What a pity, Japan is going to be a suerveillance state. At least for us foreigners. Mainichi reports: Japan plans to fingerprint foreigners aged 16 or over when they enter the country as an anti-terrorism measure, details of a revised immigration bill obtained by the Mainichi have shown. In addition, people that the justice minister deems likely to "commit crimes aimed at threatening the public" will be deported under new regulations, the revised bill on immigration and refugee recognition says. The bill, which the government plans to submit to the Diet in the near future, does not require fingerprinting for some foreigners, including special long-term Korean residents, those aged under 16, those who come to Japan for diplomatic or public activities, and guests invited by Japan. But in Japan the bill will have some resistance: Fingerprinting at immigration checkpoints has been introduced in the United States, but the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and other organizations are opposed to the same measures being introduced in Japan, and the bill is likely to stir controversy. "Fingerprinting people violates the respect for individuals under the Constitution as well as stipulations on freedom of action banning treatment that is discreditable," a federation official said. Federation officials say that in addition to violating privacy, the measure also hinders the formation of a society in which Japanese can live together with foreigners. Let's hope, the bill doesn't get through. Because I pretty much agree with the stated critisism.

I just saw that the people of the Swiss search specialist Eurospider created a weblog a while ago: Information Retrieval Blog. As I’m interested in Information Retrieval I hope, they write some interesting posts about that topic.

A lot of discussion has been going on in Japan about allowing women on the throne. The public is quite fond of the idea as well. The reason is, that for many years no male descendant has been born. No princess Kiko announced that she was pregnant and suddendly prime minister Koizumi backs away from his promise. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi backed away from his vow to change the law to let women inherit the throne yesterday, one day after sudden news that a royal princess was pregnant revived hopes for a male heir.

A few minutes ago the power supply of my Apple PowerBook started to burn. Literally. Pretty scary, too. So now I’ll have to look for a new power supply and it has to be fast. I’m backing up my data to the network so I will at least have access to that after my notebook’s battery is empty. I do hope that MacTienda or one of the other Apple service centers here has a 12" PowerBook power supply on stock. Update: I phoned the company IT Service in Miraflores, Lima. They apparently have one power supply on stock and I’ll go and get it this afternoon. I hope it’s the right one, but I’m pretty positive about it. Update 2: They did have the right part in stock and I bought it. They explained me that Apple requires official Apple Service Providers to have such parts in stock. I probably could have required them to give me the part for free as I still have an Apple guarantee until ca. August this year. But for one half I forgot about it and for the other half I was just so glad to have a new part that I didn’t mind paying a bit for it. ...

In today’s course here at the Diego Thomson I’m going to teach about computer networks. This will probably be my hardest class so far as it is a lot of theory. That stuff is sometimes difficult enough to explain in my native tongue - let alone in a foreign language that I only started learning a bit more than four months ago. Attached you’ll find the presentation I’ll use. Any comments are welcome. Theoría de redes ...

I’m loosing my faith in IMDb ratings. Compare Jarhead with The Constant Gardener. The former is a movie which I see as completely wasted money. It got a whopping 2/10 rating from me. Very rarely have I been that close to walking out of the cinema during the movie. I only stayed because I thought that this has to get better. It didn’t. Then there is the latter movie, The Constant Gardener (or El Jardinero Fiel as it is called in Spanish). Now that was a beautiful movie. Not the best story I have ever seen, but very nice filmmaking, acting and soundtracks. I gave it a 9/10. And what are the IMDb ratings? 7.6/10 for The Constant Gardener, 7.3/10 for Jarhead. I can’t for the live of me figure out the latter rating. Any ideas? Maybe Patritotic US Americans who love every movie about their military? Please help me. Maybe even some Swiss found the movie very nice and can tell me what it was. And it’s interesting that women generally like the movie Jarhead more than men (7.5 vs. 7.3 according to the detailed statistics page). ...

That’s the kind of change I hate. First providing a software for free (as in beer) for non-commercial uses and then changing to shareware. First getting a ton of free bug reports and feedback and advertisement and then “okay, thank you and now place pay”. I’m talking about the new release of SubEthaEdit. And the changelog doesn’t even look impressive. Boy am I glad that I use TextMate. And on the DasGenie weblog comments don’t work. I hope, my trackback does get through. Sorry for the rant, SubEthaEdit is still the greatest editor I know to collaboratively work on a document. It’s just awesome in that area. Update: My comments did get through after all. Maybe comments are moderated on DasGenie weblog or there was a caching problem. ...

I’m working on translating some more components of Skolelinux to Spanish. The default Web site of a server installation is done and I have also translated the LDAP user administration (a Webmin plugin). Though I currently don’t know how to include the translation into the official distribution. And it seems that in the following days a release candidate for Skolelinux 2 will come out. That version will finally be based on Debian Sarge and will include very good Spanish support. Version 1 of Skolelinux was not very good in that aspect, yet. ...

A Swiss startup company called coComment has release a new application. It basically allows you to subscribe to conversations you are having around the net. So when you comment on a weblog you can see responses to your comment in coComment. Or that’s the idea. The problem is, that currently only comments of other people who use coComment are included. So if somebody who does not use coComment does reply (the vast majority of commentors) you will not see the reply in your coComment views. Anyway, I’ll try it out for a while and see where it’s going. And I’m still wayiting (impatiently) for Chregu to implement the comment support into the planet (now that list.blogug.ch includes comment feeds). Updated to add: found this via the blog.ch weblog and Jérôme. Jérôme also provided me with the invitation code and probably still has some left. ...

Exxon Mobil posted a net profit of $36.1 billion, the largest in American history, and Royal Dutch Shell reported a British corporate profit record of £13 billion ($23 billion), both for 2005. The news fuelled complaints that oil companies are making huge profits at consumers' expense. Seen in the latest Business this week of The Economist.