Parsed Participle

The Who ended the Japan leg of their 2008 Tour with tonight's concert at the Budokan. I was actually not aware that they were now down to only two members (bassist Entwistle died in 2002) - Townshend and Daltrey.

The show was pretty much fantastic. The band was super-tight, the legendary showmanship was there, the sound was excellent, despite the high volume - the levels at the Budokan are much more bearable than a monstrous venue like the Tokyo Dome where I saw the Police perform earlier this year. The Budokan is also relevant because it's where so many great bands have performed in Tokyo. This was where The Beatles made their debut in Japan. Apparently, this is The Who's first visit to Japan. Unlike the Beatles, and the countless British bands that blessed Japan with concerts and tours in the 70's and 80's, The Who never made it here until now.

Roger Daltrey noted this fact with regret as he expressed how impressed he was by this "beautiful city and it's wonderful people."

The Budokan was as I expected: that Showa-era feel and interiors of a building constructed in the 60's. It wasn't hard to imagine the Fab Four walking around in it's corridors, since the place has probably never been renovated since. I'd seen videos of performances at the Budokan earlier (most notably Dream Theater and Yellow magic Orchestra), and it really does have that 'rock-and-roll' history feel. Before the show began, Thilo and I looked around at the mixing consoles, trying to guess what kind of software all that impressive array of equipment was running. We noticed the R.A.F Roundel motif everywhere.

The set began with Can't Explain, at a volume loud enough that made it impossible for me to excitedly ask Thilo if he'd heard/heard of the Scorpions cover version. The sound was muddy when it began but smoothened out rapidly. Maybe it was my ears getting used to the volume, but the later into the show we got, the better the vocals and guitar tone sounded. Pete Townshend actually changed guitars for every song - all Fender Stratocasters except for the acoustic guitar that appeared in the second encore. Despite their age, their on-stage antics were almost identical to what you can see in footage of their 70's performances (ask YouTube for Baba O'Riley) - Windmill strokes, and Thilo joking that 'a wireless mike would not work for him (Roger Daltrey).'

Obviously the most brilliant part was Baba O'Riley and the performance of a significant part of Tommy in the first encore.

I've noticed that while enjoying myself obviously make me happy, seeing other people enjoying themselves (to a greater extent than I am) actually not only makes me happier, but adds to it a warm, fuzzy feeling. I realized this during the ASIA concert in February 2007, when this forty-something lady in front of me simply went wild when the music began. Today, there was this quiet, fifty-something unassuming gentleman next to me, I guessed either a salary-man or a mid-level executive of some local company - who had come alone after a normal day of work, and I imagined that most likely he was suffering from that guilt associated with leaving the Japanese workplace earlier in the evening than is usually expected, skipping the almost regular overtime. When Baba O'Riley broke out, he went nuts, in a good way. I mean, imagine a suit-attired man like any other fellow you are squeezed against inside a crowded train, and here he is, sleeves rolled up, jacket thrown off and ecstatically singing along next to me, waving his arms in that rock and roll high. There's too much sentiment and joy to classify an experience like this as 'entertainment'.

Richard Wright, the pianist/keyboard player of Pink Floyd, died of cancer a little over a month ago: In Japan, at least one article in the local media referred to him as the 'ear' of Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd's music colored my view of the early adult experience, and despite not having listened to any of it for several years now, they remain one of the few bands from my classic-rock phase that I can still listen to with the same level of emotional connection.

At a time when keyboard solos were being done to death by all the other British progressive rock bands, Richard Wright was unique in his sense of coloring and complimenting the Floydian sound in unobtrusive, perfectionist yet emotionally powerful ways.
I've spent the last thirty days listening to a great deal of music from Pink Floyd's 70's phase: from Meddle to Animals - but with special attention to those fabulous sections where Gilmour and Wright harmonize (Us And Them, Echoes), and also where Wright sings lead - In Time for instance, his articulation of Roger Water's classic line about 'Hanging on in quiet desperation..'

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say

The Classic Albums documentary on the making of The Dark Side Of The Moon features interviews where Alan Parsons takes these best vocal sections apart on a console, while Wright himself demonstrates how he borrowed a chord from Kind of Blue for Breathe.

