DirectX drivers and the human condition

Just a thought I had while wrestling with an ugly issue with my DirectX drivers... I think that some of us, especially those of us who use computers for a living, tend to take for granted and somewhat trivialize the difficulty of setting up a computer and the fragility of the balance of programs, settings, drivers, and such that keeps a computer running. I realize, of course, what's involved in setting up a system, but I think it usually takes longer than I expect, even though I've done it so many times.

It's like childhood. For what is childhood anyway, but installation of software and tweaking of settings? Parents install moral drivers in their kids and try to inoculate them against adware, spyware, and viruses, and then they send them off to school where they get the most recent versions of basic utility programs and codecs installed. One thing we tend to trivialize, though, is the difficulty of the installation and setup process - the fights on the playground, the fundamental misunderstandings, the learning of boundaries through trial and error... Once we pass that point, it's easy to write it off as "elementary school" or whatever, but at the time these things are enormously significant, emotionally overwhelming, and sometimes traumatic.

So, also, are the snags we hit when installing a system. We try to uninstall one driver and install the next, something we think should be a straightforward process, and Windows grinds to a halt in the middle of the next boot. One month, one year later, we think nothing of it, but at the moment, well... you're down with chicken pox and can't go to school. Nothing to do but pull out of your daily routine, go to the doctor, get some calamine lotion and candy corns, boot into safe mode, and tweak away at your registry settings and drivers until you get over it.

And so, too, it is with civilization. Often we take for an eternal and impregnable fortress that which is but a thin veil of rules, rights, and a gambler's trust that hold together the delicately-balanced patchwork of society. And talk about a costly and painful setup process... look at the reinstall we've been working on in Iraq.

Somehow I think the unbalanced way in which we perceive these things is related to our tendency to desire permanence. We tend to minimalize the transient in our minds and give undue weight to steady-state conditions because we feel more comfortable doing so. Or maybe not... I'm still not completely awake or coherent - merriment and karaoke trumped an early slumber once again last night. I just wanted to throw this down on paper, so to speak, before it slips my mind.

とうとう日本語が出てきた！

今まで日本語はまったく書いていないからちょっと入れようかなと思っている。でも英語で書いた文をそのままで翻訳すると面白くないし、間違えたら英語べらべらの日本人の友達が笑っちゃうからちょっと違うことを書こうか。(まぁ、多分どせい笑っちゃうけどな。）
さぁ、今週末なにしていたっけ。。。金曜日ちょっと難波で買い物して、久しぶりにTokyu Handsに行った。妹の誕生日プレゼントを探していたけど面白いものいっぱいあったのにいいプレゼント見つかっていない。そして、アルビンくんとリリーちゃんって言う友達が週末広島に行く予定だった、青春１８切符で。そいつら大阪駅から夜中0:03出発するつもりだったから大阪で一緒に食べた。びっくりドンキーにつれて行って、美味しかった。リリーはチェリー味のビールを頼んで、ちょっと甘かったけど美味しかった。でも蚊がいっぱいおったから早く食べてでた。
土曜日は、珍しく予定なかったから家で風呂掃除や洗濯やそんな感じな事をして、ちょっとジョッギングもした。Oh yeah, can I just say? I went jogging on Saturday, and I was working my way through all the twisty little roads in my neighborhood, when I found a little path through this tiny park. It was nice... beautiful green pines standing before a backdrop of a cloudless blue sky, the whole scene bathed in the golden glow of a summer afternoon's warm sunlight, the natural vista broken only by the "Beware of Perverts" signs every 20 feet... WTF?? Japan is so weird. ごめんね、英語に戻っちゃった。（笑）なぜ家の近くの公園とか高校でこんなにいっぱい「痴漢に注意」って書いてあるかんばんあんのかな？そんなにいっぱいおる？めちゃいなかなのに、そのかんばんを見たらここは世界の一番痴漢が多いとこを思っちゃう！ But I digress...
また家帰って、大阪に行って友達とカラオケした。がんばってまたウルフルズの｢ラブラブ一直線」を歌おうとしたけど
やはり難しかった。速いとこでなに言っているかまだようわからへん。読もうとしたけど速すぎた。インターネットでも歌詞見つからないし、どうしよう。でもやっぱり新しい日本語の歌を歌えるようになりたい。次「ガッツだぜ」しようかと思っているけといつもウルフルズばかしやから別のグループにしようかな。Rip Slymeをめちゃ歌いたいけどめちゃ無理やろう？Def Techも難しいと思う。平井けんかな？どの歌がいいかな？コメントで意見をおねがいします！：）
今週友達が二人帰国しちゃう。ウッサマくんって言うテュニジア人と前言ったアメリカ人のリリーちゃん。ウッサマの送別会は今晩なので、リリーは明日。寂しい、寂しい。
よし。日本語でやっとブロッグ書いたね。：）

