The Gaijin Effect

Now that I've been here for about 6 months, I've confirmed several "Gaijin Effects" - behaviors that I notice that occur around me just because I look like a foriegner. There are many that I've known before:

• When I sit on a train in Japan, the seat next to me will almost always stay empty. I hope it's not my B.O.
• When I try to speak Japanese, most people will assume I'm talking English. I wrote about that a while back.
• Little kids (less than 3) will stare a lot - sort of "wow, he looks different..."

But I noticed a new one recently. When people line up for a train in Japan, it always a two lines side by side because the doors can let two people enter at the same time without bumping. However, when I am the first person to stand in the line, no one actually stands next to me. The double line starts right behind me. I still don:t understand that one...

InfoPath 2007 - odd piece of software

We just installed Office 2007 Enterprise across the 7,000+ workstations at work and that included InfoPath 2007, Microsoft free-format, ultra-flexible, form based front end for entering structured data into a database. I've only just started messing around with the software (creating a daily checklist form) and I'm a bit confused, really. It kind of reminds me of Excel - it can do anything but trying to figure out how to do the one thing you really want is damn near impossible.

I find myself dipping into the help menus constantly for almost everything I'm doing. For example, let's say you create a table, setup a couple fields and radio buttons, and get all of the formatting the way you want it.

Now, you wan to duplicate a couple of the rows and make it 5 or 6 row table instead of three you just copy and paste. Since the fields are bound to a data source, the new rows are all tied to the original fields.

So, after you publish the form, when you type something in to the fourth row, that same information is then displayed in four differently fields. The process to associate these new fields with new data fields is by right-clicking, selected "Change Binding". each process of assigning a new field is about a 9-click process and it has to be repeated for every field. In this simple table, I actually have 5 fields per line - each radio button has to be modified individually. This three-row copy and past is going to be a 135 click process to create new fields that look like the fields I already created. Since there is no "format paint" button, I can't use the insert field tools to simplify the process.

There might be a faster way to do this but I can't find it in the InfoPath documentation. That's why it reminds me of Excel. It feels like a software that requires you take a class or read a big thing text book to understand it.

Summer vacation

We have an office holiday coming up next week which is our company's scheduled Obon holiday. Unlike most national holidays, obon occurs "sometime in August" rather than on a specific day and each company picks its own window for time off. For us, it is Wednesday through Friday of next week. A lot of people are taking the full week off but I decided I'd stockpile my vacation instead so I'll be at work.

There are a variety of local holidays, festivals, and fireworks shows that are scattered throughout August because of variability of obon. You can actually plan on attending one almost every weekend in August if you wanted to. A lot of people use the August festivals as a good excuse to dress in traditional yukata. In the past, I remember only women wearing the traditional dress for summer festivals but this year, I've noticed a lot of 20-something and 30-something guys wearing traditional clothes, too. I guess the fashion cycle has come back around. It looks like colors and fabrics are bit different than the true traditional patterns, though. The ones in the stores are a bit more colorful or a bit more creative.

Chiho has a couple of yukata in the closet but she's not 100% sure that she knows how to wear one correctly. The couple of times she's worn them, she's had help putting it on and tying the obi. Overall, the yukata is relatively simple but you need to tie it correctly so that the yukata doesn't come loose or bunch funny as you walk around. Maybe I should talk her in to giving it a try this year and see if she can figure it out.

Of course, going outside in August in Japan is kind of difficult - it's so damn hot...

Build vs. Buy

Since my current company is a software development company, we seem to have one big problem: they always want to build a custom system instead of buying something off of the shelf. That is one additional difference in my current position compared to all of my clients back in Seattle. Most of them would be completely uninterested in building something - they probably wouldn't even know where to start.

"So what?" you might say. After all, the same people who create such nice, incredibly expensive, and incredibly popular software should be able to make internal tools that work well. Seems logical, but that does not reflect reality. After all, an internal tool is "overhead" so the large teams of people and careful QA testing are not available. Instead, you get this mess of home-brewed parts that no one really understands and can't update well. Our IT ticketing system runs this way, unfortunately, and has been offline 5 or six times in July and August. Since it is only maintained at the HQ, we have to wait for their business hours to get it fixed. And, if the one or two people that understand the system is on vacation....

From my current standpoint, the build vs. buy call goes like this:

• Payroll and Accounting Systems: Buy. Too many really good solutions available and making your own offers no advantage
• HR systems: Buy. You'll have to do a lot of customization with a large company but start with a real package
• Document Management: Buy.
• CRM/ERM: 1/2 and 1/2. there is so much customization that you're really doing both
• IT Management: Buy. Save yourself some pain and suffering

I think you should only build systems that actually give you competitive advantage. If you know that a SQL driven, distributed CRM system with offline synchronization will give you an advantage, then build one. If your 99.999% uptime is your main sales point, build a custom monitoring solution. Otherwise, buy it - you are buying someone else's QA, testing, and customer feedback experience instead of slogging through all the details yourself.

VMWare is the way to go

At my current company, about 80% of the servers are virtualized into VMWare's ESX system which has a ton of flexibility. We have Dell 2850s and 2950s with fiber channel cards connected to SAN and they live as clusters in the VSX infrastructure. As long as the SAN storage is visible to each server that makes up the cluster, virtual servers can be moved around at will. The management software can do it automatically or you can do it manually. That means if you have a hardware problem on one machine in the cluster, you can move all of the virtual servers to the other hosts, take the host off line, fix it, and bring it back up without any of the servers going down.

The ESX system does need at least one physical server to act as the control and management server and you need an available SQL server. After that, you can add and cluster hardware to hearts content. We have a pricey EMC SAN but you can get the same cluster support with iSCSI devices. As long as each host can see the shared storage, you're good.

There are a couple of servers types that just don't virualize well. Maybe I'm not spending enough effort to find out how to do this, but I would recommend against virtualizing:

• Active Directory domain controllers
• SQL servers
• Firewall / Routing devices (ISA or m0n0wall)
• Any server product that needs IPSEC support
• Servers that need really, really fast hard drive I/O

Almost all other servers are easy to virtualize. This way, you can actually have one dedicated web server per application, too.

Cost is a bit of a problem, I suppose. The VMWare pricing is fairly cheap compared to the feature set but the costs of the Windows licensing is not included. You have to do a lot of research and digging to make sure you are really buying what you need.

Ichikawa Citizens’ Fireworks Display

Over the weekend, we went to see the fireworks near Ichikawa (市川) station. It was about an hour or so from our condo by train and it was really, really, good. I found a clip on YouTube from the 2007 display http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=_RoQOU0ksqk that is pretty similar to what we saw over the weekend. The show was about an hour long and launched thousands of fireworks. I have no idea how much it would cost.

The fireworks are shot from a park that is along a river so you can watch it from either side. The river has pretty tall flood-control levees so you get pretty good seats from a lot of places. We didn't plan our trip out there quite so well and really didn't bring enough snacks and drinks for the couple of hours we waited for the show. We also forgot our camera... We'll just have to plan better next time.

They announced that the crowd was about 500,000 right at the start of the show. If that was accurate, then it was actually quite a bit smaller than previous years. Most of the websites said that crowds topped 1 million.

Found a good one

This blog: http://lovelylisting.blogspot.com/ posts "less than ideal" pictures from real estate listings. Some of the past history is pretty hilarious.