Kyoto and Osaka 2009

After going to Portugal earlier this month, I had to go to Osaka to attend a company seminar. I was required to attend the seminar to proceed to the next step in the employment process and I could not attend the seminar in Tokyo because I was in Portugal. Speaking about "good" timing.

If I have to spend more than 20.000 yen (around Rp. 2 million) to just attend the seminar, I might want to take a walk and look around too. So I met my senior there who is currently working in Osaka, and went together to Kyoto which is not so time consuming if you go from Osaka, only about 30 minutes by train. Nara is not so far too, but I just did not have enough time to go there.

Our first destination was, Kinkaku-ji or Golden Pavilion Temple (wiki). It's smaller than what I thought, but I like it. Unlike my senior, I don't think of it as just a gold-coated temple :).

Kinkaku-ji

Our next destination was Ginkaku-ji or Temple of the Silver Pavilion (wiki). Unfortunately, it was still under restoration, so we could not see the temple clearly. The garden is still beautiful though.

Kinkaku-ji

Our final destination was Kiyomizu-dera (wiki). It was already dark when we arrived but we could still enter the temple. That reminds me, shops around these temples close at around 18.00. I don't think that shops in other parts of Kyoto also close at around 18.00, but I wish the shops were still opened a little bit longer. You can also see Kyoto Tower (wiki) in the picture below (white thing in the center). Seriously though, they could have made a better design of that tower.

Kiyomizu-dera

Before I went back to Yokohama on the day after, I managed to visit Osaka Castle (wiki), the second castle (for defense) that I've visited. The view from the top of the castle was awesome, I was lucky that the weather was always clear when I was in Osaka, and Kyoto.

Osaka Castle

Another thing that interests me in Osaka Castle is this monument, which was built during World Expo '70. There are two time capsules buried under it. The first time capsule is to be opened at the beginning of each century, and the second capsule is to be opened after 5000 (five thousand, I don't mistype here) years have passed, which means in 6970. Uhhh, suddenly I remember the news of a person who buried his money in his garden but had it stolen recently.
Anyway, you may want to check this link if you are interested in this time capsule.



You can see the other pictures which I provided as a slideshow below, or you can visit my page on Picasa to see the pictures themselves. Now, I hope I could at least proceed to the next step of the employment process. Otherwise I would have to boycott the company because I have spent so much time and money for nothing. Just kidding :)

Portugal 2009

As I wrote in my previous post, I went to Lisbon, Portugal earlier this month to attend a conference, and of course, I managed to spend some time looking around :) That was the second time I went to Europe, and I don't know about you but I feel very lucky to be able to go there twice.

I managed to capture one interesting sight of the society there in this picture. A group of people were hanging around eating pizzas in a cafe while watching a soccer match, and check out their expressions when one team scored a goal !



Honestly, I doubt you can see a scene like that in Japan, and even in my home country: Indonesia unless you go to a high class bar where people gather to watch soccer. Well, I guess that's Portugal for you.

Another thing that attracted my attention was that, it seems that people do not mind eating while standing. I saw many restaurants where there were no seats, and people just stood in front of the counter eating (sandwiches maybe ?) while talking to the waiters/waitresses. I didn't dare to try the experience though, partly because I can't speak Portuguese and I found most of the Portuguese can't speak English, but maybe I should have ...

These are some of the photos that I took there.

On top of Padrão dos Descobrimentos (wiki)

Belém Tower (wiki)

This is the first castle that I visited, and by castle, I meant a castle which was used to defend a territory, not like a chateau which was used as a place of living. Boy, talking about how many stairs I climbed up and down to reach that castle up there.

The Castle of São Jorge (wiki)

You can see the other pictures which I provided as a slideshow below, or you can visit my page on Picasa to see the pictures themselves. I wonder how many of you know that Brazil was a colony of Portugal and the people also speak Portuguese there, with the difference similar to that of British English and American English ?

Japanese for Latex Using Kakuto in Windows

I was trying to install an environment to write latex documents in Japanese yesterday, and I was shocked when I found out that we have to download several files and install them manually as written on this page by Ohishi Masaru-san. I heard before that the Japanese Latex environment Japanese people use was different from my current Miktex installation, but gosh, isn't there one simple software that can download all the files and install them automatically ?

Then I found a page by Jan Poland who used the CJK package from the standard Miktex distribution. But I realized soon enough that it needs a few additional steps rather than just installing the package, for example we need to download the Japanese fonts.

Luckily, my colleague came just at the right time, and when I asked him, he said that he used a software called kakuto. I tried it, and it worked, all automatically, but I still needed to install a latex editor, since I prefer using a different latex editor for my Japanese latex installation. In my case, I have installed Easytex which can be found on Jin Nakagawa-san's page. After setting the paths to the Japanese latex environment in Easytex, I finally succeeded in making my first Japanese PDF.

I find it strange though that this page about kakuto only appears when you search "kakuto latex" on Google Japan, not Google International. And even that, I don't know if it will appear if you search "latex" only on Google Japan.

Data Mining Approach for Positioning Camera in Displaying Mocap Search Results

I am happy to tell that I have presented my paper with the title "Data Mining Approach for Positioning Camera in Displaying Mocap Search Results" in a conference called GRAPP 2009 this February in Portugal. This paper is one of the results of the bebas project that I started last year, with the aim to build a search engine directed to motion capture files or mocap. I think some of the algorithms that I've developed also work in video searching, although I am not really sure since I don't play around too much with videos.

The paper can be downloaded here. I have also applied a patent about the same topic before the conference, although I think it will take another 2 or 3 years before it gets approved, if it does. Anyway, I was very excited to give the presentation, and yeah, Lisbon was very nice. 16 hours (or more) of flight from Japan was really tiring though.

[Update: 2009-8-4]
A patent application referring to the above paper has been filed in Japan with the number 2009-022786. It was actually filed just before the conference though, and I just updated this post now. Call me lazy or anything, but I am happy that I have applied for my first patent ! I hope that it would have passed the screening process by next year :)