Cameron Beccario

Never stop moving

cambecc — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 12:25:00 GMT

It's been a year since I left Microsoft and moved to Japan to study Japanese at Yamasa. Now that my year-long studies have completed, I have moved to Tokyo (just this past Tuesday!) for a job doing IT design.

In the spirit of change, my blog has also moved and can be found here: http://journal.nullschool.net/

Can I promise great articles, well-formed prose, and witty comments? No. But I like the colors.

IsNot patent

cambecc — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 07:32:00 GMT

I can't stand seeing my friends slammed on Slashdot yet again, so I'd like to say something about the "IsNot patent" fiasco. Paul, Amanda, and Corneliu are some of the nicest people I know, and I had the pleasure to work directly with them for several years. The "IsNot patent" is the result of a broken system and a litigious software industry, not the selling-out of unprincipled applicants.

Analyzing the aggregate music tastes of Mac, Windows, Linux users

cambecc — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 05:00:00 GMT

Recently, a friend of mine introduced me to Audioscrobbler. Using an audio player plug-in, your music choices are collected and compiled into an overview of your musical taste, accessible from the Audioscrobbler website. The website also displays a list of neighbors--users with statistically close musical tastes. Friendster for music.

Groups are another interesting feature of Audioscrobbler. By joining a group (voluntarily), my music taste is combined with other members to create an aggregate musical profile of the group. Curious, I decided to look at the musical tastes of three groups--Mac, Windows, and Linux--to see if I could learn anything about the psychology of their users.

Presented with the top 50 favorite artists for each group of Mac, Windows, and Linux users, I first removed artists common to all three. For the record, those were:

Radiohead

The Beatles

Modest Mouse

Pink Floyd

Coldplay

Metallica

Nirvana

Depeche Mode

Green Day

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Muse

Evanescence

Led Zeppelin

Franz Ferdinand

Tori Amos

Second, I looked at the top 10 remaining artists in each group. This should give us a good profile of OS users' musical tastes:

Mac	Windows	Linux
David Bowie	Bushido	Iron Maiden
Beck	Alexisonfire	Rammstein
Pixies	Iron Maiden	Nightwish
周杰倫	Rammstein	Eels
Air	Linkin Park	Nine Inch Nails
Björk	In Flames	Lloyd Banks
Death Cab For Cutie	Elliott Smith	Dream Theater
菅野よう子	Nightwish	Blind Guardian
Bob Dylan	Incubus	Placebo
R.E.M.	Foo Fighters	Dream

As somewhat expected, the Mac group features a definite indie streak. Many of these artists blaze their own paths, such as Bowie, Beck and Björk. After all, aren't these people who think different? Also not surprising is the political rebelliousness symbolized by Dylan and R.E.M. You think they voted Bush? Hell, no. And I'm willing to bet neither did your average Mac user. It seems anime is popular, too; Kanno Yoko (菅野よう子) is apparently a famous anime soundtrack composer. I have no idea why Jay Chou (周杰倫) has such a strong showing. I've never even heard of the guy.

Windows and Linux users seem to be pretty angry people, Rammstein and Iron Maiden being highly ranked on each list. Who can blame them? Linux folks like to claim moral superiority, and this irks Windows users. On the other hand, Windows users don't care about command prompts and compiling kernels, and this irks Linux users ("they should care dammit, freedom of humanity depends on it!"). But certainly their musical tastes must differ somehow. With so many artists in common I couldn't detect a difference, so I went back to the original top 50 lists and selected the top uniquely-occurring artists. What remains is the true "essence" of the groups' musical tastes:

Mac	Windows	Linux
David Bowie	Bushido	Eels
Beck	Alexisonfire	Lloyd Banks
Pixies	Incubus	Dream
周杰倫	Foo Fighters	Grandaddy
Death Cab For Cutie	Blink-182	梶浦由記
Bob Dylan	Papa Roach	Goo Goo Dolls
R.E.M.	Korn	A Perfect Circle
The Cure	Avril Lavigne	Ben Folds
DJ Shadow	Rage Against the Machine	Motorworks
The Clash	Bad Religion	Styles

