On skin allergy

I've been chronically suffering from skin allergy, at least since when I was three, for more than 46 years. The fear of itchiness haunting me and distracting me from focusing onto what I'm doing is so deep that I still really don't want to freely talk about it.

I will write about it anyway, however, to speak up about my own weakness, and unfair discrimination against me due to the skin allergy.

My history on allergic skin

During my childhood and teenage years I got a lot of severe allergic reactions on many parts of my body. The toughest one was on my right eye which caused cataract.

The second toughest allergic reaction was during May to June 2002, when the percentage of the eosinophils among the white blood cells exceeded 33% of the whole white blood cells, whose regular value for healthy people was between one to five percents. I was suffering from chronic oozing of blood and lymph from damaged skin on my legs and elsewhere I had to scratch due to simply unbearable itchiness. I was on the verge of sepsis, which would be lethal. I got hospitalized and had IV treatment of pulse steroid therapy for a few weeks, and had daily skin-protection treatment for two years.

The third toughest allergy-related attacks on my skin are chronic shingles appearing on my left inner thigh in 1979, and on my face and neck, on 1983, 1987, 1988, 1992, 1995 (twice), and 2002. Before anti-VZV medicine became available in 1990s, I had to suffer the pain of damaged skin and nerves for more than a week after every shingles attack. While I am lucky enough that no visual sign of shingles is left on my face, the deep and untreatable pain still often emerges, especially when I'm under a severe mental and physical stress. Fortunately, since 2002, I've never experienced a severe attack at all.

I am still suffering from skin rash, nevertheless, especially on my neck and genital area due to the chronic persistent damage. This is one of the reasons I don't want to wear ties and white business shirts; I usually wear cotton-made polo shirts or T-shirts and a loose-fit pair of pants (cargo or chino), to get rid of the possible sources of skin allergy.

Skin allergy is about the immune system

There are lots of misunderstandings on allergic reactions, and the medicines and treatments used to deal with the symptoms. I was one of them who didn't really treat the disease or symptoms in the right way until the year 2002, when I was 37. Note well: you need to discover your own way to find out how you treat yourself. My stories are not necessarily applicable to you.

Ointments, creams, or lotions with steroids are essential and necessary to alleviate or mitigate the irritation and inflammation. The problem is that you shouldn't use those with antibiotics unless absolutely necessary; they are often too strong. And when you use steroids, you need to monitor your immunological condition regularly (once a month or even more); otherwise your skin or immune system in general may over- or under-react and will cause a fatal consequence.

I should also say that you can't stop scratching your skin when you feel itchy. Can you stop the reaction of coughing or asthma? You can't (or otherwise you will suffocate). So don't advise the patients of skin allergy to endure the torture of itchiness; instead help them solve the systematic immune problem by consulting to a dermatology and/or immunology specialist. The treatment strategy will not be accurately defined unless checking out the portfolio of the white blood cells and other notable markers of the patients.

Discrimination against skin allergy patients

The social stigma of having skin allergy, eczema or dermatitis, is enormous in Japan. Having damaged skin especially on the parts of the body exposed to the public will significantly degrade the self confidence of the patients. The damaged parts of skin are not infectious to other people, but quite often the patients themselves are prone to get infected by the common germs and viruses such as staphylococcus aureus.

Japanese social norm of forcing all business people (especially men) to wear ties and white-collar dress shirts (which are also stiff and cause more damage to the skin) is inherently very discriminative to the patients of skin allergy. Quite often the patients are targets of bullying and social exclusion. The easiest way to solve this is to allow wearing the less intrusive shirts and pants, unless absolutely necessary due to the external or more formal dress code (which I try to avoid as much as possible).

Patients of skin allergy or any forms of allergic reactions should not be victimized just because they are suffering from the symptoms. They are suffering from diseases which are not responsible on their own. People should recognize some people need regular intake of pills and ointments to survive, and don't laugh at them because of the needs. I've once been orally harassed from colleagues when I took necessary pills after a lunch meeting.

What I've lost and I've gained

I've lost many chances due to the skin allergy. I have to stay in the area where I can get the sufficient medical treatment in affordable manners, and I should be very cautious on exposing myself in outdoor activities. I don't swim (though I can), because I don't want to get myself damaged by the chloride in the pool water or even the sea salt. I don't enjoy natural hot springs by the same reason.

On the other hand, suffering from skin allergy makes me pursue more modest way of life, and makes me very self conscious on the medical condition of myself. After all, you've got to live with what you've got and what you've got to suffer from.

I always thank my partner Kyoko for living together with me for 22 years, before, during, and after the whole allergic skin mess in my life. And I know it's not over so I've got to be very careful as always.

My new startup: Kenji Rikitake Professional Engineer's Office

This is an announcement of my new startup business.

I've started my own business, as a Japanese government-licensed Professional Engineer of Information Technology (in Japanese it's called Gijyutsushi), since April 21, 2014. It's called Kenji Rikitake Professional Engineer's Office (KRPEO).

KRPEO provides the consulting and engineering services on information technology in general, including but not limited to: information and network security, the design, deployment, implementation and performance tuning of Erlang/OTP, FreeBSD, and Riak. KRPEO will provide all services in both Japanese and English.