Happy 10th Anniversary, Montego Bay!

hmm... so much to talk about, so little time before I should really go to sleep! I'll try to keep this short (which is the standard lie with which I start everything I write ;)

By the way, thanks for the responses to my poll so far. I think this post falls in the philosophy category, and I did take some good pictures, but I don't know how to get them off of my phone, so I won't be able to post them quite yet.

So, two topics to talk about today. Or should I say, two insights. But they're not deep enough to call insights... more like stray thoughts. My brain seems to do a lot of work when I'm not asking it to. But then again, what does "I" mean, if it's not my brain? Suffice to say, my brain's putting in a lot of unpaid overtime, so to speak. Connections. Maybe they're connections, like that TLC show.

Connection #1 - Full Metal Alchemist and Montego Bay's 10th anniversary

Anyway, the first connection. I went with my friends Alvin and Linda this week to see the "Full Metal Alchemist" movie (it's an anime about two brothers who are alchemists, looking for the philosopher's stone, and a lot of sort of philosophical reflection on the principle of equivalent trade in alchemy and in life). I enjoyed the movie, although it seemed kind of short - I essentially watched the entire 52-episode series in one weekend when I was stuck in my room with food poisoning last month, so... well, anything would seem short after that! Anyway, back to my point. The movie was cool, but the plot wasn't really what made it cool. The thing that was great about it was seeing all the old, familiar characters again. One of the characters even died in the original series, and the character that was in the movie was his corresponding persona in a parallel world... it had nothing to do with the original character except that it looked like him! But it was a lot of fun to watch anyway.

The reason I bring this up now is that tonight, I went to a party in Osaka to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Montego Bay, the bar I used to go to regularly when I lived in Toyonaka. It's a great little bar, and as my friend Adrian describes it, it feels kinda like you're in some guy's basement. Very casual, very friendly. I haven't been back there since I came to visit Japan in November.

Anyway, I went to this party. It was fun. I think I knew about 30-40 percent of the people there. It felt a little weird, because I don't really get up to Toyonaka much anymore, so I probably won't be hanging out with these people much (in the same way that, really, how much can develop and change in a 90-minute movie, compared with a 52-episode series?). The great thing, though, just like with the movie, was seeing all the old, familiar characters again. Pretty much everybody I had ever met at Montego was there, even this guy Tomi, who had moved away years ago but came down from Tokyo for the party! Life has moved on a bit - a lot of my old friends are married now and whatnot, but we partied it up just like the old days, and we drank and danced until the last trains loomed near.

Actually, a little too near. I ended up running the whole way from the club back to the JR station, making it to the platform with just two minutes left before the last loop line train ... that connected to the last Nara-bound train ... that connected to the last Kyoto-bound train at Saidaiji. This is the third night in a row that I've taken the last train home, and I've finally memorized all the key schedules!

So that was connection #1. Connection #2 needs less background to explain.

