1. Yudo: The way of the bath
2. The lines that define me
3. We’re broke, my lord
4. Brave: Gunjo Senki
5. Mondays: See you “this” week
6. Citizen Kitano

Yudo (湯道) A comedy focussed on two brothers and the bath-house they inherit after their father’s death. It felt like the subplot around the older brother’s plans might have suffered in editing but the rest of the film hung together well. I enjoyed it.

The lines that define me (線は、僕を書く) A drama following a university student who is invited to become an apprentice of a famouse sumi-e painter and his relationships with the others in the group, his friends, and his tragic history. I really enjoyed it.

We’re broke, my lord (大名倒産) A period comedy set in the late Edo period. A young man　who was raised by a salted salmon merchant discovers he’s the illegitimate son of the lord of the estate. I thought it was very, very trope-y, but good fun.

Brave: Gunjo Senki A high-school is transported back to the warring states period. Samurai attack the school, slaughter what seemed like most of the students, and kidnap several hostages. Some of the [very few] survivors set out to rescue their classmates before the school is carried back to the present day. An uneven mix of high-school sports drama, samurai slasher film, and isekai manga. Did not enjoy at all.

Mondays: See you “this” week A clever comedy with touches of The Office and Groundhog Day. A well put together film, I really enjoyed it.

Citizen Kitano A film about Takeshi Kitano and his work as a filmmaker and artist. I’m not much of a film buff so this wasn’t really my cup of tea but it seemed well made and was interesting enough.

I didn’t get to see as many films as in previous years and my miss-rate was higher than previous years, but it was still a fun week of cinema. Thanks Japan Foundation and sponsors.

Over the course of nine months or so, I visited:

1. Kanpai Sake Brewery, London

2. Bimber Distillery, London

3. East London Liquor Company, London

4. Dojima Sake Brewery, Ely

5. Copper Rivet Distillery, Chatham

6. The Foundry, Canterbury

7. Spirit of Yorkshire, Filey

8. Cooper King, York

9. Cotswolds Distillery, Stourton

10. Penderyn Distillery, Penderyn, Wales

11. The Scotch Whisky Experience, Edinburgh

12. Lindores Abbey Distillery, Fife

13. Royal Lochnagar, Balmoral

14. Glenlivet, Speyside

15. Speyside Cooperage

16. Glen Moray Distillery, Speyside

17. Aberfeldy Distillery, Highlands

18. Dalwhinnie Distillery, Highlands

19. Glenkinchie, Lowlands

20. Oban Distillery, Highlands

21. Kilchoman, Islay

22. Ardnahoe, Islay

23. Bunnahabhain, Islay

24. Ardbeg, Islay

25. Lagavulin, Islay

26. Laphroaig, Islay

27. Holyrood Distillery, Edinburgh

28. Oxford Artisan Distillery, Oxford

• Masquerade Hotel
• Saint Young Men 2nd Century
• And Your Bird Can Sing
• Born Bone Born
• Dance With Me
• My Dad is a Heel Wrestler
• Noise
• Samurai Shifters
• JK Rock

I saw Masquerade Hotel on a flight earlier in the year. It’s a fun mystery with detectives going under cover as staff at a high-end Tokyo hotel.

Saint Young Men is a collection of episodic sketches following Jesus and Buddha as they share a flat in Tokyo. I found it funny but quite short.

And Your Bird Can Sing follows three friends during a summer. It’s a drama largely driven by characters and ended with lots of unresolved drama.

Born Bone Born sees a family gathering on the fourth anniversary of their wife and mother’s death to was her bones in an Okinawan funerary ritual. This was another character driven film but it was marred, I think, by the frequent intrusion of comic interludes into otherwise dramatic scenes.

Dance With Me is a musical road-trip comedy following a corporate worker as she tries to break the spell (or curse!) of a botched hypnotism which forces her to sing and dance whenever she hears music.

My Dad is a Heel Wrestler follows a young boy as he discovers and deals with the fact that his dad works as Cockroach Mask, a heel wrestler.

Noise was another character driven drama following the lives of several people impacted by the Akihabara massacre. Like And Your Bird Can Sing, there’s not a great deal of resolution to be found here.

Samurai Shifters is a period piece that follows a samurai clan forced to relocate. I thought it was funny in places and pretty well paced but some elements could have done with a little more time to develop fully – I suspect it was trimmed a little too much in editing.

JK Rock follows three high-school girls as they form a rock group. One thing I found a little odd was the ridiculous car (surely product placement?) and the pastel interior design of the “rock cafe”. Interestingly, the actresses playing the band members did, indeed, form a rock group: Drop Doll.