I had been looking for a full-time job since October 2013, and I made a conclusion that the job market near Osaka was mostly for energy-consuming legacy programming tasks due to the fact that most of the high-end software engineering companies were only located in Tokyo. Most of the employers in Japan do not accept remote teleworking due to the cultural and legal reasons either. So I had to lean out from the traditional corporate culture of Japan, for a more sustainable business model, making myself, my family, and my customers happy at the same time. I understand this is a hard challenge, but I will definitely take it.

My involvement in the open-source developer and network operator communities in Japan and the world will remain the same and unchanged.

The English announcement site for KRPEO is at http://www.k2r.org/krpeo/. The Japanese site URL is: http://www.k2r.org/gijyutsushi/.

Update 28-APR-2014: add the URL of the English site, correct the URL of the Japanese site.

Leaving Basho - many thanks!

I will resign from Basho. 30-SEP-2013 will be the last day.

I'd like to thank everyone in Basho, especially Basho Japan KK members. Having been a part of the teams will be an unforgettable experience.

I will continue supporting Riak and Erlang/OTP after leaving Basho, as I've been doing so since long before I joined the company.

My next step is yet unclear for the time being, but I'm sure I will still be a part of computer and internet professional dev and op communities. There will be a lot of challenges, but I will take them.

Thanks again to the people who supported me during my Basho days.

Professors in the wasteland

(Photo: Wasteland by Denis Defreyne)

Becoming a professor no longer guarantees academic freedom

---

I had been a non-tenure professor of Kyoto University from April 2010 to January 2013. The life was unfortunately not so happy one, and I’ve already written a part of my story as a blog article. In this essay I’ll write about another part of the story.

---

My father Tsuneji Rikitake was a prestigious professor. He devoted his life for the geophysics and seismic research. He also went abroad to study Earthquakes, in Turkey, Canada, and at University of Colorado Boulder. He officially retired in 1991 when he became 70 years old. I owe him a lot on getting myself familiarized with mathematics, physics, and computers, from an early stage of my life. I often thought I would like to become a “professor” if I could in my childhood.

My expectation on the academic lifestyle, however, was shattered during my life at University of Tokyo from 1984 to 1990. I was quite disappointed with the huge bureaucracy prevailing in the organization; one of the example of the inefficiency was the university had two trans-Pacific TCP/IP links already in 1988, though the one was only for some dedicated science research projects which ordinary students including me at that time was not permitted to use at all. And you had to show up to the lab even if you could telecommute with the terminals and modems. I was so disillusioned and decided to leave the university after barely getting a degree of Master of Engineering.

I’ve seen a lot of unhappy people in the academics too. Many of them suffered (and still suffer) a long period of years even after getting the PhD as Joshu (or now Jokyo), the words which stand for the educational staff who have no budget privilege by themselves and have to obey the commandments of Koushi (or the lecturers), Jokyoju (or now Junkyoju), and Kyoju. It’s more like the military; Koushi and Junkyoju professors are with some budget privileges, but still under the control of their bosses aka the Kyoju (full professor).

Even in 1989 I thought those Joshu/Jokyo people were not really well respected because many of them often had to work overtime to help the private part of lives of the Koushi, Junkyoju or Kyoju, of higher-ranked members. I know at least a couple of people who got sick and tired of this near-slavery treatment against Josyu and got permanently left from the academic society and got successful life in the business world. So I didn’t want to take a job as a postdoc with Josyu (now Jokyo) position. I thought I would rather want to be a software engineer working for a corporation, under a proper governance abiding the labor laws and the corporate policies and procedures.

---

When I decided to take a job offer as a non-tenured time-limited (max 4.5 years) professor or Kyoju of Kyoto University, my primary assignment was far different from the one which my father would have taken; I was expected to work at least 70% of the “working effort rate” (I still don’t understand what this actually means) as an administrative work of the university. I was not allowed to take my own student or perform educational activities except for doing my own research. And the job offer statement even included that the candidate accepted the job would be reassigned as a full-time administrative staff. This was a terrible condition comparing to the other Kyoju people who were only doing the research activities. I didn’t have much choice though, because my employment contract was due March 31, 2010, and there was no other offer available at that time.

I was lured by the illusion of becoming a full professor, even without tenure. I could be something like my dad. At least people would call me so.

I made a terrible mistake.

---

Eventually I realized the hard cold fact of working as a pseudo-research professor. My position was in continuous professional and bureaucratic limbo; I was neither a full administrative staff nor an educational staff. I was physically alone even during the lunch hours; I intentionally or unintentionally had the lunches alone. Very few people talked to me for something other than work-related issues. I had some financial freedom of my own research budget (within the 30% working effort rate hours), and people were polite, but I realized I was working in somewhere which I least wanted to be.

What I saw in the year 2010 was a wasteland with the corpses of poor soldiers virtually (or some even actually) deceased due to the worst workplace condition or systematic bullying towards newcomers. And that was the scene exactly I had seen during my early years of life in 1989.