Connection #2 - my iPod and life in general

On the way to this party tonight, I again cut things as close as I possibly could (as usual), and ended up running out the door and down the hill to catch the train into Osaka. These train rides tend to take a while, so I always bring my iPod with me to help pass the time. As I jumped the last four steps going down to the platform and hurtled myself into the train just as the doors were crashing shut, I instinctively switched on my iPod and realized that its battery was pretty low. I'd been neglecting to charge it for the past couple days (so many things to charge! Two cell phones, an iPod, and my camera!) and its battery meter was already in the red.

So, I thought, I could listen to it for the ride into town and have nothing to listen to on the way back, or I could conserve energy and just sit in the uncomfortable silence of the train for the next hour. Of course I chose the former... chances were that there would be some juice left on the way back, and if not, I would probably be exhausted and drunk anyway. So I switched it onto shuffle. Beastie Boys ... Sarah McLachlan ... change trains at Saidaiji ... DJ Micro ... Fatboy Slim ... Carmina Burana ... Louis Armstrong ... Darude ... shuffle is awesome ... Def Leppard (wow, haven't heard them in a while!) ... Milli Vanilli ... Kuraki Mai ... Public Enemy ... change trains at Tsuruhashi ... B-52's ... a song from Bill and Ted ... Jim's Big Ego ... finally arrived at Osaka. Battery level critical.

So the lesson we almost learn from this is that, when you don't take the time to charge your batteries, although it doesn't really stop you from doing the things you're going to do anyway, it sometimes means you have to do them without any background music. And of course when I talk about "charging batteries" and "background music", I mean those things in the most general, metaphorical sense possible (but if you've read this far you probably realize that).

The reason I said "almost learn" is that, in the end, my batteries lasted for the entire train ride home, including the walk to the only convenience store in Takanohara that's open until 1am, so I could get some seaweed-covered fish-filled riceballs, which are the PERFECT epilogue to an evening of beer and dancing! So yeah, somehow I managed to just make the last train, and my batteries just lasted the whole way. Someday this will ostensibly cease to happen, and I will ostensibly learn my lesson. Until then, carpe diem!

Tsutenkaku Tower and Shin-Sekai

So these entries are a little out of order, but I don't think that is really important. By the way, feel free to comment on any of these posts, and please fill out the survey to the right! I want to provide you with the most fulfilling blog experience possible, and I need your feedback!


Anyway, last Saturday I met up with Ken, one of my ex-students, and his girlfriend, and we went to Tsutenkaku, which is a tower in south-central Osaka. For years I had known of its existence - it's a well-known symbol of Osaka - and back when my friend Caroline used to live near Namba station I would catch glimpses of it on the way to her apartment, but I had never actually gone there.

Standing 103 meters tall (about one-third of the height of Tokyo Tower), Tsutenkaku was originally built in 1912, but it was destroyed in WWII, and the current incarnation was rebuilt in 1956. It's located in an area they call Shin-Sekai, the "new world" - a 1950's vision of a hopeful future. However, the glitz and shine have faded on this now somewhat grubby neighborhood, and the surrounding area is quite sketchy by Japanese standards. It kind of reminded me of the creepy broken-down amusement park where they had the showdown with Nicholas at the end of the Care Bears Movie.

We went up inside, and it afforded a wonderful night view of Osaka, to the backdrop of of a marvelous orange moon (which I spectacularly failed to take a decent photo of). We could see Ikoma mountain to the east, the Ferris wheel near the aquarium to the west, the faint glow of Umeda hidden behind some tall buildings to the north, another Ferris wheel which we suspect is the one at Banpaku-koen to the northeast, and ... whoa! Tennoji was RIGHT THERE to the southeast. Tennoji?? I've lived near Osaka for over three years, and Tennoji was always far to the south of Namba in my mind. But there it was, right in front of us, and we had just walked from Namba minutes earlier. It was one of those moments that reconfigures the geometry of your internal representation of the world, synapses crackling as fast as they can to re-render this abruptly-reshaped map and send off alerts to memory centers holding data with dependencies on its basic spatial constraints. Heavy stuff. I needed a drink of water.



