Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Today I finally figured out why on my RedHat box at work applications like vim and w3m sometimes hang on startup for no particular reason.

It turns out that autocrap causes these applications to link with libgpm if that happens to exist on the system. Why autocrap believes that the presence of a library on the system in any way implies that I'd like to link with it is entirely beyond me.

The linking in itself is not the problem though.

gpm communicates with clients using pipes. When you stick an application in the background for a long time (I sometimes have vim or w3m instances sitting in the background for days at a time), its pipe will fill up. When one pipe fills up, all applications hang.

Two bugs: autocrap causes unrequested linkage and gpm allows random applications linked with it to cause other applications to hang by simply sitting in the background for a while.

This sucks.

It took a while, but my Benevolent Volunteer Editor (a.k.a. dad) finished triaging and editing the boatload of pictures I took in Japan. Thanks. Beer will be exchanged at the earliest opportunity.

Of the 700ish pictures I took -- eek! -- about 400ish are left. Not bad, actually. I think I'm getting the hang of this camera thing.

I've uploaded the pictures to my gallery in four categories: AsiaBSDCon 2008 pictures, sightseeing in Tokyo, sightseeing in Kyoto and sightseeing in Himeji.

Enjoy. :-)

Pending my purchase of a FON gadget or the installation of a new wireless card in my Soekris, I today installed OpenWRT on an aging Asus WL300G access point. This went surprisingly well, following the documentation.

For some obscure reason, the "sensible defaults" were not very sensible. This was easily fixed, however:

nvram set wan0_proto=none

mv /etc/init.d/S50httpd /etc/init.d/off.S50httpd
mv /etc/init.d/S50telnetd /etc/init.d/off.S50telnetd
mv /etc/init.d/S60cron /etc/init.d/off.S60cron
mv /etc/init.d/S60dnsmasq /etc/init.d/off.S60dnsmasq

Rationale: the thing has only one 802.3 Ethernet interface, which is bridged to the 802.11 interface - there is no point in running a DHCP client (started together with dnsmasq). After setting a root password, it's no longer possible to log in using telnet - so why have a telnetd suck resources? I'm not going to run any cronjobs on my access point, so disabling cron is obvious. And I'm allergic to web "applications", as everyone knows.

The thing runs very well. No complaints. I recommend it very highly over the default firmware.

Only weeks after the new reactionary Belgian government took office (and presumably not many weeks before it topples again) our shiny new Minister of War ^W Defence has decided that the Belgian army should no longer be a humanitarian organization. Rather, we should become a more active participant in NATO. (Source)

Translation: "we should lick the boots of our belligerent American allies and join them in their crusade to crush the infidels in the Middle East in response to the voices in our heads".

Thus De Crem proves that the "C" in CVP ^W CD&V is every bit as violent as it was in the middle ages. Why am I not surprised? Pesttsjeven!

I hope, again, that the confused people who voted for these incompetent war-mongers are duly ashamed of themselves and will vote a bit more sensibly next time. Idle hope, of course. Idiocy is blind after all. Chances are they'll vote even more stupidly for the even more reactionary parties who not only want to crush the infidels but the locals too.

Progress indeed! "Goed bestuur", jawel...

Took my bike to Koen this morning for a new bottom bracket to replace the one I broke earlier this week. It turns out the break was not something sudden, but a weakness that had been there for a while and finally gave up now. Possibly it was originally caused by dropped. Likely by baggage barbarians in an airport.

No matter what caused it though. My bike is fixed again and I'm a happy Bromptonist again. :-) I immediately tested it on some of the cobblestone roads in Leuven to make sure it was fine. Not a squeek to be heard. Excellent!

Some pieces of music really are not designed for cynical atheists like myself. Dialogues des Carmélites is packed with ridiculous spiritual drivel and mindless religious idiocy. While I don't condone the methods of the French Revolution (let alone approve of a death penalty), the end of this opera does have some appeal to me.

Despite the hopeless story, the music is excellent and the performance last night in Ghent was splendid as usual.