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I see quite a few articles on Medium and elsewhere about staying out of the graduate school by all means and not taking the academic postdoc jobs even if you could endure all the burdens of becoming a PhD. Reading the phdcomics.com itself will let you understand how the life of the graduate school is surreal and unbearable without a lot of humor (though I’ve never been a professor like this person.) And I have to warn you that things are always getting worse and worse every year. The workplace condition in the universities (at least in Japan but maybe also in many other places of the world) are no longer bareable if you want to be treated as a real person.

At the University of Tokyo, my father became a Josyu in 1942, Jokyoju in 1949, and Kyoju or a full professor in 1962. Maybe the 50 years of time changed the whole academic landscape, from a fertile source of the joy of research and education, to the wasteland of cheap labor provided by second-class newcomers for feeding the old landlords.

---

Exported from Medium on July 17, 2013 / updated on July 25, 2013.

View the original

My Interview on Erlang by Paolo d'Incau and my Medium posts

A brief introduction on my interview about Erlang/OTP and other tech topics, by Paolo d'Incau. (Thanks Paolo!)
http://pdincau.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/an-interview-with-kenji-rikitake-jj1bdx/

I've also posted some non-engineering essays to my Medium page:

• Things I'm not interested in
• Electric appliance woes

Enjoy reading.

The Setup

(Photo: Kenji Rikitake, taken by himself, at his home workstation, 30-MAY-2013, while watching Joe Armstrong's article of The Setup)

Disclaimer: this post has been inspired by the following website: The Setup.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Kenji Rikitake, network and software engineer. I'm a developer at Basho Japan KK, a group company of Basho Technologies, since February 2013. People expect me to write Erlang code and I like doing it, but I also write programs in C, Python, and other languages, documents, corporate blog articles, and doing almost everything I can to help my coworkers, and of course for helping our customers and friends.

I've been working on computer networking, internet, and the distributed systems since 1988, from VAX/VMS SMGRTL screen management library development, to the campus network security management as a full professor at Kyoto University. I decided to get back to where the action is on November 2012, when I experienced a mental breakdown, after spending 12 years at the research and academic ivory towers. I became a professor dropout spending unrewarded time of 2-year-and-10-month non-tenured full professor from April 2010 to January 2013.

I am also an amateur radio enthusiast and electronic device builder since 1976. My Twitter handle @jj1bdx is the Japanese primary callsign. I also have the US FCC amateur radio license with the callsign N6BDX. Morse code telegraphy and shortwave long-distance contacts (DXing) are my favorites, and I'm also interested in digital radio communications technologies, as I did in the late 1980s with UHF TCP/IP links.

What hardware do you use?

Since February 2013, Apple MacBook Air 11" on the move and Mac Mini at home, both with SSD, are my workstations. Before then I hadn't owned any Apple Macintosh computer since 1980 for myself. My first computer was Apple ][ in 1979 which I abandoned in 1982; I now realize many things have changed. I have even bought an Apple TV for my living room display and it's quite entertaining.

I've been solely using PFU's Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) and the family products since 1997. Prof. Eiiti Wada, who was my advisor when I barely got out of University of Tokyo Graduate School of Computer Engineering, designed the keyboard. Currently I use both HHKB Pro and HHKB Pro 2. I'm a conservative guy and still stick to my Logitech/Logicool Anywhere MX wireless mice, both on the move and at home, while I'm quite satisfied with MacBook Air's trackpad with a click.

Recent addition to my desk is Ergotron's Workfit-S Sit-Stand Workstation, combined with EIZO EV2436W 1920x1200 pixel monitor. Being able to work both on standing and sitting positions, with adjustable keyboard and display heights, makes my legs and shoulders much confortable and reduces a lot of stress. While this desk attachment is not the perfect solution, this is definitely worth trying. I also add a small Home Erecta metal rack to change a sitting desk to a standing writing desk; this is also good when you want to write on a paper at the standing position.

I still have Windows 7 and Ubuntu 13.04 dual-OS notebook client PC, which was the main workstation before I joined Basho. For the software experiments and development of both work and play, I rely on FreeBSD PCs since 1990s; now I run two 9-STABLE machines. I've got rid of tower PCs, and the recent Intel DC3217IYE micro desktop is working smoothly with the FreeBSD OS.

I'm not an audiophile fanatic, but I like good sounds and music. Styleaudio's CARAT-PERIDOT is one of my favorite USB headphone amplifiers. AKG K240 Studio is so far the finest headphones I mostly use at home, with a custom cable from Oyaide in Akihabara. I also use Sennheiser HD580 and Etymotic Research ER-4P. My spouse Kyoko wants to play her Super-Audio CD (SACD) disks, so I also set up a Pioneer D6 SACD player at our living room. Mackie 1202-VLZ3 is also one of my favorite audio mixers.

While on the move, a 6th gen iPod Nano, and Audio-Technica ATH-CKS90NC noise-cancelling earphones (available only from Japan) are the must, both in the airplanes and train cars. Recently I start storing music without compression, that is, with plain WAV files. The sound has got far better than those encoded in 320kbps MP3. I was carrying around a CD Walkman in 1987, and technology has made a lot of progress.

