jasonrumney.net

Remote Control

2010-07-28T15:49:00.005+01:00

I eventually gave up on the idea of trying to prod the serial port on my Astro STB and bought a cheap IR transceiver from some guy in Hong Kong via ebay. My first attempts at learning the remote codes were frustrating - irrecord complained about something being wrong after incorrectly guessing the settings, and when I finally got some codes learned, I found that a lot of the buttons had the same code, so 2, 6 and 8 were all being detected as KEY_2. Eventually I started trying to manually configure the basic settings based on some of the standard protocols, and eventually hit on RCMM-32, which learned all the codes and can reliably detect them when I press the buttons on the remote.

So now the codes are learned, along with the codes for the extra buttons for controlling a Panasonic DVD player on the bottom of my TV remote, which have now found a use giving basic control of Freevo in case the wireless keyboard, bluetooth equipped mobile phone or one of many wifi equipped gadgets is not close at hand.

Next step is to go the other way and send the codes out to the STB. The transceiver doesn't seem to be sending anything out at all. I still haven't narrowed down the problem, it may be a faulty IR LED, or an incompatibility between the transceiver (MCEUSB gen 1) and the software driving it (LIRC 0.86). Now that I have the remote codes, it might also be a good time to go back to trying the serial link, but that'll have to wait for another night. For now, I'll just post up the Astro remote codes, in case anyone else is struggling to get them working with LIRC.


# brand:                       ASTRO
# model no. of remote control: 
# devices being controlled by this remote:
#   Astro Satellite Decoder STB (Malaysia) [Philips DSR4201/68]

begin remote

  name  ASTRO
  bits            8
  flags RCMM|CONST_LENGTH
  eps             2
  aeps          100

  header        417   278
  three         167   778
  two           167   611
  one           167   444
  zero          167   278
  ptrail        167
  pre_data_bits   24
  pre_data       0x225027
  gap          99817
  toggle_bit_mask 0x0

      begin codes
          KEY_0                    0x00
          KEY_1                    0x01
          KEY_2                    0x02
          KEY_3                    0x03
          KEY_4                    0x04
          KEY_5                    0x05
          KEY_6                    0x06
          KEY_7                    0x07
          KEY_8                    0x08
          KEY_9                    0x09
          KEY_RED                  0x6D
          KEY_GREEN                0x6E
          KEY_YELLOW               0x6F
          KEY_BLUE                 0x70
          KEY_KPASTERISK           0xF6
          KEY_TEXT                 0x3C
          KEY_MENU                 0x54
          KEY_SHOP                 0xAA
          KEY_EXIT                 0x83
          KEY_BACK                 0xA9
          KEY_EPG                  0xCC
          KEY_INFO                 0x0F
          KEY_UP                   0x58
          KEY_DOWN                 0x59
          KEY_LEFT                 0x5A
          KEY_RIGHT                0x5B
          KEY_OK                   0x5C
          KEY_VOLUMEUP             0x10
          KEY_VOLUMEDOWN           0x11
          KEY_CHANNELUP            0x20
          KEY_CHANNELDOWN          0x21
          KEY_AUDIO                0x4E
          KEY_SUBTITLE             0x4B
          KEY_MUTE                 0x0D
          KEY_MAIL                 0xF3
          KEY_FAVORITES            0x84
          KEY_HELP                 0x81
          KEY_POWER                0x0C
      end codes

end remote

Controlling my STB

2010-03-17T14:36:00.005Z

My latest experiment is to see if I can control my Astro decoder via the serial port on the back, so I can have Freevo record from different channels (currently I'm mostly recording the kids shows from NHK that are on in the middle of the night, so we have to remember to leave the decoder on channel 963 each evening). There is of course no documentation about the serial port anywhere on the net, but a few US set top boxes have been hacked, so there is some hope.