Of course, I had to run out fairly quickly after the performance again to catch the last train (23:19) to Leuven. This part of opera nights always annoys me. I look forward to moving my subscription to Antwerp next year. I briefly considered moving it this year, but the opera house in Antwerp was still a building site for much of the season, and that's not fun.

Why is that last train from Ghent always packed with rowdy drunks?

On my way to Kulminator today, my trip was rudely interrupted by my right crank arm snapping right off the bottom bracket:

I have absolutely no idea how this happened! I didn't exert any extra pressure. I had just unfolded my bike and wanted to start pedalling, but instead of going around, my foot was back on the ground and the crank arm next to it.

Not fun...

Somehow, I managed to cut my left ankle rather painfully too. Probably an action<->reaction thing of the left crank arm obeying gravity after the right snapped off.

I hope Koen has the necessary parts in stock. Going to work by bus and on foot gets old really really fast...

Travel is fun (except for the flying bits and the jetlag bit, of course), but work is great fun too. I like seeing the world, but I like writing software (and getting paid for it) too.

Westbound jetlag sucks slightly less than eastbound. I went to bed last night around 23:00, thinking it was very early morning and woke up at a reasonable hour this morning (06:30) thinking it was early afternoon. Oh well, give it a couple of days.

I had great fun in Japan. Thank you Sato-san, George-san and other -sans of the organization for letting me speak at AsiaBSDCon, giving me an excuse to make this trip. I will definitely be back for next year's conference ... if not sooner.

Now for catching up with email and then off to catch the train to work. I need to remember that trains run only hourly - with luck - and never on time. The culture-shock is going to hurt. A lot.

For some obscure reason, I couldn't get a boarding pass for my flight from Copenhagen to Brussels in Tokyo, so I got to enjoy the long queue at the transit-counter in Copenhagen. As usual, I confused the hell out of everyone by speaking Danish while carrying a Belgian passport (and coming in from Japan probably didn't help the confusion).

Despite not getting an upgrade to economy extra (the flight was all booked), the long flight went well. Except for the fact that they forgot about my vegetarian meal, but they managed to find one for me without much fuss. This did void all the benefits of ordering a vegetarian meal though: I got fed at the same time as the rest of the herd instead of slightly earlier.

Fighting food with plastic weapons is hard enough without having to mind not knocking someone else's plastic weapons out of their hands with your elbows. The veggie food was good, rice and pickled veggies and some unidenfiable Japanese things which tasted good. As always, everyone else got rubber chicken. It was prepared the Japanese way though.

Sleeping on a day-flight is impossible. It's even more impossible when you're flying above a cloudless sky over Siberia. It's extremely bright!

Nearly home... phew I'll need to force myself to stay up until it's officially time to go to bed. This will be difficult. I do not know what time it is.

10:44 JST

Yet another airport which invites me to pay for using TCP but is perfectly happy to let me use UDP for free. I like that. I bought ten minutes of TCP access just to show my appreciation. :-)

I had intended to buy a bottle of tax-free sake but ridiculous, useless and bloody stupid "liquid rules" would make it way too complicated to get home. No, I do not want to retrieve my checked bag in Copenhagen, shove a bottle in and check it in again. Idiots.

Bought tea instead. I'm sure someone sufficiently creative will manage to come up with a way to blow up a plane with tea.

Looks like my flight is boarding though, so must stop ranting. Roughly twelve hours to Copenhagen. What fun, fun fun... and traveling seven hours back in time will make it all the more enjoyable. :-o

06:26 JST

It hurts every bit as much as I thought it would. Getting up at 05:55 is not my idea of a good start to the day. I don't believe in single-digit hour values at the the beginning of the day. I prefer to save them until the end!

Anyway. Off to the station and then to the airport I trot. Ta-ta.

23:03 JST

After a pleasant Shinkansen ride, I got to Tokyo around noon today. While I was in Tokyo station, I bought a ticket on the 07:30 Narita Express tomorrow morning. That is going to hurt.