On amateur radio, ICOM IC-7200 has been my favorite shortwave transceiver, rock-solid to stably pump out 100W to the antenna. I also use Idiom Press K-5 keyer for sending Morse Code with the paddles. I sometime hand-send the code with a Czech Morse Straight Key made in 1950s. I only use a temporary antenna system at the balcony of my house, with a 6.5m-length vertical telescopic fiber pole with the antenna wire attached, and ICOM AH-4 antenna tuner. I can still work the six continents and many remote places in the world. The ionosphere is always amazing.

And I also have a Sony Ericsson Android smartphone (but not used as a voice telephone in Japan due to the subscription clumsiness and legal hyper-restriction towards SIM-card-only sales), and a Sony Ericsson feature phone for the carrier au (by KDDI). They have replaced most of the needs for a dedicated camera, but I still have a compact digital camera called Nikon COOLPIX P310.

I like pens, pencils, and papers, too. Moleskine is good, though not so good for writing with fountain pens. LAMY ballpoint pens and fountain pens are very good. Pentel's PRESS MAN 0.9mm mechanical/sharp pencils are robust and my favorite since 1980s, with JIS 2B-grade lead refills.

And what software?

I've been a BSD UNIX fan since 1986. Some of the real BSD-based UNIXes I've used are VAX 4.2/4.3BSD, DEC ULTRIX, SunOS 4, BSD/OS, and FreeBSD. BSD always rocks and rules, especially since AT&T finally loosened up the license for the general public (and accepted what they stole from the Berkeley CSRG team) in 1990s. I really admire FreeBSD core developers and the port maintainers. While I do not register myself as a committer, I still occasionally help maintaining Erlang/OTP port for FreeBSD.

Linux is not bad, and Ubuntu is a nice distro, but I think the kernel is cluttered with too many drivers, though this is inevitable when thinking about how many devices it has to support. And the lack of usable man pages is the primary reason why I don't want to use Linux for programming unless absolutely needed.

I had long been a serious hater of Macintosh computers before Apple decided to introduce Mach/UNIX kernel onto it. I believe Mac OS 9 and older kernels were practically useless for any real-world production systems. And I also had long been a hater of Windows, before the multi-tasking stability was realized in Windows 2000. Having said those rants, I have very little problems on using Windows XP and Windows 7, and Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3), so long as I don't write native programs on those machines. I intentionally stayed away from Windows Vista and I'm very happy I didn't have to touch it at all. And I will not touch Windows 8 either, because Mac and the OS X look much better as a desktop.

I still have some nostalgia towards OpenVMS, which has a very consistent and rigid command line interface and internal system service architecture. I would get one if Hewlett-Packard would make it an Open Source operating system, which I also believe what would never happen.

About editors, I use both vim and Emacs. I don't want to commit to the meaningless wars of editor preferences. Currently I don't use other dedicated programming editors, though for writing this article, I solely use a web application called Writebox, which is nicely designed to avoid distraction as possible. Windows' Notepad is not bad either, provided choosing the appropriate font and screen size.

For Japanese input system, I solely use SKK, since 1990s. OS X has AquaSKK, and Windows has SKKIME. Emacs has DDSKK, and vim has skk.vim. Until recently I was using EUC/Japanese for the internal encoding system; I decided to convert to UTF-8 finally after I decided to leave Kyoto University on November 2012.

On web browsers and services: Chrome is almost always used at any time on OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu. Or even Chromium on FreeBSD if needed. Diigo has been my primary bookmarking service. GitHub is extensively used for both work and play. Also Google Drive, Calendar, and Mail, though I still maintain a primitive mail processing environment at home. Recently I'm using Feedly as an RSS reader. Music services: Soma FM and SoundCloud. (YouTube and the Amazon sites are intentionally excluded from this list :))

Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) are necessary evil. I install them on my Windows 7 machine and the Macs. I believe you cannot substitute by non-MS products, if you have to deal with the Japanese governmental agencies and large corporations, who are solely dependent on the MS products (and know virtually nothing about anything else.)

I still feel LaTeX does much better than MS Word.

Apple stuff: iTunes is not bad, especially for OS X. Keynote looks very good and easy to use.

Adobe stuff: Acrobat is installed on my Windows 7 machine, to proofread/check the PDF document structure and embedded fonts. I once used to play around with the Photoshop Elements, but now I feel OS X's Preview software is enough for playing around with the photo files.

Social services: Twitter: @jj1bdx - no need to explain, isn't it? Tweetdeck is also nice. I quit Facebook and LinkedIn because those two services were too socially demanding (and attracting too many spammers.) HipChat and Yammer are two nice things at work, and I feel those services should be outsourced as much as possible, because the providers are almost always doing better than us. And about blogging: Blogger and Tumblr.

Finally on programming languages and environment: Erlang/OTP for the obvious reason - Riak runs on it. kerl is a good stuff to switch between different Erlang/OTP execution environments. Python (with virtualenvwrapper), Perl, and awk are my favorites too. And of course, C, for fixing the FreeBSD kernel code. Programming tools: rebar, git, make, and other trivial ones (e.g., GNU Autotools). Shells: /bin/sh (NO bash assumption please though I use it too) and zsh.

What would be your dream setup?

Systems that don't need regular human intervention for maintenance. Period.

