As soon as I saw a guy solving a nonogram, on his phone in Japan, I knew I was going to get into nonograms again. Nonograms are logic puzzles played on a grid using numbers as clues. This descriptions sounds a bit like Sudoku, but that's where the similarity ends.

The square grid is empty, and the clues are at the side of each row and column. Your task is to colour certain squares in the grid according the given clues. The clues are a sequence of numbers, for example 3, 4, 7 of consecutive coloured squares, separated by at least one or more empty squares. In the case of the above clue, it means that you have to colour a sequence of 3 squares, then have 1 or more blank squares, a second sequence of 4 coloured squares, white squares and a final sequence of 7 squares. Typically when the puzzle is complete a picture is formed.

These puzzles can be called many different things, amongst them: Hanjie, Paint by Numbers, Pixel Puzzles, Oekaki Logic, and Tsunami.

If you want to try out some puzzles the Sapphire Games site offers some interesting puzzles you can play online. I even managed to find a nice version of the puzzles for the Pocket PC from Conduits. The Japan Puzzle website has a good list of links for PC programs and other platforms.

With the Sudoku craze still alive and slowly evolving in a Kakuro craze, I think there's a good market for nonogram puzzle books.

Nowadays updates are coming in batches. Ah well, I'm too busy living life instead of writing about it. This update is a bit of a diary style update, probably more interesting to me when I’m 67 then to the rest of the world. Will mindspill still be up when I’m 67?

The weekend after returning from Japan was a very eventful one. On Friday I flew to London for the best concert line-up I could ever dream of in the last 10 years. Anathema, My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost were all playing together to celebrate Paradise Lost's 20th Anniversary. The fathers of doom death metal playing together in the same gig, at the Forum in London. It was such an event that a couple of hardcore friends from home, Cyprus and Finland also came to London for the gig. We were a group of 6 dottians, 1 Finn and 1 Romanian. The concert was fantastic. I had very low expectations from Anathema and was positively surprised them. I was very surprised by My Dying Bride as they are quite peculiar live. Their stage presence is quite atypical and they played many old songs which was nice to an extent, but a bit surprising. I'm very curious to see them live again. Paradise Lost were good, but not really surprising. In the end the 3 bands came out on stage together and opened some champagne, soaking us wet since we were at the very front.

After the gig we spent the rest of the evening looking for a watering hole, but we only managed to get a single drink from the only two pubs that were open. I spent half of the night with my friends, and the other half travelling to Bratislava for a wedding. I arrived at the wedding place at 1pm and the wedding started at 2pm. Just barely had the time to pee and have a quick shower.

Slovak weddings are long. Very very long! The wedding started at 2pm and finished at 4.30am the following morning, but we only managed till 3am. There were some interesting traditions during the wedding. First, before the mass, there was a small reception and the bride and groom came to greet the guests and formally thank their respective parents. After mass at the local churc, we returned back to the hotel for the wedding dinner. We were seated at the most multilingual table, with 4 languages spoken at a time; Slovak, Hungarian (the wedding was in the Southern part of Slovakia were most people speak Hungarian), English and German.

After the starter (prosciutto crudo with parmesan shavings and melon), the waiters were carrying the soup plates and dropped one plate on purpose. All of a sudden, people rushed from their chairs and started jumping on the broken glass. Few minutes later the bride and the groom came with a broom and started sweeping the glass. (Traditionally only the groom does this). Each time they were almost finished, somebody hit their dustpan and they had to start all over again.

At midnight the bride stepped on the dance floor, and people start paying money to dance with the her. Each guest danced for a few minutes until the next paying guest took over. Traditionally, towards the end of this dance, the groom has to pay for a dance. Other guests then pay to dance with the bride, forcing the groom to up the ante for the final dance.

On Sunday I went to the in-laws to say hi, and have some delicious Slovak food. Say that I’m guided by my stomach, and you’d be saying the sacrosanct truth. I had to take a 3 hour bus at 3.30 in the morning to get back to the airport on Monday, but it was worth it. The duck, red cabbage and dumplings were delicious!

On Tuesday there was another concert. Nile came to play in a small pub in Dublin. There was an overwhelming majority of tall people at the gig, and I felt a bit like a dwarf amongst them. I enjoyed the gig even though there were some morons who threw things at the band. I never saw this happen before, and it was quite disgraceful. The band was understandably pissed off at this too.

Last Saturday we had a big BBQ in the house. A troupe of Italian friends of M, came over for a visit to Ireland, and we prepared a BBQ in their honour. Apart from the Italians we also had a German corner, and an East European corner (formed of 2 people). We supplied pork chops, chicken wings, kebabs, jacket potatoes filled with cheese and bacon, sausages, homemade pizza, bruscetta, rice salad, potato salad, leaf salad, more sausages, pineapple and melon (bbqed). In addition to this the guests got their own food too, so we ended up with loads of extra food. We probably have enough for the rest of the week. Well since summer only came in the last 2 weeks it makes even more sense to live now, before hibernating in winter.