My hotel, the Tokyo Ochanomizu Hotel Juraku (where I also stayed last week), is a convenient four-minute train ride from Tokyo station. And trains seem to run very frequently on Sundays too. Reacquainting myself with the NMBS is going to be a horrible culture shock.

Indicentally, my Japanese booking experiment from last night seems to have worked. I am, in fact, typing this from the very hotel room I booked. Wahey!

After dropping my bag off, I took the train to Kappabashi-dori to buy some very original souvenirs for some people and to Akihabara to buy some electronic gadgets. I managed to restrain myself though. :-)

Now off to bed, early and very long day tomorrow!

08:44 JST

Today I start my long journey home. A pity - I really enjoyed myself in Japan. I'll definitely be back. I'll be taking the Shinkansen to Tokyo in an hour or so for an afternoon of last-minute shopping. Tomorrow morning, I'll be on my plane home.

Expect blog-activity to diminish somewhat...

23:08 JST

This was a very alien experience! I need a hotel to stay tomorrow night, preferably near Tokyo station, so that I can get to the airport in time to catch my flight home (cry).

Armed with the "phrases" section of the Rough Guide, a bottle of tea and some patience, I set out to reserve a room. This went surprisingly smoothly.

First I asked if they spoke English. This resulted in a burst of encrypted sentences with "no English, sorry" somewhere in the middle and lots of "um" and "ah" all over.

Enter the Rough Guide.

I tried: Nihongo wa hanashimasen, eigo ga dekimasu ka? -- telling him I don't speak English and asking him in Japanese if he spoke English was worth a shot.

No luck. More cryptobabble, but less "um" and "ah". Presumably, he now thought I spoke Japanese, despite the way I no doubt butchered the language in untold ways.

Next try: Motto yukkuri hanashite kuremasen ka? -- asking him to speak slowly seems to have helped. Progress! Still cryptobabble, but slower and words like "hai" (yes) were apparent.

On with the show: Yoyaku o shitai no desu ga? -- I'd like to make a reservation. The guy really did his best to speak slowly and from words like "itsu" ("when"), I figured out that he wanted to know when I was arriving and when I was leaving again.

Slowly but certainly progress was made, and after about ten minutes of me butchering Japanese and the guy on the phone speaking very slowly and being extremely understanding, he repeated my details slowly and correctly and thanked me in very stuttery English for my patience and told me in slow Japanese that he'd see me tomorrow.

I really must find a crash-course Japanese before I come back next time. This was great fun! :-) Languages rule! And to think that there are people in Belgium who stubbornly refuse to deal with just one other language... Nutters!

I'm happy. Accomplishments always make me happy. It's a geek thing. :-)

21:57 JST

I consulted the Rough Guide about dinner this evening. It said, roughly, "basically everything around Gion is good, trust your instincts". So I did, and I walked east and darted into some side-streets and alleys off side streets and got myself hopelessly lost. Then I found a restaurant and had absolutely fantastic food. I have no idea what I ate, since the menu was encrypted and the staff spoke as much English as I speak Japanese (linguistic racists back home, again - take note of this!), but it was scrumptious!

Finding my way back to my hotel proved slightly tricky. And I didn't have all that much sake. I was just very, very lost. After some wandering, I found a station though, and asked the attendant how I should go about getting to Shijō subway station, which is where my hotel is. "Straight ahead, thirty minute walk".

I thought he meant "three minute walk" after which I'd bump into the platform where a suitable train would call. Nope. I ended up in a very, very long tunnel, exit 23 of which was marked Shijō subway station. This is one to remember for next time I come back to Kyoto. Above-ground, it was probably packed with people while the tunnel was virtually empty. The walk that takes 25 minutes above-ground only took about 15 (not 30 - I walk fast) underground because there were no traffic lights and very few other people.

Clever people, the Japanese ... I've said it before!

Now I'm researching hotels in the are of Tokyo station to spend one night tomorrow. Priorities are price and internet access. As usual.

