more gruesome than I remember.

Rachael (Sean Young) is annoyingly vapid, but I can’t tell if that’s deliberate acting, or just Sean Young being herself.

A convincing argument that Harrison is not an android is that for a Nexus 7 model working as a policeman, he was remarkably weak compared to the escapees.

Next time I see this film, likely it’ll be to look for continuity errors and listen to the great lines.

Tyrell: “More human than human” is our motto.

Camera Cinema Blade Runner Overview
sffmedia.com: What’s new in Blade Runner: The Final Cut?
cnn.com: ‘Blade Runner’ star in rehab after awards outburst

I was at the YAPC::NA 2007 Perl Conference this week at the University of Houston in Texas.

Once again, it was a great conference, with about 200 people attending.

It was my first time in Houston, and boy was it humid. My eyeglasses fogged up every time I went outside. It might be the most humid place on earth, even moreso that Bali (on the equator.)

YAPC is a great value. The conference, 2 days of tutorials plus book and 5 nights of dorm accomodations was $384.

Sunday

- got up an hour before my flight
- hot and humid outside airport in Texas
- took bus from the airport, 73 and 30, 88 doesn’t run on Sunday
- city is not a war zone like Detroit or other inner cities, but rough. one drunk on the bus
- staying in Taub dorm in “the quadrangle”, has ok common
basement with TV lounge, weight room and laundry room
- spent evening at The Cadillac Mexican food restaurant
- very off-campus $25 cab ride
- $30 fajitas and cheesecake

Monday

- meeting rooms are in the 3-storey University Center
- scattered around vertically
- coffee
- number of fast-food restaurants: Wendy’s, Subway, Chili’s Too
- Cougar shop
- TV lounge with wide-screen flat-scree TV
- Game Center with FPS, pool, air hockey and bowling

Larry gave 2 talks in morning

- briliant comparative language analysis
- Perl borrows from other languages heavily
- Perl hits the sweet spot for programmer freedom
- Prolly too many object models in Perl5. one is enough.

Lifetime of Many Hats

- born near Pasadena
- almost drowned with styrofoam surfboard
- liked to specialize in everything
- dropped out of original uni program, worked, went
to missionary school and studied linguistics, back to uni

The Perl Foundation

- case study of dev shop that couldn’t find enough perl programmers,
tried Java, ended up with 25 of each
- creating materials for the public in MBA-speak
- Forester called them and asked for scripting language survey participation
- the analyst groups rank language by current capability
and long-term strategy equal weighed, perhaps problematic for perl
which has a mature perl5 but fuzzy perl6
- somebody has written a Perl module for the Facebook API,
overlooked in their initial API release

Dave Rolsky

- error, validation, logging
- good talk

Abigail

- sudoku solver with Perl regex
- regex is NP complete … so let’s do something insane
- 250 Kilobyte regex to solve 9×9 sudo, 90 minutes to run
- he can solve it by hand in less time

Tuesday

Resume talk was funny. Basically, don’t do things
like send a picture of yourself in a disco, show up
late, or be difficult. Based on real-world experience.

Perrin Harkin

- always thoughtful and practical
- but lolcats galore in slides
- tried VMware for snapshotting environment, 4x slow
disk io on their hw, moved to lvm
- uses version control, indifferent, cvs good enough
for a long time anybody who said otherwise was a crackpot
- use 2 branches (dev on main plus maintenance branch)
- test is important, Test::More is not enough because
of namespace pollution?
- tried to store db operations and roll back in perl,
prolly better to just truncate

Casey West

- working at SocialText, SocalCalc
- started project with MochiKit, web 2.0 ish framework
- roundelement for rounded corners
- cross-browser keyboard modifiers
- animation lib
- functional
- did one lolcat to mock Perrin
- switched to MooTools for JS, smaller memory footprint

Evan Carroll, Houston.pm, Dealermade

- catalyst with Dojo, template toolkit
- ruby with scriptaculous JS, integral

Nice dinner in Hilton ballroom.

Auction hosted by Uri. Quite humorous, raised about $4,000.

Dorm party afterwards, lot of alcohol. Talked to Julian Cash
a little. He is very artistic.

Talked to Beth and Adrian, 2 bioinformatics perl chicks.
Beth runs Ubuntu on her Powerbook G4 and Adrian Debian on her Dell
notebook.

Taub dorm party.

Wednesday

Beth from Ithaca did a talk on database programming with postgresql.
She uses it for bioinformatics work.

Some type of skit about the power of the yapc perl t-shirt.

Town Hall meeting rehashing usual Perl adoption issues:

- lack of corporate funding
- lack of PR
- lack of mindshare vs other languages
- poor state of Perl distros, but in LSB

Richard Dice mentioned some feedback from Forrester Research.
Perl was rated ok overall, with a hole in WSDL support.

This YAPC finished about $6,000 in black.

Talked to Perrin a little about file uploads and memory leaks
on mod_perl. He recommended either using Apache api,
reading by row, or using exit in your Apache::Registry script
to force child to die after the upload.

Talked to a Larry a little about parallel programming
with Perl6. Seems like comprehensive support for features
found in other languages like Haskell.