Frankly speaking, I don't want to provide unpaid support or even paid support regardless of the price, especially to my spouse Kyoko, and other relatives, for broken computer and electronic systems. It takes too much time, very interruptive and distracting, and it is indeed a very stressful work. Of course this doesn't mean I want to leave them alone in panic - I want to help them, but doing so simply makes me weary. I believe the supplier and vendor of those products should also take the responsibility to build the systems self-recover, self-restart and self-fix, at least for the software.

While I'm OK with fixing systems and I think I like doing so by referring to my professional records of being a system administrator for more than 20 years, most of the so-called appliances are quite badly designed and have to have a lot of insider skills and expertise just to use them, let alone to fix them.

I believe in the hacker movement and I think hackers should be well respected in the society and that the status quo is quite against the well-behaved hackers by assuming all hackers are malicious which is absolutely incorrect, but this does not mean everybody has to be assumed to have necessary skills to repair a broken machine or system. Risk dumping of technologies or incomplete systems towards users by the manufacturers is not an ethically right thing to do.

I hope Erlang/OTP and the philosophy/perspectives on the general programming will make the world a better place, for building a robust system, not only for the servers but all software-based products.

On amateur radio: I want to have an unlimited time and access to a legal-limit transmission system and a broadcasting-station-grade shortwave antenna, at a place with the least man-made noise. I want to listen to my voice bounced back from the moon too.

About my disability: I've lost my right eye's lens for more than 30 years. I wish I can connect the mostly-working retina of my right eye to the computers so that I don't have to tolerate the optical blurriness. The Google Glass in May 2013 is not enough yet. And I hope things will get better soon.

Update: Fixing typo and adding product URLs (last update 1-JUN-2013)

I've joined Basho Japan from February 2013

I've started my new career as a Senior Software Engineer at Basho Japan KK, a 100% subsidiary of Basho Technologies, Inc., effective 1-FEB-2013. I'm very happy that my colleagues are all very much supportive for my startup as a new developer. I will try my best to catch up the lean software development process and to get the most out of both the elementary and advanced technologies for contributing to the company.

Basho is a wolf pack of the bleeding-edge Erlang/OTP and distributed system engineers, who have made Riak as an open source standard of highly-distributed and fault-tolerant databases. Catching up with the skilled engineers is a really tough job, but it's also very exciting to take the new challenges for making the actual software products to the customers. This is completely different from what I've experienced in the past 12 years as an academic/government researcher.

Basho's customers have a lot of demands for Riak already, and the company including myself has to meet the expectation while shipping the products on time and maintaining the high product standard. I will contribute my 22-year skills of network engineer, sysadmin, and an OS developer to the software development process, in the most effective way.

My participation to Erlang/OTP activities and ACM Erlang Workshop will remain the same.

So stay tuned for my pull requests and pieces of code!

Lost in transportation

I will resign from my full professor position at Kyoto University. The employment contract will terminate by 31-JAN-2013.

I've got killed by commuting, again. Yes, again. I should have learned from my past dreadful experience from 1990 to 1992. I know regular long-distance commuting is hazardous to my health. And being forced to synchronously work with other people from 9am to 5pm simply does not work for me. But I had to take the job for my paycheck, because no other practical job offer was available on Spring 2010. And I have to admit that I did not survive the tough working condition.

I was taking a sick leave from November 2012 to January 2013. I got mentally crashed due to chronic and accumulated fatigue, presumably caused by spending nearly four hours every day during commuting from home. Fortunately at the end of January 2013 my mental and physical health conditions have been back to the normal ones, but at the end of October 2012 I was very weak and mentally disorganized.

I once experienced a similar situation of chronic fatigue when I was working in Tokyo, commuting to a Yokohama office, with four train line transits every day, taking nearly two hours for each direction, from 1990 to 1992. I was young enough to tough it out for two years, but I collapsed on Autumn 1991. I had to quit the job on April 1992.

Commuting from Northern Osaka including Toyonaka to Kyoto is relatively less stressful than commuting from Setagaya in Tokyo to Hodogaya in Yokohama. It takes three train lines for each direction, much less crowded than that of Tokyo. I have to walk a lot though in Kyoto and Osaka, so the time I have to consume is approximately two hours for each direction, virtually the same as the one I experienced in Tokyo.

I tried to reduce commuting by doing my job from home, but the nature of my missions eventually changed to mandate daily commuting, and my physical and mental health conditions got deteriorated. What was worse was that I also had to work from home. I was simply spending too much time on my working hours, and in the end my productivity turned into nil.

I took my personal records of working hours spent on each task at the workplace simply for my own curiousity, measured by the unit of Pomodori, which is plural of Pomodoro. Each Pomodoro in my case means 30 minutes. I take this definition of Pomodoro/Pomodori from a popular book called Pomodoro Technique Illustrated, by Steffan Nöteberg. Note that Steffan suggests that you have to take at least a five-minute break for each Pomodoro, which takes 25 minutes. This is unfortunately virtually impossible in the corporate life.

