izzumorphed

vertical vs horizontal city models and sustainability

2007-12-13T01:37:00.000-08:00

There is a small article (in spanish) on this topic in today's edition of elpais newspaper.
Take a look. back to work

msnbc on the robo-sexual revolution

2007-10-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

Some reading for this week: a nice article (msnbc link) on robot-human relationship and their future. Includes some discussion on ethical issues as well. At some point the article mentions love dolls, which reminds me of real dolls. The future, the article claims, would be something like a real doll plus some electronics.

... what if we add some electronics to... realpolitik? :-)

xkcd

2007-09-21T15:13:00.000-07:00

After some nice time in Brasov -- doing some work -- I come back to update my blog with a link to this nice webcomic called xkcd, which I discovered looking at this most funny strip. You need to definitively take a look. The forums also seem quite interesting, dealing with topics such as math, physics or language, but also more general discussion.

lovely garden spider at high resolution

2007-09-11T02:55:00.000-07:00

There is a new guest at our place. It's a lil' nice european garden spider (araneus diadematus). My dad took this macro picture of our new mascot: (click to enlarge)

So sweety... :-)

eluveitie + others @ Alphen aan den Rijn

2007-05-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

Hi, just wanted to make you aware of this fine swiss folk metal band that goes by the name Eluveitie.

I had the chance yesterday to attend the Fear Dark Festivals concert at Alphen aan den Rijn where I could see them. It was my first contact with them and they are really impressive. Their variant of folk metal with death metal influences is really great and something quite refreshing in this scene. Of the other three bands that are in the list we did only see Drottnar and Thy Majestie. The problem I had with these two bands is that they abuse their own style. The Majestie plays a variant of power metal that is too bombastic and pretentious. I got really tired in the end. But then, power metal is not my fav metal stly. I've heard Drottnar labeled as christian black metal. Since I don't understand the lyrics I will not say anything about the christian thingy. But black metal? The only black that this band has is the singer style. The music itself is more closer to prog-technical death reminding me quite a bit to Cephalic Carnage, but less consistent in my view. I did not like the shrieking voice style and the on-stage presence of the band. Anyway, this style of music is difficult to get used to in the first listening, so give them a try also.

My neck hurts from headbanging today :-) Good sign!!
Anyway, anybody knows where the name eluveitie comes from??

btw, I'm listening right now to lucid interval by cephalic carnage (there are some live performances at youtube :) ) just... impressive

keepalive update... (with photos)

2007-05-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

Hi!! No post for some weeks, eh?
well.. don't think I'm dead. I'm just incredibly busy! but still having enough fun.. things are moving on :-)

Thought that I'd put a couple of photos that I took as of late

First, here are some photos of the Koninginnedag.
This one is from Delft

And these two are from Amsterdam

This one in the Museumplein in Amsterdam

Complete change. This is a minilepel (minispoon) that I bought. The model name happens to be "Barcelona" (you can see it)! It seems to be fashionable these days to use the barcelona name. Now that AMD also did that for their new series of quad-cores :D

Again, complete change. Now some photos from my day-trip to Rotterdam last week.
The first two are just overviews from the Euromast

This is a rare building at the port whose function is unknown to me

And this is the Montevideo building (note the large 'M' on top), Netherlands' highest residential building at around 140m

And here we have a rarity: a real expresso in the netherlands ;-)

Last week we went to the Marius Escher musem in Den Haag. It was a short trip and we went back right afterwards. I only took this photo of the Hoftoren, the tallest building in The Hague (142m) and the home of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

thats all for today I guess..
I should return to work now

see you soon!!

another week goes by...

2007-04-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

and it's already my third week here. well, at least labor week, as I arrived on a monday. I'm still working on my first project at TUDelft and it seems end of April will be a little bit optimistic. But looking at my timing here I'm not too afraid. The kilo-vector project is more about discussion than doing implementation so I can probably overlap the two projects a little. still so.. my goal is to have it finished asap

One of the more interesting things here is how the group at TUDelft is organized compared to my department in Barcelona. What I observed so far is that there is overall a much more tight integration between teachers/professors, phd students and master students. There are two factors for this: one is the personnel distribution. From the point of view of a phd student I observe that the students per room (SPR) ratio is much lower than in barcelona. Down there we have about 8-10 students per room. There are only a couple of these large rooms and they are quite separate (even in different buildings) so the relationship between students in different offices is quite small. Often weeks if not months pass before you meet a student in a different room. As a consequence relationship (and friendship) builds mostly within the same office. The SPR ratio here is around 3. The first consequence is that office space is much more silent and quite. You can actually get some work done most of the time! The second is that relationship builds more between people from different offices since there are not enough people in one office. The second reason why there is much higher integration between students and teachers are the department politics. Social events are of great importance here. And I mean that social events receive funding. For instance yesterday our group organized a karting event. Who went there were basically phd students and master students (in a future post I may include some pics of that). At upc-barcelona the interaction between master students and phd students is inexistent. Master students are located in a single room in one of the buildings and you never get in touch with them. Ok, this comparison is not very fair since master programs are likely more tied to the department in delft than in barcelona, where they are basically tied to a project that a professor proposes. It seems to me that here the department has overall a much higher overall responsibility with master students. The higher integration between students and teachers can also be seen at lunch, where we usually share table space with some of the professors. Often our sysadmin is also there. Needless to say, this is very different compared to bcn. There you'll find many small and quite closed student circles while here there is almost like a single large group but very open and with constant fluctuations. At least at lunch master students don't come to eat with us others :-)

For today I decided to post some pictures of Schveningen where we went to the beach last weekend and some pictures of Delft

To start, this is a view of the beach at Schveningen. Amazing how many people are out there. C'mon, this is April! In the Netherlands!

Guess who's the funny guy here... a little white still, don't you think? :-)

Obligatory PIC of the Faculteit Elektrotechniek, Wiskunde en Informatica of TUDelft. This pic I actually took on april 2nd, my first day in Delft. As you can see it was 5 minutes to four as I was arriving to the building.

A canal in Delft close to zuidpoort. not the nicest canal but the only image I could find :P

The niewe kerk (new church)

And the oude kerk (old church). As you can see, due to terrain conditions in netherlands it's no longer completely vertical

that's it for today :)
have a good weekend there!

busy weeks and trips

2007-04-15T13:08:00.000-07:00

Two weeks now since I arrived at this place. Guess it's getting time that I post an update :)

It has been two busy weeks now, full of activities. It's completely impossible to describe it all in one post and, since I'm already a little tired while writing this, I will not even try to give a full account, just some comments and ramblings.

Delft is a very nice city. It has many bars and the city center, with the two churches (the oude and niewe kerk) and the canals is really beautiful. However, Delft is also quite male. The presence of the technical university in this city has quite an impact on the kind of people you see when you go out at night.

Besides that, things are going along quite well, though also quite slowly as tends to be my way of doing. One of the main things I have been working on (and still have to finish) is how to arrange financial stuff. Having a spanish account is not too practical here. First, VISA (the main network in spain) is not as frequently used here. Here the cirrus/mastercard network seems to be more widely used. In addition, these people like to use cash cards, something which never worked in spain (in spain they were called "monedero 4B" but I don't know anybody who tried to use them). Of course, the way things are, getting such a cash card for me is currently not possible. well, actually it is, but at least not under good conditions. The only non-personal non-bank card that I have found is a prepaid Chipknip card provided by a company called InterEgi (www.interegi.nl). These cards you just can buy (there are options for 5€, 10€, 20€ or 50€) and then use them to pay without entering a pin code (since they are not tied to an individual person). Unfortunately they cannot be reloaded so you'd need to buy one every now and then. The problem is that these interegi cards are not too popular and can only be bought in some places. From their list of places (see website) it seems that I would need to go to Rotterdam every time I want to buy one. That is not too practical. The temporal solution is to use cash which you can use everywhere except on some vending machines. But then you have the problem with ATMs. My spanish card is tied to the local network called "ServiRed". Guess what, these guys will take a commission of 4% every time I try to withdraw money. That's not very nice. Opening a new account is something that I wanted to avoid (I'm only staying three months here) but it seems that it's probably the best solution.