• Rautavaara;
• The Alim Qasimov Ensemble;
• Dalmatica: Chants of the Adriatic; and
• Lubomyr Melnyk.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra played three of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s works. The first Cantus arcticus – Concerto for birds and orchestra uses recordings of bird song as an instrument to very great effect. I bought box sets of Rautavaara’s 12 Concertos and Choral Works later.

The Alim Qasimov Ensemble features Alim and his daughter Fargana as vocalists and Rafael Asgarov, Rauf Islamov, Javidan Nabiyev, and Zaki Valiyev playing a range of traditional instruments. The music is, the programme told me, something of a fusion of the classical mugham and more popular ashiq musical traditions of Azerbaijan. However it comes about the concert was great (and the Spiritual Music of Azerbaijan album is great too).

Dalmatica: Chants of the Adriatic is a collaboration between two groups: Dialogos, a group of four female singers, and Kantaduri, a group of six Croatian cantors. The programme explores Dalmatian liturgical musical traditions from the middle ages which use both Latin and church Slavonic. This was a really, really good concert and I will be surprised if Ispovidajte se Gospodinu, jer je dobar (track one on the Dalmatica CD or listen to the Youtube video embedded above) is not amongst my 5 favourite tracks for 2017.

The last Sydney Festival concert I went to was Ukrainian-Canadian Lubomyr Melnyk playing something of an introduction to his piano music, particularly his technique of “continuous music”. He spoke quite a bit between pieces – and said some things I found quite strange – but the music was amazing.

If the 3% of the programme I saw is any indication the 2017 Sydney Festival was excellent and I’m already looking forward to 2018!

• Kampai! For the Love of Sake (カンパイ! 世界が恋する日本酒)
• SIX FOUR: Part 1 (64 ロクヨン 前編)
• SIX FOUR: Part 2 (64 ロクヨン 後編)
• What a Wonderful Family! (家族はつらいよ)
• The Mohican Comes Home (モヒカン故郷に帰る)

Not long after I also watched:

• Your Name (君の名は)

Kampai! is a documentary about three people who are involved in the sake industry: John Gauntner – a Western sake expert, Philip Harper – a British-born sake brewer working in Japanese breweries, and Kosuke Kuji – a 5th generation sake brewery owner. If you are interested in sake, booze, or documentaries, I suggest watching it if you get the chance.

Based on a best selling novel SIX FOUR is a single massive story divided into two feature length films. I saw part one on the flight back from Japan after ICFP and was super excited to see them both at the film festival. The story follows a large cast of characters involved in the unsolved kidnapping, ransom, and murder of a little girl. It was the only major case in the year Shōwa 64 (which only lasted a week), hence the name. It spends a lot of time on the interaction between the police and the press and on politics within and between the prefectural and national police agencies but the personal dramas of the central police officer and the murdered girl’s father. Highly recommended!

What a Wonderful Family kicks off when Tomiko’s birthday request of Shuzo – her husband of 50 years – assent to the divorce papers she’s had prepared. The resulting family drama was, if I recall correctly, mostly played for laughs. Not too serious but fun nonetheless.

The Mohican Comes Home is something of a “fish out of water” film. It follows a Eikichi and Yuka – a metal musician and his big city girlfriend – as they visit the small island village he grew up in. The film was funny and poignant by turns and I quite enjoyed it but don’t go out of your way to track it down.

At about the same time the Japanese Film Festival was in Sydney the super excellent anime film Your Name (君の名は) had a fairly wide Australian cinema release (capital cities and some other centres) and I went to see that too. It’s begins with the two teenage main characters – a girl who lives in a small town and a boy from Tokyo – waking up having swapped bodies (which they continue to do on a semi regular basis). Eventually it becomes clear that her life is a few years in the past relative to his and that her small town was (will be) destroyed by a meteorite killing most of the residents! I loved this film a lot! I’ve been listening to the soundtrack on pretty heavy rotation and am really hanging out for the DVD release. If you don’t hate anime, see it!

It didn’t even occur to me that we might broadcast this prestigious sporting event live on the Internet until near the end of the event, so here is a recording of my Periscope live stream of the semi-final and final bouts.

This is the second time FP-Syd has had a Coq Fight and it again was far more enjoyable than the phrase “competitive theorem proving” might suggest. Indeed, there’s even been some suggestion that there could be a far less prestigious “minor leagues” Coq Fight at ICFP 2015 in Vancouver later this year.

If this sounds like fun keep your twitter client tuned to the #coqfight hashtag on Twitter.

Retcon: imposing eventual consistency on disparate data sources was presented at the Yow! Lambda Jam conference on May 21 2015; and

Dynamic programming in Haskell was presented at FP-Syd on May 27 2015.

NB: The algorithms presented are as described in Introduction to Algorithms (2nd ed) by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein; the Haskellisation is mine.