What I know after an hour of poking around:

Manufacturer: Philips
Model Number: DSR4201/68
Serial port: 115200 8N1 (diagnosed by observing the output)

Firmware seems to be developed in France, as the only thing I have got out of the decoder so far is some debug messages in French as I shut down. Thomson also supply decoders to Astro, so maybe they are providing the firmware for both their own and Philips boxes?

Here is the output I see:

TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > ini_mem
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > : free_mem
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > gmhw_init
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > appel a la fonction Get_Dynamic_mem, retour 0
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > Valeur de la taille totale dispo pour Partition Privee =2363736
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > Adresse de la memoire Dynamique 0xc0dbeea8
TE : c0c9877c : Ln : b40 > ok

No hits on any of that on Google unfortunately, so I'm on my own.

Atoms Moved

2008-09-22T11:14:00.004+01:00

I've now successfully imported a 700 post blog into draft.blogger.com

There were a few more quirks of blogger.com along the way. Having next and previous links in the Atom feed causes blogger to reject the entire import file, so I ended up putting them in as comments. There were also some old posts that didn't have an author (perhaps from some beta version of Roller, and blogger rejected those due to the empty name field.

Finally, I had an old comment from the blog's early days that was not UTF-8 encoded in the database (it doesn't appear correctly in Roller either), so I had to reencode that before blogger.com would accept it for import.

Here is the final export template for Apache Roller 4.0.


#set($pager = $model.getWeblogEntriesPager())
#set($map = $pager.getEntries())
<?xml version="1.0" encoding='utf-8'?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0">
    <id>$model.weblog.id</id>
    <title>$utils.escapeXML($model.weblog.name)</title>
    <subtitle>$utils.escapeXML($model.weblog.description)</subtitle>
    <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($model.weblog.lastModified)</updated>
#if ($pager.nextLink)
    <!-- link rel="next" type="application/atom+xml" href="$pager.nextLink"/ -->
#end
#if ($pager.prevLink)
    <!-- link rel="previous" type="application/atom+xml" href="$pager.prevLink"/ -->
#end
    #foreach( $day in $map.keySet())
    #set($entries = $map.get($day))
    #foreach( $entry in $entries )
    <entry>
        <id>$entry.id</id>
        <title>$utils.escapeXML($entry.title)</title>

        <author>
#if ("$entry.creator.fullName" != "")
          <name>$entry.creator.fullName</name>
#end
        </author>

        <published>$utils.formatIso8601Date($entry.pubTime)</published>
        <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($entry.updateTime)</updated>

        <content type="html"><![CDATA[$entry.text]]></content>
        <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind" 
              term="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post"/>
 <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/$entry.id" />
    </entry>
        ## use Atom threading extensions for comment annotation
        #foreach( $comment in $entry.comments )
        <entry>
            <id>$comment.id</id>
            <title>$utils.escapeXML($utils.truncate($utils.removeHTML($comment.content), 40, 50, "..."))</title>

            <author>
#if ("$comment.name" != "")
                <name>$utils.escapeXML($comment.name)</name>
#end
#if ("$comment.url" != "")
                <uri>$utils.escapeXML($comment.url)</uri>
#end
#if ("$comment.email" != "")
                <email>$comment.email</email>
#end
            </author>
            <published>$utils.formatIso8601Date($comment.postTime)</published>
            <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($comment.postTime)</updated>
            <content>$utils.escapeXML($utils.removeHTML($comment.content))></content>
            <thr:in-reply-to ref="$entry.id" type="application/atom+xml" href="$entry.permalink"/>
            <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind" 
              term="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#comment"/>
     <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/$entry.id" />
        </entry>
        #end
    #end
    #end
</feed>

