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'.

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.

# 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)

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)

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.

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

A rather surreal breakfast

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.

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.

Bikkle, in retro-looking glass bottles. The Japanese (Katakana) text under the logo reads 'Bifidus'

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.

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

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";
}

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

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

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

John McCarthy will be giving a talk about the history of Lisp, at OOPSLA 2008 (The ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications), an event that I was already wishing I could attend. Is this the 'official' celebration, I wonder? Object-Oriented Programming owes a lot to Lisp, but then isn't Lisp so much more than just OO?

M.J.D (the author of Higher Order Perl) is apparently one of the keynote speakers. I'm beginning to wish I can still make it somehow.

For a late lunch on Saturday, we walked to Burger Mania:

Burger Mania provides authentic hamburgers while providing a diverse cafe experience that brings people together.

Despite having decided not to go to Hokkaido earlier that morning, we remained indecisive till late afternoon, before finally giving in. We bought Air Do tickets at 5:45 PM for a 7:15 PM flight; packed and left home by 6:15; Got to Haneda by 6:50, making it just in time.

So my sabbatical ends in the same place it began. Sapporo has great weather this time of the year, and there was more cat-sitting as I got a chance to improve my radio-controlled chopper skills.

I decided that this was a great time to overhaul my Zaurus, since I've been meaning to upgrade the OS to Ångström for a while now. I unearthed some interesting code that I probably wrote on a plane ride a while ago, but that I shall save for another post.

I also discovered a great Soup Curry restaurant. I notice that Wikipedia does not have an English entry for Soup-Curry yet. Must I start one?

I had missed the last conferences (in 2007, I was in Hiroshima working on yet another impossible-deadline project, which was memorable because it involved adventures in Javascript; in 2006, tickets were sold out too early), so this time I took no chances and bought my tickets well in advance (before my sabbatical even started).

I even submitted a few talk proposals, out of which a talk about multiprocessing/concurrency (entitled: "From POE To Erlang") was accepted for the 'advanced' track: There were three halls/tracks in all, and the scheduling and organization was really excellent: My talk on POE (The Perl Object Environment) was followed by a talk on XIRCD, which involved some POE code so that there seemed to be some continuity.

This was also the first time in some 5 years since I actually spoke to a live audience (if you exclude the odd presentation I sometimes make at work, in broken Japanese), since I live and work in Japan. The talk went OK, but suffered a hurried, insufficient preparation. Making slides isn't as easy as I remember. I was out of practice. A second talk was also accepted, not for the actual conference tracks, but for the arrival party, on the 14^th. Surprisingly enough, a Javascript talk; turns out that YAPC::Asia and the Perl community in general is very Javascript friendly. This Talk ('The Little Javascripter / Higher-Order Javascript') did not go too well at all; I ran out of time half-way through my slides (which I feared were not really complete). It turned out to be an expensive trial run, but a good learning experience.

But I hope the main talk made up for it. Special thanks to Ishigaki-san for the translations. POE really has been amazingly useful to me in the last few months, and I thought that talking about it would be a nice way to introduce Erlang to the Camel-folks. A lot were already in the know though; one lightning talk was on exactly the same topic (a POE and Erlang success story in Amazon), and while some people made strange faces at the Prologesque syntax, a couple of Erlang fans were nodding excitedly.

The Camel Folks

The great thing about YAPC is that you get to meet so many people. They say that this was the biggest YAPC yet. Meeting Larry Wall early on the morning of the arrival party day was especially memorable: I had no idea he would be showing up for the Tsukiji 7AM-sushi eating expedition, so imagine my surprise when he appeared out of nowhere and greeted me saying "Hajimemashite! Larry desu. Yoroshiku!" (I was probably the only person there that morning who he'd not met before). He's as funny as I imagined: When we arrived to find all the sushi restaurants closed, he expressed some mild dismay that his pun on the expression "shimatta!" had gone unnoticed. ('Shimatta' is Japanese for 'closed', as well as an expression for 'darn it!')

Me and Thilo got to meet him and Gloria Wall again, when we bumped into them at lunch time in Matsuya's.

Jesse was exactly like I imagined; bubbly and resourceful; Leon Brocard was surprised (pleasantly bewildered?) to learn that I use Devel::ebug, his replacement for the original Perl debugger. I took the opportunity to bounce off a couple of ideas I had (and a hack that I'd made and had been using) on it. Jonathon Rockway's lightning talk on here documents were pretty useful, and Ingy's talks were the most fun. pQuery is a great idea.

