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It feels kind of strange: I’ve not been in Japan so long and I already attend friend’s weddings… Komei is one of the people I have known the longest in Tokyo and a truly great guy. Best wishes to him and Karine!

by ·Comments Off on “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

Yea, Albert said that. And he was not the dimmest one of the lot.

Actually, I think he would have gladly included “blind patriotic rage” under the “nationalism” umbrella. The kind of nationalism that involved sticking a flag on your SUV and cheering at Dubya’s lame western one-liners while burping your Budweiser light in front of Fox News. The same kind of nationalism that will cause even more deaths this year in Iraq than in NYC on 9/11. A nationalism, that, like any self-respecting fanatical ideology, feeds itself on its own failure…

These past two months, I have stayed away from the most important topic of all, precisely while it was entering a particularly dramatic phase of its development. Of course, I did not stay shut for lack of a strong opinion on the war or its proponents. But I guess we all get progressively numb to disgust and consternation after a while. Further more, I did not really feel like contributing to what truely is a bit of an echo chamber… I mean, call me jaded, but do we really need thousands of identical “read this article”/”this is horrible” comments, each time a statement is made or a news is published. I’m all for popular democratic involvement, but what is the point of sharing your opinion if:
1) It is the same, verbatim, as a few thousands of other blogs/websites and does not bring any new insight on the question whatsoever.
2) It will only be read by people already sold to your cause and certainly not by people who might disagree (in fact, most of us do not write for those people).

Then why post now? Well, even if I do not put the slightest claim on any groundbreaking analysis or much originality altogether, there are a few small items I felt like sharing:

  • Regarding the Abu Ghraib “Scandal”: for as shocking and vile as these treatments are, anybody who claims to be surprised at such a behaviour being condoned by US officials is either lying through his teeth or very poorly informed. Abuses are not new, they are not even a secret. The only new factor is that, this time, the whole world is looking at it and it’s hard to keep it discreet. However, many papers (not in the US, need I precise) have been pointing for a long time at the constant trampling of the Geneva Convention rights in places such as Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo. Of course, US officials are quick to point out the “extra-territoriality” of Guantanamo, in effect preserving some appearance of respectability in the face of international law. But no legal loophole will amend the fact that the US have officially recognized using “physical intimidation” and other gulag-style methods to extract information from their illegally detained prisoners (most of whom have not been charged by any qualified tribunal). The US also does not hide the fact that they routinely use the “assistance” of other countries in interrogating their suspects. In practice, it has meant shipping “suspected terrorists” to countries known for their less-than-stellar record on human-right issues and let them handle the dirty work for them. A certain Canadian traveler who had the misfortune to tick off some US airport officers certainly know something about that.
  • Common knowledge too that US media coverage of the war in Iraq is laughably bad. Actually, US media altogether have long collapsed to a rather low level of propaganda-relaying for a conglomerate of various political and corporate interests. But that’s just my personal opinion (or rather: Noam Chomsky’s, and I share it).
    Of course, this peremptory judgement admits many exceptions, most notably Sy Hersh‘s amazing investigative work for the New Yorker (the dark irony that he had to be the very person to uncover the inconvenient Abu Ghraib scandal is certainly not lost on some people in Washington: history has strange hiccups sometimes).

    Otherwise, the Guardian. consistently brings such a strong cover of every aspects of US domestic and international policies that it will quite often precede US newspapers.

    For people who can read German, the Frankfurter Allgemeine keeps a slightly more conservative approach, though as critical of the US administration, of current affairs (I think a translation of major articles is also present on the English version of their site).

    Another great reading (in French) are the pages of Courrier International which culls the best of the press worldwide and presents a compilation of translated articles written by journalists of every nationalities.