Not that I was hoping to see a Pink Floyd reunion concert anytime soon (I think they all gracefully gave up that idea a few years ago), but one can't help feeling, as Waters himself states - that Rick's was a premature death.

I'm watching Echoes / Live at Pompeii: great organ sound, great harmonized vocals, no shirts on.

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me.

Another break-in, this time by a brute-force SSH password-guess. A rarely used user account called neo was logged into from 79.116.242.2, and was running a process that showed up like:

neo  3995  0.0  0.0   1592   4 ?  S  Oct20   0:00 ./ulib

I wonder what it was actually doing. A cursory inspection of it's open file descriptors showed nothing interesting:

# ls -l /proc/3995/fd/
total 3
lrwx------ 1 neo neo 64 Oct 25 07:43 0 -> /dev/pts/1 (deleted)
lrwx------ 1 neo neo 64 Oct 25 07:43 1 -> /dev/pts/1 (deleted)
lrwx------ 1 neo neo 64 Oct 25 07:43 2 -> /dev/pts/1 (deleted)

The login occurred 5 days ago:

44571:Oct 20 19:17:08 faizkazi sshd[2972]: Accepted keyboard-interactive/pam for neo from 79.116.242.2 port 3106 ssh2
44572:Oct 20 19:17:08 faizkazi sshd[2986]: (pam_unix) session opened for user neo by (uid=0)

Thanks for sharing this, Praveen.
http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/toms-essay/index.html

Me and my sister grew up listening to songs like Luka, though we never knew what they meant for years. Suzanne Vega talks about her other hit (she describes herself as a two-hit wonder) - Tom's Diner, and the role it played in the development of the MP3 format. She also talks about her trouble with technology, and her tech-savvy mom.

The warm-and-fuzzy factor would be complete if only MP3 were a free format, though. A very interesting read, nevertheless.

My parents visited me in Tokyo for a few days last week. I've been here close to 5 years now, and this was their first visit.

• Bikkle turns out to be a big hit with Mom and Dad.
• Dad also liked Calpis

  From Wikipedia
  In English-speaking countries the beverage is sometimes called "Calpico," because "Calpis" may sound like "Cow Piss".

• Predictably, Kyoto did not excite them too much. Ryokan food, while delicious to the initiated, is in hindsight not the easiest way to introduce authentic Japanese cuisine to first-time visitors.
• I learned that to leverage the JR Rail Pass to be able to ride the overnight, undersea, and scenic train called the Hokutosei that connects mainland Japan to Hokkaido, one must book tickets well in advance. Both the Hokutosei and it's luxury counterpart, the Cassiopeia, were booked out for weeks.
• Surprisingly, Hokkaido food was a big hit: Lamb Shabu-shabu, Hokke, even Soup Curry.
• Unsurprisingly, 'Soft Cream' (on the drive to Lake Toya, venue of the G8 summit) was a bit hit.
• Onsen! Not the best hotel we'd been to, but a pretty good introduction to the whole hot-springs experience.
• Oddly enough, my father (a hands-on electronics veteran) was largely unimpressed by Akihabara. This, despite the fact that I showed him all the tiny component shops.
• I realized that the JR Rail Pass is not very useful unless you travel like crazy. By train.
• Tofu was a hit with only Mom.
• Tokyu Hands, Loft and Mujirushi were naturally bit hits with both my parents.
• Other than Kyoto and Sapporo, we did not get to have too much local food. Luckily, mom and dad were suitably impressed by the western food available in all three cities: We had a great lunch at a mom-and-pop run Yoshoku-ya-san (Yoshoku is western-influenced food with a Japanese flair, that became popular in Japan during the Taisho era) in Kyoto; went to Royal Host in Sapporo, and in Tokyo my mom and and dad discovered that Turkish and Italian food is great.

If you happen to be curious about Strawberry Cones, a Pizza delivery chain in Japan, not unlike Dominos - my advise to you would be to curb your curiosity! Their pizza is terrible and overpriced. They call themselves

"The worlds best pizza and ice-cream since 1983."

Of course, if the caption did not mention pizza then nobody would figure out what Strawberry Cones actually delivers. I don't know about the ice-cream (gelato presumably) but the pizza is simply bad.

I just found this surreal photo of me sharing dried squid with a dog in the Thar Desert.

