Under Japanese law, the 36-year old princess loses her royal title and allowance upon marriage to commoner Yoshiki Kuroda, 40, who works for the Tokyo city authorities. To prepare for her dramatic change of lifestyle, the princess has reportedly been taking driving lessons and practising shopping at the supermarket. Die Prinzessin Sayako, die einzige Tochter von Japans Kaiser, heiratet einen bürgerlichen Mann. Die Japaner haben ein Problem, einen zukünftigen Kaiser zu erhalten. Es gibt momentan keinen männlichen Nachfolger. Und wenn ich das richtig verstehe, würde auch ein Sohn von Sayako nicht zum Kaiser werden können. Die Verfassung soll aber jetzt geändert werden, dass auch Frauen Kaiser werden können. Dann sollte das Problem für den Moment gelöst sein. Und wieso kann der Kaiser eigentlich keinen Mann adoptieren? Wurde früher glaubs auch gemacht um die Nachfolge zu sichern. Oder waren das die Shogun? Ah jetzt habe ich es gesehen: Adoption was possible and a much used way to increase the number of succession-entitled heirs (however, the adopted child had to be a child of another member of the Imperial House). Ach ja, eine weibliche Kaiserin gab es in Japan auch schon. Kaiserin Suiko von 593-628. Update 18:15. Gerade kam der Economist City Guide von Tokyo rein. Ein Satz möchte ich hier zitieren: Once she is married, the princess will have to live on the meagre salary of her husband, an urban planner, though her parents' parting gift of over ¥150m ($1.3m) should ease the transition.

I have been having a look at different software this week. I digged a bit into Skolelinux (Debian-Edu), a Linux distribution optimized for schools. I was really impressed with the profile system. This is an idea to pre-configure the system for certain roles. For example there is a server profile which gives you a network server with central login, home directories on the server, mail (I think) and other things, tool. There is a client profile which needs almost no configuration and automatically integrates into the network. Language support is quite good, though Spanish is a bit rough in certain areas. What I want to try next is installing GNOME on Skolelinux. I’m interested in how easy this is going to be. We currently use Gnome here at the Diego and I’d like to continue that. Though I have read quite an interesting mail by Knut Yrvin, stating that GNOME’s language support is worse then KDE’s. His mail is quite interesting to get a general perspective of internationalization of software. Apart from Skolelinux I also wanted to try out Edubuntu. Unfortunately on my test machines the installation always failed (or maybe just took hours and I was too impatient). I’ll try again with a future release - or maybe just with Ubuntu. Then I have stumbled over the software SchoolTool, a school administration software. (When I bookmarked it at del.icio.us, I saw that I had already stumbled over that back in August…) The tool likes quite nice, but doesn’t provide the features we would need here, yet. Or so I think. And what annoyed me (at a first glance), was the strange division of courses into sections. I don’t fully understand yet, what courses or divisions are supposed to be. There does not seem to be a demo online, but you can test it out very easily if you use Debian unstable. It’s included in the distribution. And now I’m going home. A bit early today, because I’m feeling quite dizzy. Have not been as healthy as I’m used to since coming to Lima. ...

Joi Ito nimmt in Japan an einer Konferenz zum Thema “Zukunft von Japan” teil. Dabei diskutieren sie intensiv darüber, was Japan tun muss um besser da zu stehen. Interessante Punkte, und ich erwarte noch einen Artikel zum Thema. Vorerst mal: Retreat about the future of Japan. I am happy to report that most people thought that we needed to deal with the war history and that it was a bad idea for Koizumi to be going to Yasukuni Shrine. Das ist meiner Meinung nach wirklich eines der wichtigsten Themen, die Japan angehen muss. Und Schweizern wirft man schliesslich immer wieder vor, dass unsere Banken ja am Weltkrieg so stark verdient hätten (gerade in Arequipa wieder passiert). Und einem Land, welches am Krieg sogar teilgenommen hat, trägt man nichts nach.