The speakers were invited to Dan Kogai's (the Encode.pm guy!) house (now reknown for it's fabulous view) for a weekend Hackathon; I couldn't make it but did show up for a few hours on Sunday evening. I did not have anything planned to work on, so I started messing with Devel::ebug and (after the heads-up from Jesse's talk) Carp::REPL as well. I was hoping to re-implement my multiplexer hack (A way to allow Perl debugee processes to connect to a debug server so that ebug clients can debug them) without POE (which ought not to be a dependency for something like a debugger, though it was tremendously useful in prototyping the idea). Not much progress, but great fun. These people are nice.

I get back to work from June, so that means that this is probably the only stretch of time I have (or might ever have) in Tokyo that I do not have to 'work'.

I reached Chennai late on the same night. I had tried to convince my parents otherwise, but they remained keen on picking up both me and my sister (whose flight was coming in at around 5AM, only a few hours later).

Me, on a rock-pier somewhere on the northern shore of Chennai, still within city limits, but further north than I've ever been before.

My goals for this trip are:

1. To pick up academic transcripts from both the Universities I graduated from while I was in Chennai: (a) University of Madras ('96-'99), Bachelor Of Electronic Science, (b) Pondicherry University ('01-'02), Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Applications
2. Meet with an ex-professor from (b)
3. Other than my folks and my estranged sister, spend time with, or at least meet:
   • Praveen Dass
   • Arvind Balan, who complains of London
   • Prasanna, who has now been through multiple baptisms of fire in a start-up
4. Sort out some personal finance issues, including an ugly mess that ICICI bank and BSNL seemed to have created (the same thing mentioned in this complaint happened with my old, dormant account itself; and while I cannot say that it cost me 'mental stress', it was a lot of trouble indeed.)

So Leg-3 is done; and only objective (2) has not been satisfied. Oh well.

I was supposed to get to Tokyo on the 21st evening, catch a night's sleep in my apartment, and then fly again the very next morning, beginning Sabbatical Leg 3 (Chennai, India). Had they not put me onto the Nagoya-bound flight (NW71), I'd have missed my flight to India for sure. But here I am now, in a train bound for the JR Nagoya station, with a reimbursement-promised Shinkansen (Bullet-train) printed schedule in my hand. They were waiting for me soon as I arrived at Nagoya and informed me that Northwest would pay for my Shinkansen ride back to Tokyo.

So, instead to arriving at Narita and taking a train to Tokyo, I ended up arriving at Nagoya and taking a (slightly faster) train to Tokyo!

Yurika and me took a bus ride to Washington DC where we spent a couple of days with a friend of hers. DC is a nice city to walk around in, and I walked great distances both by myself, and with Yurika and Omura-san.

Sakura at the Capitol.

Back in Manhattan, I was lucky enough to attend a colloquium at the Courant Institute (Where the NYU Computer Science department is located), which featured a project that makes the night sky search-able. It implements a search engine for astronomical images that uses geometric hashes (as opposed to words) derived from the pixels of the patterns that stars form in random images. Got a taste of what a CS lecture might feel like (and there was breakfast as well).

Funk: The Headhunters (sans Hancock, whose absence was noted in many ways) were playing at the Iridium on Broadway. I dragged (my cousins) Aamer and Zafar to see the second set. Earlier on the same day, Aamer had taken me on a guided walk around the West Village all the way up to the Meat-Packing District;

Zubair shows me the view of mid-town Manhattan from his lower-east apartment building's roof.

I will be back in Tokyo tomorrow, only to leave to NY for the second leg of my sabbatical; then back again to Tokyo for a mere day, only to leave immediately (on the 21st of April) to Chennai, India - where I will be meeting my 'estranged' sister, who has been lost now for some time, in various South American countries.

Of course, before I resume work again, there will still be a sabbatical stretch (leg 4) in Tokyo, from May 4th until the end of the month.

I had hoped I could squeeze Nagoya into all this (FLOPS 2008 is from April 14th to 16th), but that would certainly have been biting off more than I could chew.

A welcome trend: like several processors these days, more knobs seem to be appearing in place of buttons and menus, as is especially true for the ME-50 shown here. Note the per-effect stomp-pedals and their knobs, fashioned like a pedal board.

The only stomp-boxes I ever liked were the Boss OD-1 and (though I never owned one) the Tube-Screamer.

Of course, I am referring to overdrive here; all the other stuff - delays and chorus effects were another matter, but even then I rather liked the stomp-boxes compared to those nasty early guitar processors with their knob-less menu-and-mode-driven digital interfaces and displays.

