en-us http://www.keithwatanabe.net/index.php Keith Watanabe's Website http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/9/5/31e20a9a092a229d9fa2053165556aa1.html
Or at least typhoons, snow, rain, cold, and even the heat.

What I mean by this is that the place is just "open". Not everywhere, but in the most dense areas, places are still "open." "Open" to me is when you have a cruddy building taking up a lot of land but not sharing any overhanging for when the place goes to hell. Then you have these idiot pedestrians just taking up 2-3 spots along the sidewalk and you're bound to knock into them and get even more soaked.

What I hope to see someday is the flippin' place spend some cash for creating more roofings as you walk down the street. Some places are actually built halfway intelligently like Kitasenju where the two sides of the main street leading towards the train station has a nice overhanging. Also, Asakusa has this too with their sort of outdoor kind of mall, near the Kaminari Shrine.

If the place doesn't want to spend money on this because perhaps people want to enjoy sunlight, then I suggest creating massive underground tunnels that link the city together. I admire Toronto for doing something like this; makes it more convenient getting around (I'm assuming) during the winter. Some parts of Tokyo have this like Ginza, or the Tokyo station. But they eventually close those sections of the city off and shove people out into the harsh city environment.

I just think that the government here is cheap and that their architects don't really know shit about city planning. Instead, they build the bare minimum and have ugly, useless architectures that really dull the mind. Until I went to NYC, I never realized what an ugly city Tokyo is. It's not ugly in that it's boring, but just the architecture sucks big time after you've lived here. I don't need the place to be aesthetically pleasing, but at least make it more convenient for pedestrians during harsh seasons.]]> Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:09:33 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/9/5/31e20a9a092a229d9fa2053165556aa1.html http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/26/4a89957da3e91ac5b85e4421992ed607.html that large data set and my application would take far too long, doing loops around a data set of 14000+ items squared. Naturally, this was AWFUL so I had to really consider how to beef up performance. Mostly, eliminating the secondary loop, causing the redundant loop to occur.

I ended up spending a good day banging my head over the problem. After a good night's rest, I figured that I needed to start by removing any calls that would be performance intensive, especially iterative. I found various database calls and some existing data elements that I could pass into the subroutine, thus improving speed somewhat. But the main double loop was the killer problem. Originally, I had written this one particular method to be reusable, in other words good economic, environment friendly programming. However, sometimes it doesn't pay to be so economic at times if you don't see the overall impact a situation might have.

So I ended up re-writing a specialized routine for that piece of code that would pass in a previously established data set, kinda like a cache effect. Space didn't matter in terms of memory usage as my application has limited users. So doing a pass-by-value to the routine mattered little. After re-integrating this piece of code into the application (with a few more performance enhancements), this little baby was soaring. In fact, compared to the original application, it really boosted performance! The performance boost was so great that my manager swore to rebuild his stuff after seeing the obvious difference in speed for the same data set.

Despite this anecdotal, what does my story have to do with the title? The thing is that I wanted to at least get the application out there. I'm on a deadline so I need to push things out fast. I didn't have any assumptions when I first built it, therefore my initial purpose was to get it to work on some sample data. More than that, I didn't understand enough the first time in trying to move it out. So it was more important to demonstrate a workable demo rather than an error proof, solid, high octane application. In other words, get it done and learn the first time what you're trying to figure out. Then once you understand the problem better, improve on the answer of your problem. That's the moral of this story.]]> Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:30:33 -0700 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2008/1/26/4a89957da3e91ac5b85e4421992ed607.html