Year: 2005

Congratulations!

I just wanted to send out my congratulations to Ikuko Komuro-Lee-senesi, a Japanese Language instructor at the University of Toronto. I was fortunate enough to have many amazing Professors throughout both my BA and MA, and Komuro-sensei is certainly among the best of them. I can’t tell you how much she has meant to my life both academically and personally.

This week Komuro-sensei was finally given the recognition that she deserves and was awarded the University of Toronto’s Outstanding Teachers award. This is a very prestigious honour and one that Komuro-sensei is very deserving of.

I have never met a Professor who puts as much in to her students at Komuro-sensei does. She gives her students everything she has, and expects an equal amount of effort in return. I would not be where I am today without her, and I owe much of my success to her discipline, her instruction, her advice and her support.

Komuro-sensei: Congratulations. You deserve it. I wish I could have been there to celebrate with you. (Thank you to Natalie for the pictures!)

Komuro-senseis outstanding teacher award

That being said, the following picture is for forgetting my middle name (again!) and for asking if I needed a fork. 😉

Komuro-sensei

Congratulations. I am beyond happy for you.

Cherry Blossom … a sneak peak

Now that my work is blocking access to this website, and taking in to account my retardedly slow Internet access as home, the promised Cherry blossom pictures will have to wait.

That being said, they were spectacular. The peak landed right on the weekend, and we managed to catch them on Saturday, before typhoon-like windows blew them away on Sunday. Japanese people wait all year for a few days of blossoms, but its ridiculous how many of these trees are in our town.

Here’s a look!

A picture of a Sakura tree    A picture of a Sakura tree

Below is a picture of a very cute baby who loves me. His name is Kousuke, and he is the baby of a good friend at work. NOT the son of my calligraphy teacher (whom I originally thought! … oops!). Below that is our very good friends Mike and Nikki. Nikki lives in Kotonami, the town beside mine.

Saya    Mike and Nikki

Cherry Blossoms

This is one of those posts without pictures, so it remains to be seen how many of you will actually read this.

At any rate, it is Cherry Blossom time here in Japan. Kiko and I will be making the rounds and should have a whole lotta Cherry Blossom pictures for you come Monday. Don’t get too excited.

We should also be getting up pictures from the Franz Trip here to Japan, and a few more we have just sort of taken. A few movies are also in the works.

I was dilligently working away at davidandkiko.com 3.0, but they have blocked access to the site from my work computer. So until my Internet gets upgraded (April 28th!!!) doesn’t look like we will be seeing much progress.

More to come.
That is all.

My Gentoo Box – MythTV, Asterisk, XBMC

My second post is almost as exciting as my first.

You get to hear about my new computer and my in-house setup.

CURRENT SETUP

I currently have an ISDN Line hooked up downstairs.
My ISDN is hooked up into a wireless router.
The router travels over to the XBOX hooked up to the TV, running XBMC.
The router also travels upstairs to my Computer. My computer serves all of my content.

Since computers don’t (easily) hook up to TV’s, I have my XBOX and Computer sharing the network through my router. The XBOX is hooked up to the TV and is used to play games. After I installed XBMC it now runs as a media center. Through the network it connects to my Movies, Videos, Music, Itunes. It streams them from my computer and displays them on the TV. Boom. Instant Media Center.

The XBOX also has access to the Internet and uses it to check the weather, play online games (via Xlink), and look up Video and Music content.

It only gets more exciting…

Gentoo, MythTV, Asterisk: My New Computer

I bought a new computer before I went to Japan. After taking three weeks and going back to Canada for Christmas, I had a spectacular crash. This isn’t the first time, but it was excellent. It didn’t matter what kind of rescue disc or special boot procedure I used, Windows crashed whenever it took a look at my hard drive. After a few days of trying everything, Linux (specifically Knoppix) was the only thing that was able to retrieve data from my drive.

So after many years of putting it off, and recognizing the irony in Linux being the only thing that could save my Windows box, I took the plunge and am now in the midst of installing Gentoo Linux.

When all is said in done, I will have the following:

A Gentoo Linux Box
MythTV
Asterisk

all installed on my system. But what does this mean?