This is why though I'd been in Japan for long enough (and this is where you can get almost any processor in existence. If you are a guitar enthusiast and have not discovered Ochanomizu yet, you should), I'd never sunk the cash for a processor.

However, a few days ago, for no apparent reason I found myself window-shopping at this guitar store in Shibuya, and even more surprising, a little later I found myself buying a guitar processor. I had never even asked to plug it in and see how it sounds. (Then as if to add one more tiny notch to the unexpectedness of the whole thing, I cycled home with the large box precariously half-stuffed into a bursting backpack)

It was the styling, the knobs, the 707-cockpit-like appeal of a very analog looking, metallic, clunky yet intuitive interface: meet the BOSS ME-50 Multiple Guitar Effects processor. Essentially a stomp-box pedal-board, only that it's all in one single unit, and no fussing with inter-pedal connecting cables and unwieldy power supplies. Construction is extremely rugged and the expression pedal feels great. The idea behind the interface (all knobs) is that you have a familiar, all-at-a-glance view of the settings on all the effects as you fiddle around for the sound you want. I imagine this is amazingly easier than any button-ridden processor, where each interface needs to be 'learned'.

Of course, the amp-modelling sucks (I'm sure it is fantastic and all that, it's just that amp modelling never appealed to me), but in a while I found great overdrive tones (the overdrive panel has an OD-1 mode) that suit me just fine. Oh, and delay is awesome: just like having a Boss Digital Delay built into a chunk of the unit; after just a few minutes of fiddling, I even figured out how to do the 'Slang' stunts (i.e., Jaco Pastorius' improvisations over a delay-looped 'rhythm track', as performed live in the track called 'Slang'). This is of course, meant to be a 'live' processor - that you plug into traditional amps, where most of the overdrive actually happens. Consequently, the amp-modelling is not the focus (which suits me fine). In the meantime, it sounds great through open-air headphones!

There are two things that I remember most clearly about those early days - one was that it was cold. I flew in straight from Chennai, India, a city known for it's winter-less, almost year-round hot-wet climate. It turns out that mid-February is the coldest time in Tokyo. The other thing was this sense of realization, this feeling of the gravity of the situation I'd put myself into; this big, yet ignored, "WHAT HAVE I DONE!" ringing loud in my subconsciousness.

I'd traded in a well-paying job, a life of comfort and familiarity, in the name of adventure. Not that there is anything remotely adventurous really, about spending your days in long meetings, not understanding a word being said around you, and having to work insane hours everyday. But in the beginning, all that was different. It really was an adventure, as anyone who decides to hit the ground running will attest to.

Every time I felt cold enough or hungry enough to ask myself why on earth I was roughing it out like the way I was, the only answer was that I did not want to let myself get further ensconced in the familiarity of the same old streets I'd known for a quarter of a century. Now put it like that, and you convince yourself that that's enough contempt bred to warrant an escape - And I had life so good back then in Chennai, in a way that one simply cannot appreciate, out of utter boredom.

But an adventure it was; in all the good senses of the word. I loved Japanese food, (and still do. Who doesn't?) revelled in observing the needless automation around me, the over-engineering, the attention to detail, the sheer number of things to see. One gets bored, or course, but my eyes were biased to technology, to details, constantly imagining how all those servo motors and hydraulics keep themselves hidden. I would write these massive, long emails about everything I was seeing and doing in Tokyo, cheesy writings that I am probably ashamed of right now, in the way that people who've lived in Japan for a few years mock newly-arrived, suitably bewildered Gaijins. I haven't written any of these mails now, ever since, in the fear that they might get discovered and laughed at.

Like I said, I'm a fan.

About the concert: Needless to say, it was a fabulous experience, the only real downside being that it's now over.

This was the first really big concert I've been to. Big in the sense of the whole Arena Rock sort of thing (not that one can label The Police's music itself as 'Arena Rock'; for the term has negative connotations) - I mean, I simply did not realize how far from the stage we were going to be until we actually walked into the Tokyo Dome - that place is huge. My first worry as soon as I laid eyes on the stadium was not that the band would appear as barely perceptible miniscule dots; it was the fact that the (a) It was going to be very loud and (b) However good the sound system turns out to be, clarity, dynamic contrast and sonic detail would suffer thanks to the physical constraints of having to fill such a large venue with sound. At least, that would be the case from where we were sitting (well, we only sat as long as we waited for Sting, Andy and Stewart to arrive). I instantly regretted not having sunk the cash for whatever premium tickets were being sold. Perhaps the sound would have been much better closer to the stage.

