Sun, 18 Sep 2005

Aikido in Sydney

About a month and a half ago I found a new Aikido dojo in Sydney and have been training there. That probably doesn’t sound much like news, but the instructors are awesome and I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to do Aikido again after what turns out to be a long absence.

Through high school and into university I’d been looking for a martial art I would feel comfortable studying. It wasn’t until I was into 3rd year that I discovered Aikido, a somewhat unusual Japanese martial art. It gets a “somewhat unusual” because unlike Karate, Kung Fu, or Tae Kwon Do, it does not accentuate strikes and attacks, but rather emphasizes redirection and using an attacker’s energy against them.

The style that I came across while at university is called Yoshinkan Aikido. It was set up by one of the students of the founder of modern Aikido with the express (and officially sanctioned) purpose of reformulating the art so it would be teachable. The combination of something whose nature represents “minimum force” and that can be systematically taught has made it well thought of by law enforcement agencies. In particular the Tokyo Riot Control police are required to graduate from a grueling year long advanced course taught at the Yoshinkan Hombu {home, head} dojo in Tokyo.

I made slow progress at first — I’m tall, grew quickly as a kid, and was not very coordinated. Between that and a lot of cross-country running [not to mention carrying a heavy rucksack], I am not what you’d call flexible. But studying Aikido was fun, I had a great teacher, it was a friendly environment, and a good diversion from the rigours of Military College. I passed my test for 6th Kyu the day before I graduated.

After I left RMC the army posted me to eastern Canada and I was no longer able to pursue my studies. There was an Aikikai dojo there (the original form of Aikido) and while I tried training there a few times, I couldn’t quite get into it — it sorta felt like driving on the wrong side of the road, and my enthusiasm waned.

Six months later I was sent back to Central Ontario to run a course for recruit soldiers. A friend of mine told me that there was a fellow at the base where I was heading who had just starting to teach people “Aikido”. I figured that even if it was Aikikai maybe I’d get along better with a new instructor. Well, it turned out not only was the Yoshinkan style that I had studied at RMC, but further my new instructor had in turn learned from the same group in Toronto that had taught my previous teacher!

So, snap, I was able to pick up right where I’d left off, and before I knew it I was training 4 times a week, including driving down to Toronto on the weekends. When the snow melted in spring, I was able to add trips to Toronto on Monday and Wednesday nights and was training upwards of 6 times a week. Needless to say the hard work paid off, and I made terrific progress. When my six month posting was up I had progressed to 2nd Kyu (a brown belt!). It felt awesome.

And then I was back to not being able to train. I was only getting to Toronto like once a quarter, and that’s not exactly adequate to keep one’s skills up. A few years later, in New York, I did find a Yoshinkan instructor but I had become somewhat rusty, wasn’t able to train very often, and all he had for a dojo was a church attic with some velcro-together gym mats. I did get to Tokyo for a weekend in summer 2001 and visited the Hombu dojo (where a high school classmate was, quite randomly, now an instructor! — small world), but then Sept 11 happened and cleaning up from that rather dominated our attention.

And I hadn’t trained since.

Two months ago, I took a moment to do a search on “Aikido Sydney”. To my amazement I discovered that a new dojo Aikido Yoshinkan N.S.W. had just opened in Redfern. Darren Friend and his wife Peggy had just moved back to Australia from Japan, he having spent almost 20 years at the Hombu dojo, most recently as senior foreign instructor.

After my experience in New York I was a bit hesitant, but I have to tell you the first day I went to watch a class in their dojo in Redfern the biggest smile lit up my face.

So I’ve been hard at it for about 6 weeks now. Needless to say I was more than just a little bit rusty, but Darren Sensei has been very patient with me, and that has indeed put me past my trepidation. Training in Aikido again after so long has been daunting — so much is half remembered at best and I’m having to recover the balances and skills that I learned long ago, but mentally overcoming such frustration is as much a part of training as the physical challenges are.

