Category: Random

Business card at a job interview

Expanding on my previous tweet, this is of course from a Japanese “business practices and manners” point of view…

american psycho - business card scene

When arriving at a job interview, as with any business meeting, your interviewer will usually give you his 名刺. It is considered polite in Japan to accept it with 2 hands, bow, place it neatly on the table and answer by giving out your own 名刺.

Note: to anyone about to work with Japanese people: always have at least 2 dozens business cards with you at all times!

But in the case of a job interview, should you present your business card if it is from your current employer? In a way, you are betraying your company by looking for a new job. Moreover, the guy already knows you, he has your resume on the table already…

I’ve always been confused with this and am not sure of the appropriate behavior. Maybe I should make myself a batch of personal business cards for such occasions where it is not acceptable to present yourself as your business-self:

Superman – associate @ SuperFriends

As opposed to:

Clark Kent – reporter @ DailyPlanet

Meta-tags proposal for the new DiggBar

Many think the DiggBar is evil. I don’t. I find it ingenious, especially the digg.com pre-pending which will automatically generate a shortened URL for you as well as a “Submit to Digg” button if the page URL has not been submitted yet.

prepending digg.com for the digg bar

unsubmitted diggbar

However, when you submit a link to Digg by this way, the title and description of the item are empty by default, placing the burden to fill up these fields on the submitter. He needs to go back to the page, copy the title, copy some text of the article or make up a better description, which is all a pain and poses a big hurdle…

Digg submission - all empty

Digg offers a way for webmasters to create a link that will pre-fill these fields with the data you want your readers to use. This is done by simply setting some parameter in a URL to put as target of the link:

http://digg.com/submit?url=example.com&title=TITLE&bodytext=DESCRIPTION&media=MEDIA&topic=TOPIC

But this process is not compatible with the DiggBar and its URL pre-pending feature. What we, webmasters, need is a way to define these values that will work everytime.

Why not Meta tags? Step 1 of the step 2 in the screenshot above is Digg downloading the page to check it really exists and provide potential thumbnails for the submission. At this stage they could read a couple of meta tags in the <head> of the page and use that to pre-fill these fields.

<meta name="digg-title"  content="My title here" />
<meta name="digg-description" content="My 350 characters excerpt." />

It would then be trivial to write a WordPress plugin that generates these meta from your post title and excerpt (or similar concepts in other CMS platforms).

If you think this would be a feature you would like to see, I invite you to digg this blog post: http://digg.com/d1p1YV

Funny dog toys from Japan

I’m going back home to Paris with the girlfriend for a week after Golden Week so of course the usual shopping lists start dropping in my mailbox. They are mainly filled with tech related stuff and gadgets that are quite a bit cheaper than in France (with a VAT at 20%, it’s hard not to be competitive…) – like digital cameras, or just not available anywhere but in whacky Japan – like USB humping dogs.

But this time I got something really original. My brother asked me to bring him back a special chewtoy for dogs that he wants to offer to a friend of his. I found the design so cool and original I wanted to share it with you guys.

doggy-teethdoggy-lineup

There are 4 different types and they go for ¥238 on Rakuten. Pretty awesome.

Prime Ministers of Japan

  • Junichiro Koizumi – 小泉 純一郎 – 2001 to 2006 – grandfather was Minister of Posts and Telecommunications
  • Shinzo Abe – 安倍 晋三 – 2006 to 2007 – grandfather was Prime Minister
  • Yasuo Fukuda – 福田 康夫 – 2007 to 2008 – father was Prime Minister
  • Taro Aso – 麻生 太郎 – soon to be sworn in – grandfather was Prime Minister, father in law was Prime Minister

Can you see a pattern here?

Otaku rush on the new Fukutoshin

Last Saturday morning I was leaving a party at 5 A.M. in Shibuya and decided it would be nice to come back home to Shiki with the new Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin line which was opening the very day and interfaces with my usual Tobu Tojo line for an almost direct trip to and from Shibuya (I just have to hop from one side of the platform to another at Wakoushi) in a breeze.

fukutoshin line - map

So my girlfriend and I arrived at 5:30 after being guided by cops that were all over the station for the opening and got there to climb in the first train to arrive at Shibuya station and reversing for the journey back to Saitama.

Ruiko said:
Do not under-estimate the Japanese Otaku…

Remembering this saying by a good friend of mine, I wasn’t surprised when that first train came in Shibuya station packed full of weirdos with backpacks and cameras (the classic Otaku costume). They came out of the train clapping and cheering, taking photos of each other in front of the driving cabin and macroing on every little details of the new train and station.

After the flow ebbed, we climbed on the train and were followed by a dozen of guys who must’ve missed the very first train. Losers… One of them was recording the trip and announcements with a microphone, bobbing his head to each of the stations’ distinctive music as if to music from heaven… One of them had long pommeled hair and wore a flowery dress…

I didn’t take any photos of them as my girlfriend was afraid I would get shanked by one of the weirdos like what happened in Akihabara 2 weeks ago, but I do have some photos of the brand new piece of station in Shibuya.

ctype_digit error in WordPress 2.5

wordpress-image-uploadI’ve upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5 last weekend. The new design of the admin backend is great and seeing things evolve like that really motivates me to pour more time into my blog and add some nice little functionalities that I’ve been thinking about lately.

But it happens that I came upon an error when trying out the new image uploader and I’m sure many people will get it too:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function ctype_digit() in wp-includes/link-template.php on line 182

What happens is that my flavor of PHP5 is not compiled with the ctype flag. This seems to be the default on Gentoo, so if you run it be sure to add the ctype use flag to your portage config. But if you can’t recompile PHP, you can just open up the file wp-includes/link-template.php and replace the line 182 as follows:

Replace ctype_digit with is_numeric

That should do the trick until the version 2.5.1 that should patch things up according to what I see in the bug tracker (pending issue on link-template.php and a similar issue in another file already merged in 2.5).

Meeting shenanigans

Just a random conversation during one of my team’s daily meetings at work:

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.

Sand storm

Last Saturday in the early afternoon, we had a huge dust storm all over the 関東 area. It started out as a very nice day, sunny 15°C, I went for grocery shopping in just a light sweater. Then around 2PM, the sky suddenly became dark, great gusts of wind started whistling around the corners of our building, we could see the road signs and city lights shaking in the street and parked bicycles being blown away. The sky became dark yellowish / light brown as the huge dust cloud passed over us. Then it was over in 15 minutes.

砂嵐 by surround on flickr

I couldn’t take a good photo as my girlfriend wouldn’t let me open the windows or open the door to go outside (we just cleaned up the apartment, so letting all this dust come in was definitely not a good idea), so I got this photo of the event from surround’s photostream on Flickr.

Apparently, these dust storms happen often in the Kanto plain at the turn of spring. This huge plain all around Tokyo is heavily farmed and parched fields, from the very dry winters we have here, go up in dust with the strong winds marking the coming of spring.

MQL baffles me

My job consists of writing functional specifications and generally managing the architecture of a big R&D information system based on a wonderful jack-of-all-trade application called eMatrix from Dassault.

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…