Last week we had an employee coming back from the US get yanked into quarantine at Narita for a week because he sat in the vicinity of a guy with a fever.

Today we received the following email:

Due to prevention of New type Flu, VTSJ Safety & Health Committee would like you to deploy as followings.

Before coming work place, it is necessary to check your body temperature. If you have more than 38℃ of fever, Report to your manager and call to inquiry counter (phone desk organized by the health ministry).

*If you are not able to talk by Japanese, inform to your HR Department.

When your team member will be infected a flu, Manager must report it to Safety Group by attached format. Manager must ask your team member to avoid coming to his/her work place until approval from Public Health Department.

Along with PDF flyers about proper hand washing and "coughing etiquette" as well as the official excel-made (everything is made with excel in Japan) "Flu Patient Declaration" form for use by managers to report to Human Resources.

One of my team members didn't come to work today because he wasn't feeling good. I'm tempted to rat him out to the company with the provided form and get him quarantined until next week... (^o^)/

His replacement was nominated at the same time as the ex-CEO of Saint Gobain, a high-tech materials manufacturer mostly known for its glass products (your car's windshield and windows have a good chance of coming from them). The interesting thing being that he had to step down last December when Saint Gobain was indicted for price-fixing cartel by the European Union and fined for 900M€.

The interesting part is the reactions I observed on my French and Japanese colleagues as they heard the news:

• French people follow the news about the company and were all talking about it the Monday morning after the announcement.
  • The bonus, although everyone thinks it's pretty tasteless in our situation, was more or less expected.
  • However people are really shocked that the new CEO's last accomplishment was getting his company indicted for the very serious offense of price-fixing.
• For my Japanese colleagues, I had to break the details of the news to them as the local papers are much more interested in the latest development of the North Korean missile threat.
  • They are pretty much outraged about the bonus.
  • When told about the cartel affair, their reaction is incredulity: "Europe is really severe on those things..."

Funny how the points of view differ on the subject.

I found the exercise very interesting which is why I will copy my reply in here. Be prepared, it's a bit lengthy.

What is it I do?

I work for Valeo in the Compressor Branch. We make compressors for automobile air conditioning systems: for those who remember their physics lessons and the first law of thermodynamics, the decompression of a fluid lowers its temperature. This is why A/C systems use what we call an A/C loop where we compress/condense a gas on one side before decompressing/evaporating it in a heat exchanger to cool the air coming in your car (then that gas goes back into the compressor for another round in the closed loop). The technology is rather cool and I love looking at CAD models, manipulating the prototypes and talking with our designers to understand how every little part of our product works.

Back to me. So Valeo is this big automotive parts company which is organized into branches by product family: Compressors, Transmissions, Wipers (don't under-estimate, windshield wipers are high technology items), Lighting Systems, etc. Under each branch there is a division for each country of production. I work for the Compressor branch and therefore give services to all the divisions of my branch in multiple countries: Japan, Thailand, South Korea, China, Czech Republic and USA.

The Compressor branch is a bit special by the fact that it is the only one whose HQ is not around Paris but in Tokyo. The activity was bought back from a Japanese company as a joint-venture with Bosch, then 100% by Valeo 4 years ago. It is therefore a Japanese company whose whole top management (except for R&D) was replaced by French expatriates after acquisition...

I work in a team that manages the information systems (computers and software) of the whole R&D service: 80% in Japan, 20% and growing in the other divisions I listed above. I work mainly on the the PLM system (Product Lifecycle Management) - a kind of big software system that handles all the product design activity from start to finish:

1. design new technology prototypes
2. management of projects to adapt, manufacture and sell this product to new clients
3. design of all the parts included in the compressor and storage of all 3D models and 2D drawings
4. approval process for these designs
5. life of the product with continuous updates to lower production costs and improve margin

I'm the main-guy on this rather big-big-system. I'm the expert. I train the users, I solve their problems be it technical (buggy server) or functional (software not used in the right way), but mainly I observe all the processes linked to the system - spanning all domains of the company except finance/accounting) - and try to modify the software (by writing specifications that will be written in code by offshore developer in India) or the way that we use it to improve the efficiency of these processes. See Kaizen.

What I like in my job:

• I gravitate around the R&D service but I get to touch all domains of the business which is very interesting.
• I get to travel quite a bit, at least when the company has money (cf. last point of what I don't like in my job).
• I can play around with servers, make mini-projects on the side to code and build useful tools for my team and I, but I do not spend my whole time coding: I code what I want (i.e. what I like) and pay other people to write the big boring 100.000s lines of code for me.