The opening act was Fiction Plane, and since I didn't know right then that the singer/bassist was Sting's son, I actually wondered for a moment why there was something vaguely Sting-ish about him. Unlike his Dad, though, it appeared that he put in quite a bit of time with his Japanese.
The band itself was OK, but the biggish-ness of the sound began to worry me. Since for the most part, I listen to Jazz these days, Rock, especially when played really loud (and that's usually at a level beyond the threshold of pain), sounds lacking in detail and feels hard to listen to at such volume levels.

But the sheer excitement of watching the band that wrote some of the most memorable songs of my childhood (though I really began to listen to them more closely past the age of 16) walk onto the stage, and break into 'Message in a Bottle', sans the big video displays (they came on only during the next song, "Synchronicity II"),

Streaks of color from the Synchronicity album cover

Message in a Bottle itself seemed like a bumpy start, performance-wise; (but like I said, it didn't seem to matter) I mean, the main guitar riff sounded muddled, and as is the case with so many big concerts, the first song ends up feeling like a sound-check - levels of this and that kept going up or down till they find their optimal position.

I've always thought that Synchronicity II was rock-anthem material, sound-wise at least, and performance-wise it was awesome. I'd picked up a copy of the programme, and in it it said that The Police had sort of worked out their mix of improvisation while keeping the songs as familiar-sounding as possible. This they got right. The improvisations were awesome (so long as you had not already seen them on those YouTube videos of earlier shows on the tour - these seemed to be rehearsal-time improvisations, not performance-time); During Synchronicity II, when Sting sings,

Sting appears on the monster screen:
We have to shout above the din of our Rice Krispies...

Grandmother screaming at the wall...

Stewart Copeland was utterly amazing. While Andy Summer's guitar sound did take a hit or two in terms of detail loss, the percussion was clear, precise and super-tight. Well I suppose it's one of the inherent difficulties of playing live as a 3-piece band - for the guitarist, I mean - you can lay down tracks in a studio, but on a stage a guitarist sometimes has to drop a solo or improvise in such a way that things do not sound empty. Look at any live performance of The Police from the 80's and you'll see what I mean. Maybe too high levels of sound really take away more than they give. Maybe even at the Tokyo Dome, the sound was probably superb on stage, coming out of the monitors.

Another thing is the song-writing value. Sometimes you know a song for it's lyrics; which have a certain context, an interpretation (that you may or may not even be right about). Some of this feels lost when performed in uniform, stadium-filling rock-anthem spirit: many of the Police's songs are in my opinion subject to this slight skew - when performed with an energy and spirit not really connected with the song. Let's face it: So many Police fans simply love the not-so-upbeat lyrical twist to the songs, which in their studio versions are laid out with sparseness and precision, preserving all the cynicism, imagery, and sometimes outright darkness. I suppose that these things, highly subjective that they are, are especially hard to get right, even if one so wishes, in a large adrenaline-charged concert.

He walk unhindered through the picket-lines today
He doesn't think to wonder why

Well I may sound confused and self-contradictory, but man, was it a brilliant show or what. Nothing feels sadder at this moment, than the fact that it's over and there's nothing quite as great to look forward to.

It turns out, programming is far more fun.

# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig

But my old impatience with hardware-shopping came back and got me. (have I ever mentioned the time I purchased a 21-inch IIyama monitor on the spur of the moment while waiting for a friend at Akihabara?) So given just 20 minutes before closing time, and my list of chipsets I started scanning the available products on the wireless section of BIC Camera. Now there are several difficulties in doing something like this:

1. Everything is in Japanese. And I only read a small subset of the Language.
2. Every card says it works with Window Vista, XP and 'even' 2000. (nothing else)
3. The actual hardware that a certain product uses is usually not mentioned on the packaging; (Unless it's Intel or something) so even if I know that a certain Realtek-based card is likely to work, it's no good unless the packaging mentions that the card is based on a something-or-the-other Realtek chip. (there are exceptions: Graphics cards always have explicit chipset information, or at least, the marketing name-space is mappable to what's inside)

('Atheros' also rang more than a bell; In at least one of my previous jobs, there was a project that involved the development of an Atheros driver. Needless to say, it wasn't a Free/Open-Source driver, and though I myself never worked on driver development, I actually remember integrating it (the kernel modules) into the base-system of some embedded router OS. Again, some product that we (our company) got paid for, but probably didn't go too far since it wasn't Free.)

And, as is typical of Tokyo, the snow looks nice and pretty for probably less than an hour or two, before it gets all dirty and slushy.