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It’s Saturday night, just past 4am.

Right now, I could be:

Instead: I am in the middle of an empty office lab overlooking deserted downtown-Tokyo, staring at a monitor, running Support Vector Machine simulations.

Something, somewhere, went very, very, horribly wrong with my life.

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Pros and cons of loading a 120-ft scroll of tracing paper into my typewriter and going on a frenzied 48h non-stop benzedrine-fueled Masters thesis writing session:

Pros:

  1. It worked for Jack Kerouac.
  2. I’d be done 3 days earlier: more time to edit and correct typos.
  3. I’d be done 3 days earlier: more time to spend drunk in some seedy Golden Gai bar.

Cons:

  1. Actually, it took him three weeks to write it. I don’t have three weeks.
  2. Sleep deprivation-induced typos probably likely to include: entire paragraphs written in Urdu, random obscene expletives, obscure references to isomorphic transformations in alternate planes of reality…
  3. Comparability of Beat literature masterpiece with Natural Language Processing project involving Machine Learning parsing of Rhetorical Structure Trees: dubious.

It’s a toss, really…

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In today’s Guardian (emphasis mine):

In a rare interview, Rob Wainwright, international director of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca), told the Guardian […]

Meanwhile, somewhere, there’s an international director of the Funny and Organised Crime Agency (Foca) who feels like nobody takes his job seriously…

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Update: added some linky goodness to some of the pics H took that night.

Last weekend was メタモ 08, aka the Metamorphose Music Festival in Shizuoka: a comparatively low-key, 3-stages-1-night, affair with affordable ticket price (a fourth of Fuji Rock’s), featuring mostly electronic and/or non-mainstream acts.

Conditions this year were just short of apocalyptic, thanks to the nastiest weather of the entire Summer: rainy and cold… Fortunately, the real downpour held off until Sunday morning and we managed with only a couple light drizzle episodes through the night.

Anyway, I’ll spare you our own antiques and just post a couple thoughts on the different acts we got to hear:

1. Tony Allen opened the night with some kickass afrobeat on the main stage. He did quite alright, bringing up the generally dampen mood into party mode. Having spent countless hours of my youth looping Africa 70 tracks to exhaustion, this was probably one of my most feverishly awaited act of the night, and the only disappointment was that it didn’t have a better timeslot.

2. Since I’d already heard Jazztronic and DJ Krush a few times before, I used the chance to take a little rest at our “camp” and stock up some [mostly natural] energy for the night. Whatever I caught of Album Leaf in the distance (and later up close) provided a satisfyingly eery ambiant background for a relaxing time.

3. Fully rested and after walking around a bit, we came back to the main stage for Boom Boom Satellites, which was really the nice surprise of the evening: knowing nothing of them save for a couple tracks and videos H. showed me, I was expecting some slightly boring typical J-pop with some electro-rock accents… But apparently (and also according to H.), their style has evolved a great deal over the years and they played something much closer to full-on electronic music with rock instruments. Both the resulting hypnotically long tracks and the super-upbeat crowd made it one of the highlight of the night.

4. Theo Parrish was another act I was really looking forward to, seeing how his two last parties rocked my Summers…
And the disappointment was commensurate: his usual awesome blend of beats was made absolutely unbearable by some of the worst sound quality I have ever heard in my life (and I have heard a lot, trust me). Not only were the highs and mediums ear-piercingly loud, to the point of physical pain (we had to walk one full hill over before we could stand it), but they were also so distorted as to make the whole thing absolutely impossible to listen to.
I remember one of the first piece of advice I was ever given when I started pushing records in clubs, was to always take a minute off and walk around the place to see how the music sounds from the other side of the turntables (usually heaps less nice than what you hear from your spot). Of course, when you play some huge outdoor venue like that, you don’t need to worry about it: that’s what the sound guy is for. Except the sound guy that night was obviously sleeping. or deaf. or both.
Either way: after toughing it out for 20 minutes, we gave up in rage and went back to the other stages.

