Two phones in a week

As I mentioned previously, last week I had a SE P800 pickpocketed from me. And now, less than a week later, just after I had received a replacement SIM card from my mobile provider, I lost the other phone, a much cheaper one though, but still a blasted nuisance. I was on my way to a concert by a band called Bloomfields with my wife, and probably lost it somewhere on the way to the train station from home. We kept trying to call my phone, until at one point whoever had picked it up or stole it from me decided to keep rejecting our calls, I just called my mobile provider to deactivate the SIM card, lest the miscreant rack up charges on my line. Sheesh, two phones in less than a week. I just got myself a replacement SIM card with the same phone number, and spent slightly less than 2k for a cheap handset. I'll keep using cheap phones for the time being. At least a phone like this probably won't be worth stealing.

At any rate, these Bloomfields guys are a pretty cool bunch. They're sorta a retro band made of some young guys that generally play music from the 1950's and 1960's. They sported a look sort of emulating the Beatles from before 1963, before they got into psychedelia and the like. Music from a simpler time, arguably music from before the time that Don McLean calls the "day the music died."¹. Fittingly enough, one of the songs they sang was Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day," the song which gave "American Pie" its enigmatic chorus. All in all they gave us a wonderful performance full of energy. I invited my aunt and her husband for this, and as they actually lived in that era they probably enjoyed it even more than me and my wife did. During the concert, the art gallery sponsoring the concert raffled off a few paintings, and I actually won a painting... Oddly enough, the particular painting I won was the only painting of the lot which caught my eye as I looked at them behind the band. I imagine it'll be a nice bit of art for the new home I'm looking to buy later this year.

全く。一週間二台携帯を無くなった。俺は本当に馬鹿。。。
__
¹ In the spiritual sense, not the literal. The day the music died was February 3, 1959, but part of the Beatles oeuvre spiritually belongs to the era before that time, IMHO.

もうすぐ俺はお父さんになるよ！

Yes, it's true. My wife is (finally) pregnant. I should be a dad by late May to mid-June of next year. There's even a chance that my baby will have the same birthday as me. Can't really tell for sure as my wife uncharacteristically forgot to note the exact date when she last bled, but it must have been sometime early last month, so the doctor figures she'll give birth by late May or mid-June. This comes as something of a surprise as we both thought that it would be a while before it actually happened, and considered the possibility that either or both of us might be sterile, and the reality of this hasn't quite sunk in just yet.

This is tough, actually. Not just for her. I've found myself looking for ways to save more money here and there, cut out my frivolous expenses and be responsible like a father should be. It's tough, actually. Suddenly what once looked like a reasonable amount of money looks a lot smaller. My wife has gotten far more temperamental than even usual, but that's expected, I guess. I also have got to clean myself up somewhat. At least now my wife has been forced to stop smoking cold turkey, so now I can be back on track scaling down my smoking as well. I hope that after at most six months I can completely stop, and stop for good. Wish me luck on this.

I suppose it's true what they say. Getting married won't change your life so much, especially if you marry someone you've been steady with for a while. Having children will, though.

On another note, I've lost one of my phones. Again. This time, it appears that I was really pickpocketed, and I won't have some good, honest person return it to me like what happened before. Oh well. I guess they'll get their due eventually. And it was a Sony-Ericsson P800 at that. Maybe next time I should just get one of them cheapo phones instead of a pricey phone like that one. But then again, I've always wanted a phone that would work seamlessly on my trips to Japan, so that cuts down my choices for a new phone a fair bit. At any rate, I ought to get the line working again by later tonight, after spending a bit more of the money I have which I can ill afford to spend...

新世紀エヴァンゲリオン

I've just recently finished watching Neon Genesis Evangelion with my wife, although I had indeed seen this landmark anime several times over the years, even before I had met my wife. She enjoyed it, although she does admit that it would have been difficult for her to swallow had I showed it to her as a year ago when I first got her hooked on anime. She says that she understands it, sorta, and I get the feeling that I'm Bobby Newmark and she's Gentry when they start talking in Mona Lisa Overdrive:

You've been looking all over the Matrix, but I've been looking at the Matrix, the whole thing. I know things you don't.

While I think we're a long way from developing a comprehensive explanation of the meaning behind Evangelion at this point, even a subjective one, between us we may be able to develop one yet.

At any rate, while looking around for more Eva stuff, I ran into this page. I got Ayanami Rei, which doesn't surprise me (or my wife for that matter) one bit. My wife got Kaoru Nagisa, the fifth children and the seventeenth Angel. In retrospect it's a reasonable characterization.

