Tag: english

Oxygen

September 29, 2020
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Using supplemental oxygen for high altitude climbs is common. I’ve even seen people use mini oxygen tanks on Mt Fuji. While it’s highly unlikely you’d need extra oxygen around that altitude (unless you go there with absolutely no training and the lung capacity of a goldfish), it can keep people alive and let them succeed above 8000m.

I don’t know who came up with the idea that climbing without supplemental oxygen is the only “fair means” to reach a summit (maybe Messner?), but I beg to differ. It is definitely a bigger achievement but that does not make using it cheating or doping.

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The algorithms

September 29, 2020
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Honing your skills on CodeWars or HackerRank is definitely a good idea. I’ve myself spent months on the former and some time on the latter, and right there is a display of my issue with them: I lose interest. At first it’s really nice to tackle a bunch of “interesting” problems and feel successful, but as the difficulty of the problems goes up, it soon turns into “how do I get around the shortcomings of the language I use?”

That’s naturally something worth considering, but it just feels so weird when I have to overcome performance tests aimed at C in Ruby (or Clojure). It’s doable (most of the time), but it’s a whole different kind of measure. I recall a problem for which solutions in C were mostly pretty naive loops while something similar in Ruby would fail even the first few load tests.

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Counting the milliseconds

September 26, 2020
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I’ve been building a Netty-based web server in Clojure. While I haven’t had the strength to do much with it these past few months because I prioritized the climbing season, now that Hacktoberfest is incoming I’m planning to go pedal to the metal with it (and with my git GUI work-in-progress).

I’m building iny (named after a fox from Fekete Istvan’s Vuk) with the clear goal to replace Aleph. While I’m a huge fan of Aleph and the libraries around it (like Manifold) it’s no longer maintained, which is simply not acceptable when we’re now looking at http/3 coming out sooner than later (support is already in browsers after all).

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The mighty sword

September 13, 2020
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Mt Tate is a pretty famous tourist destination. Sure with the coronavirus going on it’s only dedicated people (like me) there, but usually the place is buzzing with tourists to the point you’re more likely to hear Chinese than Japanese. Now it was quiet though. And unlike the last time, now my destination wasn’t Mt Tate itself.

I went to climb Mt Tsurugi (“sword”), a mountain that’s considered maybe the most technically difficult of the 100 famous Japanese mountains. The reason is that it’s a steep, rocky mountain where the “trail” often turns into climbing straight up a rock face (with the aid of chains). To make it even more exciting, the weather was bad too.

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Kai-koma

August 30, 2020
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Sadly this year the southern Japanese Alps are very difficult to access. All the mountain roads are closed, the buses aren’t running and some municipalities outright announced they don’t accept any climbing notices. So basically you either have to walk in all the way from one of the still accessible mountain passes, or go for the mountains “at the edges.” Since I wasn’t in the mood for a 30km approach just now, I decided to take the latter choice and climb Mt Kai-koma.

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Omote-Ginza and Gendarme

August 23, 2020
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Much rest wasn’t planned. Maybe eat something nice, drink a beer and enjoy a hot spring and get some sleep in a bed for a change. More important was doing my laundry and refilling water. The previous four days in the Ushiro-Tateyama range were fun, and I was up for more.

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Back of Tateyama

August 23, 2020
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I was confused why the Ushiro-Tateyama mountain range (from Jiigatake to Mt Shirouma) is called what it is. It means “rear Tateyama” which is weird from my point of view: isn’t it in front of Tateyama? The name of course would come from the other (Toyama) side, but it still feels weird.

A while back I walked into a bookshop and I spotted a mountain magazine focusing on the so-called kiretto of the country. These are gaps in the mountain range, often very “deep” cols with pretty tough terrain. This magazine named three as the “big three” of Japan: the Hachimine col between Mt Kashima-yari and Mt Goryuu, the Kaerazu col between Mt Karamatsu and Mt Shirouma, and the “great” dai-kiretto between Mt Hotaka and Mt Yari.

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Going green

August 9, 2020
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There is kind of a status to having your GitHub contributions chart covered in green. For those unfamiliar, it’s a calendar-like chart that shows how active you are on GitHub any given day. It’s assumed that the greener the better. I’m not so sure anymore.

From the start of May to the end of July, I tried filling it up. Do something every day. My conclusion is that this is a typical case of Goodhart’s law. Basically as soon as a certain metric (in this case turning that chart green) becomes a goal in itself, it ceases to be a meaningful metric anymore.

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The Eagle Has Landed

August 2, 2020
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Alas this isn’t about seeing Avatar live, though I’d definitely love that too (not with the virus though, not anytime soon). This is, on the other hand about climbing three of the Hundred Famous Japanese Mountains in the Northern Alps – and one of them is called Washiba-dake, which would be “wings of the eagle.”

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Iced to Electron

July 12, 2020
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I got really frustrated by GitKraken. I’ve been using it for years now both for work and for hobby projects without much to complain about really. Then again I’m not a heavy git user: mostly I just commit and push, only occasionally squashing or cherry picking. I don’t even remember when was the last time I needed a rebase, but it wasn’t yesterday.

However recently GitKraken started having these weird problems with my work repositories. These can get pretty big (by my standards) with tons of branches getting pushed to in parallel (and in the early days some very large blobs got checked in too). Because the branches move really quick it’s important that I can keep my own up to date by merging the head branch back.

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