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Author: Oliver Roup

  • Japan 2017

    Japan 2017

    Japan

    A few notes I took on a recent trip.

    Before you go

    • Follow Tokyo Fixer on Instagram. At minimum he will get you excited. If he inspires you, he has the time and you have the budget, apparently he’ll take you to all the secret cool spots in the city for a “mere” $780 a day. Also humorous is Shibuya Meltdown which is pictures of Japanese passed out in public.
    • Apparently there is a Japanese rail pass only available to foreigners and that must be received by mail outside of Japan. I did not find out about it in time and didn’t find the cost of rail travel to be that problematic (particularly not compared to the rest of the country which is insanely expensive) but I’ve been told it is a good deal.
    • Book one night (or more) at a fancy Tokyo hotel and contact the concierge now and ask them to make restaurant reservations for your stay. (More detailed advice below)
    • Getting to and from Narita to Tokyo, a cab would cost you about $250 USD. The Skyline Express is the cheapest, fastest train I found. There’s also the Narita Express which is a competing company, stops in more places and costs slightly more.) Beware when returning that the Narita Express can sell out and the local train takes an extra hour to get there.

     

    Tokyo

    • Subway – Tokyo has two competing subway systems the JR (Japan Railway which goes all over Japan including Kyoto) and Tokyo Metro. Luckily their payment systems are interchangeable. The Suica card which is the JR payment card is transferable to the NFC chip on your recent iPhone (I know it works with the X and I think it works with the 8 / 8+)  if (and only if) you don’t buy the personalized card.
      • When you arrive go to the vending machine at a JR (not Tokyo Metro) subway stop and buy a non-personalized Suica card. Switch the locale of your iPhone to Japan. Then when you go into Apple Pay, one of the options will be add Suica card. You then transfer the value from the Suica card to your phone by literally holding the two close together. Once the value is transferred you can set your cell phone back to US locale (the keyboard also changes slightly) and throw out the Suica card. From then on, you can pay for Subway by tapping your phone on the turnstile and you can add Yen to the card from Apple pay. It’s stateful though so if there are two of you, you need two cell phones and can’t share one because it would get confused about taking two trips at the same time. Also note that the bullet train you cannot pay with NFC and need to buy the old fashioned way.
    • Apple maps works better than Google maps for walking directions in Tokyo. Hilariously there are signs everywhere that say please stop walking and texting and it seems like a genuine health hazard there.
    • Tabelog is like Yelp for Japan and available in English. Foursquare is also good although incomplete. (Like the ratings it has are good but it’s missing a lot of stuff.)
    • I stayed at the Prince Gallery Tokyo which is one of the newest hotels in Tokyo. I think it’s similar in quality to the Mandarin where I also stayed one night but I found it on Hotels.com for $350 a night, vs the Mandarin which lists for $1100. It is not as centrally located though. The Park Hyatt was also super recommended to me but it was entirely sold out when I was there and the pricing I saw makes me think you’re paying a lot for the “Lost in Translation factor”.
    • The best coffee I’ve had in my life was at Streamer Espresso on the second floor of the Prince Gallery (the same building is also the new headquarters for Yahoo Japan)
    • A list of michelin starred Sushi restaurants compiled by my friend Noah (I think these are in the pricey but not insane category. I paid $400 for Sushi lunch. Mental note – don’t order the sake pairings at lunch unless you have time for a nap.):

    Sawada, Tokami, Arai, Sushi Sho, Mitani, Hashiguchi, Amamoto.

    • Stay in a super nice hotel (The Prince Gallery, Mandarin Oriental and Park Hyatt all qualify) at least one night because the concierge there can help you get reservations at places you will never be able to get on your own. (Even on nights you’re not staying at the hotel.) Advance notice helps a lot. I would give your concierge a list of restaurants you’re interested in and tell them you’ll accept whatever reservation they can get. I ended up with a lunch reservation at Mitani and it was amazing. I generally avoided being the American taking pictures of his food but I asked the Chef’s permission to take a photo of this

      Uni and pureed Ikura dish because it was so amazing.