I leave you with some pictures before going to bed:

The hostel at sebaastiansbrug (where I'm staying)

A sculpture of some sort of gigantic lizard. This is in a cave close to Maastricht

A camera attached to a speed radar. It carries the legend "Go Fast" (click to enlarge)

Me in front of the cathedral of notre dame in Antwerpen (yeah, we did a nice trip last weekend. maybe I should post a specific entry)

Delft!

2007-04-04T13:58:00.000-07:00

Amigos,

I'm finally in Delft. So far it has been lots of work and little time for myself, but no worrying. 3 months will generate enough good moments, I hope :)

Monday was quite a story. After having woken up at around 5:45h to catch my 9:00h flight to Amsterdam I landed here at around 12:00h. That's actually 40 minutes of delay but I don't know where they came from, since we had only 10 minutes of delay in Barcelona. After landing in Amsterdam and taking something to eat I ran into the train with my 30+kg of baggage to depart for Delft via Den Haag. Once at Delft I went by feet to the offices of Duwo. This was a little suicidal for my hand as the trip is not that short and the terrain (stone-roads mostly) is not the best to pull a 25kg bag. Once I got the apartment keys and got installed I was lucky to find a large supermarket just in front of the hostel. And surprisingly it opens until 22h. This I think is quite strange for a country where people have lunch at around 12h. I know of no supermarkets in Barcelona that open until after 21h. Anyway, since it was not too late at this moment (around 15h) I decided to go to the TUdelft building to see my advisor. So there I was, with a sequence of meetings until at 20h I finally went home, visited the supermarket, ate something and finally had time to sleep. I have prepared some photos of my new room:

For some reason or another my new sony camera decided not to be mounted within my opensuse 10.2 so I have to reboot into windows every time I want to collect new images. I've not been able so far to figure out why this happens. At some point the kernel prints a message such as "chose option 1 from 2 choices" or something like that. This seems a little strange and may be related to my problem but for now is not something I do care about. More interesting is how to setup all the internet things with TUDelft. Apart from the department you need an electronic association with the university. The university provides you a login/pass that you need not only to access some specific services, but also to access internet in general from the duwo hostels. The duwo connection itself is quite strange. It requires you to install an rpm (in the case of linux) to provide as special configuration of adsl (!) using a pppoe link. This rpm was later upgraded by opensuse 10.2 which installed a different version of the tool in which commands are named pppoe-start/stop/status/setup instead of adsl-start/stop/status/setup. This looks more logical than the adsl name since there is no adsl modem in all this process! Anyway, getting it working was a little more difficult than inserting the appropriate values in the adsl-setup script, but now it's working (otherwise I would not be writing this :) ) so I'm happy. I'll tell more stories soon :)

diary.close()
see you

moving to Delft

2007-03-26T05:18:00.000-07:00

Hi folks,

I've been too silent recently. There's no good reason actually but my thoughts have been too much with work. And along that with my trip to Delft next week where I will be attending TUDelft for the timespan of three months. Well, it's about time to travel a little. In return I expect to learn some stuff about FPGAs, get my european phd title after returning and have some fun :)

In Delft I will be staying in a university-provided residence (duwo). It's about 480€ for a room in a shared flat, monthly rate. That looks huge even compared with Barcelona, but if we take a look at the residence of UPC (Resa) it's not that much. I heard that a study here costs about 600+ € per month. Fortunately I will have a grant to cover for all that. Only that at this time the grant has still not approved. The decision will come in about 4 days. And I'm leaving in one week. love risk? :-)

My only fear is that, like usual, I have planned far too much work for this stay. Looks like I have to work on two projects, write a conference paper for my current work and start writing my thesis. In addition, I want to study some japanese because the certificate exams are just in about two months. And finally, how to manage all the partying? :-)

I'd better not expect too much out of all this. Overplanning is not good at all. Things never turn out how one plans them original. Therefore you should not stick to static plans, but dynamic plans. I prefer to think in terms of an always-evolving plan. So, better relax now and try to get the work done without thinking too much about it.

well, hasta pronto!

manjar blanc

2007-02-04T09:49:00.000-08:00

so.. back from hipeac'07 in ghent

If there's something I love from Belgium it must be belgian beer. Weekend and early week in ghent gave me the opportunity to try out some more variants: rochefort 10, chimay triple and kasteelbier (dunkel), all of which are of the 'tripel' variant, which have stronger taste and are around 10% (which is the reason I didn't try any more :D). Of the three I found the tastes of rochefort and kasteelbier most interesting. Particularly, kasteelbier seemed to me a very fine beer. Have to try it again next time :)

On the other hand I have to make a comment about their cuisine. It's quite ok in general, but beware of the mussles. On saturday I committed the error of eating a full portion of mussles for the lunch. FYI, the presentation was like the following:

Now, after eating this quantity of mussles a la white wine, and an additional portion of Schwarzwälderkirschtorte afterwards :-) , an enormeous mussle ball formed in my stomach, and I could not eat anything else until the next morning. Amusingly I was not really hungry the during breakfast. So, take care with the killer mussles whenever you go to belgium! Of course, it's not my fault for having eaten an irrationally large dish of mussles ;-)

Talking about food, I decided to learn some mediterranean cuisine and today I started with my plan to cook something new (ie, something that I have not cooked before) every weekend. I started with a dessert from tarragona called 'manjar blanc', made mostly out of almonds, milk and sugar. It's very simple but still I found it delicious. Maybe I put too much sugar but that's ok for me. And my family also seemed to enjoy it :) Here's a photo of the final presentation (not that you cannot really imagine much about the food from this photo...^_^)

For next week I want to try out a crema catalana, which I've eaten so many times but never prepared myself.

hasta pronto!

health related to urban sprawl?

2007-01-25T10:06:00.000-08:00

Urban sprawl seems to be a quite important topic in urban development. The generalized impression seems to be that it is more a problem. I quite agree with that. Urban sprawl results in little population densities. As a result mass transportation systems are inefficient. Wherever you locate bus / subway stations, people will just not make use of them because the average length to your place is still too far. Thus in horizontally developed urban areas you'll find increased use of private motorized transportation means, mostly in the form of automobiles, with the associated environmental and noise problems. As usual you can read a lot more on this topic in wikipedia.

So recently I came across an article that analyzes this problem from a different point of view. The argument is that urban sprawl may be linked with worse heath. It seems to me that there are still many open points in the article that need more discussion. However I thought the idea interesting. The main point seems to be that cities not consisting of mixed business/residential areas discourage human exercise since you never get anywhere by walking or riding a bike. The study is not too conclusive but an interesting read nevertheless.

ave s103 and fastech 360

2007-01-12T05:33:00.000-08:00

Recently I read an interesting update relating to the long awaited madrid-barcelona high speed line (known here as AVE = alta velocidad española). It seems the trains doing the partial route tarragona-madrid will be substituted with S103 models. The S103 is a siemens velaro E, a variation of the ICE 3 for the spanish high speed network. There's some more info in wikipedia. Apparently the TALGO developed S102 had a vibration problem that precludes it from running at the planned 350km/h and makes it less comfortable for the passengers. The siemens trainsets are heavier, more powerful and more stable.

On a related note, I saw this information of a newer shinkansen design being undertaken by JR east. The fastech 360 is a shinkansen model capable of running up to 360 km/h. Interestingly it features emergency air brake plates like those for an aircraft similar to the ears of a cat. It has therefore been called the ねこみみ新幹線, meaning "cat-eared Shinkansen". Wikipedia has also some info.

byebye 2006

2006-12-31T11:06:00.000-08:00

well, it's bye bye and I'll make one last post.
in one hour I'm expected at a party.
and, well, I thought... let's try to make some sushi :-)
the result looks more or less like a parody of japanese cuisine, but I swear I did my best!! :-P
you may take a look ... and so if you're also attending said party you'll know what to expect! ;-)
as you see, there are two types of sushi: the good and the bad
but what you don't see: among those there are, the safe and the venomous :)
the russian roulette :P
byebye!!

technology review on innovation in spain

2006-12-29T03:25:00.000-08:00

Some browsings ago I found this series of articles on technology innovation in spain. While these articles look too optimistic to me (spains economical increase is mostly based on real estate market, and many believe this is a bubble!) they are nevertheless an interesting read. It's actually surprising to see spain referred to as a "technololgy leader" as the general impression is that spanish tech used not to be too reliable. Maybe this is changing, but inferring from the drop in exigency that I've experienced in tech universities in spain as of late, this is hard to believe to me. Anyway, independent of what the outside impression is, I guess the important is here is to be demanding with oneself.