I think the worst time wasting events at the workplace were regular meetings. Many of the meetings take at least two Pomodori, and some of them even take six or more, which means three hours or more. Locked onto a chair for such a long time without a break makes you feel very sick, and will surely hurt your back. I also have to write that commuting only for attending face-to-face meetings is simply a waste of time and the physical energy. And I've found that for many days I had to work more than 20 Pomodori at the workplace, which suggested lower productivity.

I think allowing telecommuting, teleworking, working from home, or whatever frees the employees or managers from the physical office or being forcefully bound onto an unnecessary face-to-face meeting, is a must for a modern organization to boost the productivity of each organizational member. Some people may argue this is not for everyone, but I strongly believe this option should be available for all people, unless the person deliberately want to dedicate a fixed window of time to a fixed place with prior consent. I also think that the number of meetings should be minimized, and that the time spent on the dedicated meetings should be kept as small as possible.

I understand that occasional or sometime less frequent (for example per month or bi-weekly) business trips will be necessary, and I usually accept them. Face-to-face meetings are indeed necessary for some decision makers, which I also consider logical. But I think daily long-distance (more than 30 minutes or even one hour) commuting should not be used as a piece of litmus paper test of the royalty to an organization.

Unfortunately people at most of the organizations in Japan still think physical commuting and daily or weekly face-to-face meetings are critical and mandatory, and that there's no other way. I think this sort of thinking will no longer work well, regarding the increasing population density and train network failure rate, especially in Tokyo and the Kanto plain, and also in Osaka/Kansai, Nagoya, and less crowded regions. And people in Japan are now struggling to allocate their scarce resource of time to taking care of their family members, of their children, or of their elderly parents, which no one else will take it as the primary role. The time and physical energy management gets even more important for each individual than ever.

So I've decided to choose another way of living, before getting lost in transportation. Getting back to the days of working from home and telecommuting/teleworking is nothing new to me, because that's what I've done from 1992 to 2010. Leaving the career track of academic research is sad. But I need to live and survive. And I want to use my time and physical energy wisely. I'll take this new challenge again.

Update 7-JUL-2013: A followup post is here in Medium.

Coming change in 2013

(Photo by Kenji Rikitake, with a book cover of "Concurrent Programming in Erlang", which is an on-demand printed version via amazon.co.uk)

I've been away from this blog for quite a long time. This will be a short entry, though I'm writing this to make a mark at the beginning of the year 2013.

I'll be on a big transition in this year 2013. I'll write about the details when available. I can promise that I'll keep focusing on Erlang/OTP and distributed systems, as I have been for the past 5 years. Stay tuned for the details.

Lots of things happened last year. A good news is that I joined the 11th ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop held at Copenhagen on September 2012. Meeting a lot of great people and nice friends there was a precious experience.

A bad news is that I have been taking a long sick leave since November 2012. I will write about the details later when I feel I should, but for the time being I can only conclude that a long-distance commuting literally killed me again, as it had done during 1990 to 1992. I definitely have to change my lifestyle.

On new year's resolution: I won't declare it this year, because I need to drastically restructure my professional life anyway. Of course I've got to get myself into a good shape. And I need to spend more time on code writing and development, which I could not for the past three years.

I hope things will work out in a good way this year; it's a year of Snake in Japanese/Chinese 12-year holoscope, and it's my year too.

Why Erlang people need the Erlang Factory events

Disclaimer: I am writing this blog article on my way home from SFO. The reduced air pressure in the passenger cabin might have affected the contents of this article.

I spent all three days of Erlang Factory SF Bay 2012, with two more days to cope with the jet lag. This was my third consecutive time to participate in the event as an invited speaker.

One of the most impressive things about this conference is that Francesco Cesarini, the leader of this event and CTO of the hosting company Erlang Solutions, carefully treats all delegates (which stands for the participants) equally with kindness and hospitality. Francesco's principles are well understood by all the other Erlang Solutions staff members as well.

I think Erlang Factory provides integrated feelings of satisfaction to all the delegated by letting them exchange the serious but friendly discussions. This is not something you can find over teleconferences or any forms of distant communication either synchronous or asynchronous. Erlang Factory is not a decision-making event; it is about sharing ideas and hanging out with each other, supporting both mental and emotional needs of the delegates.

Erlang Factory conference accepts a large number of versatile topics including:

• Distributed databases
• Case studies in production systems
• Detailed debugging into the library and the host operating systems
• Crash courses for programming and testing the language system, and
• Official announcements from Ericsson's OTP Team, who owns the final responsibility of managing and directing the language system's future.

An opportunity to discuss various complex issues with the speakers and the audiences is itself rare and precious, especially when the issues share the same core interests: Erlang/OTP.

Erlang Factory also accepts non-mainstream topics as a talk proposal. In the past three years, I talked about RPC over SSH, Mersenne Twister implementation with the NIFs, and in this year 2012 it was about IPv6 readiness and programming tips of the language system. Those are not necessarily the mainstream topics in the Erlang/OTP community, though I find quite a few problem reports on the online discussion places, such as in the erlang-questions mailing list.