More on 'Stuff'

I'm a regular reader of Paul Graham's writings, and he recently wrote a new essay about stuff. You know, stuff. The sort of cruft that tends to accumulate here and there as you live your life. Same as everyone else, I have too much stuff. Moving where I had, where I couldn't afford to keep as much of this stuff I had accumulated back when living in my mother's house has been something of an eye-opener. The only stuff I've actually got with me now is less than half a dozen books, less than half of the clothes I used to have in my closet, and a few gadgets. A week or two ago I moved nearly all my stuff to my mother-in-law's house, and the amount of it was absolutely astounding. Printed circuit boards and electronics back from when I was an engineering student doing embedded systems. Old cables and other obsolete computer equipment, including the old Commodore 64 and 1541 diskette drive that were my first ever computer. An old steel string guitar which I used to practice on, but whose neck was cracked and so it can no longer be properly tuned. Hundreds of books, enough to fill eight sacks. Piles of old diskettes that probably contain nothing of use even if they could be read. Even a few Zip disks back from the day when I had a working drive. Old tapes of heavy metal music that probably have It's extremely difficult to get rid of stuff like this, as much of it has attached sentimental value and the nagging feeling that I might someday need this cruft. My wife has even more stuff of this sort lying around that she's reluctant to dispose of... We humans are strange creatures. Things like these tend to control you rather than being useful to you.

Well, I'm moving again soon, now that the bank has finally decided that they'll sell us the condominium unit we've been looking at, and maybe I'll get my wife to agree on the things we ought to keep with us and the things we ought to dispose. It's gonna be difficult, as we're both equally sentimental, but perhaps it will feel like getting rid of five pound ankle weights that we've been walking around with all our lives.

Resharpening C

Most of my professional work in programming lately has been primarily in Ruby, and prior to that Perl and Java. I haven't seriously programmed in C in a long time, and suddenly now I find myself working on writing patches to a largish open source project written in C that we've been using for the past few years as the basis for one of our company's products. Hopefully these are just trivial patches to the code, but they do have to link into a library which I'm writing which implements a lightweight, custom network protocol which I've invented and proposed in order to improve the system's performance. Sockets programming in C. Fortunately, it seems that my skills have not degenerated as far as I had feared.

My previous experience with C, and with other projects written in languages with no automatic garbage collection has me worried about memory leaks, and so I try to use a library called Valgrind to smoke out memory leaks and bad dynamic memory usage. It takes a great deal of care to do this sort of thing properly, and frankly it's a lot of bother. Every new function I have to write needs to be documented as to what memory allocations it makes and who has responsibility for releasing this memory after it's done. I can imagine that this can quickly explode in complexity as more complex relationships between functions and data structures are established. This sort of thing is what led to the formulation of Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

Later. More lines of code to go.

Cの記憶装置プログラミングするのは難しいだよ。危ないですから気を付けて下さい！

Blindsided

I've been in the middle of a hectic week doing testing of code for a protocol described only by Japanese-language documents. It's been quite difficult, seeing as we (to be more precise, our client) are paying the other end of the integration testing serious amounts of money for every hour we fail to make this work, and we're being pressured to do this as soon as we can. The specification documents are fairly difficult going, even for native Japanese speakers we've consulted, and it was only through combining our own technical knowledge with language skills of native speakers did we manage to make headway, and eventually today the testing was concluded without incident. Last Friday though, was quite a different story.

We had to get some third-party middleware to take care of some of the things we needed to do, again only documented in Japanese, and for some complex technical reasons it was quite impossible to install it expeditiously on the Japan-side server which we had hitherto been using to conduct interop testing. We had to do it from here, inside a virtual machine to boot, although we're planning to eventually reinstall everything when we visit there again soon, and so I had to jump through a lot of hoops to allow the server to be visible to our Japanese counterparts.

And so the testing began. They told us that our system was not responding. We asked them to elaborate. They said that the system was timing out sending replies to them. We asked them to elaborate further, as we felt that nothing was wrong. They sent a tcpdump of the connection attempts on their side to us. We looked it over, and it showed that they weren't receiving any kind of SYN-ACK response from the three-way TCP handshake. That's odd, I thought, and ran a tcpdump locally to see what was going on. My tcpdump shows that my system is sending the SYN-ACK in response to their SYN, and we replied that they aren't sending us the ACK in response so that the TCP connection can complete. Checked possible TCP connection parameters in the Linux kernel of the box we were remoting to in Japan. Nothing odd, no tuning needed. Until three hours later one of us thought to check the routing table of the Japan box. Turns out it was missing the route it needed to go back to our counterpart's server, and yes, our system was sending the SYN-ACK, just to a gateway that didn't know where to route it! After that, connections started to properly come in, and there were no further serious problems, apart from the fact that it was already too late and testing had to continue on the following Monday.

