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)

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.

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.

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.

Teleworking technology: we already have it

I've been thinking about months for what technology can help people to discover and get the most out of teleworking. I'm getting closer and closer to the following conclusion:

We've already built teleworking infrastructures, at least in my home country Japan, and many other nations and regions which have already deployed the Internet. Period. We need to focus on how to break the barriers and remove the impediments to people to embrace teleworking technologies as their own tools.

Let me simply put in this way: teleworking is no longer something special. For example, writing this blog itself is a very good example of teleworking technologies. All I need is a decent Web browser capable to run JavaScript for Blogger's writing environment; and I can publish and show you what I write, like what you read now.

Collaboration is getting more and more easier also. LUNARR allows you to flip back an electronic document and let you and other people write something on the back. This is a rather intuitive way to co-author a document, which I had never thought about until I saw it. Geeks will do the whole things in more geeky ways using SSH, rsync, CVS, subversion, or whatever else for software development, but it's not only for geeks anymore. Anyone who has to write a document can do it on a teleworking environment.

So let's stop saying "I'm not allowed to work from (wherever you want other than your office) because blah blah blah..." and talk how you can leverage your productivity from introducing teleworking into your lifestyle. If you and your employer think teleworking is something restricted for special people, that mindset is archaic, and no longer applicable to the 21st-century version of modern lifestyle. And let's not take commuting as a duty; it should be a choice and it has to be, to reduce the gross amount of time and energy wasted by being forced to commute.

But beware that teleworking is not necessarily a duty either; don't do it like this as in an xkcd article. Don't leave your partner alone just because "something is wrong on/with the Internet" (grin).