Gentoo

A Linux distribution that is known for its hands-on approach. All of the installation and configuration has to be done with the command console, and is a very different experience then todays Window-based operating systems. It can still look and act like Windows, but it doesn’t have to.


MythTV

I’m very excited about this. Ever heard of Tivo? MythTV turns your computer in to an entertainment system. It acts as a digital video recorder amongst other things. You can schedule TV programs to record, watch live TV, pause live TV, and store them all on your hard drive. You can access and schedule your recordings from the Internet, and you can easily transfer your programs or burn them to DVD. It basically means that I can have as much control over my TV as I want. When I move, it can move with me and adjust the TV schedules and programming accordingly. All free, for no subscription fee.

Asterisk

This is also very exciting. Estentially Asterisk acts as a PBX. What this really means is that it becomes its own telephone switching center. I can design my own voice mail, call forwarding, blocking etc. I can hook up my VOIP phone (my 416-internet phone number) and have it interact with the phone network. After I am done with it I will be able to forward calls from my 416 number to my Japanese cell phone, call Canada from my cell phone, or even allow people to make local calls in Japan from Canada.

I will keep everyone updated as to how the projects are going. Linux will be a pain in the ass, but it will give me an education in Unix, Network and Server systems that I have been severely lacking. When it is done, it will be super. (I’m most excited about being able to watch TV and record two separate channels at once. Through the XBOX MythTV front end I can beam everything right to my TV. Does the excitement ever end??)

Makes you think.
That is all.

Binary Numbers


Yes. I know this is my first post.
Yes. I know it is about binary numbers.

David: Guess what I did today?
You Guys: What?
David: I taught myself how to read binary numbers.

So here it goes:

Binary Numbers work on the base 2 system. We are used to counting with a base 10 system. For example:

12 has two numbers. A 1 and a 2. 2 is in the first column. The “one” column.
Every column to the left of this goes up by a multiple of 10 (base 10).
Hence, 12 has ONE ten and TWO ones.

So far so good right? Now for binaries.

Binary numbers can only be 0 or 1.
The first column is the “one” column.
Every column to the left of this goes up by a multiple of 2 (base 2).
Hence, 11 in binary is equal to 3.
11 has ONE two and ONE one.

Got it? Good. So when dealing with computers (usually 8-bit binaries)

128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
—————————-
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 = 0
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 = 255 (128+64+32+16+8+4+2+1)

OK. Then what about 10101010?

128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
—————————-
1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 = 170 (128+32+8+2)

What about going the other way?? Easy. Let’s take 159.

Divide 159 by 2. (base 2, remember?) = ONE 128 with 31 remaining.
Divide 31 by 2. = ONE 16 with 15 remaining.
Divide 15 by 2. = ONE 8 with 7 remaining.
Divide 7 by 4. = ONE 4 with 3 remaining.
Divide 3 by 2. = ONE 2 with 1 remaining.

Therefore it must be:

128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
—————————-
1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 = 159 (128+16+8+4+2+1)

To summarize, here is a chart I pulled.

Base 2 = Base 10
0 = 0
1 = 1
10 = 2
11 = 3
100 = 4
101 = 5
110 = 6
111 = 7
1000 = 8
1001 = 9
1010 = 10
1011 = 11
1100 = 12
1101 = 13
1110 = 14
1111 = 15

Interestingly enough, and this IS a tangent, it really comes into play with subnet masks.

There are a couple intresting things about subnet masks. They don’t really behave like you would initially expect them to. The numbers of a subnet mask count ip addresses that are not there. This means higher the numbers of a subnet mask are the less ip addresses belong to it.

For example:
255.255.255.255 = There are no ip addresses in this range.
0.0.0.0 = This is the range of all ip addresses.

The rest of this article is also pulled.

Lets take one of the most basic subnets the 255.255.255.0 one, and see how many addresses are in it’s range. The first step is to put the subnet into binary. Let go ahead and do that now. If you don’t know how to put something into binary read Binary Numbers for more information.