5. Back at the steamy indoor stage, we caught the end of a nice set by Fumiya Tanaka (seen a month ago at Womb) and then Josh Wink: pope of 90s acid house and producer of one of the most infectious 303 track ever made… A solid and largely danceable set, albeit ostensibly geared at people in a much less sober state than I was (yea, no higher state of consciousness for me that night): could have used a teensy bit more melody and texture here and there to complement the raw pumping beats.
Also, I realise whining about this puts me into the annoying clueless fanboy category, but I was really hoping to hear some version of his signature track: I know he might have got sick of people expecting it every single time for the past 15 years, but there really aren’t many occasions to hear it in a live club these days.

6. Galaxy 2 Galaxy was another nice surprise (only today did I realise I had heard them before: many years ago at DNA lounge in SF): live instrumental, jazzy, funky house with some seriously good vibes… Would have probably been the high note of the trip with an uplifting warm sunrise instead of that gloomy morning weather drowned in drizzle and gray skies. Still enjoyable nonetheless.
Also they played the best dance track of all time, so there’s no way to go wrong with that.

7. I honestly felt bad for Cobblestone Jazz: they played some nice groovy stuff, but by then rain had started falling for real and we were all rather content sitting under the roof structure, huddled together in our makeshift camp, snacking on curry and planning a strategic exit.

Apparently, we left none too early, since, just a couple hours later, torrential rains forced all trains out of Shuzenji to a complete stop until Monday.

Overall, a great night and some awesome music: can’t wait to do it again next year, on a dry and warm Summer weekend.

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Geek news warning: sane people and anybody for whom such acronyms as PHP or GPL merely evocate some brand new drugs the kids might be into these days: you are probably better off skipping this one.

I’ll try to keep it short.

Spam Karma 2 is now released as GPL v.2. This essentially means you can do anything you want to it, except claim you made it (copyright and attribution notice must remain there). You should also note that any attempt at deriving some ill-deserved profit from it through harebrained web marketing schemes will earn you both my long-standing scorn and a nut-shriveling decrease to your actual karma.

I suppose another angle to that post’s title could be:
Officially discontinuing Spam Karma’s development: so long and thanks for all the fish
as this is what this truly is about.

But, such a title would be slightly misleading (and no doubt heavily quoted out of context): Indeed, I am hereby officially announcing that I will no longer support, maintain or further develop Spam Karma (beside some very occasional, very limited poking, until the transition to a self-maintained project is completed). However, thanks to the magic of free software, all the unsung heroes of the Open Source world will soon rise to take over and bring you a stronger, better, more closely supported version of Spam Karma!

Okay, what’s more likely to happen is that nobody will really bother taking over, except perhaps a handful well-intentioned but utterly clueless beginner coders who will quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the task and next be seen running away screaming at the top of their lungs. Hey, I’m not blaming anybody: I wouldn’t waste my time on a non-paying, open-source community project either…

But on the off-chance that you would (and trust me it won’t do anything to help you get laid either), I have set up a Google Code repository, which could become the jumping point to some magnificent community-based development effort (or not). If you are interested in participating in any way, contact me (mail or contact form) with a *brief* description of who you are, what you can do and what you wanna do. I don’t need a resume (I am not hiring), just a very quick idea of what level of responsibility you’d be willing to take on the project. I’ll put in the first couple people that seem to know what they are doing (and do not sound like they’ll be selling everything to Russian mafia-owned spam sites) as administrators of the project, and hopefully from there on, things will work by themselves…

If you think you’d like to tackle any aspect of SK2 development (including possibly porting it to other platforms), here is your chance. Speak now or go back to more fruitful and life-rewarding endeavours forever.

Oh, and as for the “reasons”, well, here they are:

Continue reading

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Location: Hair of the Dog, Golden Gai’s one and only true punk bar.
Yi and I having a heavily inebriated wednesday evening night out, group of young Japanese boys discussing their band’s next club night on the other side of the bar, 時計じかけのオレンジ projecting to the tiny corner screen, random punk score blaring through the speakers…

Barmaid: [handing a menu-like list of all-time punk records] Please pick anything you would like to hear from that list.