Clever as ever, the Japanese have combined an animal shelter with a teahouse to create the Tokyo phenomenon known as “cat cafes.” To understand why the Japanese would pay ($8-$12 an hour) to play with someone else’s cats, you have to ... (continue reading at Josh Spear)

Yes the inevitable had to happen. I'm back from Japan. It was a wonderful holiday, everything went according to plan, and we got to see as much of Japan as possible in two weeks. We started out with a couple of days in Tokyo, then went on to climb up Mt. Fuji. Luckily the weather was cooperative on the mountain, after the torrential rain we previously had in Tokyo.

After Fuji we went to the cultural capital, Kyoto, with a side trip to Nara. From there to Hiroshima and the island of Miyajima. Finally in the end we visited Beppu in the South Island (Kyushu) and Yudanaka near Nagano to see the snow monkeys.

Hopefully I'll have some time to write a bit for meaningful comments about Japan, instead of a list of place. At the moment though I'm having a sever attack of post holiday blues.

Just before leaving to Japan, here's a presentation I made for the Misses about Japan. It's a fun sort of presentation, with facts and curiosities about this weird and wonderful country.

Japan from A to Z

For credits for the pictures in the presentations click on the pictures

I won an Award for the best node link animation in the VAST 2008 Competition. The competition consisted of a data set of phone calls between the families of the people running a controversial religious organisation, living on an island. The phone calls retrieved from the island's phone company, provided enough data to extract the social network of the families on the island. In addition to this, each phone record had the time of the call, the duration of the call, and the location of the cell tower from where the call was made.

The tool developed with Processing, was designed to allow easy exploration and interactive animation of a dynamic network. The network can be represented at different levels of detail. At an overview level, the whole network can be visualized using a matrix representation. From this overview, interesting detailed parts of the network can be zoomed upon, and explored, using a node-link representation. Finally, the individual nodes can be studied at an instance level.

The award was given due to the "innovative visualizations, excellent analysis, and outstanding functionality demonstrated in the visual analytic environments" shown.

P.S. Guess this explains why I was so quiet in June.

I remember I posted this some time ago on GeekBaazar, but this is a good time to post it again.

The onion investigates ...

The Beijing Olympics: Are They A Trap?

On a more serious note, check out these photos from the opening ceremony. As my German house mate says, Ammmazzing!

Google have added a feature to Google maps that lets you take virtual walks in a city. You can literally follow street paths on a map and have a 360' view of all your surroundings. This feature is called Street View. Click on the images for a quick preview.

From some superficial searches on the subject, the images were taken with video camera mounted on a car, going around the streets. Not all countries have this feature enabled but on August 4th it was introduced for Japan.

This is really amazing stuff! It gives a whole new dimension to travel planning. Images and news about Google Street View found via Japan Probe.

Some sites with interesting street view collections:-
Top 15 Google Street View sightings (Mashable.com)
Google Street View gallery

Via Japan Probe

Once (3 stars) - Once is an amateur shot, Oscar winning (2008) musical shot in Dublin. If you've ever visited Dublin you’ll easily recognise most of the spots where the film was shot. I think the film portrays life as a young immigrant in Dublin quite well. Apart from that though there aren't many other reasons to watch the movie. The music is kind of ok, but it's enough if hear the Oscar winning song on myspace. I found the plot a bit lame and quite anti-romantic, but then the movie wasn't plot oriented.

Ratatouille (4 stars) - A cute relaxing Pixar movie about a rat who likes cooking. Apart from the usual high standard Pixar got us used to, the story can be enjoyed by kids at a simple level, and by adults at a higher level.

My neighbour totoro (4.5 stars) - Brilliant anime. This is probably the equivalent of beauty and beast, or the lion king for Asians, everyone saw it. The movie is directed by Japan’s most famous animator Hayao Miyazaki (who also did Lupin III, Spirited). The movie is about 2 young sisters who find a strange new world, similar to Alice in Wonderland, with cute furry magical creatures. Great stuff!

Lost in translation (2.5 stars) - I had very high expectations for this movie, but was left disappointed by the story. I liked the portrayal of Japanese culture and customs in the film, which was very evident and consistent with what I read about Japan till now. The film is about culture shock, which admittedly is very difficult to capture on film. However, I think that this aspect was dampened by the subplot of potential romance between Scarlet Johansson and Bill Murray. This might be an Oscar worthy movie, but maybe not an enjoyable one.

The Dark Knight (5 stars) - I honestly can't remember the last time I gave 5 stars to a movie, but probably it was fight club. This movie is just fantastic. Class! Perfect! I can keep going on and on with superlatives, but I think you got the drift. If you're unsure about it because it's a batman movie, don't be. True batman can fly just a bit, but his super powers are very limited compared to other superheroes. This could have easily been a fast paced, high tech, highly polished action movie with no super powers. Not entirely unlike a James Bond on steroids. There are super cars, super bikes, great action sequences, plot twists, ethical dilemmas, what more can you pack in 2.5 hrs of film. Probably nothing!

I've added the pictures of the trip to Loch Dan.

The burger currency guideline from The Economist