DisneySea

Over the last few years Tokyo DisneyLand has been transforming into Tokyo Disney Resort. In May last year they had build a new hotel and some shops, and were working on another hotel, the monorail, more shops, and Disney Sea. So today we went to see how it all looked now that they’re finished.

I’ve been trying to work out why they named the new park “Disney Sea”. It does have a watery theme throughout, although you still mostly walk between the attractions. I think that the name was thought of before the park was designed, and it was named because they build the park on reclaimed land where the sea used to be.

I have seen two of the attractions (Indiana Jones and 20000 Leagues under the sea) in other Disney parks, but everything else seems to be unique to this park. This is also the most beautiful of all the Disney parks throughout the world, but I assume that is because it is the newest: Disney just seem to be getting better at making their parks.

The queues were quite long; some attractions had 2 hour waiting times. We got some FastPasses for “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, and then went to find some of the less popular things.

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Mass storage camera

My new camera has a USB port, and it uses the USB mass storage protocol to allow the computer to access the files. Protocol standards are great: it’s a pity all developers don’t read them, especially when they are developing a product that implements the protocol.

I connected my FinePix to my ThinkPad, they said hello, then Linux got confused. I asked what the problem was, and Linux told me that FinePix was answering all the questions strangely: there was extra bit where there should not have been extra bits.

I asked the Google-monster if he’d heard about any similar problems and it told me about Linux and a Sony Clie who seemed to be having the same conversation. The solution that worked there was to ask Linux to just ignore the extra bits and hope they didn’t matter. I tried this, and FinePix and Linux have been best of friends ever since.

I don’t know for sure who caused the proble. Being a Linux fan(atic) I tend to believe that the Linux hackers got the protocol right, and my other USB mass storage devices seem to agree with me. But that isn’t really the point: if I hadn’t been using a Free OS, I couldn’t have fixed the problem in 20 minutes, and my new camera would soon be full of images that I couldn’t access.

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Shinjuku

I’ve just bought a Fuji FinePix F401 digital camera in Yodobashi Camera Shop in Shinjuku.

Shinjuku is a mad place! I’ve been told that Shinjuku train station has over 3 million people pass through it during rush hour. If only 1% of these people bought a camera from you, you could make a lot money. That’s probably why there are so many people selling cameras at Shinjuku. Or maybe they’re all just crazy.

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Stallman is right!

Karen and I were sitting in the BMI lounge in Belfast reading an Internet magazine that described XML as “an open source language”. This annoyed me more than I expected, possibly due to my lack of sleep. “Stallman is right” I said.

The Open Source movement was started to ‘rebrand’ Free Software to make it more acceptable to business and give it a name that was less open to confusion. “‘Free’ is frequently misunderstood to refer to price and not freedom” was their complaint, so they choose what they thought to be a less ambiguous name: “Open Source”. RMS didn’t like this because it stopped people talking about freedom.

“Open Source” has turned out to be much more open to misinterpretation and misuse than “Free Software”: many people, including the authors of the article that sparked this rant, believe that something is open source if you can read the source code. Yes, “Free Software” was slightly ambiguous (in English; the translations in most other languages were not ambiguous at all), but the term could be simply clarified with phrases “Free as in ‘speech’, not ‘beer'”; “Open Source” is much more difficult to explain.

So, again I say “Stallman is right!”. He may be a fanatic, but without him we probably wouldn’t have Free Software by any name. He takes a lot of abuse for wanting us to talk about “Free Software” instead of “Open Source”, and asking us to accurately describe our favourite OS as “GNU/Linux” instead of just “Linux”. If RMS annoys you, good: he’s doing his job. RMS, keep up the good work!

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I’m leaving on a jet plane

This time tomorrow we’ll be on our way to Japan. I think I’ve got everything I need. I’ve started to write a schedule for the holiday; I hope to finish it today, but that will never happen.

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Size doesn’t matter

I’ve just got a new battery in my Mickey Mouse watch.

The first place I tried couldn’t do it. They looked at the watch and told me it would cost