My style of talk at the Erlang Factory is nothing extraordinary:

• First I analyze the problem and define the detailed problem domain to solve;
• then I write some example code to solve them and put them on the Web including GitHub and the other sharing places before finalizing the talk so that I could make it better with the wisdoms of others;
• I also experiment and evaluate the results while I'm finalizing the code and the presentation materials;
• Then at the Erlang Factory talks I discuss the conclusions found and propose the unresolved issues which may become another interesting talk topic.

The important points are sticking to the facts, no exaggeration, distinguishing assumptions from the facts, and listening to what the audiences ask and comment. Actually this is the same procedure I will take for the ACM Erlang Workshops, but for the Erlang Factory I try to make the presentation including more practical aspects and open questions.

I usually assign three months as a part-time project for an Erlang Factory presentation. The toughest part is to decide what to talk about. It's actually Francesco who suggested me to give a talk about IPv6 for this year 2012. I had some experience dealt with the technical issues of IPv6, so I decided to take the suggestion. The important point is that what you are going to talk is negotiable with the Erlang Factory staff.

This year 2012's events of Erlang Factory SF Bay Area were very intense, both in formal and casual senses. I've got an impression that it has become a truly international-class conference, while retaining the casual and friendly style of the past conferences.

I believe people go for conferences and events to meet people and share the feelings. It's a sort of festival, or Matsuri in Japanese, though also with the practical exchange of ideas. I strongly suggest all the Erlang/OTP enthusiasts to participate in this superb Matsuri.

Small pieces of happiness that I pursue

The small pieces of happiness I've been pursuing since 1992 are as follows:

• Making money by doing what I want and by minimizing doing what I don't want to do;
• Living in a house of my own control with my partner without interference;
• Working at a place where I want and at a place where I can minimize the mental stress; and
• Working at a period of time in the most productive way, including taking enough time to rest.

I feel I've been devoting myself to pursue this small happiness at my best effort.

And I'm happy with it.

It's all about experience

It's not just the programming.
It's not just the music.
It's not just the message.

It's all about experience. And the desire for it.

People are looking for a new experience through technologies.

Concurrency will surely help giving a smooth experience; and even more good things.

(I will not quote Jimi Hendrix here)

Twitter in Japan after 3-11 or 11-MAR-2011

I'm really thinking about restricting my tweets to tech issues only.

Tweets in Japanese have been getting too political these days, especially after the 3-11 accidents and disasters. People are less restrictive on expressing op-ed tweets, and the tweets further invoke even more harsh exchanges of discussions without careful thoughts, often lead to blackmailing.

I do understand people in Japan including myself have legitimate fears against the possible nuclear and predicted earthquake/tsunami disasters. And I accept people have rights to openly discuss those matters. Twitter, however, is not a good place to have discussions with showing sufficient clarifications and enough pieces of evidence.

Open-plan office and peer-monitoring socialism against creativity

When I started working as a programmer after I graduated from college in 1990s, I was fortunate enough to have a wall-separated booth, thoughwithout a door. This is something which workers have taken for granted atresearch laboratories in the USA or Canada. But things have beendifferent in Japan, where I live and work.

Having a separated space for individuals has been considered a luxury inJapanese companies, where people think space is money. So I should emphasize I was fortunate; because in Japan still corporateoffices are mostly open-planned: everybody seeing each other with nowall, whole bunch of noise, and is forced to listen to each other.

I had to work in 1980s with an open-plan office in Japan as an inturn,and I thought working in the office would surely hurt my body anddegrade the quality of my thinking. If I were just moving around anddoing ordinary tasks, I wouldn't have considered it much. But I had tothink there for writing a technical report. So I thought something hadto be changed.

I do not reject the idea of shared meeting space or the importance offace-to-face meetings. Those are vital factors of successful companies.But without a place for solitude, nobody would be ableto think. Without thinking, no innovation will come, and nonew idea will emerge. How can you think without being alone?

Recently I've found an article on Web which says working in open-planoffice makes you sick and is hazardous to your health.

A recent study of Dr. VineshOommen and his group in Queensland University of Technology showsthe following results:

Results: Research evidence shows that employees face a multitude ofproblems such as the loss of privacy, loss of identity, low workproductivity, various health issues, overstimulation and low jobsatisfaction when working in an open plan work environment.

Well said.

Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister also write in one of theirclassics Peopleware (2nd Edition, 1999, Dorset HousePublishing) as follows (in Chapter 12):

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enoughquiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create theirown sensible workspace.

I've read the 1st edition of Peopleware (published 1987) in 1989, so theworkplace privacy issue is well-known for at least 20 years.

On the other hand, Japanese workplace has little changed for the past 20years. I still see many open-plan offices, especially amongnon-engineering workers.

I suspect Japanese open-plan offices are designed for managers to putthe subordinates under surveillance during the working hours. This isan example of a dark side in Japanese workplace socialism.

In a typical office layout, a manager in a team has the own desk besidesthe cluster of the desks for the team members. A team member can't takea rest or make a physical movement during working hours. I think thissort of desk layout does not respect the health of the team members, letalone the privacy or the productivity.

I've found quite a few articles about this open-plan office sicknessissue on the Web. So I think this is a matter of concern for manypeople. Maybe this is a sort of backlash due to the recent economydepression.

I'd rather work alone if I were put into an open-plan office every day again, solong as my brain and my ideas are the source of my income.