The only deck I’ve uploaded so far is A Complete Idiot’s Introduction to Formal Concept Analysis for Dummies to Teach Themselves which I presented at the FP-Syd functional programming meeting in November, 2013.

Upcoming talks include:

• retcon: imposing eventual consistency on disparate data sources at the Yow! Lambda Jam conference next month (May 21-22); and

• An approach to dynamic programming in Haskell at FP-Syd a few days later on May 27.

On Saturday there’re two keynote sessions and five slots with competing sessions.

1. The Exportables session by Simon Hobbs will no doubt help in my quest to develop a reliable and efficient workflow at work.

2. Allie Micka’s keynote Running a Drupal business and contributing to Drupal sustainably is a keynote and sounds interesting enough, if not quite my cup of tea.

3. Dave Hall’s Building Distributions with Drupal 7 will, again, help in my quest for standardisation and automation to simplify workflows.

4. Josh Waihi’s keynote Goodbye Centralization, Hello Distribution: An Introduction to Git, is an introduction to git (which I already use and am relatively familiar with).

5. Given the number of times I’ve been asked about options for paid membership, the Paid Membership Sites session by Chris Hood will scratch an itch of mine (which other people have been tickling).

6. As I’ve implemented two or three custom CCK fields (and others on my team have implemented another few), Ivan Zugec’s session on Fields in Core: How to create a custom field is sure to be interesting.

7. Dries’ keynote session with details to come is by Dries. And a keynote. And by Dries.

My choices on Sunday are less clear cut in spite of having a choice in only four slots:

1. I expect John Zornig session about Building a document management system in Drupal to be inspiring when combined with my recent interest in Solr-based search.

2. Both Turbo charge your Drupal site by Kim Pepper and Fancy Pants WYSIWYG Editing by Boris Gordon sound interesting and useful.

3. Session by Dries.

4. I’ve got a bunch of projects coming up at work that need payment solutions of various types so The Payment api and its framework approach to module development by Allie Micka will obviously be useful, but I’m personally interested in systems administration and performance so Horizontally Scaling Drupal by Dave Hall sounds interesting. Simple page layouts and customisations using Views, CCK and CSS by Dale Baldwin sounds a bit entry level.

5. Both Case-Study: ABC Dig Music by David Peterson and Migrating to a Drupal Web Environment by Fiona Bush sound like they’ll have interesting insights. I’ll probably go Fiona’s session, if only because I went to ANU for a while.

6. Josh Koenig’s keynote session details to come.

7. Lightning talks are alway good (or, at least, over quickly).

Now that I’ve thought about it these plans will be making their way into my calendar.

I’ll give a brief summary of the talks I found particularly interesting below. I think they’re in order, but don’t quote me on it.

Early on in the morning Trent Lloyd presented his car tracker built with a hobbyist GPS/GSM module and an Arduino programmed using a UML methodology based on state charts. One of the nice things about this talk is that it is related to Harry McNally’s talk last year about using UML state charts for embedded programming.

Second was Sam Spencer’s fascinating introduction to the increasing use of open source technologies within the Australian Bureau of Statistics. He told us about the work currently underway at the ABS to provide their data in more useful and open formats (XML-based standards) than the current mix of PDF, Excel, and other proprietary documents. This was the highlight for me, and a great opportunity to hear from someone working at the coal face.

Also in the morning I saw Cristian Frichot talk about web application security. His interesting overview of one or two classes of vulnerabilities (including cross-site request forgery), some statistics (18% of phishing sites are on hijacked servers; 26% of Australians were “affected” by identity fraud in 2009), and references to efforts raising the profile and quality of web application security were particularly timely for me. Of particular interest were the Open Web Application Security Project and their open source Enterprise Security API project.

Matt Lambie spoke about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the lessons he’s learned from it (he’s a blue belt) and their application in business (he’s the CEO of the Frontier Group). This was an interesting talk (for the Jiu-Jitsu demonstrations if no other reason) which seemed to emphasise the importance good decision making (especially with respect to our own capabilities) and agility.

A fascinating talk, if perhaps not “useful”, was David Cake’s overview of the “sausage factory” that is ICANN and the DNS. He managed to cover a lot of ground to give us a flavour of the acronym soup that is the ICANN and the somewhat farcical (from the outside) nature of the procedures and politics at play in the closest thing the Internet has to a governing body.

The last session of the afternoon was Adrian Chadd’s talk about the optimisation. Like many of the speakers, he covered a lot of ground pretty quickly, but the take home message (the one I got) was that blithely ignoring (or abstracting) many aspects of system and application performance is coming back to bite us. Many of the performance challenges faced by developers in decades past are making a resurgence and the industry (and academia) seems ill prepared for them.