Hanazen, Jaya One

So here's a post of a nice dinner I had during New Year's Day. That's 01 Jan 2009, which is many many days ago... I could apologise for the lateness, but what good would that do? Ho ho ho...

Met up with my friend Tim and Algy for a dinner at Hanazen Restaurant at Jaya One. Great location, lots of parking spots, and so many eating choices... Jaya One is one of my favourite eating spots.

By the way, Tim and Algy, you both look fabulous! Better than anything I remember from our study time together in Monash Sunway.

Tim Shim, that's him

Algy Algy, looking good.

So Tim went and ordered the biggest bento on the menu. I expected nothing less from the man. And it was gorgeous. Grilled fish, crispy prawn tempura, fresh sashimi, snails with rice, chawan mushi, pickled vegetables, miso soup, some fruit and tea. He was grinning throughout the meal, so it must be good.

Algy ordered the unagi set. The portion was really generous. She had trouble finishing it.



I ordered the fish and sashimi set. You cannot see the vinegar rice on the sashimi because the topping is too big.



Look at the pretty colours

Pretty much everything was wonderful. Some good conversation catch up, tasty food... restaurant was quite noisy due to high number of customers, and the fact that the interior was all smooth and hard materials like wood and glass. The sound echo was quite high.

The only damper of the night was a less than impressive baby octopus dish which Algy ordered on a whim. It was overly salty, so we didn't enjoy this one much.

we are salty... said the baby octopi

I still loved the food and am planning to go again with another bunch of friends soon. Maybe 2 of us can share the gigantic Hanazen Bento!

Viva La Vida, Joe sues Coldplay

Viva La Vida, a song from UK based band Coldplay is in trouble. According to Joe Satriani, the song's chorus is much to similar to his own song If I Could Fly.



Viva La Vida did very well in many awards last year, including a coveted Grammy 2009 for Song of the Year.



There are so many conflicting views on this. Copyright infringement is a major issue, especially for the arts. It is also interesting to see how easily a party is perceived as liable to plagiarism. Joe Satriani has always been acknowledged as a artist with super talent and skills, but did not find mainstream success like Coldplay has. And with a song like Viva, all the attention it got and is still getting today, it's hard not to draw comparisons to the similarities. Coldplay's predicament is not unheard of... KD Lang's Constant Craving also bore similarities to other artists' work some time back. Even further back in history, classical music composers like Strauss found themselves copycat rivals too.



It's definitely easier to pick out strengths and flaws of Viva, a song currently so high in profile. If it was downright plagiarism of a catchy hook, and only Coldplay themselves can answer this, then Satriani should be given his dues. If it was pure coincidence, which I am more inclined to believe it was so, I wish Satriani could just be content that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery".

SSRS 2008: Request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized

I decided to blog on some of the technology problems I encounter in my daily job.


Last week, one of the servers I was helping to manage got its machine name changed. However, not all the configurations for all the programs were changed as well. So all those applications with the old settings started crying out for help.


One of it was SQL Reporting Services (SSRS). In SSRS 2005, the reporting services configuration manager showed you a little tick icon

In SSRS 2008, those little icons are gone.

Viewing my trusty Report Manager yielded this cry for help.

No permission setting changed, so what's the deal?

Well, apparently a lot of the settings for SSRS was set to use the machine name previously. If you go to the Database item of the configuration manager, you'll understand what I mean.

How to resolve?

1. Correct the entries in sys.servers - you'll have to run the following statement into as many database servers as you have

EXEC sp_dropserver @server = <oldname> EXEC sp_addserver @server = <newname>

2. Update the settings in configuration manager, so set the new servername. Just run through the database portion as you normally would in setup.

After that, "Bob's your uncle" as my English friends would say...