7th december opeth/barcelona concert

2006-12-08T15:53:00.000-08:00

mikael akerfeldt is a hacker. with music, that is.
his ability with humor is to be classified elsewhere. though :)

this was december 7th, barcelona.
yet another opeth concert. but there's no new release.. nothing new to promote. they'd probably enjoy it. as a musician, I would. and within the crowds there, I certainly did.

There was a pretty large feeling of deja vu for most of us there. On a certain 10th of december 2005 Opeth performed a fine concert in a sold out Apolo conert hall. That was last year, in the "ghost reveries" tour.

Thus I came with different goals this time. Opeth is always an experience in music. I always learn something new listening and trying to grasp the multiple facets of their music so I decided not to talk too much about this and take the chance to attend alone and just experience it.

I guess nobody expected that the concert would sell out as it did last year. If you attend a concert for a second time there must be a good reason for it. In my case its simple. I'm pretty sure I'll go to all opeth concerts in my city. I simply enjoy their music too much. For some people it may have been that they just didn't go to the first concert anyway. So I guess many people there would have discovered opeth within the last year. And then there is still a different type of crowd there. Opeth, with their fusion of jazz and progressive rock elements, also attracts people who are more into that style and, maybe by friends' advice or newspapers, will just decide to go. It's these kind of crowds that can give you more interesting opinions. however, this time I didn't take the chance.

Now, not only is opeth music quite notable for its complexity and variety, but also are the concerts quite singular. Since opeth write multi-sectioned songs often lasting more than ten minutes, it's usual that the audience will applaud and cheer on the base of sections, not necessarily on the songs ending (which, of course, is still greeted with the larger dosis of enthusiasm)

Compared to last year, I think the set-list almost didn't change. The first song "ghost of perdition", the last one "grand conjuration" and the extra one "deliverance" where played last year in the exact order. In addition, the classic "when" was also in the show, but not "demon of the fall", which used to be a classic, now that I think of it. Another difference was last years' inclusion of "under the weeping moon" a song from their first album "orchid" which they didn't usually play. Instead, yesterday's show included the great "Black Rose Immortal". Impressive

what I noticed is that Aekerfeldt continues developing his ego as frontman. I can't remember that in my first opeth concert -during the "deliverance" tour- aekerfeldt used to make so many jokes with the crowds between the songs. that was repeated yesterday, although not so much as last year in which he told some weird music-related jokes almost between every song. probably he noticed that it was boring some of the folks after all. I wonder if that development comes with the success that has been following opeth since the "blackwater park" album

the performance of the songs yesterday was very good. The Apolo hall has in general very good sound quality, and that applied mostly yesterday. However, I'm sad (and I don't know if this applies to all spots int the hall or just where I was) but Peter Lindgren's guitar was almost inaudible during most of his solo parts. Also, Per Wiberg still doesn't have a very strong image within opeth. I wonder if that is intentional?

Opeth are now retiring into a period of inactivity to work for their next album. We'll have to be patient..

There's a certain detail seen here
The pen must have slipped to the side
And left a stain
Next to his name
She knew he was gone
And isolation
Is all that would remain
- From "Isolation Years"

some thoughts about the new El Prat airport configuration

2006-10-28T05:12:00.001-07:00

status:draft
disclaimer: i'm not an expert on this topic, just a fan of transportation systems

--

Since I'm quite interested in mass transportation systems on of the things I have been following as of late are the developments of the El Prat International Airport, which for those who don't know is Barcelona's main airport. Currently air traffic is increasing everywhere. With the arrival of low-cost airlines this increment is now larger than ever, particularly for airports that are major destinations of tourists. This applies pretty well to El Prat.

Today El Prat is a pretty saturated airport. Last year it did handle abouy 27 million passangers and this year it is expected to handle over 30 million. The airport itself is quite close to the city - only 3 kilometers away - which gives it a lot of potential. But it has also some problems: particularly, it is located in a well populated area (gava, castelldefels, and el prat de llobregat) and the - related - fact that spacial expansion is hardly possible. In addition, area around the airport includes a natural protected zone (the delta del llobregat). Even so, the airport is currently undergoing a large transformation with the addition of a new runway and the construction of a new terminal. With this new infrastructure it is supposed to be capable of handling up to 55 million passangers.

Before 2004, the airport operated in a pretty unefficient configuration. It had two runways: 7L/25R and 2/20. 2/20 crosses 7L/25R diagonally meaning that simultaneous traffic was not possible. 7L/25R was normally used for landing while 2/20 was used for takeoff. When landing, planes would fly over the Zona Franca - an industrial complex just to the south of Montjuic. For takeoff 2/20 would lead them just to the sea. This configuration has minimal noise impact over habitated areas, but it has the aforementional problems of non-parallel operation. In addition, 2/20 is a small runway. Large aircraft cannot use it for takeoff, they have to use 7L/25R, which btw has now been expanded to be 3.7km (while 2/20 is only 2.6km). In 2004 a new runway was opened: 7R/25L. This runway, as the name suggests, is parallel to 7L/25R. It is also quite smaller (2.7km) having been built in a more constrained area. The introduction of this runway enabled parallel operation and therefore a big increase in traffic. Since then the new configuration has been to use 7R/25L for landing (direction barcelona) and 7L/25R for takeoff (direction gava-castelldefels). But the gava-castelldefels area is inhabited by around 170.000 people. This has caused a lot of problems to the neighbours, which have been demonstrating and occasionally blocking airport access (directing their problems towards the airport users btw). On the long term this configuration was to be modified again. As told, there is a new terminal under construction. This terminal lies between the two runways. This enables an even more efficient configuration which consists in the independent operation of both runways, so each terminal (old and new) could focus on the traffic of a particular runway (currently aircraft landing in 7R/25L have to taxi to the old terminal for a couple of minutes - crossing the long runway in the process). However, this configuration would even increase the noise problems over the populated area.

After months of negotiation between AENA and the town councils a new configuration has been approved. From now on runways will again have a special purpose: 7L/25R will be used for landing (as happened before 2004) and 7R/25L will be used for takeoff. Takeoff direction will be towards gava/castelldefels, but the planes will immediately turn towards their left (ie, towards the sea) so to avoid the habitated area. I wonder if this is really going to help that much. From the airport configuration point of view this means that taxing before takeoff will be quite long for passengers of the old terminal. Not such a big problem. On the other side, 7R/25L is not a large runway (2.7km) which means that large aircraft will need to continue using the old runway. I don't have the data of which aircraft this comprises but I guess it would be A340's, B-777's, B-747's and the likes, but you don't see them to often in Barcelona anyway. I wonder also if this has any effect on the prediction that the airport would be able to handle 55 million passengers by 2008. I have yet to see an announcement regarding this.

How much is the airport really going to grow? From a geographic point of view, this airport serves a population of over 5 million people living in the barcelona province. Add all the tourism and the requirements problaby grow a lot. There is already speculation that the airport will be too small again within 15-20 years. What's will be the next step? A completely new airport is probably not the solution. Very expensive and where is enough space anyway? Already the first voices have been heard suggesting that new runways be built over the sea. I only know of two airports built like this: kansai international airport and the new nagoya airport. Both are located in Japan. I've always thought that must be increadibly expensive. In addition these airports tend to sink a couple of centimeters every year so maintainance is a little more costly. All this is very speculative. Let's see what's going to happen.