The Mac group retains its indie rebelliousness (note inclusion of The Clash and The Cure). They probably have a hard time getting along with people outside of their "in-group". The Windows and Linux tastes are still hard to differentiate, so I looked up the "mood" of each artist at allmusic. If mood is any indication of the disposition of listeners then the results are oddly appropriate. Windows users are hostile, raucous, confrontational, nihilistic, angry and angst-ridden. On the other hand, Linux users are messy, cerebral, quirky, earnest, greasy and menacing. Well I guess that settles that.

Installing Japanese Keyboards on Windows XP

cambecc — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 01:32:00 GMT

A little while back I bought a Japanese keyboard to use with my laptop while docked. It's a Microsoft Basic Keyboard 1.0A, with 109 keys. Not only does it have more keys than a standard US keyboard, but the layout is slightly different (such as the location of the apostrophe ' and at-symbol @ keys). To enable this layout in the US version of Windows XP, I configured IME by adding the Japanese keyboard layout to the Japanese input language service. Unfortunately, this didn't work. A bit of searching turned up this very helpful page written by Michael Eng for installing Japanese keyboards on Windows XP (scroll down to the bottom of the page since it also contains instructions for NT4 and Win2k).

Not only must you add the Japanese layout to IME, but you must also install a Japanese keyboard driver. Here's the set of instructions, updated to Windows XP SP2. Of course, use at your own risk.

1. Navigate to Start->Control Panel->Keyboard
2. On the Hardware tab, click Properties (note that the current driver is probably "Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard")
3. On the Driver tab, click Update Driver...
4. The Hardware Update Wizard launches. When it asks if Windows can connect to Windows Update to search for software, select "No, not this time" and click Next
5. Select "Install from a list or specific location (Advanced)" and click Next
6. Select "Don't search. I will choose the driver to install" and click Next
7. Uncheck "Show compatible hardware"
8. Select "Japanese PS/2 Keyboard (106/109 Key)" from the manufacturer "(Standard keyboards)" and click Next
9. Click Yes to continue with the installation when the warning about installing incompatible device drivers appears
10. Click Yes to continue with the installation when the warning about replacing PS/2 mouse port drivers appears
11. Click Finish and reboot

A friend of mine said he didn't need to jump through these hoops, that his Japanese keyboard worked out of the box on his US WinXP machine. Not so in my case. It's interesting that step 7 is required; Windows seems unable to detect that I have attached a Japanese keyboard. In fact, if Windows could detect it, this whole workaround probably wouldn't be needed.

I'm at war with the washing machine

cambecc — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:39:00 GMT

I'm at war with the washing machine. No matter which countermeasures I take, this "home appliance" manages to stretch my clothes to extreme and unfair proportions. It is particularly brutal to t-shirts.

I'm not the only one. Each apartment in my building has the same model. Every so often I spot a student, a fellow soldier from the front, with a t-shirt draped loosely around their neck like a toga; a t-shirt sent forth into the watery void only to return a changed garment, a v-neck vest or a one-piece skirt.

The machine, a Sharp ES-25E, consists of a main washing tank with an impeller at the bottom. The impeller, which periodically changes direction, creates a watery vortex of death in which my hapless clothes become "clean". They also become stretched in a way similar to when approaching the event horizon of a black hole. The impeller can be set between two levels, strong and weak, both of which elicit evil cackles from the machine. Down at the 100 yen shop, you can buy nylon-mesh bags for protecting clothes. In theory this reduces the stresses experienced when spinning through the vortex but, alas, it merely delays the inevitable.

If I had a dryer, I could purposefully shrink the clothing back into a reasonable shape. Hmm... Perhaps the war is not lost.