Moving Atoms

2008-09-14T12:21:00.022+01:00

Having now found an apartment in Malaysia, I'm now faced with the logistics of moving. One problem I'm facing is that for the last 5 years I've run my own server, which now supports several blogs, a forum and my mobile phone's OTA backup. If I knew it was just for a week or two, I could take it offline temporarily, but from what I can tell, internet connectivity in Malaysia is probably not going to be reliable enough to keep all this online for a reasonable proportion of the time, and unless I pay serious money I'll be stuck with the hassle of a dynamic IP address. So I'm looking to migrate at least the blogs and forum off to other services. I've just finished migrating the posts and comments from my first blog (there are still hard links back to my server that need fixing), which was no easy task, as although draft.blogger.com supports Atom based import, it is very particular about some things, with very little documentation and completely useless error handling - it just seems to stop processing as soon as it finds something it doesn't like, and if nothing has been imported yet you get a general meaningless error message, but if one or more posts were successfully imported, it just silently fails to import the posts starting with where it failed. So here is what I found.

In addition to needing to be a valid Atom 1.0 feed, each entry needs a unique self referencing link: <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="post-id"/> The href does not have to be real, just unique, so I used example.com in my export from roller. The import process also does not accept empty tags for the post or comment author's email, name or uri (according to the rnc schema, only email cannot be empty).

The following is the template I used to export posts and comments from Apache Roller 4.0. It is based on an earlier export template for JRoller by Damien Bonvillain that output Atom 0.3, with updates for Roller 4.0, Atom 1.0 and blogger.com's undocumented quirks. The exported content still needs some post processing; removing or filling in empty author child tags, checking the truncation of comment titles or misformed content has not broken anything, and replacing relative references (which shouldn't be there in the first place), but generally it works for short blogs. There seems to be a hard-coded limit in getRecentWeblogEntries of 100 posts, so it needs rework to use a pager and an external script to fetch all the pages.

As with the original, paste the contents below into a new roller template, then use the template to access your blog. If you have too many posts for blogger.com or the export script to handle, you could try using a pager in the export template, or break up the export file manually after extracting everything.


#set($entries = $model.weblog.getRecentWeblogEntries('', 100))
<?xml version="1.0" encoding='utf-8'?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0">
    <id>$model.weblog.id</id>
    <title>$utils.escapeXML($model.weblog.name)</title>
    <subtitle>$utils.escapeXML($model.weblog.description)</subtitle>
    <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($model.weblog.lastModified)</updated>

    #foreach( $entry in $entries )
    <entry>
        <id>$entry.id</id>
        <title>$utils.escapeXML($entry.title)</title>

        <author>
          <name>$entry.creator.fullName</name>
        </author>

        <published>$utils.formatIso8601Date($entry.pubTime)</published>
        <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($entry.updateTime)</updated>

        <content type="html"><![CDATA[$entry.text]]></content>
        <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind"
              term="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post"/>
    <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/$entry.id"/>
    </entry>
        ## use Atom threading extensions for comment annotation
        #foreach( $comment in $entry.comments )
        <entry>
            <id>$comment.id</id>
            <title>$utils.escapeXML($utils.truncate($utils.removeHTML($comment.content), 40, 50, "..."))</title>

            <author>
              <name>$utils.escapeXML($comment.name)</name>
              <uri>$utils.escapeXML($comment.url)</uri>
              <email>$comment.email</email>
            </author>
            <published>$utils.formatIso8601Date($comment.postTime)</published>
            <updated>$utils.formatIso8601Date($comment.postTime)</updated>
            <content>$utils.escapeXML($utils.removeHTML($comment.content))></content>
            <thr:in-reply-to ref="$entry.id" type="application/atom+xml" href="$entry.permalink">
            <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind"
              term="http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#comment"/>
        <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/$entry.id"/>
        </entry>
        #end
    #end
</feed>

Flat hunting

2008-08-12T06:12:00.028+01:00

Having just taken up a new job in Malaysia, I'm over here looking for somewhere to live before the family join me in late September. I've been here a week now, and am still getting handle on what flats, houses and apartments are available and where all the facilities are that we will need.