I didn't cover quite a couple of issues regarding the airport in this entry. I tried to focus on the runway configurations. Maybe a different time I'll say something about my thoughts on airport access issues, where also a lot of things are supposed to change :)

hasta pronto

violent overactive debugging -- c++ STL nightmares

2006-09-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

this may be considered a draft:

ok, let me see if I can come to some conclusion about this half-nightmare bug-hunt that I came across recently

as some of you know, one of my tasks at work consists in maintaining a simulator of kilo-instruction processors. The other day, while playing with a new implementation of load-store queues, I came across this funny segfault. My program makes extensive use of c++ STL and the particular module in question makes extensive use of list<>'s and multimaps. At some point of the program it was calling equal_range() to traverse a set of instructions with the same address. If you think about this you'll see that a multimap is the perfect structure to simulate a memory disambiguation queue. equal_range() returns a pair of iterators. In pseudo-c++ it looks like this:

pair <> it_pair = disamb_queue.equal_range(load->address())

what happened is that traversing the resulting iterator would result in a segfault as one instruction would have an invalid memory address. Later analysis turned out that the memory address of the instruction (which was 0x3 btw) was obtained from the number of elements in the SQ, a local variable present in the store queue. Well, looks like the typical horrible memory management problem. Unfortunately, analysis within gdb was difficult as the debugger refused to de-reference the iterator structure while complaining that it had an uncomplete type. So I had to actually guess the distance of the pair of elements from the node head, which turned out to be 24 bytes. But let's better forget about that.

Given that my debugger experience was being very complicated I implemented a debugging function that just runs equal_range() and traverses the elements of the structure. This allowed me to track down the moment at which the program started to break. Apparently this was happening very close to the end, but why exactly was still a mistery.

I knew this must be a memory management problem so I turned to glibc malloc hooks. In linux, glibc memory management can be tuned by setting up an environment variable called MALLOC_CHECK_. You can set this variable to three values: 0,1 and 2. 0 instructs glibc to ignore the error, 1 tells glibc to print a diagnostic and continue and 2 instructs glibc to immediately call abort() when a problem happens. I had used this technique before with success but this time I ran into problems. Running with MALLOC_CHECK_=1 returned a double free() call, but within the debugger this was not reproducible, so I could not find the moment of the double free(). And yes, the debugger was running with malloc hooks, at least it printed the messages in the terminal. Using the abort() method also didn't work for some reason. abort() seemed not to be called. I particularly like the abort() method - when it works - because it allows you to just break at abort() within the debugger and print a backtrace of what was happening at that moment. But anyway, it didn't work this time.

My dispair was pretty large at this point. Debugging STL is something no person would do in his sane judgement (except maybe if you are a STL developer). So I went one step further and tried out a tool that I had avoided for too long: Valgrind. I had always thought that valgrind was something similar to electric fence, ie, a library that substitutes malloc/calloc/free and changes alignments to give you more information. I was very confused! Valgrind is actually a cpu emulator that tracks validity of all memory data and addresses. This allows it to detect a number of common errors: reads of free'd data, using non-initialized data, off-by-one errors, etc. The tool is beautiful; the only problem may be its slowness - around 20 to 30 times, something normal if you consider it is an emulator. Fortunately my error appeared within the first 20 seconds, so I could run valgrind and have the result in a couple of minutes. Valgrind is cool, but interpreting its error messages is not trivial at first and it has the problem that even though you can track the error to the exact line in the source code, there is no way to know when exactly it happened. Thus I cannot just reproduce the error condition inside the debugger. CPU simulators are in general cycle based, and calls to the same functions are happening continuously.

What Valgrind did tell me was basically that equal_range() was reading data that had been freed earlier in a different function. Valgrind actually tells you which function free'd the data. This feature is really critical! Thanks to this information I was now able to start the traditional method of fprintf() based debugging :) In the end I found the error in a mismatch of insertions/deletions based on a subtle different between two different simulators I amb maintaining (a subtleness I had never come across before) and now I have been able to fix this error. This story may be the daily bread of many developers, but I wanted to post it because it fascinated me the number of different debugging techniques I had to use to actually solve this problem. There were at least 4 techniques involved (gdb, MALLOC_CHECK_, valgrind, fprintf()) and every technique allowed me to go just one step further. fascinating...

After I solved this bug today I started to think about writing a book about debugging c++. of course I'll never do this, but being able to use debugging tools can really help a lot. As an (ex-)teacher I have always been disappointed about how far debugging tools are neglected by course programs and by the students themselves. but this is a topic I'll not touch here :)

good night!

internet adventures part II

2006-09-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

hi there!

well.. I finally have some good news: internet is working and this time completely.

after the last post, I spent the morning searching information on what had happened to me and I found a more advanced forum of people who had been able to go past the "set adsl open dmt" issue. The funny part, I found out, is that most of those people had also observed the large data burst problem (though they referred to it as the problem of "sites with large forms"). Someone suggested that a MTU of 576 should work best with the PPP mode we are using. He apparently found that information on wikipedia. I tried it, and in fact some pages started to work (gmail for instance). But not all.

So finally I tried to configure for the second time the Comtrend ADSL modem (software version A101-220TLF-C35) of telefonica that a friend let me. I searched for the user/pass (which is 1234/1234) and entered the parameters. At first it didn't work but with some additional modifications to the standard configuration it did. These changes consisted in:

1) enable G.DMT modulation together with ADSL2+ and T1.413
2) select "outer pair" instead of "inner pair" as the phone line pair

the first change was pretty obvious as that is what I had been told with the previous modem. However, the second was more sort of luck. Telefonica distributes its modems with a couple of microfilters. However my installation at home, which was done about 5 years ago does not use microfilters and instead relies on a splitter at the entry point. I don't know if there is any relation between these but this fact made me change to "outer pair". maybe I should take a look at this issue more closely :)

well, the important thing is that I can work without problems now. Some day it seems that ya.com will send the new modem and at that time I'll have some new adventures to tell :)

ok.. hasta la vista then!
-- izzu

my internet adventures

2006-09-08T00:43:00.000-07:00

Hi there!

It's reasonable to think that complexity increases as technology advances, but the adventures I have been having with my ISP as of late really surpass my capacity of understanding.

Let me explain you this little story. First some background. I'm a DSL user located in barcelona, spain. Our servide provider is ya.com and it has been for about 5 years now. We've been very happy all this time, with minimal downtimes and continuous increases in throughput (we started at 256kbps and are now at 4mbps).

Last year (2005, that is) ya.com bought a fiber network called albura. Not many people talked about this but it's basically the beginning of my small horror story. Thanks to the albura network (AFAIK) ya.com has been able to offer 20mb download rates using the so-called adsl2+ technology. Ya.com clients from 2001-2002 did not use this network and instead relied on lines that were leased from Telefonica, spain's main operator. This circumstance prevented our migration to adsl2+. Thus we were still using adsl2@4mbit speed in July this year. and btw our modem router was the ancient 3com 812 officeconnect which does not support adsl2+ anyway.

In july 2006 I started observing strange behaviour of my modem. In general it would work, but periodically the modem would stop working for some time, apparently rebooting itself (although this I did not notice). It mostly worked so I did not bother too much. However, on July 26th (more or less) it stoped working completely. The modem was still synchronized but there was no way to send-receive packets. Since I was on a trip I could not check these facts and instead thought that I'd be able to easily correct the incident after returning home.

But once I was back home things just got worse. I could not make the modem work despite my best tries, and worse, the modem suddenly lost synchronization and stayed so. At this point (I guess Aug 1st or 2nd) I contacted tech support, who provided me with some new configuration parameters (which for some reason nobody had told us we had to change). But this did not solve the problem. We were told to wait for technical staff to contact us on our problem.

Since I didn't want to wait I made a small web search and imagine what I found. Apparently ya.com was in the process of migrating all 2001-2002 users to the albura network, but something went wrong and lots of people in my area were having the same problem. What follows is a couple of weeks trying to contact tech support without luck. Some three weeks later (!) finally a technician contacted me and told me that 1) ya.com people had checked the remote modem station and that 2) a new router was needed for the adsl2+ technology, which would be sent in shortly after. Then he told me that even though my modem was not adequate we could use a patch to make it work. This patch consisted in telneting into the modem and issuing the commands:

set adsl open dmt
set adsl reset

Back at home I tried, and effectively it resynchronized after a minute. Interestingly I had to reconfigure the modem to act as default gateway, something which I had never modified but suddenly was not active anymore. Anyway.. it was working and after 4 weeks I was happy again. But now is when the most perplexing starts, a new problem that I still haven't been able to solve at this point.