Outsider's Eyes

cambecc — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 06:32:00 GMT

It may sound strange, but odd-numbered years always bring me better fortune than even-numbered years. Sorry, I won't elucidate.

I've returned to the United States for the holidays to visit family and friends. Having spent the previous 9 months living in Japan, I've wondered how this experience has changed my perception of the US. What would I see differently with outsider's eyes?

First thing that struck me is the disproportionate amount of over-the-counter/prescription drug commercials on TV. No matter what ails you, it seems there's a drug to help.

If English is the national obsession of Japan, then dieting must be the national obsession of the United States. I realized this when drinking some diet orange juice for breakfast. Diet *orange juice*? It seems everything comes in a diet form these days. Furthermore, newscasts report the latest findings on diet science, diet technology, diet success stories, etc., etc. Don't forget the commercials for exercise equipment, dieting books, and dieting drugs (see above).

Speaking of diet, American cuisine is drenched with dairy products. Not that I'm complaining; I love dairy. Fried cheese anyone?

It seems 1 out of 10 cars has a magnetic "hero-ribbon" or "flag-ribbon" stuck to it.

In Japan, the ambient noise is loud and the people will rarely tell you exactly what they think. In the US, the people are loud and usually tell you exactly what they think (about you).

America contains people who think voting for George W. Bush was a good idea. As far as I can tell, Japan does not.

Finally, the American lifestyle is luxurious. Living spaces are huge. Transportation is super-convenient, assuming you own a car, and cheap (if I wanted to drive 45 km on the highway in Japan, it would cost me $14 in tolls). Food is cheap and portions are large. Also, houses can be heated all day long. In Japan, I can afford to heat my bedroom, but not my kitchen or bathroom. This makes for some really cold showers in the morning (which perhaps partly explains why Japanese prefer to bathe at night).

People to thank, blogs as an emergent social network

cambecc — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 00:31:00 GMT

Meeting people and building social networks is what makes conferences like TechEd really valuable. Last week was no exception. I had the privilege of meeting and talking with quite a few nice people. Thanks to everyone on this list:

[伊藤由起子] Yukiko Ito, ZEST Inc.

[宇田豊和] Toyokazu Uda, Fuji Xerox

[柿沼雄一郎] Yuichiro Kakinuma, ITMedia

[河端善博] Yoshihiro Kawabata, SQL Server MVP (blog)

[片岡真二] Shinji Kataoka (Pegasus Laboratory)

[北端智] Satoru Kitabata

[小島紋] Aya Kojima, INETA Japan

[杉下朋年] Tomotoshi Sugishita, Visual Basic MVP (PAPA'n VB)

[鈴木祐巳] Masami Suzuki, Microsoft

[沼口繁] Shigeru Numaguchi, Microsoft

[堀田健也] Kenya Horita, ASP .Net MVP (Hollytown)

[福王寺聡明] Tomiaki Fukuoji (FooPah!)

[山崎明子] Akiko Yamazaki, NEC, presented the VB 2005 session

[優一吉原] Yuichi Yoshihara (Elfaria Development Studio.eds)

Special thanks go to Fukuoji-san, Sugishita-san, and Yoshihara-san for putting up with my horrible Japanese abilities for so long. Also to Ito-san for inviting me to TechEd and and Kawabata-san for inviting me to the Comega panel discussion.

At the TechEd 10th Anniversary party, I was introduced to a bunch of people, one of whom had drawn my likeness in character-form on a paper plate and handed it to me along with his business card. No name, just a blog: TimberLandChapel. [UPDATE: the owner is [今井聡] Satoshi Imai--thanks for the email, and the drawing!]

There are many other cool people I met, but either I don't have their business card or I drank a little too much at the party. So, ごめんなさい!