    My personal favorite among politics/war-related blog is definitely Whiskey Bar were both content and form are a pleasure to read. Beside, any man who can quote both Monty Python and Pontecorvo’s movie Battle for Algiers in a perfectly meaningful political analysis has to be my hero…

And that will be it for tonight, as I will have to handle another kind of international conflict pretty soon if I do not close this computer immediately…

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Keitai PictureYet another entry that our non technologically minded readers might want to skip (read: any person sane enough to keep nighttime exclusively dedicated to sleep and/or reproductive purpose rather than inane technological musings and script coding).

First is a little contribution to this massive venture in ego stroking that are personal websites. Or ego-crushing, as the case might be, but that’s none my business if nobody cares about your collection of vintage dr Pepper bottles from the 70s and your logs remain desperately empty (tip: try incorporating a sex angle to the whole thing). Anyway, if you have a site and want to monitor who comes and see what, I put together a small php script to parse and display log results matching a specific text string.

Why bother when there are many much more advanced log parsing utilities out there? Well, because, oddly enough, Awstats, that I use a lot and thanks to which I know that at least one person a month gets here by searching for “pokemon rape pictures” in Google, Awstats is unable to give me something as simple as the number of single visitors to a specific URL on a daily basis. Despite the fact that it’s sometimes damn useful. For example to know how many so-called friends have been checking our announcement for this great party we are throwing in Yoyogi next week. Hence this script.
You can download it here.
Using it is ridiculously simple (provided you know what PHP and Apache logs are, otherwise I strongly suggest doing a bit of research beforehand). Drop as many Apache log files inside the “data” directory as you want. Direct your browser toward the “quicklogs” directory, appending “?match=something” to look for a specific word or expression. Results should come neatly presented with little horizontal bars for each day.
Oh and yea: as usual, Creative Commons GPL 2 license blah blah blah etc.

In other totally unrelated, albeit not any less geeky, news: I’ve been playing with fsv, a “3D File System Visualizer” for X-Window (for trivia fans out there, I reckon this is a clone of the actual SGI program used in the movie Jurassic Park… you know, when that girl knowingly explains “This is Unix! I know this.”). It does what you would expect and display directories and files on your desktop in a cool, though slightly dated, 3D look. You can move the camera around, zoom and explore directories.

Playing with fsv got me thinking about all these alternate file-browsing system and why nobody had come up with more insightful ways to present organized data yet. Explanation: while fsv or XCruise 3D navigation systems are definitely neat-looking and in fact somewhat useful, the major turn-off is that they use file size to decide what importance to give files (e.g. how big, how bright or how close to the camera it should be). In an era where most hard drives are filled with files of disproportionate sizes (a 15 megs MP3 here, 600 megs movie there and a 30k text file in the middle), this comes with little use and ends up creating useless scales where a few files take all the visual field and a myriad of others are barely visible.

Further more, most visual implementation (not all, but most) still rely entirely on the file hierarchy (i.e. what file is in what directory) to display files together, be it as 3D block (fsv) or stars in a virtual galaxy (XCruise). This is also thoroughly unproductive in those days…

Why not, for example, incorporate criteria such as:

  • Creation and last modification date/time. Both to judge the relevance of a given file but also to create artificial contingences between files: if you’ve edited two files, each one in a separate location on your HD, on the very same date and time, chances are they are somehow related.
  • File type: not just a dumb extension matching or similar, but a classification by type of media. If you start heading toward a jpeg file, chances are you are looking for a picture on your hard drive, therefore the system should privilege files that belong to that type (not only jpeg: any graphic files, possibly even movies or less closely related file types).
  • File Content: of course, that would become more of a performance issue, but, using a smart keyword indexing system, we could get files of similar content presented closer together.

Another thing of importance, I think, is that these criteria should be evaluated dynamically (or cached whenever possible, but it’s not a good idea for a file-system browser to take a half-hour parsing the HD each time it starts): navigation should never be interrupted to scan the content of a folder or read metadata. Relevant data should be integrated progressively as they are read and file representation morphed accordingly to fit their new status (e.g. for a program like fsv, block should grow or shrink, change color and move around when their contingence and relevance becomes clearer to the system).