Möchte nur kurz auf den Artikel von Mario Aeby hinweisen: Blocher sucks. Es geht um Blochers Haltung gegen genauere Geschwindigkeitsmessung. Wer zum Beispiel gegenüber unkooperativen Asylbewerbern Nulltoleranz verlangt, muss unvorsichtige Autofahrer mit gleicher Elle messen. Gesetze sind da, um eingehalten zu werden. Danke Mario für die Zusammenfassung. Gute Artikel.

Peru scheint ja momentan ziemlich streilustig zu sein. Neben dem Streit mit Chile, legt sich Peru nun auch noch mit Japan an. Da Fujimori neben dem peruanischen auch den japanischen Pass besitzt, wurde dieser in Chile von japanischen Diplomaten besucht. Nun zieht Peru den Botschafter aus Japan ab. Peruvian government officials reacted sharply to Japan's response to the detention of Fujimori. Peruvian Foreign Minister Oscar Maurtua summoned Japanese Ambassador to Peru Hitohiro Ishida on Tuesday and protested the embassy's response. "Japan's action is unacceptable because it has no right to intervene in the extradition between Peru and Chile," Maurtua was quoted as telling Ishida. Auch ist Peru wütend, dass Fujimori aus Japan nicht ausgeliefert wurde. Peru hatte an Japan wiederholt Anträge zur Auslieferung gestellt.

One thing I did not learn at the language school in Arequipa is computing vocabulary. But for my work here in Lima, I need quite some of that. So I have been digging at bit for vocabulary lists. PONS has a list of new vocabulary (German/Spanish) which includes a lot of computing speech. For example recently some blog-related words have been added. Yo soy un bitacorero, I am a Blogger. Apart from that I usually look over at DIX, a German-Spanish dictionary. ...

I have finally uploaded all my pictures from my first month in Peru. I think this is the right time, to summarise a few highlights from my first month here. The links in the following texts point to the corresponding pictures. The second weekend in October, we visited the Colca Canyon from Arequipa. We drove there by bus starting from Arequipa. The bus left at 2 am Saturday morning. We then went to Cruz de Cóndor where we saw some condors flying. Then we visited the village Yanque where we also passed the night. After a visit in a hot bath (in a bassin) Saturday night and another one (this time right out there in the nature) on Sunday in the afternoon, we left again for Arequipa. The following Saturday we went to Mollendo which is a city at the pacific. From there we took a taxi to Mejía and walked all the way back to Mollendo. The Sunday of that weekend we spent sightseeing Arequipa. Two days later we finally went for our Cuy (guinea pig) eating. October 28th was the last day at school and I had to say good bye from my wonderful teachers (picture only visible to friends). If you enjoy my pictures and would like to see private ones as well, get an account at Flickr (it’s free) and add me to your contacts. ...

In Japan I took a picture of every bed I slept on. I’m trying to continue that tradition here in Peru. There is already a nice collection over at Flickr: My beds in Japan and Peru.

One of my tasks here at the Diego Thompson is to work more on the Open Source curriculum. The new computing teachers should receive quite a good knowledge in that area. Matthias created a basic curriculum during his civilian service. I’m now going to put that few pages into more detail and also watch out for books or other material that could be used for the classes. Additionally I’m going to put a bit of that stuff into the curriculums for primary school and kindergarten teachers. So I started with reading Matthias’ curriculum a bit more thoroughly (now that I can actually read a bit of Spanish) and also got myself a schedule of the current Linux clases. Then I’m going to talk to the teachers and I also plan to watch them teach a bit to get a feeling of how they do things around here. From there I’ll continue. I’m doing this for the first time, you know. :-) ...

Ich habe gerade mein aktuelles Lieblingsbild auf Flickr hochgeladen. Das Bild hat ein Freund während unserem Ausflug im Colca Canyon geschossen. Ich habe es dann noch mit einem Bibelvers angereichert und das bildet nun meinen Bildschirmhintergrund. Hat eine fast perfekte Verteilung von dunkeln und hellen Bereichen um als Bildschirmhintergrund zu dienen. Dürft ihr gerne auch verwenden. PS: Die anderen Bilder noch aus Arequipa werde ich demnächst auch endlich mal hochladen. Und von hier aus Lima sollte es dann auch mal Bilder geben. ...