    • People talk a lot about Jiro’s a lot and it’s definitely an option (and probably won’t be forever since he’s getting pretty old) but know that it’s in a subway station and basically a 20 minute experience. So while the food is phenomenal you’re not getting a lot of ambiance or “experience”.
    • If you’re at all into Steak, Japan has I think the best steak in the world. The place we ate at felt a bit touristy and I think you can do better but the steak was amazing.

    • AirBnb experiences was awesome. I did two:
      • Feeling Samurai Soul was awesome. It’s out in the suburbs about three hours long. You go to a guy’s house where he has you pick out an

        outfit and a sword and ultimately has you chopping through bamboo.

        Super cool

      • One Night in Tokyo was also super cool. Make clear what you’re interested in because she’s familiar with a wide swath of Tokyo.
      • I really wanted to do Play with a Japanese Sword Fighter but it was sold out. Some guys I met at the Samurai experience said they were going there the next day.
    • Definitely go to the Tsukiji fish market. The fish are brought in super early in the morning. The fish auctions start at 5am and at 10am when they’re basically done selling fish they allow the public to walk through and check out while people are basically cleaning up. There are a few ways to do Tsukiji:
      • If you are standing in the right place at exactly 10:00 (not 10:01) you can be in the first wave of people allowed in. The line gets long quickly so arriving at 10:15 you might not get in at all.
      • You can go in with a guide who can get you in before the 10:00am opening where you see the actual auctions. I’ve heard people telling stories of getting up at 3 to be there by 5, but the tour I found is this one where a guy who used to work there takes you in at 8am
    • After seeing Tsukiji go to one of the local sushi places. We went to Daiwa Sushi. Next door is Sushi Dai which is supposedly better but has a much longer line and closes at 10am. We waited in line 45 min but it definitely moves quick and is worth it. There is more order to the line than it first appears.
    • After eating definitely take some time to walk around the stalls near the market which to me were the best part. I had a

      $40 skewer or Kobe beef cooked by a street vendor with a blow torch. Also a cup of O Toro

      for $15 which would likely have cost $100 in the US and a super cool knife vendor

      .  If you want an official tour this looked cool but I did not go.

    • For nightlife my favorite place was Bauhaus. It has an amazing Japanese cover band

      with about 10 people, half of whom are performing at any one time and the other half of whom are serving drinks. A well travelled friend told me it’s his favorite bar on Earth. Afterwards around the corner is

      Railcar which is a great after spot. If you see 50 year old men hitting on girls who look 16 apparently that’s totally normal there.

    • Go to the Shimbashi area of Ginza and just wander around. Tons of cool bars and shops. Keep your eye out for Super Mario Kart

      in the streets of Tokyo.

    • Also check out the Golden Gui

      (Golden Road) in Shinjuku. It’s filled with bars that fit 4 or maybe 6 people. Just keep looking until you find one that you think will fit you and ask the bartender if you can come in.

    • Akihabara is the “electronics district” in Tokyo. It’s absolutely worth seeing although it will make you sad for the future of humanity. It’s basically filled with arcades

      and pichenko (a type of slot machine) parlors and comic book stores that are like 8 stories tall and get more pornographic the higher up you go. It is populated by 99.5% men well into their late forties smoking and reading comic books or playing video games or some local version of magic the gathering. There are tons of models and figurines for sale and the depictions of women are terribly bi-modal: either virgins (like 14 year old wide eyed giggling school girls in skirts) or whores (like super sexualized enormous breasted warriors clad in lingerie and carrying a sword four times as big as their body.)

    Kyoto

     

    • Definitely take the bullet train from Tokyo, it’s fast and easy and an experience in itself. When headed away from Tokyo, the ocean is on the left side of the train and Mt Fuji

      is on the right so take your pick on which you’d like to see. Unlike American planes A is on the right and D is on the left. I chose reserved seating which is still not that expensive but a cheaper option is unreserved seating which seemed a bit scary to me.