It would be essential that such a system integrates a powerful search tool to help navigating or filtering. This should be easy to do but I have not seen much of this in any projects lately. With HD routinely containing thousands if not millions of files, it is just vital to have ways to query a certain file by its name or type.

All these features, conjugated with one of these 3D file-browser project could give a seriously kick-ass software and help get past their sole purpose as futuristic eye-candy.

And now for the complaining about how little time I got and how I’d love to implement such a thing one day soon… yea whatever…

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Movable Type 3 Developer Edition is out.

Stirred quite a controversy and lots of anger, huh…

While I think it’s perfectly reasonable that a company start trying to make some serious money off their product (gotta pay Mie after all :[/mfn] I think what most people are complaining about, is the steep pricing mechanism: of course there still is a free version, but if (like so many) you happen to have more than one author and/or more than three blogs on your site, the first price comes to $70 and goes very quickly up with each new blog/author.

Problem is, for as much as I like MT and appreciate the work that’s been put into it, $70 is, both psychologically and in regards to the competition, too high to justify such an investment. I mean, MT is a fine product, but let’s face it, most of its core could be coded (better and faster) by one or two people in less than a week (granted: with an interface nowhere near as polished). The only feature that really makes it stand apart is its flawless handling of multiple blogs/authors and good support of web standard technologies (xml, atom, xml-rpc etc). If you remove the former from the free bundle, it doesn’t hold a candle to some other free solution out there.

Further more, I personally think (and seem to be one of many), that a revamped commenting system is a tad light as the only prominent feature in a major update. It makes it hard to justify an upgrade.

To conclude, it might be more realistic and in tune with the market to offer a personal use license for under $30 that covers up to a dozen blogs/authors, while charging “real” commercial prices for corporate use. As for me, I think I will stick with this version for a while and might consider switching to WordPress in the future: its architecture is definitely nicer, and the fact it is open-source and written in PHP makes it infinitely more appealing to my inner-geek (plus the moral bonus of being able to contribute by coding)…

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Yet Another Party Announcement

If these upcoming party announcements are becoming a bit monotonous for you, that’s because they are, believe me… So this is the last one, I promise, and precisely to tell you where Party Notices will be posted from now on.

Let me introduce our brand new NativeTokyo page (that is, until we get nativetokyo.com launched). For now, it contains details for two parties in May:

  • Candy in Shibuya on Friday, May 21st
  • Free Day Party in Yoyogi Park on Sunday, May 23rd

    • you there!

    by ·Comments Off on Yoyogi Park Party

    Picture yoyogi01.jpg Here it is at last. I just finished a first version of the flash flyer for our May 23rd Party in Yoyogi koen.

    This flash anim is definitely not a work of art. There are many things I am not quite happy with, and I kind of botched the sound editing. But this will have to do, as I’m a tad busy trying to ingurgitate a few hundred nasty pages of applied mathematics and quantum mechanics in time for next month’s finals. All this, naturally, on top of my regular full time job and musical activities.

    The skinny:

  • Music will definitely be on the house side, with a pretty wide range of deep, funky and latino beats, maybe some electro and probably a bit of progressive (though not before later in the evening) along with other old school stuff to cap the evening. Overall, definitely of the easy-to-groove on variety, and most definitely NOT trance.
    In fact the subtitle to this party could very well be “NaTP – Not a Trance Party“… ’cause there won’t be an inch of it… got enough of that around there.
  • The spot is really damn cool: in the middle of the trees, a bit secluded. Nothing to do with the concrete area in front of the NHK building where the trance parties take place.
  • We’ll be there before noon and probably start actually playing around 2pm. No actual plan to stop it at any set time. Will depends heavily on conditions. But it should go at least past sunset.

    • More details soon enough, along with a map. Send me a note if you wanna receive an update.