Thursday

Damion was unable to come to YAPC this year, so Randal Schwartz filled in for him for 2 days in the Advanced Perl training tutorial.

Randal did a good talk on his page-by-page views on Damion Conway’s Perl Best Practises book from 9 am to 2:30 pm.

I tend to identify more strongly with Randal’s programming style than Damion’s in some cases. For example, I’m not a big fan of English.pm.

Randal delved in detail into some areas of Perl upon prompting by the audience. He spent some extra time talking about Perl control structures.

I was born in the mid 1960’s, so demographers classify me as a late baby-boomer.

Regardless of how I’m labelled, I’m certainly aware of the generation gap when talking to Generations X and Y in California. All people are unique individuals, but some trends do appear.

From a variety of sources, including online, the Mercury News social networking articles and personal conversations with young people, here’s some anecdotes about young Americans:

• Gen Xers often identify as the underdog, not as a winner. For example, when watching Roadrunner cartoons, some identity as Wile E. Coyote - always coming up short.
• Gen X/Y don’t mind when providing personal info in online forms. They’re asked so often that they either just fill it in, or put in fake info. They’re also willing to provide account passwords so that one site can contact their friends lists.
• Gen X/Y males like to recline in their chair when web surfing, so find bigger fonts helpful
• the ability to skin (customize) a site is essential to express their individuality, no matter how hard to read
• ring tones are very important for self-expression on cell phones
• they like to download or buy single songs, rarely albums
• myspace.com is their hub for dating, hook-ups and self-expression
• Gen X/Y are very suspicious of older people’s motives (the man). Love to tell stories of ‘trust fund babies’ who ignore their parents, drop out of society and go to Grateful Dead concerts or the Big Island communes in Hawaii.
• Gen X/Y think a crappy photo or video (lo res, bad lighting) from a conveniently small camera is better than no foto at all - even acceptable
• Gen X refer to negative people as ‘haters’
• Gen X/Y are the first generations of digital citizens. They don’t read (or pay for ) newspapers and magazines.
• Gen X/Y expect computers to be able to play DVDs
• Generation Y mostly don’t have access to credit cards, so don’t require them for age verification or purchases
• Gen Y often views the PS3 at $600 as too expensive for a game console
• For Gen Y, SMS (texting) is often more popular than IM (chat) now
• some Gen X/Y ask their parents to get very involved in school and work applications and interviews (helicopter parents)
• big consumers of energy drinks like Red Bull

Can you think of any others?

Anecdotes about Japanese youth from a Japanese person:

• children want to be different than their parents - either study harder to be more successful, or just drop-out
• often young people choose part-time jobs to have more personal time
• there is concern about higher taxation to pay for a retiring, older workforce
• young people not only use cell phones heavily, but are doing social networking on cell phones
• young women are doing cosplay more often now, not just men.
• Nintendo DS very popular as portable gamiing platform

cnet.com: Chatting ’bout an IM generation
What the Mainstream Media Can Learn from Jon Stewart
crave.cnet.net: What teens can teach you about tech
cnn.com: Honda Civic tops teen driver list

Just investigating how well modern Japanese personal and place names are represented in commonly-available character sets, such as JIS X 0208 and Unicode.

The short story is that Unicode on a recent version of Windows or Mac OS X should be adequate in most cases, perhaps over 99%, for handling modern input data involving place and personal names.

For the actual details, please read on …

So far it appears that there are several Japanese place names that use kanji not available in common computer character sets.

Japanese personal names have the following general properties:

• People born in Japan normally have a family name (2 kanji) followed by a given name (2 kanji), both written in kanji. There are about 100,000 family names. There are many more given names, with kanji selected from an official list maintained by the Ministry of Justice, the Jinmei kanji list, of 500 to 1,000 characters.
• However, if parents insist on a given name that cannot be represented in the Jinmei list, they may register a given name in hiragana.
• Foreigners have their name written in katakana unless they register for a name in kanji.
• Names written in cursive calligraphy (sousho) for use in poetry or artistic forms, or on hanko stamps, or variants, cannot be represented with standard code points and would have to be handled as an image.

JIS X 0208 - 1983 does a fair job of representing most, but not all, personal names and locations. It includes the Jinmei kanji list.
JIS X 0213 - 1997 is an update of JIS X 0208 that is round-trippable with Unicode 3.1.

So personal names are mostly representable in current JIS and Unicode, although anybody can use variant kanji that would cause problems on input, storage and display of their name. I suppose such a user would have to fall back to another kanji codepoint, same kanji with wrong glyph, or even just use hiragana.

Windows XP and Server 2003 can process Unicode 3.0 and Unicode 4.0. Vista appears to support Unicode 5.0. Rendering would depend on your installed fonts.

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) supports Unicode 4.0.

Unicode in Japan
Japan expands list of kanji for names
Japanese Names
Is it true that in Japan a citizen’s name has to be in kanji, and not in hiragana?
sci.lang.japan Frequently Asked Questions
Wikipedia: Japanese Names
Jun Gifts: Hanko Stamps
Which Unicode Version Is Supported by Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server?
Extend The Global Reach Of Your Applications With Unicode 5.0
Apple Mac OS X: Features - International