View Larger Map

Unicode and fonts

2007-10-30T12:27:00.004Z

Kenichi Handa has been hard at work on a Unicode based Emacs for some years now. For Windows users, there is nothing radical in the default build, a few more languages are supported, and a wider range of Unicode characters, but the Windows specific code has only been updated enough to keep working. In future, optimisations and simplifications can be made due to the internal encodings of Emacs and Windows being both based on Unicode. Messing around with code pages to get fonts displaying will be a thing of the past, and can be already thanks to the new font backend.

While work progressed in parallel on Emacs 22 and the Unicode codebase, there were several other developments happening outside the core Emacs development team. Multiple terminal support (multi-tty) has already been merged with the CVS trunk, though it doesn't mean much to Windows users. Limitations in the way Windows handles console output mean that it is never likely to provide much in the way of new features on Windows, though it may be possible to rid ourselves of the runemacs.exe hack without sacrificing console support using the multi-tty feature.

Another new development was support for X freetype font rendering. On the face of it, this doesn't seem to mean much to Windows users either, but after being merged with the Unicode branch, it has been refactored into a new font backend design, with better support for unicode fonts. No longer are fonts defined by their character-set, Emacs can make use of font meta-data to determine which Unicode subranges each font supports. Currently the font backend is not enabled by default, but has to be enabled with a configure option. A backend has been implemented for Windows native fonts, and is ready for testing.

Checking out the Unicode branch:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co -r emacs-unicode-2 emacs

Building Emacs with font backend support:

cd emacs\nt configure --enable-font-backend make bootstrap

Future work

The new font backend is noticeably slower on Windows. A lot of this is probably down to the fact that the old font code cached the font metrics for ASCII characters of fixed width fonts, whereas the new font backend does no such caching yet. We can probably do a better job of caching by calculating which ranges of characters the fixed width applies to, rather than just ASCII. We might even allow multiple such range/width combinations to be associated with a font, to speed up CJK text display (where characters in the font are one of two widths).

There is no support for BDF fonts in the new font backend. BDF fonts will be given their own font backend, hopefully mostly reusable on other platforms.

A Uniscribe font backend may be introduced to enable some of the more advanced layout features in Windows XP and later. The new font backend design makes it easier to add new support like this without complex dynamic loading logic to support older versions of Windows.

Izakaya ryori (pub food) - 居酒屋料理

2007-03-29T05:06:00.003+01:00

An izakaya is a typical drinking establishment in Japan, though they have always had more emphasis on food than the typical English or New Zealand pub. Like English pubs, and New Zealand cafes, some izakaya have recently started to modernize their menus, combining different styles and bringing foreign influence to traditional Japanese favorites to create new "modern Japanese" dishes. This is especially noticeable in competitive areas like Ginza, where izakaya have to differentiate themselves from the hundreds of other eating and drinking establishments in the area to attract customers.

Unlike Western pubs, much of the izakaya is private areas where you reserve a table, so more like what we would see as a restaurant, although many after-work groups use it as we would a pub. Some traditional izakaya have seats at the bar, where you interact with and are served by the owner, but more upmarket ones are strictly table service, with waiters and waitresses rushing about in response to bells at each table, making you imagine you are on an aeroplane.

Despite being in notoriously expensive Ginza at the heart of downtown Tokyo, a variety of dishes and several hours drinking at Tomoru came to approximately ¥6000 per head. As well as the crayfish salad, branded omelette and meaty morsels pictured, we also had several other mouth watering dishes washed down with wine and beer.

Okonomiyaki (savoury pancake) - お好み焼き

2007-03-29T03:17:00.003+01:00

Okonomiyaki is native to the Osaka and Hiroshima areas of Japan. It is a pancake made with potato flour, and containing cabbage, and assorted other vegetables and meats, and in the Osaka variation, noodles. Once cooked, the pancake is topped with brown sauce, mayonnaise and bonito flakes or tiny flakes of nori (seaweed), which appear to dance as the heat rises around them. If you are a connoisseur of Korean pa-jeon and Vietnamese banh xeo, then okonomiyaki is a must try dish, along with takoyaki, small dough balls containing octopus that are often sold from carts on the street.

