Sapporo Snow Festival 2009

You can see some pretty awesome snow sculptures at the festival!  I got to go twice, once during the daytime on Saturday, then again on Tuesday evening with Alex, but a mix up in meeting and communications meant I didn’t meet Alex in the end, but still got to see a few of the sculptures all lit up…  The ice ones look much better by night!

Last Wednesday, a Public Holiday here in Japan, a Singaporean student at the language centre (Wan Jee) arranged for us to go to a Singaporean buffet-banquet at a hotel in Otaru.  It was delicious and we all ate far too much!  I had to leave slightly earlier than the others to prepare to give a speech on Friday morning.  The others went to the Otaru candle light festival in the evening.  My speech went well on Friday, it was all about electrocuting myself when I was little.  We have to do speeches each time we finish a section of the course in front of all of the students and teachers at the centre!

Then just the other day my internet began working!  The NTT (Japanese equivalent of BT) came and put in the line a couple of weeks ago, but it took Biglobe (my provider) a little longer to get it up and running.  The line is an optic fibre link to the exchange which promises a maximum ability of 100Mbps, but in reality it is giving 12-15Mbps downstream and almost as much upstream at the moment…  Which isn’t the 100Mbps, but still isn’t bad for a consistent connection speed.

The final bit of news is I am on Twitter!  If you are on twitter you can follow me at flat3d, I’d love to follow you too…  I’m building up my links (it’s all about the links…)
For those who aren’t or don’t know what it is, it is a bit like facebook’s status updates, but made viable.  In reality it seems to be a bit more like one huge chatroom, with a whole lot of conversations going on at once, the nice thing is it sort of tunes in your friends and tunes out everyone else, so you can follow conversations.  It’s also possible to use it to simply let people know what you are upto, which might sound pretty dull or dim, but I like the idea that I can communicate daily life to folk and friends at home.

The big surprise for me is that it is actually pretty big in Japan.  It seems to be filling (bridging?) a gap between the all out geekiness of IRC (internet chat) and the more mainstream social users of Mixi (sort of Japan’s answer to myspace or facebook…)  At the moment I am much to illiterate to make much use of it in Japanese, but as I learn more hopefully it will be a valuable resource in learning about the tech world/culture in Japan and even help me with studying the language!

I will sometime link it into the site here, a twitter updates jobby or something, but I am not sure the best way to do it yet, or even if it is actually worthwhile…  Some more thought required I guess…

It usually begins with something that seems fairly straightforward or simple, something that shouldn’t be a problem at all!  Things go smoothly at first, but after a short while something appears that was unexpected, soemthing isn’t formatted quite correctly and to get any further you will need to spend hours reformatting it, maybe the data isn’t as complete as you thought and you will need to spend a while typing in or copying and pasting the rest into the file, or there might be a step in the process that you didn’t foresee and seemingly no easy way to overcome it…  But you have come this far!  Surely to go back and do all this by hand would be much more labour than to overcome the obstacle and get it done right?  So you plough on, and as time wears on and the text on your ctrl key is worn back to unreadable from all the copying and pasting it begins to look like the manual option might have been quicker, but surely there isn’t long to go now?!

This is the kind of thing that crops up all the time in IT work, particularly in software work that is heavy in data processing.  In my last job we often took feeds from various places and attempted to automate them to make life easier (well in this case actually just to make the project possible!).  Of course if you have the right tools and so on, you can overcome the obstacles and, to quote someone else, “anything is possible!”

But the issue is made even more frustrating as you realise why it occurs and what it means.  If (suitable) data is already in a digital format, it is sheer lunacy to have to do manual work in order for it to be acceptable in another location.  The whole point of digitising data is to increase its accessibility, portability and usefulness and this too often is forgotten as people make an application that produces data or transfers it.  Perhaps the developers didn’t use standard formats designed for transferring data such as XML, CSV etc for textual data, common image formats or whatever is suitable for the data in question.  This is less of a problem now thanks to the web and forced portability of data.  The real killer comes in lack of consistency, when data is being transferred in a common format, or even a well specified uncommon format, but all of a sudden something changes and data is coming across in a slightly different format.  Of course this results in lost data, mistransmission, etc, but it also makes attempting to process the data automatically a real headache, and it is inevitably down to poor design and implementation of the original system.

So I’ve warbled on and no one is going to be reading now, even if they were the last time I checked!  But the next time you find yourself thinking “technology makes things so much more complicated” ask yourself if it is the technology that makes it difficult or the design of the system.

(This post was inspired by my attempts to get my supporters addresses from the automated email sent to me and into my pc’s address book.  Surely someone might have thought about the format that the addresses are provided in and thought that commas alone might not be the most useful separator…)