What I don't like in my job:

• It's complicated to work in Japan for my manager in France and users all over the world to satisfy imperatives from Group Headquarter in France who seems to always forget that I am the only bastard with a time difference of +7h (don't I love it when I get asked why I wasn't there for the meeting at 4PM Paris time...).
• It's not easy to quantify my ROI (return on investment - how much money I saved for the company compared to how much I cost) at the end of the year.
• The location: my office is in a factory in the middle of nowhere, 1h of train away from Tokyo plus 20min of bus from the closest train station.
• Right now, the automobile business is not the funniest place to be at: budget cuts, canceled projects, travel and hiring freezes, restructuration plans. It's not all rainbows and unicorns...

Actually, it's nothing unusual for Japan where the 25th is a day like any other day. But this year is special: you should know that I work for a big French automotive parts manufacturer, and this is not a very fun time for us.

Car production is down ~30% over all the industry, which means we also must cut our production by 30%. So our manufacturing plants all over the world are shutting down 1 or 2 weeks early for new year vacations.

But then, since part of my job is support, not only for Japan but for all our plants around the world, I have to be there in an empty office in an empty factory on Christmas day in case the phone rings or an email comes in requiring my mad skills...

*crickets chirping*... yeah, right...

First create a specific python file to hold your custom filters at the root of your application. In my case I use customfilters.py like this:

import re
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
 
register = webapp.template.create_template_register()
 
def escapeimg(body):
	return re.sub(r'

', '[IMG]', body)
 
register.filter(escapeimg)

Then in your main application source file, call the following line outside of the main() definition, for example just after your modules loading:

"""Load custom Django template filters"""
webapp.template.register_template_library('customfilters')

You should then be able to use the new filters you registered in customfilters.py straight away in any of your Django templates without any % load foobar % call

import cgi
import urllib
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.api import urlfetch
 
class FlickrController(webapp.RequestHandler):
	"""Proxy for Ajax calls to flickr"""
	def get(self):
		flickrapiendpoint = 'http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/'
		flickrapikey = 'you_flicker_api_key'
 
		params = self.request.GET
		params.add('api_key', flickrapikey)
		params.add('format', 'json')
		apiquery = urllib.urlencode(params)
 
		result = urlfetch.fetch(url=flickrapiendpoint + '?' + apiquery, method=urlfetch.GET)
		self.response.out.write(result.content)
 
def main():
	application = webapp.WSGIApplication(
		[('/flickr/', FlickrController)],
		debug=True)
	wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
	main()

I didn't see examples of such a script anywhere else so I thought I'd post it here for all to see.

Information for Dental Checkup and Treatment:

Announcing the "Let's leave 20 teeth at age 80" campaign

Aren't your decayed teeth or pyorrhea getting worse while you are unaware ofr them? Health Insurance society has been sending application forms of dental checkup to the insured persons in numeric order of Insurance Card.

This time your insurance card number is in range of an applicable object: you are entitled to a complete dental checkup including teeth, gum and supporting bone X-rays at 10% of the medical care cost.

This is actually a pretty good deal, apart from the goofy tag-name for the campaign, and I've signed up for a long overdue checkup on the cheap.

Colleague: We have a problem with the *censored* server.
Boss: Where is that server located?
Colleague: It's in the Intellectual Property room, on the 2nd floor of the Reliability building.
Me: Yeah, you know that place? It's right next to the office of Lost Causes.

We always have lots of fun during our daily meetings.

Special Tax Credit
Inform of special tax credit (deduction of housing loan) system like house loan etc. of residence tax. It comes to be able to deduct the amount of a special deduction like the house loan etc. that were not able to be deducted from the income tax is able to deduct from the residence tax in 2008 fiscal year.

Okay... As usual I'm going to stamp the paper with my hanko and give it back praying that I have not signed over my soul to the devil...

I often delve deep into the application with the MQL console (for Matrix Query Language) to dig out some insight into the data we manage.

And, more often than not, I find things that makes me cringe:

MQL<45> print bus ECO ZCO3171 - select history.promote;
business object ECO ZCO3171 -
history.promote = time: 10/22/2007 9:56 state: Design Work
history.promote = time: 10/22/2007 17:23 state: Review
history.promote = time: 10/22/2007 18:28 state: Release
history.promote = time: 10/24/2007 21:33 state: Implemented
MQL<46> print bus ECO ZCO3171 - select history.promote[1];
business object ECO ZCO3171 -
history.promote[1] = time: 10/22/2007 17:23 state: Review
MQL<47> print bus ECO ZCO3171 - select history.promote[0];
business object ECO ZCO3171 -
history.promote[0] = time: 10/22/2007 9:56 state: Design Work
history.promote[0] = time: 10/22/2007 17:23 state: Review
history.promote[0] = time: 10/22/2007 18:28 state: Release
history.promote[0] = time: 10/24/2007 21:33 state: Implemented

If someone has any insight on how a query language can be this flawed, I'm all ears.

PS: If you don't understand anything about this post, I'm deeply sorry for boring you with my tech rants...