It seems to be distressingly easy to get blindsided like that on a project where there's a communication barrier like what we had. I wonder how that can be avoided....

By the way, here's a bit of an update on the saga of Mr. M. Seems that he didn't take his eviction from our compound sitting down and he tried to call a bunch of his relatives, including his parents (who seem to be even more arrogant than him, if that were possible) and a few others, some of which were fairly influential police/military folks, to attempt to strong-arm the issue with our landlord. It seems that the very possibility of being civil and humble escapes this person. So here he is, with all his stuff out there in the middle of the front yard, with his relatives outside being restrained by local cops (the house is beginning to look like a crime scene, and many of our other neighbors have gathered to see what the commotion is about). He talks about whether our landlord is familiar with the laws governing apartments and the like, and she answers yes, she's a lawyer (albeit a non-practicing one), and has consulted with other lawyers whose specialty is that area of law, and says that those laws don't apply to our place, which is simple rooms for rent. In absence of such other laws the only thing that applies is the contract, which had a few simple rules which he had routinely and gratuitously broke time and again, and there's a clause there which allows the landlord to terminate the contract with a month's notice, which he had received. His month was up, get the hell out of here.

The showdown was getting somewhat ugly, and in haste he tried to check the pile of his belongings that were gathered in the front yard, and a pile of magazines fell out, for everyone to see. Pornographic magazines. Not just any pornographic magazines. Homosexual pornography. As in man to man, gay pornography. The landlord and her helper note this and call attention to this loudly enough for everyone around to hear, and this calms down the angry Mr. M, who immediately starts crying. Turns out that he really was gay, and had been hiding the fact from his family. In hindsight it seems to explain his arrogant behavior (overcompensation for his homosexuality). He confesses this, of all people, to my wife, whom he had befriended lately, and tells her that he has bigger problems than all this, as his family didn't know he was gay and he'd been keeping it from them because they would predictably disapprove...

As a family friend of ours who had visited later that day when the commotion died down said, "What a twist..."

全く。あいつは秘密なオカマでしょう。だから、あいつは傲慢無礼なやつだ。

Neighbors and Problems

Like I mentioned earlier, me and my wife are now living in a small compound somewhere in the heart of the city, with the landlord's house in the center and a cluster of small structures attached to it are being rented. We live in one of these little outlying structures, a fairly small place, probably something like 15 square meters floor area or somewhat less, which is why we've been needing to be imaginative to avoid clutter and mess in our home... Anyway, this post is about one of our neighbors, a certain Mr. M, who incurred the wrath of the landlord and has just been evicted.

Apparently this Mr. M just recently migrated from one of the provinces and had managed to move quite a sizeable amount of his belongings from there to his former apartment, which is about twice the size of the one where I live with my wife. he had been late on several rent payments, and proved a troublesome tenant in other ways, quarreling blindly and very rashly with the landlord about some rules (such as when his brother came home during the small hours and no one let him in because house rules forbade such late comings and goings). Eventually, after yet another late rent payment, which was apparently the last straw, he was told one month ago to prepare to pack his belongings and leave.

He didn't seem to be the least bit perturbed by this development. We had been on reasonably friendly terms with him, as he had lent us some of his DVD's which me and my wife enjoyed at late nights, and we shared a batch of gnocchi with mushroom tomato sauce I had made for dinner. We talked with him over this and even gave him the number of a moving service that we were about to use to move the rest of our stuff from my mother's house to my mother-in-law's, but he talked vaguely about "defending his rights" or some such nonsense. Oh well.

The fateful day came and went. He came home at 2am the night before and wouldn't be roused until late. Apparently he had found some sort of job or somesuch, and that seemed to concern him far more than his impending eviction and the fact that our landlord was serious and well prepared to carry out her threats on him. And so late last night he came home at his accustomed time, and when no one would let him in he called the police, and they had a bit of a showdown with the landlord. The proceedings turned farcical as the police he had called in to help wound up siding with our landlord and brought him out of the premises for trespassing. Probably within the day they'll move out all of his effects where they'll be brought to a police station or somewhere, and Lord knows how much of his stuff will be broken or lost or stolen until he finds another place to stay, hopefully doing so in such a way without again pissing off his new landlord.

全く。あいつは一体何を考えていたんだ。あのバカ。