With the modem synchronized everything seemed to work well. Everything except gmail. For some unknown reason, after logging into gmail I am completely limited. Emails can only occasionally be viewed, sending is impossible and chat also doesn't work. And this happens on all computers at home. ALL! So it must be something of the network. But what? I have checked that both TCP and UDP work and I even played with modem parameters such as the MTU and other parameters that I can't remember. It can't be a software problem since the same computers that exhibit this problem work perfectly in a different network. I have tried to google for similar experiences, but without luck so far. It's so perplexing that I don't even know if I would be able to explain the problem correctly to a technician.

I think that this maybe has some relationship to the technologies used by gmail. I tried to find out something. GMail uses mostly AJAX to minimize transfers between client and server. AJAX seems to contain three components: XMLHttpRequest+JavaScript+XHTML (simplified). Individually searching for problems with these technologies also has yielded no answer as to why I may have problems accessing the site from my network. Maybe it is google that doesn't like our network address?? Or could it be that the "patch" does not provide full internet service??

As said, I'm perplexed. Luckily I do most interneting from work, where I do not have this problem, but it is still annoying getting home and not being able to access gmail other than through the POP3 interface.

So far my horror story :) If you somehow came here and have a suggestion I'd really like to hear it.

In the meantime I'll get back to some reading/hacking :)
ByeBye! -- izzu

UPDATE:

What you just read is what I wrote yesterday at night. But I couldn't submit it to blogspot. Imagine why. However, the incident has allowed me to confirm a previous hypothesis that I had discarded: The problem with my DSL line lies in the fact that the ATM/ADSL network cannot support large bursts of outgoing data. This is what I thought when I started to play with the MTU parameters, but my tests didn't work back then. Thus I had since discarded this idea. But yesterday, after seeing that I could not submit the post, I tried to upload it to a server that I can access from work so that I could send it today (and this is what I'm doing now, btw). My surprise: the sftp command stalled. When this happened I was reminded of my previous hypothesis and decided to test it. Luckily sftp has a switch (-B) that allows you to specify how large the blocks of data are that are going to be sent over the network. I tried with -B 256 and it also stalled, but it went further. Then I tried with '-B 16' and I was able to transfer the document. After noticing this I have been playing a little with the UBR and CBR parameters of the ATM line but I have had no success. I think I will try to find some info on this in the web or give a second chance to an adsl2+ router that a friend let me. Anyway, as you can imagine, the worst of all this is not the internet problem itself but the nervousness of days and days of tuning router parameters without success.

Well, back to work for today
-- izzu

280706.1

2006-07-31T13:58:00.000-07:00

sexually aggressive, we know you
feel their treasure, smell their sex
peer dance, sexually emulated on imagination level
maybe not all, but
nature can embrace you
collectiveness, war against isolation
we must help. protection is needed not a coward. what else..
but,
could they enjoy it.. or could it be just envy?
responsibility is collective
a barrier to eternal happiness, eternal fight, war declared
thanks for an violent night, death and cradle of filth
divinity and lust, are forever forbidden, to meet
hold on, for opportunities for a new development on the horizon, but
dead gods, trouble to be found on the way
patience eternal
now, in the darkness.. everyone gets what he deserves...

Puigmal 2006

2006-07-17T05:10:00.000-07:00

Hi!

Here are some photos from yesterday's climb to the Puigmal mountain in the north-east Pyrinees. We basically made an 8-hour trip starting at FontAlba (at 2050 metres), first going up to Puigmal (at 2900 metres), then down to Nuria (at 1900 metres) and finally back to FontAlba. Wheather conditions were mixed, with good weather at first, but then rain and hail as we approached the top. The rest of the trip was better, with almost no rain but also not much sun.

I've created some downsized versions of the photos for the upload. If you happen to know my email address you can contact me for the originals (totalling 130MB)

These first photos are from Ribes de Freser were we stopped for some food

On our way up to FontAlba...: cows, some views of the valley, and me driving

These photos are from the parking at FontAlba. There's a lot of people here. Most people are going to Nuria or are just out for a casual stroll. It was about 12h now.. pretty late to start the climb, actually. But anyway..

The small building that can be seen is the Alberg at Vall de Nuria. In the later part of the trip we passed it closer

On the way up to the Puigmal.. many returning hikers...

A view of the valley after some minutes of walk. The parking can still be seen

Marisa and Quim on one of the more steeper parts

An ant was carrying this (presumedly dead) spider. When I caught the picture the ant had hidden between the stones

This is the top of Puigmal. As you can see, weather conditions were not too favorable there

some views of the valley..

The top of the mountain was closer, and now covered in clouds..

and whilst on the harder part of the climb it began to rain and hail

but we managed to finish the climb. Here are two photos of the team. It was still raining heavily and at this point the camera got a little wet. Therefore, unfortunately, many of the following pictures are not very clear.

On our way down to Vall de Nuria (notice the drops on the camera objecitve? :-) )

Marisa and Josep

Marisa + Josep, and Quim farther away

Horses and cows all around...

Josep + Lluis

Marisa reasoning on the meaning of life

goats in the wilderness...

Quim and Josep on the correct path.. we had to do some backtracking :)

The first sight of the Vall de Nuria Sanctuary and surroundings

The Alberg at Vall de Nuria. Compare with the first photos..

And finally the camera's objective dried..

A complete view of the building

And some photos of the "Cremallera de Nuria" (a type of rack railway) approaching its destination

the lake in vall de nuria

taking a break...

Another full view of the building with the sanctuary in the middle

going back to Fontalba.. more horses and cows (sorry, bad resolution..)

Well, that's all! :) Hope you enjoyed the photos. I think it is a very recomendable trip for a 1-day journey.

See you!
azathoth

the day he himself shall wipe my tears away

2006-06-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy Days are here again

It's already a couple of weeks ago that I finished reading kenzaburo's "the day he himself shall wipe my tears away", but I can't continue without posting at least one recomendation for this insane novel. This has been my first contact with the japanese writer and I'm very impressed. The chaotic style of the novel, out-of-order story telling and mixing points of view - disrespectful to the nature of paragraphs -, gives a terrible impression of the condition of the main character: a man lying in an hospital bed waiting to die due to a faked cancer while retelling the history of his youth. I have to heavily recommend this novel, but please take at least an overview of japanese history around the second world war. It will help a lot to understand the plot.

Kenzaburo is really brilliant. I would classify this novel in the same area as Ernesto Sabato's "On Heroes and Tombs" (orig: Sobre Heroes y Tumbas) both in terms of quality and darkness. Of course, congratulations also go to John Nathan for his impressive translation work.

paradigms in large number construction

2006-05-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number—not an infinity—on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.

So starts this article on big numbers by scott aaronson. The previous test, being conducted on school students tends to bring up solutions using many 9's. However, in the science of big numbers who wins is who is able to deal with the strongest mathematical paradigm, not who writes faster. Read the link for an account on the history of exponentials, multiple exponentials, Ackerman's function and Busy Beavers.

As is pointed out by the author, there is a large correspondence between the status of science in each era, and the progress in our capacity to name big numbers. As you progress through the article it becomes clear how new concepts such as recursion and computability have to be developed to name bigger and bigger numbers.