This Okonomiyaki Special was ¥900 from a small store near Hiroshima station. We had another in a quick lunch stop at Shin-Osaka for ¥650.

You can easily make okonomiyaki at home following this recipe or many like it. Often at restaurants, you will be given a bowl of raw mix, and cook it youself on a hotplate at the table. At other restaurants, you might sit at a counter in front of the chef as they cook in front of you, as common in many types of Japanese restaurants, and probably the closest you'll come to "teppanyaki" style cooking in Japan.

Adding some zest to Picasa's HTML export.

2007-03-18T23:55:00.004Z

Google's Picasa is great for managing your photos. It even has an Export as HTML Page option, which lets you generate a webpage for your photos. But all of the page styles it generates are very simple - if all your photos aren't the same size and orientation, the result is messy.

There are some good web page designs around for photos. Lightbox 2.0 is one, but you have to code all the HTML pages by hand, which is tedious and error-prone.

Picasa lets you generate ugly web pages easily, and Lightbox 2.0 lets you generate good looking web pages with a lot of effort. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to generate good looking web pages as easily as you can with Picasa?

When exporting from Picasa, you have the option to export the page as XML Code. This isn't very useful by itself, but with an appropriate stylesheet, you can easily transform it to anything you want. I wrote a stylesheet for converting to a Lightbox 2.0 style blog entry.

picasa-to-lightbox.xsl

Because I use this for blog entries, not complete webpages, there are some stylesheet definitions missing from the generated html, along with the rest of the html head section. See the Lightbox 2.0 webpage for details on what is needed.

To convert Picasa's generated index.xml using Xalan, I use the following command-line:

java -cp xalan2.jar org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN index.xml -XSL picasa-to-lightblox.xsl -OUT blogpost.html

Leave a comment if you have any more Picasa tips.

Hiyashi udon　(Cold noodles) -　冷やしうどん

2007-03-17T15:01:00.003Z

At every tourist attraction, people will get hungry, so there is always a restaurant somewhere, usually something quick and cheap, so families can get on with sightseeing and save their money for the gifts they need to take back to friends, family and workmates back home. Here at Yoshimi Hyakettsu (Yoshimi "100 caves"), there was a small family run restaurant which had run out of everything on this chilly spring day except hiyashi udon - cold udon noodles. Udon are a thick white noodle made from wheat flour. They are normally served in a hot soup, but in summer they can also be eaten cold with a soy based dipping sauce on the side. Here you see the noodles, sauce and wasabi, chilli and ginger to be optionally added to the sauce.

Udon are not the only noodles eaten cold. Zaru soba (buckwheat noodles on a bamboo mat) is another popular dish, as is hiyashi chuka (cold ramen noodles). Harusame (rice or bean vermicelli) is another noodle that is commonly eaten cold in Japan and elsewhere.

Asari (Clams) - あさり

2007-03-16T23:05:00.003Z

Fresh seafood is very big in Japan, and it doesn't get fresher than when you collect it yourself. These live clams were collected in Ise Bay by the uncle of the family I stayed with as an exchange student in 1989. We used them in miso soup and spaghetti vongole, it sure beats the canned or frozen variety you would get in most Italian restaurants here in the UK.

While I was staying with the family, and whenever I have visited since, uncle Jouji would often bring some fresh food over. He lives just out of town, and is retired so has plenty of time for gardening, fishing and gathering shellfish.

Asking to be sued

2007-03-15T13:43:00.003Z

Spotted today on the front page of Google News UK. The article itself was worded slightly differently.

Someone's asking to be sued, but is it Google, or ABC News?

