WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?

Nothing New Under The Sun

I was struck by a thought today* and posted on Twitter:

Is the Pushmi-Pullyu** a kind of palindromedary?

Then I was struck by another thought* and Googled the term palindromedary.

And got 27,000 hits.

Which is impressive and depressing simultaneously.

* Ow!
** From Doctor Dolittle.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:47 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ano Natsu De Matteru

Also known as spoiler.

This one is actually good - funny, well-written, well-acted, beautifully drawn, and willing to hit the tropes head-on or dodge them balletically as its whim takes it.

One thing that intrigued me while watching the show was when it was set.  One, no cell-phones or computers anywhere; can't be twenty-first century.  Two, skirt length, can't pre-date the mid-60's.  Architecture (the school has a large, curving glass wall, for example) and transport (the very few cars we see are neither boxy nor sleekly curved) both suggest the 80's or 90's.  The male lead has a Super-8 film camera, and it's not highlighted as an anachronism, which points to the early 80's.  But there are shelf stereos - CD only - and the cordless phones are bulky but not that bulky, which suggests at least the late 80's, probably the 90's.

That aside, it has a busty redhead, a tomboyish girl who goes hmph, and a twintailed girl who goes ufufufu.

Oh, and railcars.  All in all, it's a real throwback, a 90's style comedy with 2012 production values, and definitely one I'll be watching.

A solid three little fishies out of four. 


Warning!  Containment failure imminent!  Warning!

Big sister and the hmph girl.

Obligatory mascotty thing.

The ufufufu girl.

And the ditz makes four.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:35 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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That Papa Show

Papa no Iukoto wo Kikinasai!  Also known as Oh, right, the whole of Wikipedia is blacked out.

A college-aged boy ends up looking after his niece and step-nieces after their parents are lost in a plane crash.  Some genuine moments of comedy and tragedy, but the storytelling is heavy-handed and it strays too close to ick territory for my liking.

Could be worse.  Knowing the Japanese, could be a lot worse.

Two little fishies out of four.  Maybe half a point more if we get to see more of the monorail.  Monorails are good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:21 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And He Rocks



more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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CouchDB, Riak, And Whatever-The-Hell-You-Want Indexes

One of the things I like most about CouchDB is its index definition mechanism: Javascript.*  For each index you want to attach to a database, you write a short Javascript function that assembles the key (or keys) from the fields in the record.  CouchDB then manages the underlying B-Tree based on those key values.

This means that if you want to index an array, or a user-defined data structure, or build a partial index, or a full-text index, or anything that can be implemented on top of a B-Tree, you can do it.  Write the code once and CouchDB will ensure that it's applied consistently.  Far more powerful than standard SQL indexes, and much cleaner and more efficient than using secondary tables, joins, and stored procedures, which are the canonical way to tackle this problem with SQL.

As of version 1.0, Riak supports indexes as well as the basic key/value access and link walking.  The way Riak handles things is slightly different to CouchDB.

In CouchDB, each record is a JSON document.  Since that's predefined, CouchDB can allow you to inspect the contents of the records and manipulate them using an embedded Javascript interpreter.

In Riak, records are arbitrary binary-safe blobs; you can store anything you want without having to encode it in any special way.  To index your records, you provide the index names and values along with the record.

Just like CouchDB, this allows you to build indexes in any way you like.  Riak stores the index values twice, once in the index structure and once as metadata alongside the record, so that it can maintain index consistency on updates and deletes without you having to worry about it.

You can have as many indexes as you like (the developers note that they've tested it with 1000 indexes), and like CouchDB, you can do anything you can do with a B-Tree (or rather, with an arbitrary number of B-Trees).

It's a very powerful feature.

* Lua would be better, of course.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:35 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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