The article ends with a reference to a study which appeared 1999 in Science in which a group of Neuropsychologists developed an experiment to associate language with our capacity to compute and predict (ie, our capacity to make approaximated computations). The authors of the study, cited below, conclude that different parts of the brain are used when doing precise computations and approximations. Interestingly, when doing a precise computation the part of the brain that is used is the same part that deals with language. Why? Because computation depends on the capacity to manipulate symbols, be it mathematical symbols or linguistic symbols. On the other hand, they argue that approximations are done using a mental image of a "number line". It's an interesting point. However I don't understand some parts of their methodology, particularly when they claim that a larger percentage of the test individuals correctly solved computation problems stated in the language in which they learned to solve them, rather than in a different tongue. I'm not sure what they mean and why this happens. It should not be difficult to translate a mathematical problem, and trying to solve it using an unknown symbol system is something that I can't even imagine... I guess I have to read the original source :)

Here's the reference for this paper:

S. Dehaene and E. Spelke and P. Pinel and R. Stanescu and S. Tsivkin, "Sources of Mathematical Thinking: Behavioral and Brain-Imaging Evidence," Science, vol. 284, no. 5416, May 7, 1999, pp. 970- 974.

old salon article revisited

2006-05-16T05:42:00.000-07:00

This weekend, while reading on the physical views of a certain Tom van Flanders (on which I came casually while cruising through wikipedia), I came across this article on salon which discusses recent controversies on the procedures used by einstein to develop his theory of general relativity. The article is not very technical nor detailed, but it's interesting and written in an entertaining way. In the end the author looks more biased towards support the standard viewpoint (ie, Einstein did not cheat) but I won't restart this discussion here (lack of detailed knowledge on my side, and also lack of comments here ;) sorry).

on a personal note, it's rather strange that I repost links to articles on my blog. it's mostly a way to increase traffic so not sure if I should continue with that...
fins aviat - see you

俳句のスピーチ

2006-05-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

As expected I spent most of last week preparing my short speech on haikus which I delivered at yesterday's class. I've noticed that my japanese has not improved much as of late. That worries me, I should definitively spend some more time into readings and increasing my vocabulary. Anyway, before the speech gets lost forever I'll post it here :)

The speech was accompanied with the famous basho hokku 'the old pond' and a haiku by Masaoka Shiki that I found on this nice page of virginia.edu dedicated to the works of Shiki.

---

俳句は日本の最も短い詩です。俳句は短詩の１つの種類です。
俳句は定型詩で、五・七・五の韻律があります。
それは短歌と同じです。短歌は歌う詩です。
でも、俳句はそんなに定型ですから歌えません。

俳句の知識が濃いです。それに、時々助詞もありません。
だから、読者が自分で解釈をしなければなりません。

俳句は所について説明をしますが、感情を表わす言葉は全然ありません。
俳人の目的は読者が自分の感情を経験することです。

それに、俳句には季節についての言葉が含まれていなければならない。
この言葉は季語と言い、俳句に大切です。

少しい例を挙げます：
春の季語：蛙、蛍、桜 …
秋の季語：天の川、名月…
夏の季語：蝉、トンボ、夕涼み…
冬の季語：雪、元日…

俳句の元は俳諧の連歌です。この詩は俳人のグループの書きことでした。
俳諧には五・七・五と七・七の韻律を連ねます。
まずの五・七・五の詩の節が発句と言いました。
この詩は最も大切な連歌の分です。
だから、普通もっと経験がある俳人はその発句を書きました。

正岡子規は19 世紀の終わりに俳諧の連歌から発句を離しまして、
発句は俳句と言われるようになりました。
だから、芭蕉の俳句と言うのは正しくないです。
芭蕉や蕪村や森竹は発句をかきました。
子規の時代の俳人は俳句を書きます。

one week vacation

2006-04-26T05:25:00.000-07:00

Hi there, I'll be in Berlin for the next week (until wednsday) which means that, first, I'll be much more relaxed than usual :) and, last and least, that there will not be any new posts here. This is listed in order of importance, as not posting here for over a week or so is not actually something unusual after my last break from blogging was about 6 months long (ups) :P

And so that you don't feel bored from reading this void entry, here is a pic of Cadaques, a location to the north of Catalonia where Salvador Dali used to live and which I visited last Saturday.

Guess this is good-bye then. Cu

guitar zazen experiences

2006-04-25T02:48:00.000-07:00

Hiyo there,

In my particular way to understand metamusical zazen (坐禅) (?) I thought I'd provide some recordings with my guitar during meditations. Don't take my made-up term "metamusical zazen" as something serious, it's just I don't find any better way to describe this activity of mine consisting in finding relaxation by concentrating on guitar-playing per se, without caring on modern song-writing. This is something I love to do when I have some 30-60 minuts of time and I find it really funny. Now, I have listened myself to these pieces afterwards and I can tell you they are not exactly "beautiful", but there are some occasional nice moments and, as something for myself, I find it funny to apreciate the way I try to apply mathematical sequences into music with both a touch of acoustic and metal (opeth rulz) :)

Anyway, this is probably just plain stupid so please don't take this as something serious :)

First pieceSecond piece

the computer is your counselor

2006-04-19T09:44:00.000-07:00

The computer. Supposedly cold as a stone, emotionless. But on occasion developing a sense of counselor. That occasions, I confess, are rather terrifying.

For instance, the following happened this morning while I was trying to copy-paste some items from kdevelop to my terminal. I must have done something wrong, for kdevelop stalled for about 10 seconds while performing this task. But after this period it finally printed its output. But interestingly, instead of pasting the name of the command-line variable I was looking for, the procedure pasted two times the sentence "creo que no es bueno ser nerd", which is spanish for "I don't think it's a good thing to be a nerd". Thanks god it didn't take much to remember the source of these words. They belonged to an msn chat I had yesterday. Otherwise I guess I would have been very scared :)

However, this still raises some technical issues. How come that the mouse copy-paste procedure recalled this line which belonged to the day before? Well, I guess it must have been one of the last things I read yesterday, and after that the machine hibernated, so it is not entirely impossible. But anyway. it was a funny moment to witness

but after all, am I a nerd? ;)

more frightening sporadic HD errors

2006-04-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

So, there I am this morning, booting my ibm x40 laptop when I get the unfamous /dev/hda2 was not cleanly unmounted message during linux boot. Off to a root shell. ok. what happened? All right, I remember. Another one of those sporadic Input/Output errors, yesterday night... What's causing them? Nobody knows. Why does the HD report IO errors just somtimes, but generally works 99% when manipulating those files in directory X?

However, things are more weird. 'Tis my first time with fsck required due to errors. In general the Input/Output error had always remounted filesystem read-only (as it ought to) and after reboot everything had worked flawlessly. Until today.

So I drop to this shell and shortly refresh my knowledge on e2fsck and badblocks. After looking for a while I decide to e2fsck -c -p -v the partition. It starts to work, recreating the journal, but then tells me to run a manual e2fsck (ie, without -a or -p option) Well, it's not the first time this happens to me, so no reason to fear. So I go on with e2fsck -c -v and start recovering inodes, readjusting filesystem consistency and so on for hundreds, if not thousands of inodes. Yes, I confess there were so many errors that in the end I didn't check anymore what inodes I was repairing. So I just pressed "enter" until the job was done. I only stopped once to consider if repairing the /etc directory could be a problem. But that's not a question to think a lot. In any case, until the filesystem is not repaired it will not be possible to boot. So I also repaired that one. But not without implications

After repairing and seeing that badblocks did not detect a single bad block I reran with e2fsck -c -c -v to see if the non-destructive read-write check would find some bad block. But still there was no bad block to be found. So weird.. I thought. Isn't there supposed to be some problem if I get continuous Input/Output errors on some inodes? Or what else does a readlink() call do? Anyway. Disk repaired. Next Step: Reboot

So I select linux on the prompt and start to boot. After a short while it is clear that something is not working. I have an interesting init: NO INITTAB message. So I try to enter manually the runlevel. Let's say: 3. But all this did was freeze command line and allow no further input. So I repeat the procedure. But now it's time for linux single user mode.

Once dropped off to the root shell I look at the root filesystem. Everything's fine, so let's look into etc. cd /etc returns /etc: not a directory. WHAT?!?! file /etc returns English ASCII text WHAT?!?!^2. And vi etc shows an interesting xml file interleaved with some non-sense binary data. Definitively something is not quite right when /etc is an XML file and all your configuration file are stored as recovery inodes in the /lost+found directory :) Thought I may recover from /lost+found. I entered, but: Welcome to the jungle!

Fortunately, after seeing that I would not be able to live without a reinstall, I was able to backup most of my critical data. And it was thanks to my Windows partition, as linux was very firm in its intention of not letting me mount the usb mass storage devices, despite it allowing me (apparently) to load the kernel module. Connecting the devices just did not add anything to dmesg output, nor did it activate the device lights. All I could do is move my sensitive data to the windows partition and reboot from there.

