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Mile woes

Yes it's this season of  the year. I flew 42709 miles (70% of the actual) this year and want to make it 50000 to get to the ANA platinum. I plan to fly back to Tokyo and SFO-NRT would make it 49900. Short of 100 miles :)

The options I have:

1. On 22nd, fly to Los Angeles with UA and then LAX -> NRT with ANA. The return flight is NRT -> SFO. This will add extra 500 miles for me and the price is almost the same. This is more economical and ridiculous choice :)
2. Buy "Premium Economy" flight for SFO-NRT. I need to pay $500 more but will get 2000 more miles because it gives me 100% of the flight mile instead of 70%.
3. Get some domestic flight while I'm in Japan: for example, go to Kyoto via Shinkansen for a day trip and then fly back from Osaka to Tokyo. This costs like $250 and gives me 200 miles or so. 
4. Get some domestic flight while I'm in US. for instance, 1-night trip to Seattle and stay in the next weekend would just cost $200. 
5. Not bother getting 50k miles and instead upgrade my ANA credit card to super flyers card. This doesn't give me the 100% bonus miles for every flight but I'll get lifetime Star Alliance Gold and can use ANA lounge for all flights (even in economy). This costs the annual membership fee $120.

Hmm :)

Old school Videogames in HD

Fully working Flash based Tetris game that should work in HD screen. It's so awesome that would probably make you mad :) There's also a link to Space Invador in HD but I couldn't find the swf link.

Did you see that ludicrous display last night?

It was tough watching The IT Crowd S02E02 on my flight while everyone else was asleep, because it was hard for me to keep from laughing out. I especially liked the first few minutes where Moss found the very useful bluffball.co.uk (grr it doesn't really exist!) and Jen had a date with Michael who looks like a magician.

Hearts Canon SD 880

If you follow me on Flickr you might've noticed that the amount of pictures I upload to Flickr has increased dramatically recently. It's not just because I'm back home in Japan but also I got a new camera Canon SD880 (or IXY 920 is in Japan) and it works really well.

It's a straight upgrade from my previous model Canon SD800 but this one has a new image processing engine Digic4 and has automatic face recognition, and really smart automatic exposure. Those ones I uploaded to Flickr didn't have any customization besides that I change the color to VIVID, and all other ISO and exposure settings were automatic (besides I made the default exposure to lower like -2/3). Ken Rockwell has more reviews and tips.

I highly recommend this camera as a main compact if you're not DSLR photo geek, or even if you are, the best alternative if you want to take daily photos without carrying around the heavy one.

Path::Class and Unicode filename woes

(I've been working on the new TypePad connect and profile stuff, so this feels more natural to get back to blogging on TypePad :)

I've restarted my love of hacking RSS feeds and Perl (aka Plagger) and launched my new toy project Remedie the pluggable Media Center application written in Perl and backed by Plagger. I'll talk about it more on that later, but this has already proven its usefulness and addictivity so that I can't live without this.

The one thing I hate to write and see in my code is the code to deal with Win32 though. Based on the recent popularity I picked Moose and Path::Class to represent the local file path in Remedie code, but it just started to hurt me, because Path::Class does special care of Win32 filenames and file paths, like changing directory separater to backslash (\) while Perl itself doesn't have any problem with forward slash even if it's on win32 file systems. charsbar is trying to deal with that by writing another Path::Class compatible class called Path::Extended.

The other problem is Unicode filenames. In most UNIX operating systems like Mac OS X or Linux we just use utf-8 filenames, but on Win32 it's different. They have local code page, which is usually cp932 in Windows running in  Japanese environment, and they also have wide filename API to deal with UCS (UTF-16) filenames without encoding/decoding filenames to the local encoding (cpXXX). Unfortunately perl itself can't handle those Unicode filenames natively using its built-in open() functions. You should use Win32API::File to handle them.

As a starter, I wrote Path::Class::Unicode that encodes filenames to the local encoding (cpXXX) when it's opening a file, but eventually we might need IO::Handle compatible proxy that allows you to read and print that is eventually proxied to API calls to Win32API::File.