Remembering Japanese cars from the past

Month: December 2008 (Page 3 of 4)

Useless Japanese car innovations: spoken reverse warning signal

I managed to find another useless innovation: we all know the reverse warning signal, short beeps indicating a big truck is reversing (with no rear vision at all). That’s very useful and people are used to it and act upon it.

In the early 80s Toyota innovated the reverse warning signal and equipped their MarkII with a spoken reverse warning signal:

Of course this innovation is only useful for people understanding Japanese, if they are used to it at all… If someone would reverse with their Jaguar and that car would tell me in English “Watch out, big lump of iron is reversing! Keep away! Do not stand in the turning circle! Etc. etc.” I would not really act upon that: I’d probably first start laughing my ass off and then probably congratulate the driver with such cynical car!

You see, that’s why this can only fall into the category of useless Japanese car innovations!

Programming: ON DUPLICATE KEY MySQL weirdness

I had some weirdness with MySQL today… Updating on a duplicate key error works like a charm: it updates the row which violates with the key and everybody is happy!

Well, actually I’m not… I encountered this problem today. I had a table with a number and an average and the table named averages looked like this:

|-----------------------------|
|      id |  number | average |
|-----------------------------|
|       1 |       1 |       0 |
|       2 |       4 |    0.25 |
|       3 |       2 |     0.5 |
|-----------------------------|

Now let’s say I wanted to increment id 1 with number=2 and an average=1, normally I would use the following query:

UPDATE `averages` SET `number`=`number`+2, `average`=(((`average`*`number`)+(1*2))/(`number`+2)) 
WHERE `id`='1';

This would update the table and set the number to 3 and average to 0.6666667. This worked fine till I added this to a cronjob which calculates averages from large quantities of rows. Since I would not know the identifiers upfront I changed the query to an INSERT query with a ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE part which updates when we already have a row for the identifier, so I came up with this:

INSERT INTO `averages` VALUES (1, 2, 1) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE `number`=`number`+2, 
`average`=(((`average`*`number`)+(1*2))/(`number`+2))

But, as I found out later, this doesn’t work the same way as the UPDATE query: the ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE does not write itself to a single UPDATE query, but rather to two seperate UPDATE queries. This means that the query will be written to this:

UPDATE `averages` SET `number`=`number`+2 WHERE `id`='1';
UPDATE SET `average`=(((`average`*`number`)+(1*2))/(`number`+2)) WHERE `id`='1';

Can you identify the problem I encountered here? And perhaps guess what the average column was set to?? 😉

Hilarious: Drift series special: Beauty Battle

Hachi-roku.com.au blogged about it some time ago: Drift Special – Beauty Battle (girl drifting)… I only was able to watch part of it but it is absolutely hilarious!

First part:

All parts:
1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFD6Vx7UYFI
2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZxLMncnbPc
3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwkiP8-mq0A
4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRqaAj70p3U
5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk2oFfAItOU
6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqXhMQNr0K4
7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6IS7fLfpyU
8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR62NnPfIOw
9: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubo8HD-HzLg

The main story is that three girls share an AE86 and start drifting with it. They battle with various other stars (featuring earlier!) and if I’m not mistaken: it all ends well with them. 😉

This is a special of the Drift series by Futoshi Jinno. If all other parts of the series are this horrible the director definitely created something worse than The Fast and The Furious Tokyo Drift.

Ah well… Three girls drifting in a hachi-roku are always entertaining enough. I think I’ll take the time and watch it tonight…

See also my follow ups:
http://www.banpei.net/content/hilarious-drift-series-special-beauty-battle-part-2
http://www.banpei.net/content/hilarious-drift-series-special-beauty-battle-part-3
http://www.banpei.net/content/hilarious-drift-series-special-beauty-battle-part-4-final

Surprise by the previous car owner

I think we all have bought a car in the past which held really nice surprises. For instance my good old trusty Trueno had a really nice surprise of a thick layer of bitumen to cover a really badly rusted spot. Or my new TA60 Carina had the really nice surprise of having retro tires mounted in 1983 under the car and only to be replaced in 2008 when I mounted the Celica Supra rims. Or the Mitsubishi I once owned had the original instruction manual which was illustrated with manga. 😉

Well, I think we all had these happy or unhappy surprises in the past… But I don’t think you can match up with the nice surprise Nori Yaro had when he bought his Nissan Skyline GTS-t!

First of all: his Skyline featured a period Kenwood double-din tape radio which was non functioning. He tried to fit another one, but he did not have the right connector for that so he fixed up the old Kenwood:
Double din Kenwood tape radio
Double Din Kenwood tape radio

Then he discovered there was a forgotten tape inside the Kenwood:
Surprise: Hello Kitty tape
Surprise: Hello Kitty tape inside!

Who would like to hear Hello Kitty when driving in a Nissan Skyline GTS-t with a mechanical diff, coilovers and sitting in a bucket seat?? I can only come up with the answer that the previous owner must have been a women drifter! 😉

Keiichi Tsuchiya’s 1989 Group A JTCC coverage

I was browsing some movies on Youtube and found a lot of Group A coverage of the Japanese Touring Car Championship during the 80s. Lots of cool cars like the Toyota Corolla AE86, Nissan Skyline DR30 and in later coverage the Nissan Skyline HR31.

During the JTCC 1989 season the coverage was illustrated by Keiichi Tsuchiya. During that era Keiichi Tsuchiya drove the Sierra RS500 for Cosmo Oil and you can see him sitting in the Cosmo Oil pitbox. I only found two coverages so far and hopefully I will find some more later on…

First race:

This race was held on the West Circuit (Mine circuit) and Keiichi and his co-driver qualified 8th and finished eleventh.

Second race:

This race was held at the Sendai Highland Raceway and Keiichi and his co-driver qualified 8th and finished 3rd. It is great to see that the AE86 wasn’t entirely dead in 1989: the Trampio Levin is still driving around. 😉

This is a few years after when his pluspy videos (with the Levin and Trueno) was shot:
First pluspy video (Levin)
Second pluspy video (Trueno)
Same glasses and footage of the AE82 FX number 38 he drove during the 5th round of the JTCC on the Fuji International Speedway in november 9th 1986.

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