I'm reporting now about 12 hours after incident. As system administration was also unable to find errors in the hard drive (what the hell!) we opted to reinstall the original setup, without the manually installed kernel that I had added from suse's ftp (we're using novell GNU/linux in our company). But I'm still wondering in how far a misconfigured system with a standard kernel (used as default in a more recent distro) would end up generating Input/Output errors. Maybe a race within readlink()? But did I see this error always with readlink()?? I can't remember. This has happened to me about 5 times now (all of them after I installed the new kernel). If the problem is hardware then I'll just wait some weeks until it resurfaces. And then the diagnostic will be definitive. Any ideas anyone??

Well, hope you liked my catastrophy-story with happy-ending.
Next time I'll better ask Cthulhu for inspiration

Comeback! and い碁 translation :)

2006-04-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

今日は！

Yes, it's been a very long time since I last updated my blog :) Well, after so many tries I'm starting to suspect that blogs and me don't relate too well :D

But enough of that. Last week I've been working on a small translation of a GO text to test my ability as translator and also to learn some GO. Translating is not an increadibly funny task to do, but it was not as painful as I thought. However, it was painful in the complexity. After having studied 2 years of japanese my level is still pretty pathetic. But it's fun, so complaining is not justified here.

So, what I did is try to translate the first page of one of Asahi's articles about the 31th meijin (those articles appear regularly published here) These articles are far too complex and long considering my nihongo ability so I'm more than satisfied with trying to translate one out of all 8 pages!

After my first try I have to confess that the results are not good. More than half of the sentences leave me with questions related to meaning and grammar! But, on the other hand, I guess that these GO texts are as complex as I will find in regular japanese (if not more).

Before starting, here is the structure I used to translate. It's very simple: First I post the original paragraph. Then the translation. Due to the complexity of the task, I need to add many comments. Those are within brackets and follow a 'TN:' sign, which basically means "Translator Notice"

So, let's start with this article. For an sgf of the match this article refers to, clic on this link

Hope someone finds this enjoying
Till next time!

azathoth

--------------------

This is a partial translation of the article 四天王対決 which appeared on 04/04/06 in the Asahi Shinbun (igo section) This is only the first page. Original url is: http://www.asahi.com/igo/meijin31/12/

いまの囲碁界の最前線で活躍する四天王同士の一戦。対局前から盤側でワクワクした気分にさせられた

In the World's GO front line there is currently a batlle going on among the big four. Starting even before of the matches, there is a feeling of excitation/nervousness going on in the vicinity.

両対局者に張栩、羽根直樹を加えた四天王というフレーズは、彼らがタイトル戦に登場するたびに浸透した。最近はライバル同士がタイトルをかけて争うことも多い。

Both players (TN: referring to Takao Shinji and Yamashita Keigo) along with Cho U and Hane Naoki, who form the so-called four Devas (TN: or just the big four?), are going to battle for the title (TN: refers to 31th meijin title) (TN: This sentence ends with something about appearance and osmosis which I don't get). (TN: I also don't really get the next sentence. It looks something like: "Recently, the rivals have lacked in titles, but there are many disputes"?? )

日本棋院は今、４人それぞれにふさわしいニックネームを選んでいる最中という。記者はそちらの決着にも興味津々だ。「カミソリ」「殺し屋」「コンピューター」「宇宙流」（誰のことか分かりますか？）のような、ぴったりの愛称を期待しよう。

Now, the Nihon Kiin is said to be in the middle of choosing nicknames respectively for the 4 players (TN: それぞれ is used here in a way I don't understand). The reporters are very interested in the decision. Who is who? (Nicknames follow:) 'Razor' (カミソリ) 'Professional killer' (殺し屋), 'Computer' (コンピューター) and 'Way of the Cosmos' (宇宙流) (TN: all this is so weird :) Did
I get anything right?)

本局は２月中旬、ちょうど山下が棋聖に復位する１週間前に打たれた。うれしいことに、タイトル奪還目前の集中力そのままに、本局に臨んでくれた。開幕２連勝の好調高尾も気合十分だ。

In the main office (TN: the meaning of 本局 translated here as "main office" doesn't make much sense. This meaning comes from wwwjdic. My kanji dictionary doesn't contain this compound), during the second third of February, Yamashita (山下) had restored his Kisei Title, just after having been beaten one week ago. (TN: I don't understand the grammar of the next sentence. Here is a try:) Happily, the title recovery happened with the same ability to concentrate as before. (TN: I don't understand the following, also. A try:) With two promising consecutive victories, Takao (高尾) is also showing plenty of
fighting spirit.

黒７のハサミに高尾の白８は変化球。黒は９とコスんだ。周囲の石の配置は違うが、ここで昨年の名人戦七番勝負第２局（張名人—小林覚九段）を思い出した読者は相当な通である。似た場面で小林は黒９をＡで応えていた。

To the hasami (pincer) of black at 7, Takao answered at white 8 with a 変化球 (henkakyuu, ie, change of speed). Black at 9 is a cross-over. The arrangement of surrounding stones differs, but this position reminds to last year's seventh game of the second round of the Meijin (Chou-meijin versus Kobayashi Satoru 9-dan) (TN: not sure whether it was the 7th game of 2nd round or the other way round, but anyway). In that game, Kobayashi anwered the cross-over at A.

この進行を記者室で見て、「いろんな打ち方があるんだね」とつぶやいたのは、たばこを吸いに来た小林だった。

In the reporter room, after seeing this advance there was a mutter "varios ways to follow, right?" (TN: this sentence ends with something about kobayashi and smoking tabacco which I don't get)

白１０は２８分の考慮で打たれ、白１２ツケから２０までのワタリをめざす。白１０は結果的に本局の最長考だった。黒１１は、白１２以下を事前に察知してのひと工夫。どうせ固めてくれるのなら、狭い黒Ｂよりもまさる理屈だ。

White 10 came after 28 minutes of consideration. White 12 to 20 aim at a crossing. Because of the result it is aiming at, White 10 deserved the lengthiest consideration. (TN: I have problems with the following sentence. I interprete the following:) Regarding black 11, white 12 has a sense of going below (black 11) early. (TN: There is something about the word "scheme" (工夫) that I didn't understand in the context) (TN: The following sentence is also quite complex. What I extract does not have much meaning:) In case he gets fortified, surpassing theory says that a narrow black B is not better.

Japan - Part 3

2005-10-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

Hi!
Did you get bored of Part 2? I guess so.. but I didn't care much for my blog the last weeks :) (ups!). Well, in any case here is a new set of photos. These cover our last day in Nara and the start of my vacation (now on my own) with photos of Nara and Kyôto

This is Nara's main shopping street

Some funny guys ;)

Pure japanese culture: a pachinko (japanese casino-pinball game)

A group photo before I continued alone. From left to right: Miquel (me), Xavi, Oliver, Gladys and Carlos

Here starts my journey. Everyone else took the flight back to Amsterdam. I stayed until Wednsday. First some Nara pictures

The inevitable Todai-ji photo

Upon arrival to Kyôto. This is Kyôto station. An impressive construction.

There are two subway lines in Kyôto. This is the Karasuma-line.

Close to Higashiyama hostel: Okazaki-koen gate. Unfortunately it was a very rainy afternoon

And this is Kamo-gawa at night. Pontochô is on the right.

More images will follow :-)

izzu

Japan - Part 2

2005-09-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

Hello there!

Well, internet conditions in Nara and Kyôto were not as good as Tôkyô and I had no chance to update my blog. Anyway, I was very tired those days and would probably not have done it anyway ;)

Fact is, it's been since Thursday that I've been back in Barcelona, busy trying to meet everyone and talk to all friends. I'm tired now, but I feel it is time to give a new subset of photos. These cover our last day in Tôkyô and our one-day trip to Ôsaka. Unfortunately I lost three days of photos covering Kyôto and Nara (unforgiveable!). These were right in the middle of the photos I'm showing now (ie, between Tôkyô and Ôsaka. You figure...). But now to the pics

The first pic gives a view of Tôkyô tower and the temple Zozo-ji (?)

more zozo-ji

Next is a view of Tokyo with Shinjuku at the far end. Unluckily a smoggy day..