Of course, no reconstructed inner-city observatory tower would be complete without its own graven idol. Billiken, a wooden sculpture of a fat, smirking, pucker-faced dwarf, sits upon its wooden throne, standard Japanese shinto money-box at its feet for people to throw coins into and clap and pray. I think rubbing Billiken's foot was part of the ritual too, judging by the extraordinary concavity of its right sole. Carved by an American as a gift, Billiken's inscription (not visible in this picture) reads "The god of things as they ought to be". Or rather, the left side reads "The god of", the center panel reads "things as they", and the right side reads "ought to be". The reason I point this out is that apparently, whoever made the souvenirs for Tsutenkaku neglected to realize there was writing on the two sides. Everything from the omamori (good luck charms), to the 3D cast iron models of Billiken, sport only the words "things as they", a statement more mysterious, certainly, than the sound of one hand clapping.



On the way out, Ken and I discovered, nearly forgotten in the back of the visitors' center, cracked blue paint from a past age peeling off in splinters, two actual fun-house mirrors! What they were doing there I don't know, but it fit right into the Care Bears image that had already fixed itself in my mind.

By the way, much like the old Hancock building in Boston, the lights atop Tsutenkaku signal a forecast of the coming weather. Unlike the old Hancock building in Boston, there is no catchy rhyme to help you remember what the different colors mean. The diagram here shows the nine possible combinations. By the way, I'm getting some of these graphics from this Tsutenkaku website. There are some great "Engrish" explanations of things in here, so check it out if you have the time and inclination.


Anyway, after a dinner of greasy Chinese food bathed in tobacco smoke in a little restaurant at the base of the tower, we skirted around the city zoo to get to Tennoji station to catch the train home. On the way we passed several open spaces full of sleeping homeless people. This is a very uncommon sight in Japan, and it was a little scary - as we were walking through one pretty dark alley, we passed this naked guy just sitting there, staring at us and talking to himself. As we walked on around the zoo, captive animals called out to us in hopeless anguish from inside their concrete prison walls. "This is Shin-Sekai," they were saying. "This is the new world."

Some thoughts on the lowly cicada

Today, I turn my thoughts to the lifecycle of the cicada. Several times over the past few weeks I've reflected upon them, and last night I had another thought.

First, of course, the facts. Depending on the species, cicadas live underground as nymphs for anywhere from 2-17 years (the most well-known are the 13-year and 17-year cicadas) before emerging to the surface to hatch into their winged forms, and sing their mighty resonant song for 4-6 weeks before their little lives come to an end. You can research this stuff on the web - the specifics aren't necessarily relevant to my point.

The cicadas in Japan are an overwhelming presence in the heat of the summer. Their throbbing symphony of buzzing envelops you like a silvery rain as you walk outdoors, and taunts you through your window as you sit in your sweltering room, awaiting the evening retreat of the oppressive sun. In the mornings, they were even substantially louder than my alarm clock! Now that the summer is approaching an end, though, their numbers are dwindling, and their song is but a faint echo of what it once was, lacking the overwhelming punch that was its hallmark, like a muzak interpretation of Guns 'n Roses.

The obvious analogy that first hits anyone, I think, is the brevity and intensity of the cicada's life. Its song lasts but a few weeks, a reminder of the transience of life and the ephemeral nature of all we hold dear. Much like the sakura blossoms in spring, they are a reminder of impermanence. We often lull ourselves into a false sense of security, fooling ourselves into thinking that the things we have established in our lives - our situations, our relationships, our belongings - are permanent, but nothing lasts forever (even cold November rain).

Ok, so that's one way of looking at it.

