Hiroshige: The 53 Stations of the Tokaido

Hiroshige: The 53 Stations of the Tokaido by Muneshige Narazaki

The Tokaido is featured prominently in both of James Clavell's novels on Japan, Shogun and Gai-Jin. When Jeff and I were in the Hakone area of Japan in 2007, we had come upon a stretch of tree-lined road that was supposed to be a section of the old Tokaido. At the Edo Tokyo Museum, I had read about the extravagant daimyo processions on the Tokaido in feudal times. Countless books, poems and art work have been produced about the Tokaido, with the most famous being Hiroshige's "The 53 Stations of the Tokaido" in woodblock prints. As I have no knowledge of Japanese, these prints are the only ones that I can appreciate.

A third of the book is an introduction, with the rest being full-colour reproductions of the prints. A brief description is provided for each picture. Some of the familiar names that I encountered in Japan made me smile: Nihonbashi, Shinagawa, Odawara, Hakone, ...

While classical Japanese paintings were chiefly influenced by Tang dynasty Chinese painting techniques and subject matters, the woodblock prints of the nineteenth century were entirely original. Hiroshige's pictures leap off the pages with their vibrant colours, elegant composition, and lively human figures. The understanding of perspective being a uniquely European invention, Hiroshige's representation of buildings, trees and mountains often appears a bit awkward. However, he excelled at drawing marvellously natural, realistic, and creative human figures. Another strength of Hiroshige's was his ability to convey emotions. His pictures effortlessly exude loneliness, joy, melancholy, humour, sadness, fear, ... It is fascinating to think about the lives depicted, of that bygone era...

The distance between Tokyo and Kyoto is just over 500 kilometres. In the olden days, a trip from Edo to Kyoto on the Tokaido required two weeks on average, twice as long when the weather did not cooperate. Today, our train ride on the Shinkansen Hikari took a mere two hours and forty-five minutes without any worries about the elements. The Nozomi covers the distance in an even shorter interval of two hours and twenty minutes. Times have definitely changed.

iMac Memory Upgrade

We run all three of the major operating systems at home: Mac OS X on the iMac, Windows (XP) on the laptop, and Linux on my computer. There was another PC running Windows, but I recently took that one apart, so it's no longer in service. Someday I'd like to get another Mac desktop and a Macbook. In the meantime, these machines keep me busy enough.

A little while back, I upgraded the memory on my Linux box. The improvement on performance was astounding. When Jeff started whining about the iMac being slow, I thought I'd try the same trick.

I ordered the memory cards on-line late yesterday afternoon. The stuff was shipped yesterday evening and delivered this morning! It took all of five minutes to put the new memory cards into the iMac, including the two minutes I used to admire the inner workings of this impossibly slim machine. Jeff was distraught at the sight of his precious computer upside down, opened up and inert, but breathed a sign of relief when the computer booted up successfully after the mistreatment. I verified system information, and performed a few tasks. There was no discernable change. Maybe I'll notice the benefits later.

Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Jeff used the word "Lilliputian" the other day, which led us to a discussion of Gulliver's Travels. I said that although I'd heard about the book since childhood, I never read it because I was told that it was a satire on the politics of Swift's time, which I didn't think I would understand. Jeff said he believed I'd enjoy the book even if I didn't know about the politics of the 1700's -- how many people do? So I bought the book.

First off, it took me a while to get used to Swift's style. Needless to say, the English language has changed in three hundred years. Some of the expressions are puzzling, such as using "mine eyes" to mean "my eyes", which I assume is because "eyes" starts with a vowel sound; some are old-fashioned, such as "six and thirty" instead of "thirty-six"; and some, such as "above an hundred thousand inhabitants", suggest that the "h" at the beginning of many words was silent in the old days. Many words were also spelt differently: chuse (choose), croud (crowd), œconomy, phænomenon, phœnix, politick, sate (sat), shew (show), shoar (shore), stroak (stroke), taylor (tailor), etc. It is interesting to observe that while the old style "œ" became just "e" in most cases, "phoenix" escaped the change, which is why I've always found its pronunciation odd. A persisting suspicion of mine, that the surname "Taylor" came from "tailor", was also validated.