11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000 = 255.255.255.0

So how do we find out how many ip addresses are in this group? Well its rather simple actually. Just count the number of zeros, and then take 2 to the number of zeros power. In this case it would be 2^8 = 256. Another way to do it is to multiply 2 times itself 7 times. 2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2=256 So we have two hundred and fifty six ip addresses in that range! Another thing that is intresting to know. Subnets will always be all ones on one side, and all zeros on the other. I mean that they will always look like 111111000000 and never like 1010101101.

Lets take a closer look at what a group of ip addresses looks like. Using the 255.255.255.0 subnet from above let me make a table.

192.168.1.0 – Subnet Address
192.168.1.1 – usually the gateway
192.168.1.2
192.168.1.3
192.168.1.4
192.168.1.5
192.168.1.6
…
192.168.1.252
192.168.1.253
192.168.1.254
192.168.1.255 – Broadcast Address

Every group of ip addresses, has a Subnet Address, Broadcast Address, and Gateway. Both the Subnet Address ip address and the Broadcast Address ip address are used to send information to every ip address in the group. The Gateway acts sort of like the group’s controller. For instance, let’s say that your computer is on the ip address 192.168.1.3. When you send send information to the internet, your computer sends data to the gateway. Then the gateway sends that data on to the internet. The same thing is true when you get data from the internet. The internet sends data to the gateway, and then the gateway passes that information on to your computer. The gateway can be on any ip address in the range. Usually it is on the second ip address in the range, or the second ip address from the end of the range. The Subnet Address is always on the first ip address in the range, and the Broadcast Address is always on the last one in the range.

Okay I’m going to change our subnet from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.255.240. Lets say the ip address of our computer is 192.168.1.132. How many ip addresses do we have? Well lets convert the subnet to binary. You should get the following binary subnet.

11111111.11111111.11111111.11110000

Okay, we have four zeros. So take 2^4 which equals 16. Alternatively 2*2*2*2 equals 16 as well. We have 16 ip addresses in our range. Well lets draw out our table. We can’t draw our ip address table without knowing where the range starts. This is how you figure that out. We take our subnet and AND it to our ip address converted into binary. Go ahead and conver our ip address into binary. You should get the following.

11000000.10101000.00000001.10000100 = 192.168.1.132

Now we AND that with our subnet. It is easy to think of ANDing as finding the truth of two numbers. Every 1 is true and every 0 is false.

True and true is true! 1 and 1 is 1.
True and false is false. 1 and 0 is 0.
False and true is false. 0 and 1 is 0.
False and false is false. 0 and 0 is 0.

So lets line up our subnet and our ip address.

11000000.10101000.00000001.10000100 = 192.168.1.132
11111111.11111111.11111111.11110000 = 255.255.255.240
———————————–
11000000.10101000.00000001.10000000

So look at the first column. We have a 1 and a 1. 1(true) and 1(true) = 1(true) The next column is the same thing. The thrid column is a 0 and a 1. 0(false) and 1(true) = 0(false). Continue doing that for the whole number. Now that we have our result lets take it and convert it back to base 10, so we can get the first ip address in our range.

11000000.10101000.00000001.10000000 = 192.168.1.128

Great! Now that we have our first ip address and we know that we have 16 ip addresses, we can make our table.

192.168.1.128 – Subnet Address
192.168.1.129 – Gateway
192.168.1.130 –
192.168.1.131 –
192.168.1.132 – Our computer!
192.168.1.133 –
192.168.1.134 –
192.168.1.135 –
192.168.1.136 –
192.168.1.137 –
192.168.1.138 –
192.168.1.139 –
192.168.1.140 –
192.168.1.141 –
192.168.1.142 –
192.168.1.1

43 – Broadcast Address

Makes you think.
That is all.

Japanese Candies

First there was “The Mountain of Mushrooms” chocolate mushroom candy.

Chocolate Mushrooms Picture

and then there was “The field of Bamboo shoots” chocolate bamboo shoot (possibly acorns) candy.

Chocolate Bamboo Shoots Picture

… and now, ranked as my new favourite Japanese candy, I am proud to announce “Chocolate Tree Stumps.”

Chocolate Tree Stumps Picture

They are so good. No joke. Really really good. They can only be outdone by the extra large Mountain of Mushrooms I found in the convenience store a few months ago. It was like 200 yen for 4 of them, but they were really really good.