17:06 JST

I had a somewhat late start this morning. I spent some time sorting my pictures (yes, yes, you'll get to see them soon, promise!) and only got to the station around 10:00. The great thing about Japan though, is that you can walk into the station at pretty much any time of the day, buy a ticket, walk up the escalator and hop on the train to your destination. Wherever in Japan that destination may be.

If the NMBS is reading this: please take note of the absense of "wait 20 minutes" sections in my last paragraph!

So I took the 10:13 nozomi train to Himeji and arrived there at 10:58.

Himeji castle was definitely worth the trip! It's a very impressive edifice. As in Nijō-jō, the paranoia of the builders was clearly apparent. The keep is surrounded by some very solid walls and the moats don't look very inviting to potential invaders either.

Being cherry blossom season, the castle was packed with busloads of Japanese tourists. Of course, there was also a bus of German and a bus of English tourists around. They're everywhere. :-)

After seeing the castle, I walked through the gardens and had a nice cup of tea. I still have not figured out how to achieve comfort on a tatami mat. There must be some trick to it. I will keep researching.

On the train back, I downloaded some pictures. I particularly like this one:

I had intended to visit the Ryōan-ji temple on getting back to Kyoto, but due to my late start this morning, I didn't make it back in time. I'll go and see that one tomorrow before heading back to Tokyo for last-minute souvenir-shopping in Akihabara.

Some more pictures of Himeji-jō and its lovely garden:

23:15 JST

Today, Claudio and I overdosed on temples. You simply cannot throw a stone in Kyoto without upsetting some temple or shrine's zen garden.

We started our day at Sanjūsangen-dō, which is simply overwhelming. The sheer number of statues in this temple is mindboggling. In addition to the 1000 life-size statues of Kannon (who is said to have 1000 arms) and the enormous main statue of her in the middle of all these, there are 28 statues of various "guardian" deities with variable numbers of arms, and two statues of of Fūjin and Raijin -- bigshots in the celestial pecking order -- each with two arms.

That's 1,031 statues. More than 40,000 real arms and more than 1,000,000 imaginary ones. That's a lot of arms!

I am not entirely sure about Buddhist mathematics though. While they say that Kannon has 1000 arms, they only put 40 on her statues (mounted on a kind of backplane attached to the shoulders, from a cursory inspection) because they think each arm is saving 25 worlds. This clearly involves some very imaginary numbers. Incidentally, Kannon is also said to have eleven heads. Some of these are also presumably in different worlds.

It is a pity that taking pictures in temples is not allowed. The Sanjūsangen-dō authorities take this even further though and even put up signs disallowing sketches. I can understand forbidding flash-photography for conservation reasons but also forbidding sketches is nuts. The people who carved the statues have been dead for centuries, copyright is way expired!

Being a law-abiding sort of person (cough) I didn't take pictures. Being a dreadful artist, I didn't even make sketches. Come to Kyoto yourself to see the statues. They're worth the trip! You might want to hurry though, because Japanese temples have a historical tendency to burn down. Given the number of candles, insence and tablets being burned ("offered to the Buddha"), this surprises me not at all.

On a side-note, while I have fewer issues with Buddhism than with certain other sects -- Buddhists don't make a habit of invading "holy lands" or have a policy of killing or "educating" infidels, as far as I know -- it does strike me as being a very mercantile affair. You can throw coins into big trays in temples and shrines for good luck. The higher-value the coin, the better/bigger the luck. You can also buy candles to "offer to the Buddha". Again, larger and more expensive candles are said to have a higher success rate.

Clever people, those monks. Good nose for business!

But I digress.

After the Sanjūsangen-dō, we started on the "Hills, Temples & Lanes of Southern Higashiyama" walk as suggested by the Lonley Planet. The walk starts at the Kiyomizu-dera temple which every single Japanese person tries to see. At the same time!