I believe this was in December, 2005. The sand dunes are the ones a little outside Jaisalmer, Rajasthan. I distinctly recall sleeping tent-less, and that it was very cold.

I made a mistake today that I always feared I would. I walked into an Izakaya this evening, expecting that I could order the same sort of things they serve during lunch - Soba and Tempura set menus.

Many Izakayas transform into simple restaurants serving regular inexpensive meals during the day, especially during lunch time on weekdays. Though I had noticed that about this place, I had only so far been there during lunch time, so nothing stopped me from walking in at 9 PM hoping to get myself some Soba/Tempura.

This can be awkward on many levels: dress-code is never explicit in such places, but one still stand outs out wearing a T-shirt and jeans, when everyone else is still in business attire after a hard day's work. The other thing is that Izakayas are not just about drinking, but the group ritual of drinking together. I was the only person there by myself, and only because it would have been too rude to walk out right after walking in.

Still, it had been a while since I'd been to one; mostly because of the relatively low profile I have been keeping at least where the social life around work is concerned. Izakaya food, which is basically healthy, small-plate dishes usually meant to accompany drinks, is very innovative and one requires a certain amount of knowledge to be able to order properly, so I had to sort of wing it.

That awkwardness behind me, everything was simply delicious, not surprisingly the Tempura no Moriawase. I accidentally ordered the Wafu-Shumai, which was rather amazing too. Not a mistake that I am regretting too much at this point.

I have no idea why Bikkle seems to have become my favorite drink these days. Bikkle is a yogurt-like drink sold (apparently) only in vending machines in Japan; there seems to also be a version sold in a conventional PET bottle in the convenience stores, but while I can't explain why, I am sure that the glass-bottle vending-machine version tastes much better.

Having discovered that there's a 100-yen vending machine nearby that sells it, it's been a constant rate of two bottles a day. It also seems that I'm not the only Gaijin who is a big fan of this drink: I could list a few people, but maybe I'll simply hope that Google leads other Bikkle lovers to this page.

As someone who has maintained his set of 'dotfiles' faithfully for a few years now, window-manager choice and configuration has been of great importance. I used FVWM for a few years, finally switching to Sawfish somewhere in 2005. My sawfish configuration mimics what I had set up in my fvwm days rather closely, and sporadic periods of messing around with settings have been the only (enjoyable) disruption to my otherwise very productive computing life (as far as my Desktop environment is concerned).

I switched to Sawfish simply because it's scripting language, librep is a Lisp - one that I had been spending many commuting Zaurus hours on. Life has been very good with this the way it is.

Until I read yesterday's LTU article a post that talks about side-effects in imperative languages that cause closures to capture variables in less-than-desirable ways. It was not the actual post itself, but a link to a series, with one interesting post featuring a tour of Haskell and a rather fabulous example to use as a working demo program: XMonad, a really good window manager written in and extensible in Haskell:

• Windows are automatically tiled
• Mouseless
• Configurable (even in real time), using Haskell

I'm tempted to try it; given todays large displays, arranging windows with your mouse just feels silly.

Imperative-style Iterations and closures don't mix well

The undesirable form of variable capture that Erik Meijer describes is, I think, a lot to do with supporting closures in languages where C-style iteration is still relatively a norm. The for (i = 0; i<10; i++){ /*..*/ } lets you use the i as a block scope variable while it remains a part of the mechanism of the iteration. It's easy to reproduce this in Perl (the language which is many things to many people), if you use the C iteration idiom:

my @arr = ();
for (my $i = 4; $i < 7; $i++) {
    push @arr, sub {
        return $i;
    };
}

for (my $i = 4; $i < @arr; $i++) {
    my $f = $arr[$i];
    print $f->(), "\n";
}

But the idiomatic way does away with this problem; and things are better now that we don't have to get distracted by the iteration mechanism: map and grep where one can:

my @arr = map {
    my $i = $_;
    sub {
        return $i;
    }
} (4..7);

print $_->(), "\n" foreach @arr;

Javascript may not have map/grep, but for Functional-style iterations, libraries do a great job of providing such utilities. Prototype.js comes to mind.

var delayedActions = [4,5,6,7].map(function (n) {
    return function (i) {
        return i;
    };
});

In fact this is where these closure-ish APIs shine - they overcome Javascript's problem (i.e., variables only have function scope) by expressing loops functionally.