    • For dinner my #1 recommendation is this

      BBQ place that appears not to have an English name. At first told me he was full and I asked if I could come back later and eventually he let me have a spot if I came back in 90 min. Totally worth it.

    • Also super recommended is Beer Komachi.

      A little more tourist oriented but amazing food and plenty of locals. Fits maybe 15 people.

    • I climbed

      Mt Inari which is about 10,000 painted gates on a three hour climb up a mountain. It’s definitely some exercise but not overly arduous and there’s plenty of places to stop on the way up. It’s also free and accessible by Subway. Another advantage is that after climbing for about an hour the crowds thin out and you get some solitude. On the way back down, stop and have an amazing bowl of Udon.

    • I also went to the

      Bamboo forest which is super cool but sadly completely packed with tourists. Go mid-week if you can. The Tenryū-ji Temple is at the end and is totally worth seeing. It’s worth it to pay extra to get to go inside. (Removing your shoes of course)

    • I spent a night in Kyoto at a

      Japanese Room

      at the Westin Miyako Kyoto. It had a great garden and was cool for a night but I’d be surprised if you want to spend more than one there. Check out the bathtub.

    • I found

      another Hotel on hotels.com that was fine but nothing to write home about. I did not stay there but my friend Noah highly recommends the Celestine Kyoto Gion.

    • Make sure to take a walk along the river.
    • An excellent breakfast

      is available here and about a twenty minute walk along the river

      from the core part of Kyoto.

    • I’m sure you’ll want to go check out the central market but it’s mostly crap made in China and tourist oriented shops.

     

    Hakone

    • Hakone is a mountain hot springs town and the birthplace of Onsen or Japanese hotbath spa. I only got one day here and it was raining and a holiday so everything was packed. I stayed at the

      Hyatt which was great. The rooms are cool and everyone walks around in hotel supplied Kimonos. The pool is open until midnight. Worth mentioning that they are unisex. Also if you have tattoos you are not allowed in the pool. (And generally speaking Tattoos in Japan are considered only to be worn by criminals or otherwise undesirable people.)

    • It was sadly totally fogged in when I was there but there’s a cable car

      that can take you to an amazing view of Mt Fuji.

      This was as close as I got but still pretty amazing.

     

    Generally

     

    • Generally it was an amazing place and I am sure I will be going back. There is extraordinary attention to detail and perfection combined with people who are generally very nice and hospitable. In Tokyo in particular there is a sense of an enormous place with an uncountably large number of tiny little places tucked in somewhere that are amazing.
    • Part of the pleasure of Japan is it feels like it’s “on the right difficulty setting.” A place like Beijing is very foreign and even after spending a week you can feel like you didn’t really crack it or see the amazing parts of it at all. American cities and much of Europe is tuned to English speaking travellers and feels like you’re seeing the exact same things everyone else is seeing. Tokyo is right at that sweet spot where initially it feels super foreign but if you stare at that subway map you really can figure out where you want to go.
    • Definitely spend some time wandering aimlessly. You will absolutely find something wonderful. I’d like to hear about it.
  • Quote

    Quote

    The simple truth is, not all of us become the men we once hoped we might be. But we are all God’s creatures. If there are those among us who thought ill of Mr. Hollom, or spoke ill of him, or failed him in respect of fellowship… then we ask for your forgiveness, Lord. And we ask for his.

    – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

  • The Reverse Turing Test

    I’m always fascinated by the subtle ways in which our otherwise insightful predictions about the future are nonetheless totally wrong.

    The famous Turing Test is paraphrased as “can you tell it’s a robot?” In the ad tech business (and many others) we spend much more time on the problem of “Can you tell it’s not a robot?”

  • Setting up a new mac

    Setting up a new mac

    I bought a new iMac recently and figured it would be worthwhile to write down everything I did to get it to where I wanted it.