Once I became familiar with the writing, I thoroughly enjoyed the stories. Anyone in computer science would smile at the story of the Big Endians vs. the Little Endians. Some of Gulliver's antics are hilarious. While it's true that a little background on the politics of the day would be helpful, one doesn't need much knowledge on history to recognize the satirical tone throughout the book. Many of Swift's commentaries on society and politics are loud and clear, and are still very much applicable today. It is a testament to the depth of the author's thinking that while his writing style is dated, the essence of the book is not.

Sony Clié on Mac

I've had a Palm Pilot since 2001, and can't live without it. However, the two devices I've owned are both Sony Cliés, rather than actual products by Palm, from where the name Palm Pilot came. The Sony devices always felt much more refined to me, and I've never regretted choosing them over other similar choices. My first Clié, a PEG-S320, was running strong when it "retired" to make room for a better model, a PEG-TJ37. I still use my little TJ37 everyday. It will be replaced for sure, as soon as the Apple iPhone becomes available in Canada. In the meantime, it's served me well.

To perform the most important function of a Palm Pilot, HotSync, one needs to install the Palm Desktop on one's computer. Sony provides their clone of a Palm Desktop, which works fine, except that it is only for Windows. Sony has never been keen on Mac or Linux, and, as the Clié line was discontinued a few years ago, never will be.

On Linux, there exist a few clones of the Palm Desktop, with my favourite being J-Pilot. It isn't quite powerful enough, and used to require tinkering and additional kernel modules before it would work with a Sony Clié. Nevertheless, it is always fun playing with programs on Linux. Even though I could only do a HotSync via USB, not Wi-Fi, for years, I relied on J-Pilot to back up my Clié.

A few days ago, when I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, I discovered, to my consternation, that J-Pilot stopped working because of a kernel bug. While I can still back up the Clié on my Win XP-based laptop, I was annoyed.

It then occurred to me, Why hadn't I thought about HotSyncing on our iMac? A little research on-line (mainly from the Wiki entry on Clié) shows that it is entirely possible. There is a product out there by Mark/Space called "The Missing Sync" which offers a desktop HotSync tool between Palm OS and Mac OS X. However, I could save myself the $40 charged by The Missing Sync by using the free Palm Desktop if I'm willing to do some delicate work. The only negative is that HotSync via Wi-Fi is not supported in Palm Desktop for Mac. This is an inconvenience, but not one worth spending $40 on, especially considering that my Clié's days are numbered.

I downloaded Palm Desktop for Mac and installed it on the iMac. After carefully following the instructions described by lensovet, I successfully performed the first HotSync between the Clié and the iMac.

An added advantage of HotSyncing on the Mac is that many applications, such as SplashID, offer a version for Mac OS X, but not one for Linux. Now I can backup not only the basic PIM data but also application data, something that I couldn't do on Linux before.

Ubuntu 8.04 Again

Today when I booted up the PC, my wireless connection established successfully on the first try. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it will remain the case.

A new bug has popped up. When I hooked up my Sony Clie Palm Pilot to the USB port, and tried to do a HotSync using J-Pilot, the USB connection could not be made. The following message showed up in the system log file:

kernel: [37147.023105] visor: probe of 2-1:1.0 failed with error -5

It turns out that this is a bug (#10118) introduced in kernel 2.6.24 and fixed in kernel 2.6.25. Luckily, so far, it appears to affect only the "visor" module. Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex," scheduled for release in Oct, 2008, will include the new kernel. As there isn't a kernel patch available (I would have liked the opportunity to compile the kernel, something that I haven't done in a few years), I'll wait for Intrepid. In the meantime, I'll HotSync using my laptop while trying to see if there is another way to HotSync on Linux.

Ubuntu 8.04

I've been running Ubuntu (version 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon") since the start of the year. As I've mentioned before, I'm extremely satisfied with the Ubuntu distribution. It's getting closer in appearance and usability to Windows and Mac OS X, while someone like me still gets to enjoy the flexibility that comes with a Linux system. Best of all, everything is free!