Following is a photo of a typical "high-tech" toilet. Taken in the Nikko-Nara hotel :)

The next set of photos are from Ôsaka. They were taken a couple of days later due to my mistake with the camera.

A couple of Ôsaka buildings seen from Osakajo-koen

The famous Ôsaka castle

An Ôsaka view from the castle

And finally, another view of Ôsaka; this one taken from the 27F of the Ôsaka train station (not shin-osaka train station). すごい！

More pics will follow :)
Bona nit!

Japan - Part 1

2005-09-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

Hi, as promised here are some photos from the first two days in Japan. but only a small subset wit simple comments, as we're are terribly tired and the software is playing tricks on me.

First of all here is the reception team at kansai internation airport :)

This is the sumidagawa, close to our hostel

This is the Kannan at Asakusa (or something similar, need to check my guides ;)

These photos are from today. This is a view of tokio from odaiba

This is Fuji TV building (?) at Odaiba

This is a view of Ginza on Sunday, with the streets closed to the cars. The guy in the picture is my collegue Xavi

This is the large apple store at ginza

This is the East entrance to the Emperial castle

Shinjuku (Kabukichou) in the afternoon

And finally Shibuya at night. This photo is without flash and is thus very bad

This is Shinagawa station. Yamanote line had a problem while we were returning, so we looked for a restaurant at this place :)

I promise more photos in a couple of days :)

Towards Japan

2005-09-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

This is my last post before going to sleep. Tomorrow my flight to kansai (kix) leaves at 10:35h in the morning. I've just seen there are a couple of nice hurricanes or whatever right south of Japan (maybe close to okinawa?). I hope this does not interfere too much with our plans. Maybe getting lost in 新宿 (shinjuku?) is not a bad idea after all ;)

We'll stay in 浅草 (sumidagawa) while in 東京 (tokyo). Seems like a good place from here. In 京都 (kyoto) I will be staying at 東山 (higashiyama) which on the map looks also pretty close to the center. No idea about the 奈良 (nara) hotel.

uff, I'm so tired I'm going to sleep now. let me hear from you on this blog ;)
good night

Opeth - Ghost Reveries

2005-09-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

Opeth's new album "Ghost Reveries" is out. I've been listening to it for the last couple of days and I'm pleased to to inform you that GR is another masterpiece from this swedish band. I was a bit confused after the Deliverance/Damnation CDs. Deliverance sounded a little too systematic. However, GR goes back to the variation and feeling of older albums more like Still Life. It is, however, not so heavy. The progressive death metal of Opeth is still there and in large quantities, but the rythms seem slower. But do not think this is some doomdeath album.

It's hard to state some songs as the best ones. I sincerly like them all. But I will cite "Ghost of Perdition" and "The grand Conjuration" as favorites, probably just because I've heard the most.

Btw, Opeth is now a quintet as their tour keybord player Per Wilborg has been added to the lineup permanently. This addition may be one of the principal differences in the sound with previous albums. The utilization of keyboards is not abused, which was one of my fears. All in all, another top album from Opeth. Just can't stop listening it. Damn! 97/100

22 ing world youth goe championship

2005-08-27T05:39:00.000-07:00

The 22nd wygc was just held in Barcelona. It's a pity that I coundn't attend any of the matches, although I could watch the finals realtime on KGS. In the senior category SONG Sang-Min (KR) won against the chinese player TANG Wei-Xing(CN). In Junior it went the other way round and the chinese player LIAO Xing-Wen(CN) won against the korean player NA Hyun(KR). Although many of the regular matches are accessible at the web page of the 22nd WYGC I can't find the finals, which I would otherwise link here. The matches were retransmitted through kgs, so they can be probably retrieved from there. I'm trying to remember the usernames. I think it was "wygc" for the senior final and "wygc1" for the junior final. This needs to be checked.

You can access all the data from the WYGC website and start wondering why you started playing GO so late :)

back from stockholm

2005-08-27T05:30:00.000-07:00

Hello!

It's been two days since I've been back from my Stockholm trip and I'm just starting to have some time to write. Things will be very busy for me this week considering that I have to prepare two presentations for ISHPC 2005. We'll be leaving next Friday, but this time it will be a mega-trip to Kansai International (near Osaka). But more on this in a different post.

Stockholm is a beautiful city. I hope to post some pictures later. A great help to my appreciation of the city has been the fact that we got seven days in a row with good weather. That's actually a pretty distorted image of the city but for one I welcome these sort of distortions. Stockholm is very clean and beautiful, and beautiful are swedish ladies :) (footnote: important contribution to male appreciation of cities) To my surprise, there were many many people on the streets. It turns out they have such bad weather that when the good wheather comes everyone wants to go out and enjoy it. I don't want to wonder how gamlastan will look in the winter...

Everything went smoothly, except we should have taken a look at the airport before buying the ticket. stockholm-skavsta, like barcelona-girona, is about an hour away from the main city. Of course there are busses, but things start to get ugly when you acknowledge that your return trip is at 7:00am and you will have to take the 3:45h bus. And it gets worse when you are informed at 0:00am that the bus terminal is going to close and the railway terminal closes at 1:00am. So we were at Stockholm, 1:00am in the morning just walking around normalm until we ended at some place that served free american coffee (well, I guess it was not completely free but we made some mistake and got it free :)

But other than that, and the fact that my credit card was exhausted the day we arrived due to some calculus error I committed, the rest was ok. If you're lucky I will post some pictures from the trip, but now I want to concentrate on a different topic. See next post!

izzu

holiday transfer times

2005-08-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

hi!

some updates... I just came back from the Colonia de Sant Jordi, which is a small harbour / beach town in southern mallorca, where my family tends to stay during the month of August. Here is a nice picture of the place, as seen from the Platja d'es Dolç (ie, the beach of the sweetwater)

So, that has been one week of sun. And what comes now? One week in Stockholm. There is something like a 15 degree difference so it should result in a very different type of vacation. In addition, not taking my computer with me this will also modify a lot the activities I have been performing last week in my free time. Among others, I've had time to work a little on my GO engine (I'll dedicate a post later), I've been reading Ishigure's In the Beginning, been reading some Haikus and Zen koans and, finally, I've been practicing a little of 日本語 (japanese).

Well, I'm going to end this post now, as I don't like these sort of update-posts which don't really say much other than hello! I'm alive!, as if somebody really cares. If I'm lucky and our hostel in Stockholm has free internet I'll try to describe a little the city and our adventures. If not, just wait for the 24th when we'll return :)

Until then, just some nice and very well known haikus; just for your pleasure
(both from basho, 芭蕉)

荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川
The sea is wild! The Milky Way extends,
Far over to the island of Sado

古池や蛙飛びこむ水の音
The ancient pond!
A frog plunged-splash!

First Post...

2005-08-08T04:02:00.000-07:00

Hello Everybody :)

This is my new blog. For those who are here for the first time, Welcome! Most others may have reached trying to find my old blog Out-of-Order, which is no longer available due to server problems (php issues). Anyway, I never liked running php software on a personal account. Having powerful interfaces to the outside world can be something dangerous, you know..

This is my first post here, and my first for a while as I'm leaving today for two weeks. I'll be in Mallorca until the 16th and in Stockholm until the 24th. It's unlikely that I update my blog these days. However, many people have asked me to document my trip to Japan in September. I hope to be able to update my blog on a regular basis by then.

You may have noticed I have changed the title of my blog to izzumorphed. This is of course a word-play with isomorphism and izzu, which is my usual login (but was not available here...). As someone very involved in science (socially) and arts (personally), establishing isomorphism among diverse disciplines has always fascinated me. If you are curious, start grabbing a copy of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach and you'll know what I mean. There is really a lot to learn and do in the matter of cross-discipline influences (some refer to this as cross-pollination, but in general I hear this term used only referring to similar disciplines)

I have to go pack my baggage now. It's getting late I have not packed anything still.
To all, have a happy august and a nice vacation (if)

izzu