    • Install bootstraps:
      • Chrome – Preferred browser
      • Iterm2 – Terminal
      • Homebrew – The missing package manager
      • Atom – Text editor for code
    • Install brew packages and ruby
    • Configure git
    • Copy across SSH keys (Airdrop is a good way to do this)
    • Configure SSHD for passwordless entry
      • Modify /private/etc/sshd_config
      • Put the SSH key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
    • Sync remote files from old machine to new with rsync (Not everything is in Google Drive / Dropbox)
    • Install from the app store
    • Install from web
      • Backblaze – Whole mac offsite backup
      • Dropbox – Sync work files
      • Google Drive – Sync personal non-photo files.
      • Google Photo Sync – Yes really there are two different google clients
      • Emacs – Text editor for when you need to automate stuff
      • Gimp – Image editing
      • Office – Hey, I still need Excel
      • Skype – Talking to mom
      • VMWare – Run Windows and Ubuntu in a box
      • Paparazzi – Great screenshots
    • System Preferences
      • Dock
        • Set size as small as it will go, turn on zoom
      • Security
        • Turn on the firewall
      • Sharing
        • Permit remote login
      • Mouse
        • Turn on right click gesture
    • Remove from the dock:
      • Safari
      • Mail
      • Contacts
      • Calendar
      • Notes
      • Todo
      • Pages
      • Numbers
      • iTunes
      • iBooks
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics take a leap

    Computational Fluid Dynamics take a leap

    People ask me all the time what work is being done that I find exciting. Honestly it’s a little harder than it used to be. The simultaneous emergence of cloud infrastructure providers and mobile hardware created a cambrian explosion of innovation that now feels like it’s settling out.

    The work done in this video is a huge counter-example though. It’s a couple of years old now but I still find myself referring to it often enough that it’s worth creating a pointer to it.

    Computational fluid dynamics which is the use of simulation for physical systems that involve fluids has traditionally been very hard. Your choices were either a low-fidelity model which did not map to reality well or a higher fidelity model which takes months on thousands of cores to simulate.

    The folks at SpaceX have found a way to create a fractal representation of CFD meaning that the parts of the simulation where interesting things are going on are modelled at high resolution and the parts where nothing interesting are going on are represented at low fidelity. The model adjusts as the simulation progresses and the whole thing is tuned to perform well on GPUs like those sold by NVIDIA.

    The result is that simulating novel designs of their upcoming raptor methane engine becomes something you can run overnight on a laptop. This is really exciting work and there is a myriad of other domains that this will impact. (Unfortunately, one of them likely being nuclear weapons design.)

    The video is 50 min long but well worth it for those technically inclined. There is also a higher level article describing the work. If you just prefer the eye-candy, there’s a video of that too.

  • Unevenly spaced time series analysis

    Unevenly spaced time series analysis

    A number of years ago I bought a Withings connected scale. It’s great. You get on every morning, it logs your weight and uploads it to the internet where it can be analyzed.

    Recently, I decided to use the Withing API to build a plot that I could include on my homepage to keep an eye on my weight. Something every weight-watcher knows though is your weight fluctuates and so it’s great to keep an average. Unfortunately, unevenly spaced time series do not interact well with simple moving averages, so I found this paper and converted the code into javascript:

    The algorithm expects data in a variable called json_data. It’s an array of arrays, each of which is a timestamp and data pair. (This is the form that Highcharts expects.) The key factor is tau, the length of the time window over which you’re averaging. I have it set to a week here which I think is about right for looking at human weight. (3.5 days works quite well too.)

    The results are here:



    The code in context and a cleaner running example are both available. You can also see the raw data I use to fuel the graph.

  • Tesla, Autopilot and Data Collection

    Tesla, Autopilot and Data Collection

    2013-tesla-model-s-test-review-car-and-driver-photo-490335-s-original

    f I were going to build a self-driving car, I’d want to have a large corpus of field data. What situations come up most commonly? How do humans handle them? How might our computer react in a similar situation?

    Google’s self-driving car efforts are well known and they’ve spoken publicly about how all the miles their autonomous cars drive are carefully logged and analyzed. When a human takes over, presumably something has gone wrong or is at risk of going wrong and those situations are carefully scrutinized. Unfortunately this data is not what I’d call a clean sample of real human behavior. Everyone driving one of Google’s car is either an employee of Google or closely affiliated and most importantly, they know they’re driving one of Google’s special and expensive cars. No doubt they’ve signed a bunch of confidentiality and other forms. And so even if they’re driving themselves, they’re likely to be highly cautious. Those cars can only be used in certain controlled circumstances and the data Google can collect will be constrained.

