My current position at the Tokyo Institute of Technology funded by the JSPS ends today. Today, I have cleared my office. And I am now on vacation, for several weeks, before I start my new job.
Because of that, I have not been very active online during the last weeks. And as I don't have Internet access at home, I will be mostly offline during the several weeks to come. But I will also have more time to work on my Erlang-related projects (Dryverl, Erlang-related macros in GNU Autoconf...), to develop a new backend supporting Griffin Technology's AirClick USB wireless remote-controller for LIRC (I already have developped a stand-alone program supporting it, based on the libusb, and which I developped by reverse-engineering), to restart playing the classical guitar and learning Csound (I bought The Csound Book), etc., etc.
This will be a very geeky vacation, indeed. (^_^)
The JSPS has published on their web site a presentation I made at the Takasaki High School last October. That talk was in the context of the Science Dialogue program, in which JSPS-funded post-doc scientists like me give talks to high-school students.
The subject of my talk was a general introduction to the education system in France and to my research domains: software engineering, software architecture and systems management. This was kind of a refreshing experience. I went with Pr. Chiba as a translator, because my Japanese is too minimal to give a talk in Japanese. ^_^
In the photo on the left, you can see students in front of notebook computers, during the discussion session after my talk: I made them type commands in Windows' shell, to experiment with Internet protocols (nslookup, ping, etc.).
The student standing up is the one who volunteered to impersonate an IP router.
I had brought Ethernet cables with me, and made students impersonate a TCP stack, an IP stack, etc. and made them exchange packets in the form of paper envelopes.
That was fun. ^_^
I have presented a poster (in A0 format) and a two-pages position paper, at the JSSST SPA-SUMMER 2005 workshop (4th Summer Workshop on Systems for Programming and Applications), that took place at the Isawa hot spring, 2005-08-22 to 23.
We have a new logo for our laboratory! It consists simply of the laboratory's acronym letters (C, S, and rotated g):
One may think that it is very similar to Java™'s coffee cup logo... But of course our logo represents a Japanese tea cup, not a coffee cup! If one turns the cup, one can clearly see the tea bag label, proving that it is a tea cup:
I also proposed a rice bowl version of the logo, but the other group members did not like it... Don't you think that this version is nice?
This semester, I have been following the J1 (“Elementary I”) level Japanese language class at Tokyo Tech. The Tokyo Tech J1 level is the absolute beginner level, which corresponds to volume 1 of the Minna No Nihon Go (みんなの日本語) method book. I have passed the exam for that class, so I will take the J2 (“Elementary II”)level class (volume 2 of みんなの日本語) next semester! 乾杯！