The other day, I saw a poor little cicada frantically flapping about, crashing into walls and trees, panicking as it realized that it had reached the beginning of the end. Cicadas are rather loud as they wrestle with their impending doom, and this one was clattering about with great fervor. I found myself cheering it on, "fight, little one! squeeze out every sweet moment of precious life that you can before the darkness overtakes you!" Futile, of course - its fate had been decided since the beginning - but still, it put on the most spectacular show, navigating the concrete barriers of my apartment complex with a wild passion, crashing violently into one wall only to roll over and launch itself into the next. Again, it's the same kind of theme - impermanence and transience, but watching this had a much more profound effect on me than mere philosophical musings among the song of the cicadas beneath a tree in a park.

"Sometimes you've gotta take life by the lips and just YANK!"

But last night I was walking home after having said my farewells to yet another departing friend, this one a connoisseur of "enhanced experiences", let us say. Perhaps this was why I began thinking again about our small friends, but from a different perspective. Consider - they spend 17 years underground and 4 weeks aboveground, and all we think about is the relative brevity of their adult life. What about those 17 years? Do they not go about their daily lives as a grub, squidging about in the dirt and roots, garnering nourishment and ... well, garnering more nourishment? My point is, after 17 years of that, a cicada has to be pretty used to its lifestyle. After 17 years it knows its little underground world pretty thoroughly inside and out. It has its daily routine, knows the good places to go suck on tree roots, and is master of its domain. We don't give this part of its life enough credit.

Then, just as it's starting to think, "well... looks like I only have 4-6 weeks left to grub about in the dirt", it suddenly finds itself crawling up out of the ground and bursting forth into a world of brilliant colors, surround sound, incomprehensible depths and distances, new smells, flavors, movements... sensory overload! Not only this, but suddenly its exoskeleton bursts open, and it finds itself with ... wings? Absolute three-dimensional freedom! Held back by none of the restraints that were taken for granted in its old world, it is now free to explore, to fly, and to drink in this technicolor extravaganza of a world it could never have even dreamed of!

Scale this now to a human lifespan, and consider what it would be like if you could live the last 6 months of your life experiencing the analogue of this, a hyperdimensional experience of sensory input you now cannot even imagine, suddenly and unexpectedly unbound by the physical restraints of this world and free to fly through space and time! Oh, and incidentally you also have a mission in this synaesthetic swirl of color-sound-taste-music to mate once before you die, an activity which, scaled up by the same factor, would last for five full hours, the intense, passionate climax to this unexpected new life you have miraculously discovered!

How about some farewells to kick things off?

So it's kinda funny - I'm just settling into my new situation here in Japan, but as the summer ends a lot of the interns I work with are leaving ATR to go back home.

When I first got here, I was a little frustrated that everybody at work spoke English and the only people I hung out with were foreigners - one of the reasons I came back to Japan was to get better at the language, and I spoke less Japanese here than I had back in Boston! As time went on, though, I started to realize that a lot of the people here are really cool, multitalented, diverse, intelligent, introspective, inspired, hilarious, and often fairly strange in unique ways. It's been a long time since I've been surrounded by people like that, and I'm starting to realize how sad I am that they're going to be leaving soon.

Of course, ATR is kind of a crossroads for international, multidisciplinary research types, and although there are a lot of amazing people here, nobody expects to stay too long. At the same time, though, I feel like I've connected with some of these people at a really deep level, and I wish we could be together for a more substantial length of time...

Tonight we had a going-away party for a few of the people who are leaving next week. We went to karaoke and I learned a new song for the occasion - "Love Love Icchokusen", by Ulfuls (my favorite Japanese band, whose concert in Osaka next weekend is unfortunately sold out). There are some really fast parts, though, that although I had practiced and practiced, I just couldn't sing real-time under the influence of alcohol. Actually, I could barely sing them _not_ under the influence of alcohol. And to be fair, I wasn't able to find the lyrics online, so I kinda transcribed it at work by ear and tried to memorize what I had heard, which was for the most part nonsense Japanese. So you shouldn't think that I suck that bad. I think I pulled the song off fairly well, although one Japanese girl showed up to the karaoke session, which really threw me off - I thought I'd be able to BS my way through all the parts of the song I didn't understand. ;)

Anyway, I guess sometimes you cross paths with people, and you know that those paths are going to diverge before long, but you just have to make the best out of the time you have together, and live those few weeks as intensely as you can. I've had to say goodbye to so many friends though. It would really be nice to have someone stick around for a while. Yeah, like I'm one to talk, moving off to Japan like this. Whatever, you've gotta have fun, right?