Working CW stations at the end of the year

I've set up an amateur radio station again this week, and worked some stations, including some friends. The transmission feeder is a temporary one, so I will disassemble and reassemble the system soon, after the new year vacation time is over.

Amateur radio for me since 2002 is mostly CW (Morse Code). CW is the most primitive but still practical digital communication form. The bit rate is about 10 to 25 bps (no kilo, mega, or giga) (that is 12 to 30WPM) and it's very slow indeed. You still can send something meaningful over CW, and it has been used for more than 100 years. See how people are using Twitter these days.

CW has already been phased out from the mainstream of professional communication systems, but it's still a viable backup, and ham radio operators still use it over shortwaves to exploit the maximum possibility of communication, to overcome the difficulties of natural and artificial noises, and significant path loss. On the other hand, the latency is minimal; only the path distance between the peers determines the delay time. It's the oldest chat system in the world.

The hardest part of CW is that you need to learn and have a lot of practice to listen to it. It's like learning another foreign language. Some eccentric people including me, however, choose this road less traveled, for many reasons.

Many old operators may find out their younger days of enthusiasm towards radio itself. And many hardware hackers will use CW for realizing the simplest but useful radio system with a pair of home-made transmitter and receiver. Whatever the reason it might be, still quite a lot of people devote themselves to CW. And I am one of them.

Working on CW is simply a good time for me. Learning for a faster CW listening stimulates my mind a lot. And CW reminds me of the very basic issues of digital communication; reliability, bandwidth, stability, latency, and practicality. The procedure of sending and receiving letters by yourself gives you more time to think.

I'm a computer engineer and scientist, and technologically CW is an archaic thing. The principle embedded, however, is still effective to be a fundamental motivation of pursuing engineering and scientific skills; to explore the road less traveled and discover the new world.

The following article of Jeff, KE9V may help you to understand why some old amateur radio operators are still enthusiastic to operate on CW: The Road Less Traveled

73 and have a happy new year 2009.

Kenji Rikitake, JJ1BDX(/3), JO3FUO, N6BDX and JQ2KST

My Influences

My influences on programming, Internet, and computer skills:

1. Tsuneji Rikitake, my father: who taught me basic math, FORTRAN, and financed my startup (of my professional career, indeed)
2. Paul Vixie and DEC NSL people: for the primary idea of firewalls and Internet systems administration, and the proper engineering attitudes toward problem solving
   
3. Daniel J. Bernstein: on re-thinking Internet protocols from the very beginning, especially on DNS
4. Bruce Schneier: for the basic philosophy and principles of security, not only for computer systems
5. UNIX gurus on Bell Labs and BSD communities: for the programming suite and styles, including C, awk, and Bourne shell
   
6. Joe Armstrong and the Erlang programming communities: for letting me know a practical message-passing-based concurrency
   

I know there are many other people I should put on the list, but I will just keep this list small.

My salutation to Chad Fowler and Kevin Smith for reminding me of this topic.

A quiet life without a TV tuner

I've been spending time without TV at home since this (2008) September. And I recommend you to do so too for living a quiet life.

I decided to stop watching TV regularly; no airwave, no satellite, no cable channel at all. Actually the condo building I live is cable-TV ready. But I decided to quit. I gave our LCD TV to my wife's Mom. We instead listen to the radio when we're at home and having a dinner or lunch and we want some news. Most of airwave TV programs are junk. And most of non-airwave (that is, paid) TV programs are also junk. And we know most of airwave radio programs are junk. But some of them, including news and classic music programs of our national broadcaster (in Japan), are fortunately not. I carry around a pocket radio when I travel in Japan to listen to the same night program called Radio Shin-ya-bin, a rather-quiet-and-calm program without ads.

We still want to see the DVD contents. We have a DVD player. So I decide to newly buy and install a new PC display instead. It accepts DVI, VGA, component and NTSC video, and even HDMI. It has 1920x1200 pixel resolution; an excessive spec for DVD or an old PC. It doesn't have a TV tuner, however. It doesn't have speakers either, but that is OK, because I installed a pair of speakers and an amplifier with AM/FM radio tuner installed. So no problem for enjoying audio.

The good thing about not watching TV while on a family meal is that we rather talk and make a lot of conversations. And we started to read a lot of books and talk about them. It's like living in the world of 1950s or 1960s, though we still use PCs.

We have also quit subscribing newspapers since this April. I decided so because even Nikkei Shimbun, let alone other papers, were carrying junk articles these days. The New York Times and The Economist have already allowed people to read their articles online freely, as other media companies follow. So I told my wife we didn't need a newspaper subscription at home anyway. She first complained, but eventually she also learned to enjoy reading something instead, or to spend the time for being exposed to mass media to something else.

We don't have any game machines such as Sony's PlayStation or Microsoft's Xbox. Our eyes can no longer follow or respond to artificial graphic pictures.

We mostly use PC to read letters and design presentations; we don't make active 3D graphics and we will not unless we need to visualize something for our works. And of course we see visual presentations on YouTube and elsewhere. The good news is, however, they are on-demand only. Unless you explicitly tell PCs to show them, you don't have to watch at those on-demand videos.