This got me thinking a little bit (the social networking, not the drinking, although that happens sometimes too). Closed social networks such as Friendster and Orkut are exactly that: closed. And they have a tendency for major branches of their networks to die off. But blogs and blogrolls can be said to constitute an emergent, loosely defined social network owned by no one entity. In much the same way that RSS is used as a standard for publishing (allowing aggregation and subscription, among other things), wouldn't it be nice to have a standard way of describing the social relationships between two people, i.e., two blogs? This standard could facilitate back tracking, privacy permissions (see LiveJournal), and who knows what else. Perhaps it already exists?

TechEd part 2: Comega and VB

cambecc — Sat, 11 Sep 2004 02:05:00 GMT

Finished another day here at TechEd. Saw a presentation on Visual Studio Team System. Wow. No wonder the blogosphere is ablaze with Team System discussions. Where did they find the time to build all that stuff?

I was fortunate enough to be invited by INETA Japan to participate in a panel discussion on Cω, a "strongly typed, data oriented programming language that bridges the gap between semi-structured hierarchical data (XML), relational data (SQL), and the .NET Common Type System (CTS)." I began thinking what VB could do with Cω-like features. Some of the features such as streams, anonymous structures, and choice types seem an ill-fit for VB, but the ideas of concurrency and integrated SQL expressions are particularly appealing. Imagine an application whose memory store is implemented as a database. The benefits are obvious--sophisticated search, sort, scalability, and persistence are automatically available. Combine the database server with a garbage collector and you have a generalized memory manager, albeit one suited for web applications spread across geographically distant servers. But programming such a model today is difficult because the interface between source code and database in most languages is too complicated, not only for fetching and storing data but also for doing it in an asynchronous manner. A language that simplifies this code/database interface would be quite compelling.

The Cω feature which bothers me most is support for XML syntax. XML may be the best thing since sliced bread, but this seems done more for the sake of fashion than functionality. I see the benefits, but XML... inlined in my source code? Bleh. It's not aesthetically pleasing. I dislike XML comments for the same reason (but unfortunately they made it into VB). Perhaps I eat my own words here; SQL syntax seems similarly bolted on. I agree, but it's the idea of closing the code/database gap which is compelling, not which specific syntax is used.

Overall, though, Cω looks really neat. In particular, the SQL integration elicited oohs and ahhs from the normally reserved audience. Thanks go to INETA Japan for inviting me to the discussion.

TechEd Impressions

cambecc — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 02:27:00 GMT

I've finished my last session for the day here at TechEd. Right now I'm staring out over Yokohama Bay where the expansive Yokohama Bay Bridge dominates the view.

I attended the VB 2005 session this afternoon to see what the audience was like and what kind of topics were discussed. The room, which sits about 1200, was probably 1/3 full (the same was true for the C# session immediately following). The presentation started out with demos of new language features such as My, unsigned types, operator overloading, and generics, and ended up discussing application settings and project related improvements. I sometimes forget that there is so much more to VB than the core language. The VB language and IDE team (the folks who do Intellisense, Edit & Continue, etc.) at Microsoft has historically been around 10 people in size, but there are 20 to 30 other developers in VB working on vital features such as Data, Project, and Deployment.

Talked with a few attendees after the session and asked what they thought about the new features in VB 2005. The favorite by far was Edit & Continue. I asked about Refactoring (prominently featured in C#) and the reception was lukewarm. My Japanese isn't good enough, so I couldn't figure out the reason why.

I am surprised with how many women are attending TechEd, and I don't know whether it's Japan or a general industry trend (maybe not). We, society as a whole, need more women working in IT. The industry simply cannot grow and innovate if 50% of society's intelligence resources aren't significantly involved.

More to follow tomorrow.

Tech･Ed 2004 Yokohama

cambecc — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 22:41:00 GMT

This week I will be attending TechEd 2004 Yokohama. The event runs from Tuesday, Sept. 7th, but I'll be heading out on Wednesday in time to attend the VB and C# sessions. Not sure exactly what to expect since everything will be in Japanese (I still feel like an absolute beginner despite my efforts to learn the language over the past five months), but I'm looking forward to it. If you're attending too, drop me a note. Hope to see you there!