The beta version of a new release of Ubuntu, version 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron," came out last month. Yesterday, after hesitating for a few minutes, I decided to go ahead and upgrade. The downloading took over four hours -- ouch! The upgrading another hour or so. The good news is afterwards, my system rebooted successfully, and at least superficially, everything looked to be in order. An immediate improvement showed up when I issued the command to shut down the system: my PC turned off automatically. You may ask, What's so special about that? Well, this power management feature is taken for granted by Windows and Mac users. Once upon a time, it also worked on my PC with an older distribution of Linux. Unfortunately, since Fedora Core 2, my computer would go through all the steps of the shut-down process except the very last one, which is turning off the power; I had to manually push the power button. It was not a big deal, just a minor pain. With this new Ubuntu distribution, I no longer need to push the button. Hooray!

My happiness was short-lived. Today, I tried to take advantage of the newly functional power management feature by configuring the computer to enter power saver mode after a certain idle period. The machine did go into the saver mode, however, it would not wake up no matter how much I screamed and yelled, and I was forced to do a hard reboot. Dreadful. I had to disable the power saver function.

Two other problems surfaced also.

One involved swapping the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys. Being a UNIX devotee, every time I come upon a new environment, I swap the left Ctrl key and the Caps Lock key. It was easily accomplished in Ubuntu Gutsy by going through the Gnome system configuration. In Hardy, the same steps swap the functionality of the keys, but every time the Caps Lock key is pressed, the Caps Lock LED light on the keyboard is turned on even though the Caps Lock key now acts as the Ctrl key. Some may say this is not a big deal, but it is. Aside from the annoyance of sensing the light going on from the corner of my eye each time I press Ctrl, I don't want to be confused by the LED light into thinking that I've got my caps locked. A search on the web shows many angry users in the same boat as me. A few workarounds were proposed. My own solution came from Ubuntu bug173350: I must combine the suggestions of MountainX and Jay Finger, but ignore those offered by Taylor Venable and Robert Lange.

The second problem is more serious; I've yet to figure out the condition under which it occurs. Yesterday, after my initial upgrade to Hardy and a reboot, my wireless connection was established automatically without a hitch. This morning, after turning on my computer, the wireless connection couldn't be established by NetworkManager. I know my wireless modem firmware is up-to-date, so I rebooted the system. This time, the wireless connection came up without a problem. Later, when my machine entered power saver mode, but had to be unplugged and restarted, the wireless connection failed to establish yet again. Once more, a reboot led to success. What does this mean? That I have to boot up twice each time? Nobody else seems to have run into this problem yet. I'll have to try a few more times to see exactly when this behaviour occurs.

The Magic Mirror of Escher, by Bruno Ernst

The Magic Mirror of Escher by Bruno Ernst (Taschen)

Anyone who loves mathematics would be fascinated by M.C. Escher's prints. I am drawn to them yet am also disturbed by them -- actually, all surrealist work rattles me. (Even though Escher is not considered a surrealist artist, he has often been linked to surrealists.) I can't imagine having a Magritte or a Dali painting in the house -- not that I can afford one anyway -- because it would bother me instead of giving me pleasure. This is not to say I don't find surrealism interesting. It is indeed. I just don't want that weirdness to be part of my life. I wonder if it's because I haven't enough anger in me. It seems to me that one has to be very angry to be a modern artist. I'm afraid I'm too happy with life.

Anyway, Escher's prints are in fact nothing like the typical modern art rubbish. His pictures were carefully planned, and meticulously executed. There is no vagueness to his message, only boundless imagination. Incidentally, although mathematicians find advanced mathematics embedded everywhere in Escher's work, Escher himself claimed no understanding of mathematics as he had no grasp of abstract concepts unless they were expressed with concrete drawings or objects. The book analyses most of Escher's pictures in detail, which actually took the fun out of one's private enjoyment.

As a side note, the book was published by TASCHEN. I happen to own another TASCHEN book, one on the Flemish painter Jan Vermeer, so it was interesting for me to read the story on the inside of the dusk cover of the Escher book. It was stated there that, "TASCHEN's Great Adventure began back in 1980, when eighteen-year-old Benedikt Taschen opened a shop in his native Cologne, Germany, to market his massive comics collection." More than twenty-five years later, "TASCHEN has grown into one of the most successful and unique publishers in the global market..."