    When Tesla announced the autopilot features it really struck me that the hardware installed seems much more capable than what is really required for the features they’re offering. Radar for adaptive cruise control? Seems like overkill. But hundreds of thousands of Tesla cars with these sensors, all collecting data on their drivers and the situations they encounter seems like an amazing opportunity to build a corpus of real world situations encountered by human drivers and what they do. We already know that Tesla has the ability to connect to their cars remotely. What if Tesla is already deploying their self-driving software to their cars and running it in a mode where it’s just not hooked up to the actuators in the car? At every moment the car software could be simulating what it might be doing in the present situation and logging what happens when its choices differ from what the human actually does. Tesla engineers can then analyze these logs, adjust their software and re-simulate the car encountering that situation. At some point they’ll have it down to where the only places the human and the computer diverge is where they’re convinced the computer is making better choices. At that point, ship it! (Modulo lots of regulatory and insurance concerns.)

    As an engineer that sounds exciting and cool. For me the ideal version of this would be that all the car data would be uploaded to HQ where I could analyze it indefinitely. Of course I’m sure customers and law enforcement would be interested to know if a full sensor download from all Tesla cars were being stored at Tesla HQ indefinitely. So it’s possible that the data would be anonymized somehow before being uploaded to HQ.

    Does any Tesla owner out there want to share the privacy policy or the text of any opt-ins for the autopilot features on the new cars?

  • Bitcasa, snake oil, etc

    I’ve watched with some amusement the controversy between CrunchFund and TechCrunch and whether Mike Arrington can successfully / fairly cover the startups that he writes about / promotes. On the general question, I have no idea, and I do think Mike has unfairly taken the brunt of the firestorm here when lots of other publications or their parent companies have investments in venture funds. (The NY Times and Giga Om among them.) Also AOL not just approved of the situation, they invested $10m in the fund, so it’s a little disingenuous to give Mike a hard time about it now.

    But on the other hand, let’s take a specific case:

    http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/with-bitcasa-the-entire-cloud-is-your-hard-drive-for-only-10-per-month/

    Here are some great quotes from the article:

    But Bitcasa is not like any of those services. It doesn’t move files around. It doesn’t sync files. It deals in bits and bytes, the 1′s and 0′s of digital data.

    I’m sure I shouldn’t make fun of technology reporters who obviously don’t understand anything about technology. Here’s another great quote:

    And because the data is encrypted on the client side, Bitcasa doesn’t even know what it’s storing. […] Even if the RIAA and MPAA came knocking on Bitcasa’s doors, subpoenas in hand, all Bitcasa would have is a collection of encrypted bits with no means to decrypt them.

    While this is highly unlikely, it is technically possible. However:

    Sharing files via Bitcasa is simple too: just copy and paste a file’s or folder’s link (a URL, available on right-click)

    One wonders how Bitcasa can deliver an unencrypted version of the file or a URL that contains one if they don’t have the secret key. And finally there is this:

    Using patented de-duplication algorithms, compression techniques and encryption, Bitcasa keeps costs down (way, way down, but that’s it’s secret sauce)

    Oy. “Patented” (I’m guessing they mean patent pending) proprietary encryption algorithms that somehow let you de-dupe files without knowing what files you actually have. This seems almost certainly like snake oil. You could be comparing encrypted files if all your users share the same encryption keys but of course this means that it would be very easy to figure out which files each user was really storing and the benefit of encryption is lost.

    That a startup would be making somewhat overblown claims is not so surprising to me, but what bothers me is the breathy press-release quality of the post. And at the end of the post you see it:

    Disclosure: CrunchFund is an investor in Bitcasa. 