If you’re a Sydneysider, and maybe interested in picking up a martial art, I highly recommend you come and watch a class (schedule here) and talk to Darren Sensei or Peggy Sensei. The best endorsement I can make though, is to quote an email I got from my high school friend in Tokyo:

I just got your email address from Peggy and thought I’d write a very quick hello … You are very lucky to be training with Darren and Peggy. Between them they have an unbelievable amount of experience in Yoshinkan Aikido and you’ll be able to grow with them for a long, long time.

If you want to learn more about Aikido, you might have a glance at the website from a dojo run by one of my former instructors in Toronto (Incidentally, that has to be one of the best web site designs I have ever seen. Clean navigation, tasteful use of images, lots of whitespace, good information pacing… Wow)

Of course, there’s a flipside to having resumed training after years absence: in the words of E.T.: “ouch” :)

AfC

aikido-in-sydney, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/personal at 14:01, 18 Sep 2005.

Tue, 06 Sep 2005

Now with half hours!

I (finally) updated my little timezone script slashtime to show half hour timezones properly.

The version on used on my website (shortcut /time, hence the name) outputs the excellent little ½ character, which looks even better, but I haven’t quite figured out how to switch my terminals to unicode so .5 will do for now.

AfC

halfhour, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/software/slashtime at 05:49, 06 Sep 2005.

Fri, 02 Sep 2005

Testing the GTK 2.6 to 2.8 upgrade path - Part 2

I’ve been testing the upgrade path for java-gnome. Last week I verified that if the underlying GTK+ upgraded to 2.8, an older libgtk-java 2.6 would still work. Yeay. The next part to test is, of course, that existing apps still run cleanly when libgtk-java revs from 2.6 to 2.8. This has turned out to be trickier than I would have hoped.

During this cycle, a library called cairo-java was introduced. Since it depended on things in common with other java-gnome libraries, Jeff, Nick and Ismael spliced out the core GObject stuff and put it in a common base library. That means that now to build libgtk-java you’ll need this base library (I’m being vague about the name on purpose; more in a sec) and cairo-java. That’s not so bad (although it would have been nice if we’d had tarballs somewhere along the way) but it turns out that when Jeff moved Handle from libgtk-java he also moved it from java package org.gnu.glib.Handle to something called org.gnu.javagnome.Handle.

This is problematic because it means that just about any Java application that has been written so far and that imports org.gnu.glib.Handle will break and fail to compile if libgtk-java is upgraded. Java does not have C’s problems about stability - you can quite happily add a method or constructor and not break API or ABI compatibility - but this would be a serious ABI break and that’d be a shame without a really good reason. Even (especially) stable libglade-java no longer works because of this change.

Meanwhile, a number of us weren’t thrilled about the name that the base library is got called in CVS (“jg-common”) and so back in April we decided to rename it to a more sensible glib-java. Trouble is, no one actually got around to doing said rename, which started to seriously worry me - I do the downstream packaging for Gentoo and know how much of nightmare it is to change a package name once it’s been released out into the wilds. Better to get it right before the first release goes out.

Well, changing the library name pointed the way towards how to fix the ABI problem: put Handle back in org.gnu.glib where it came from (and, indeed an appropriate namespace for something that is in a library that will be called glib-java, after all). As it happens, Java is very good about multiple libraries jointly making contributions to the unified Java package namespace, so it won’t cause a problem with the other org.gnu.glib classes that have yet to migrate from libgtk-java.

I’ve got the library rename done and propagated up to cairo-java and libgtk-java. Reverting the class move will be a much bigger patch, but a couple of us are working on that now and Eclipse will take care of 90% of the work. Still, it means that libgtk-java 2.8.0 is probably going to be a couple of weeks yet.

For those that are interested, there has been considerable discussion of this topic on the java-gnome-hackers mailing list.

In the mean time, we’ve seen a bit of new blood (yeay!) and a number of long standing bugs have been nailed! We’re just about ready to pump out a bug fix release from the stable branch, 2.6.3. I’ve been hosting unofficial release candidate tarballs at my company’s R&D site.

AfC

gtk26-to-gtk28-part2, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/software/java-gnome at 04:59, 02 Sep 2005.

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