Right... so anyway these are some pictures of our last crazy karaoke night together.

A few haikus to start...

Hello out there! So I decided that it's high time I joined the blogging world. My new job keeps me so busy that it's hard to keep in touch with all my friends, and there's SO much that I want to tell everyone!

Anyway, I sat down last night and wrote some haiku to kind of summarize how life has been going for me since I moved to Japan last month. Here they are, with annotations as appropriate:

Used coffee filter
Dried out in the kitchen sink
It's time to slow down

This is the one that got me started - I got home last night after work and found an old coffee filter lying in the sink - the filter and the grounds were bone dry, and I realized that I've been so busy lately that not only have I not had time to cook at home, I haven't even had time for coffee in the morning... I think that filter was from about a week ago! I think I'm going to make a concerted effort to slow down a bit and regain some balance.

It's hard, though... I really enjoy what I'm doing at work (building and programming humanoid robots, for any of you who were wondering) so I tend to stay pretty late. I really don't mind working long hours, but it doesn't leave much time for other things in life.

A trembling servo
Redesign its control loop
And drink more coffee

So for one of my projects I'm building this stuffed animal (not really sure what it's supposed to be - the girl I work with just keeps telling me "It's traditional Japanese ghost.") which has servos in it to move its arms and head. One of the problems with the servos and controller boards we use (or maybe all servos do this?) is that they tend to twitch back and forth slightly as they try to stay still. This is kind of annoying in a stuffed animal, so I rewrote the code to cut the power to the motors when they're not actively in use. The other night, though, I was on my nth cup of coffee for the day where n was large, and looking back and forth between the shaking arm of the doll and my own hand shaking over the keyboard, I had a "moment" - it was kind of like in Return of the Jedi where Luke looks back and forth between his own damaged mechanical hand and Darth Vader's.

A memory leak
Manifestation of sin
How much time is left?

So for those of you who don't know, as a program runs, the computer has to allocate chunks of memory to hold variables and objects that the program uses. After that memory is used, it needs to be freed so that it can be reused. Sometimes this is automatic, but sometimes you need to do it by hand. A common problem that happens when programming is that you forget to free up memory that has been allocated. If this happens many times (say, inside a loop) then the program starts to take up more and more memory as it runs, until the program exits or the computer's memory is full.

For one of my projects, I've been writing control software for various sensors, which collects data from the sensors and sends it to other programs over the network. A few days ago we started running it at the Osaka science museum, where we have humanoid robots that guide people around to the various exhibits. In the last few days before the project went live, we were doing overnight test runs of all our software to make sure it was stable over long periods of time. During those tests, we discovered some memory leaks. Since we had so much work to do, though, we really only had time to fix the worst ones. Practically speaking, if a program leaks 10 megs of memory over 8 hours, it's not a problem on a system that has 512 megs of RAM.

Generally speaking, though, memory leaks tend to be the result of sloppy programming. In many cases, if you're just going to compile your code and pass the program off to someone else, they'll never know how well- or poorly-designed your code was, but in this case it's clearly visible. The indelible evidence of your sin is exposed for all the world to see, with no time left to cover it up. I feel like this was a rich metaphor for many aspects of life, but I don't want to ramble too long. Next poem:

The convenience store
Closes at 9:30 sharp
Convenient, for them.

This is just one of my little frustrations with the place where I live. It's way out in the sticks. There are no bars and no karaoke near our station, and even the convenience stores close early! Of course, it's probably a good thing that there aren't many distractions because it helps me focus on work, but ... 9:30? Come on.

Anyway, there's my first blog post. I'll try to get some photos up here at some point too.