Before visiting the temple itself, we decended into the tainai-meguri which the Lonley Planet shrouded in mystery. I'm not entirely sure whether this "attraction" is simply a means of extracting money from tourists (¥100) or a genuine element of Buddhism. Basically, you walk down some stairs into a very dark corridor until you encounter a large stone mounted on bearings which you're supposed to turn clockwise and make a wish, then you walk out again, wondering what on earth that was all about. I associate this kind of gimmicks more with fairs than with temples, but I'm a cynical bastard.

The throngs of tourists detracted somewhat from the temple's appeal, so we mainly enjoyed the splendid view over the city and the landscape from the temple's terrace.

Next up: lunch. The Lonely Planet suggested a sweet-shop in pretty much the busiest street I've ever seen (which, after this trip, is saying something!) and we didn't find it. Probably for the best. We had a very tasty okonomiyaki in a smallish restaurant a couple of streets on.

Luckily, the rest of the walk proved to be somewhat less busy than the first part. Having had our fill of temples for a while, we skipped a couple of the ones suggested by the guide and only went into the Chion-in, the last temple of the walk. Beyond the gigantic gate, we found the temple to be "on". Lots of burning insence and monks chanting nonsense (have I coined another phrase?). I always enjoy watching people go about cult-gymnastics and Buddhism is very interesting. I must read up on Buddhist rituals and come back to watch some more of them.

After the walk, Claudio and I parted company. Claudio is off to Tokyo this evening and back to Switzerland tomorrow. Unlike me, he's coming back in two months time for another trip. I have a feeling though that I'll also be back here at some point. Though maybe not in two months! I need to get some work done now and again too... Which also has its charms, of course.

I tried to synchronize with Soren and Christoph for dinner but this seems to have failed. I just noticed that they tried to send me email from their rented Japanese mobile phones and that bogofilter marked them as spam. Damn.

Tomorrow, I'm making a little excursion to Himeji, a mere 1½-hour train ride from here, to see what is claimed to be the most beautiful white castle of Japan before someone builds skyscrapers all around it, or before an earthquake or a fire obliterates it. I briefly considered planning an extra train ride in the afternoon to Okayama to see the castle's evil twin, which is all black (Crow Castle), but it would make things too difficult and not seeing it now gives me an extra excuse to come back for it later.

I will post pictures real soon now. I just found out my camera decided to start numbering from "img_0001.jpg" again, so I'll need to do a bit of scriping to make sure I don't blast a batch of pictures away with a new one.

Watch this space!

23:37 JST

Met up with Claudio very early this morning to make our way to the Imperial Palace in good time to register for the 10:00 tour. The Lonely Planet mentioned we'd need our passports, but it was overly pessimistic about the waiting times. We arrived at 09:20 and were able to participate in the 10:00 tour.

The Palace is very spectacular. It's really a pity you're not allowed to go into the buildings. The walk in the beautiful garden really makes up for that though.

I managed to get the pictures off the wonky SD card I blogged about yesterday. It turns out the dcim directory doesn't really look like a directory and the kernel doesn't like that. The camera seems to keep a pointer straight to the pictures though, so it doesn't have a problem with this. I used gphoto2 to get the pictures off the camera. I've saved a dd of the card to try to figure out what happened to that directory.

Unfortunately, I'm a bit too tired to upload some pictures tonight. I'll deal with that tomorrow!

After a long stroll through the Imperial Palace garden, we walked on to Nijō Castle. This is the one that's always used in books and films about paranoid Japanese warlords. The floorboards really sing like nightingales and the fortifications are impressive. Like the Imperial Palace, Nijō-jo also has a fantastic garden. Zen gardeners must have worked cheap in the 17th century!

Lunch were hot udon noodles with tempura shrimp in a small place in a narrow shopping street. The usual trick "look for the locals" worked again. We chose to sit at a table since I'd not entirely recovered from last night's tatami research session.

Then off to see the Golden Pavilion, which must be the most-photographed temple in the world. I took about twenty pictures of it. It's hopelessly difficult to take pictures of. What with idiots such as myself walking in front of cameras all the time. Damn and blast tourists! :-) Again, you'll have to wait a bit for the pictures.

We tried to synchronize with Soren and Christoph for dinner, but failed. I have a feeling we'll succeed tomorrow!