    It turns out Sarah Perez claims she didn’t know Bitcasa was an investment of CrunchFund when she did the interview. I’m assuming that’s true. But the optics are certainly bad. Imagine a hypothetical meeting where Mike Arrington says, “Hey Sarah, will you interview these Bitcasa guys? They seem great.” Sarah might get positively biased without even realizing that she’s talking about a company her boss has invested in.

    Certainly this kind of situation makes me less likely to take what TechCrunch writes seriously.

  • Apple + OnLive?

    Big software companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and even Facebook have a ton of cash on their balance sheet. Whenever investors start pressuring them to dividend some of that cash to shareholders, the ready answer is always that they’re hanging on to it to facilitate major acquisitions. Steve Jobs said recently justified his $51B cash pile by speaking to the possibility of strategic acquisitions.

    Here’s an idea: Apple should buy OnLive. If you’re not familiar with it, OnLive was founded by Steve Pearlman, the guy behind WebTV (acquired by Microsoft) and Moxi (acquired by Paul Allen’s Digeo) and a key figure behind General Magic. (IPO in 1995). OnLive offers it’s customers the chance to play cutting edge games on relatively low end hardware without installation by running the game in the cloud. The user software decodes a streaming video of the game action and sends the user input back up to the cloud. The original announcement was met largely with derision, claiming that round trip times would render the games unplayable.  That talk has since faded with the launch of the service. Clever engineering and placement of servers at the edge of the network have yielded a completely playable product. Users don’t need modern hardware or to install games, they are immediately playable and booted on-demand in the cloud.

    Although the game selection is currently somewhat limited the service has several characteristics likely to be attractive to publishers: Complete immunity from piracy, reduced revenue erosion from the used game market and zero distribution costs. Time-based “PlayPasses” and unlimited subscriptions for older games offer a price-point for everyone.

    OnLive recently introduced a “MicroConsole” for $99. Since all it needs to do is decode video and stream USB input back up to the cloud, the hardware is cheap. As games improve and require more sophisticated hardware, consumers will not need to upgrade – all the upgrades happen in the cloud and only for the games that require it. A parent faced with a Microsoft or Sony console in the $300 range or a $99 console from OnLive with games of similar quality will have an easy decision.

    Question: Which company totally dominates mobile gaming? If you answered Nintendo or Sony, you’re a few years out of date. The answer is Apple. The iPhone and iPod touch enjoy huge penetration, a massive library and an easy payment mechanism. Steve Jobs recently claimed that Apple owns 50% of the mobile gaming market. (A figure disputed by Nintendo.)

    However in the “living room game market” (what we once might have called the “console game market”), Apple has no solution at all. In theory, they could do what Microsoft did, burning billions of dollars making custom hardware, but why would they? Apple already introduced an inexpensive living room device that decodes video and retails for $99. It’s called the AppleTV. Customers rent videos through the device and stream them over the net. 10s of millions of customers already purchase games and other digital goods from Apple for their iPhone and iPod Touch. Adding games to AppleTV would only require the addition of USB ports or wireless. Certainly OnLive is going to make the move in the other direction – the console controller conspicuously sports video controls even though OnLive doesn’t currently offer video.

    Might Apple try to just build something like OnLive themselves? Sure. But OnLive has built some seriously impressive technology, including tough-to-duplicate leases for space at the network edges, not to mention some fearsome looking IP.

    Another interesting tidbit: Steve Pearlman’s employer from 1985-1990? Apple Computer.

    Credit: Christian Romming, a co-worker of mine helped develop a number of the ideas above.

  • Keyboard modified clicks

    In case you’re ever wondering, here is a full list of the “key modified clicks” that the major browsers look for:

    (Note that on Windows, “cmd” is “ctrl”)

    Chrome, Firefox:
    shift: new active window
    cmd: new tab
    cmd-shift: new active tab

    Safari:
    cmd: new tab
    cmd-shift: new active tab
    cmd-opt: new window
    cmd-opt-shift: new active window

    IE:
    shift: new active window
    ctrl-shift: new active tab

    Note that you also need to deal with right clicks and “open in new window”, “open in new tab”, etc….