Dave: Huh… let’s see… I don’t know… how about Japanese punk…?

Yi: [showing rather random entry in the list] Hey! that Japanese punk band’s called So-Do-Mu!!! Tee hee hee…

Dave: Yay for Sodomu…

Yi: Tee hee hee…

Dave: [to the barmaid] How about playing some “Sodomu”…

Barmaid: Sure, Right on its way…

[couple minutes of fumbling around the mp3 collection on the computer, then finally the track changes…]

Yi: Hey! that doesn’t sound so bad actually…

Dave: Yea, I’m not sure that part is really their own… Probably an intro of sorts…

[Young japanese guys mumbling things about ongoing music in their corner]

Young Japanese Guy #1: Blahblahblah, right?

Young Japanese Guy #2: Blahblahblah… No, I don’t think so, this must
be Chopin…

Young Japanese Guy #3: Chopin? Mmmnnn… Blahblahblah…

Dave: Actually, that’s Beethoven… Moonlight sonata.

Young Japanese Guy #1: Really? Oh… maybe…

Young Japanese Guy #2: Oh yea! of course…

Young Japanese Guy #3: Definitely Beethoven!

[All three guys: swooning to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata’s first movement, Adagio Sostenuto]

Dave: …

Dave: So yea… this is one of Tokyo’s most hardcore punk bar.

Dave: …

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One little-known feature of the Japanese Input tools on OS X is the ability to easily access a whole lot of unicode symbols without having to go dig through the Character Palette each and every time. If you enable Japanese Input (also known as Kotoeri) on your mac, hitting a keyboard shortcut (apple-space by default, I think) will toggle kana input on and off, whereby you can type japanese words in kanas and press the spacebar to pick a matching kanji (followed by ‘enter’ to validate the transliteration).
The nifty bit comes from the availability of UTF-8 characters that are not kanji, but nonetheless useful in a lot of situations. Just as any other kanji, typing a kana sequence (usually the name of the symbol in Japanese), followed by a press of the spacebar, will automatically let you insert the desired symbol.
Note: Apparently, most of these work equally well on Windows Japanese Input system, but I haven’t tested it.

For example, any Japanese girl knows all too well how to obtain the following cutesy icons:
おんぷ[onpu]　→　♬♩♪♫
ほし[hoshi]　→　☆★

On a more pragmatic note, you can also choose from a very complete set of arrows:
やじるし[yajirushi]　→　↑↓☝⇔ etc.

And one of my personal favourite: european currency symbols that would otherwise take half an hour to find on a standard US keyboard:
ゆーろ[yuro] →　€
ぽんど[pondo] →　£

Another very cool set for your scientific paper-writing needs:
すうがく[suugaku]／えんざん[enzan]　→　√∃∀≠±∇

Not to mention the entire greek alphabet:
あるふぁ[arufa]　α
べーた[be-ta]　β
がんま[ganma]　γ
でるた[deruta]　δ
しぐま[siguma]　σ

etc. etc.

You will find even more of these in this large (albeit probably not exhaustive) list of special character shortcuts.

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There is a lot I would like to write about the recent news from Ireland…
But frankly, I can’t be arsed and it would be nothing you couldn’t read elsewhere anyway.

So to keep it short and bitter, I’ll just say that, as a fierce Euro-hopeful, I’m doubly disappointed by this result. Not only because it drags the once promising European process further into the ditch where it’s been for the past couple years, but also that Ireland, of all countries, had to be the one responsible for doing so.

If by now you haven’t heard a thousands times how Ireland virtually owes a huge share of its current miracle economic success to the very European solidarity process they have just bailed out on, then you must have been sleeping for the past 20 years.

It’s bad enough seeing people and countries act as selfish me-first teenagers, but when said country was until not so long a clear beneficiary of such solidarity and decides to leave as soon as they are finally asked to pitch in… That’s both infuriating and slightly dispiriting about people.