Claudio found an interesting tempura place in the Lonely Planet, somewhere in Gion. When we got there, we were seated on "cheat" tatami (with a pit for legs and feet) and discovered that the people around the counter with us were three American MathWorks employees who work on MATLAB and two French tourists accompanied by a French friend of theirs who lives in Tokyo. The two locals who were also around the counter disappeared too quickly for introductions.

It turns out that we all used the Lonely Planet as our guide, and four copies of it were on the counter. I really should have taken a picture of that!

Now off to bed. Email from Soren seems to suggest that we'll manage to sync up tomorrow for dinner at least. We'll see if we manage it. The lack of real-time means of communication is really annoying here. In all other respects, I rather like the fact that my mobile phone is off. It feels strangely liberating. I dread the moment I get to switch it on in Copenhagen. I bet it's going to beep for twenty straight minutes with missed calls and messages.

01:55 JST

Up early-ish this morning to meet Claudio at a breakfast place in Kyoto station. We had a breakfast-buffet including tea for the amazing price of ¥820 (<€7). And they say Japan is outrageously expensive! It can be that, but only if you're outrageously stupid.

After breakfast, we set out on the walk the Lonely Planet describes as a philosophical meander through Northern Higashiyama. The guide claims this should take about four hours. It took us about six hours, but we had a fairly long wait before lunch and spent probably quite a bit more time trying to understand zen gardening than the guide anticipates.

This was all well worth it though. While we still don't understand zen gardening (turtles, cranes, leaping tigers, ... trust me, it's just rocks arranged in unbelievably beautiful ways -- nothing there to understand!), we had some excellent soba noodles at a place called Hinode. Just what we needed after the first batch of temples before starting on the next one.

I would love to post my pictures, but for some reason, my kernel seems to believe the file system on my SD card is corrupt. The camera has no problems with it, however. I'll see what's up with that when I get home, or on the long plane ride.

Dinner tonight was shabu-shabu on tatami mats in a very nice restaurant. Again, very acceptably priced -- approximately ¥5000 per person including sake. Tatami hurt. Really. How the Japanese survive it, I don't know. But I intend to continue my research on the topic until I do.

We encountered some slight linguistic and cultural barriers trying to bootstrap the shabu-shabu process. Neither the Rough Guide nor the Lonely Planet went into much detail about how to go from raw materials to yummy food. Luckily, the nice waitress wearing a bright purple kimono (p2 would feel right at home!) was very helpful and got us started.

After dinner, Claudio went off to try to find internet access (note: always make free internet access a priority when shopping for hotels; it is not all that difficult to find), and I went searching for an onsen.

The Lonely Planet pointed me to Funaoka Onsen, which proved to be surprisingly difficult to find. It is located in a part of Kyoto where all the street signs are encrypted and no decrypted version is provided for tourists. Armed with about five words of Japanese, a bilingual map, and some patience, I solicited the help of the locals to find my way. This was quite a lot of fun. Again, I don't understand what linguistic racists at home are complaining about. Other languages are great!

When I found the onsen, I discovered that it had definitely been a good idea to learn to recognize the kanji I'd likely encounter there. Had I not done so, finding the men's area (50% guess) might have been rather too interesting, given there were no helpful Western-style pictograms around to guide the way.

It turns out that that I was not the only gaijin in the establishment, but definitely part of a very small minority of the customers. The washing infrastructive was certainly optimized particularly for people about three quarters my height with twice as flexible knee and hip joints.

But the baths were excellent! My body is now very thoroughly boiled. Especially the 'electric bath' was interesting. Very tingly sort of sensation. Not for everyone, I guess, but I didn't mind it.

Tomorrow, we will try to synchronize with Soren and Christoph of NetBSD. Since none of us are connected through any real-time medium, this is likely to prove rather tricky. I'm sure we'll manage it though.

In other news: I wrote a second batch of postcards and the first batch should be on its way. With a bit of luck, they'll arrive in Europe before I do...