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Larsblog

Stout on the 45th floor

In the skyscraper district of Shinjuku stands the famous Tokyo city hall. It's a huge modern building surrounding a circular plaza, with two giant towers rising on one side. The tops of the towers are studded with antennas, giving them a strange science-fiction look. At the top in one tower is an observation deck open to the public, and so we picked a day with clear skies to visit the tower and watch the view of the city from the top floor. ...

Read | 2007-06-30 15:57 | 2 comment(s)

Dogo Beer

Dogo is a small onsen (Japanese bath) town near Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku. The town is really centered on the bath house, which is said to be the oldest in Japan, dating back at least to AD 720. We took the tram from our hotel in Matsuyama, and went straight to the bath house. Buying a ticket is a bit tricky, since there are many choices, and the bath procedure is a bit complicated, but the helpful English brochure you get at the entrance explains it all. ...

Read | 2007-06-28 22:23 | 0 comment(s)

Bakushu Club Popeye

That there exists a place on this planet where you can choose between 40 different Japanese microbrewed beers on tap, some of them even real ale on cask, seems too good to be true, but it isn't. Bakushu Club Popeye in Tokyo actually does this. It serves reasonable western food, too, so we spent two entire evenings there, trying out the different beers. ...

Read | 2007-06-26 20:12 | 1 comment(s)

Synonyms in Topic Maps

Understanding how to represent synonyms in Topic Maps is not trivial, and the discussion of it highlights some interesting things about the semantics built in to Topic Maps, so I think it's worth having a look at this pattern. Let's say we want to create a topic for the city of Lviv, which is also known as Lvov. It has a few more names, but we'll pass over those for now. In his Master's Thesis Roy Lachica listed three different ways to do this, and we'll go through them one by one. ...

Read | 2007-06-07 20:48 | 3 comment(s)

Japanese beer

Japan is not, of course, a country with any great beer tradition to speak of, and so one may be forgiven for thinking that it's all a dreary swamp of bland pale industrial lager. There is some truth to this, but there is also a lot more going on in Japan, which has a thriving craft beer scene. There is also more to the industrial beer scene in Japan than one might think. Our recent holiday gave me some opportunity to study this, and this is a summary of what I found. ...

Read | 2007-06-04 20:52 | 13 comment(s)

Three Weeks in Japan

Japan was the first country in the far East I visited, way back in 2002. It was just a two-week business trip, but I was completely overwhelmed by the whole experience, and always wanted to come back. In 2004 I was lucky enough to get another trip, this time for a week and a half. However, all these trips did was make me want to see more of Japan than just meeting rooms and hotels, and so when my girlfriend suggested we make Japan our main holiday destination in 2007 I of course accepted immediately.

...

Read | 2007-05-29 23:22 | 1 comment(s)

7 tips on writing clean code

My job has required me to read quite a bit of code written by other people, and over the years I've found that there are some problems that tend to recur again and again. The idea with this blog entry is to write up some tips on this once and for all, in the hope that it can help people out there who struggle to write clean code. ...

Read | 2007-05-03 13:34 | 62 comment(s)

Topic Maps 2007

This year the Norwegian Topic Maps conference for the first time went international. The timing was really poor for me personally, unfortunately. We finalized the formalities of the acquisition of Ontopia by Bouvet two weeks before the conference, moved office the Friday before the conference, and then I spent most of the conference week discussing the acquisition with partners and customers. Then I had one week in the office, before leaving for three weeks of holiday in Japan. If you've been wondering why this blog has been quiet after posting #100, this is the reason. ...

Read | 2007-04-28 13:27 | 0 comment(s)

Antwerp and the Kulminator

About a month ago my girlfriend and I went to Antwerp to relax, do some tourism, and try some new beers. Antwerp turned out to be perfectly suited to all three pursuits. The city isn't too big—a little smaller than Oslo—and the city center is very compact, and packed with historical buildings. The size is deceptive, though. Antwerp is one of the world's biggest ports, and has been a world center of trade since the 16th century. In fact, for a while in the 16th century Antwerp was northern Europe's second biggest city, before its role as a trade center was taken over by Amsterdam. ...

Read | 2007-03-25 20:47 | 3 comment(s)

#100

I've reached a small anniversary here, in that I've finally gotten to blog posting #100. That doesn't mean I've done exactly 100 postings, since there are some posting IDs for which there is no published post. Some of these never got written, some are half-written, and a couple got too personal to be publishable. Still, it's a good time to reflect a bit on how this blog has developed. ...

Read | 2007-02-20 22:13 | 4 comment(s)

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