Yuba ryori (Yuba cuisine) - 湯葉料理

2007-02-25T17:56:00.003Z

Japan is home to many restaurants specializing in one specific type of food. Shozankaku Matsuyama, on the top floor of the Isetan shopping centre above Kyoto Station, specialises in Yuba - a byproduct of the tofu manufacturing process sometimes called tofu skin. Every dish they serve contains yuba, and their menu is extensive. I opted for the Takenoko Zukushi (Bamboo shoot set menu) for ¥5000, while Chizu went for the plain Yuba Zukushi for ¥4500. Each set menu consisted of around 7 courses and a drink. We both started with yuba sashimi, slightly different variations but both with fresh cold yuba alongside the more conventional raw fish.

Next up was another cold dish, of yuba in soymilk. After that the dishes diverged, and the bamboo shoot theme became apparent in my dishes, such as the steamed rice topped with peas served with pickled bamboo shoot, yuba and other pickles.

The dishes continued coming out, with yuba tempura, yuba rice, yuba noodles and others not pictured here (the photos were out of focus, or we were too busy enjoying the food and forgot to capture them), including yuba desserts.

Jin chess client

2006-09-15T12:37:00.003+01:00

I have just learned of a Linux.com article about the alleged GPL violation by IChessU using the Jin chess client with their proprietary video chat extension. I was somewhat surprised to read that Alexander Rabinovitch was quoting this blog as supporting his position. I cannot imagine what post he is referring to, and noone has contacted me about this. For the record, I do not support his position. From what I understand of the case, Rabinovich initially contacted the author of Jin about licensing his code for a proprietary chess client he was intending to distribute. The Jin author made an offer of licensing the Jin source for a one off fee of US$4000, which would have allowed Rabinovich to distribute unlimited copies without needing to comply fully with the GPL. Rabonivich turned down this offer and decided to try to sneakily get around the GPL, by linking to the Jin code via a socket layer which he wrote [update: it seems he may not have even used sockets in the end, and in fact linked more directly].

It is a common misconception that the GPL only applies to statically linked modules within a program. It is an even more common misconception that the GPL cannot apply if there is a socket link between two modules. This has never been tested in court as far as I am aware, and it all boils down to what constitutes a derived work under copyright law.

My opinion is that if you add a network protocol to a GPL program specifically to get your proprietary module working with it, then you are creating a derived work, and the GPL applies to the work as a whole.

Hi Mum

2006-05-19T11:55:00.003+01:00

Google Maps has just extended their mapping to Australia and New Zealand. The NZ maps even show the boundaries between sections! I wish I had this before I went to New Zealand in December / January. If only I could figure out how the searching works, at the moment it only seems useful for locating places that you already know where they are.

15 minutes of fame

2006-05-06T17:08:00.002+01:00

My brother Adrian has just had his 15 minutes of fame, after a $12.2M cock up by his bank which they couldn't seem to put right for three days. I'm still fighting my own bank over a £20 penalty they charged me a few months ago because I paid my credit card off before they sent the bill out so I wouldn't get stung with late charges while I was away. Thats the £20 penalty for late payment that OFT ruled as excessive last July and gave the banks three months to change, then finally followed up on last month after the EU competition commision came to the same conclusion.

Road to nowhere

2006-04-14T01:02:00.004+01:00

Check out this Satellite image of the M25 near Woking, from Google Maps. No wonder google's directions always seem to be about a block out.

Update: It looks like they've moved the problem
a few hundred meters north now.

Sanitized search

2006-01-27T22:58:00.002Z

Image 1 of 42 from a Google image search for Tiananmen Square on google.cn.

Image 1 of about 14000 results for the same search on google.com.

[Courtesy of a Slashdot post]

It appears from this and a few other quick searches I tried, that Google's capitulating to China and "filtering" their results amounts to only returning results for pages that are located inside the Great Firewall.

Time to think

2005-10-23T14:34:00.002+01:00

With Chizuko and Arata in Japan for the last 2 weeks, I've had a lot of time to catch up on where the industry is and do some thinking about projects of my own that might have some potential. I've been up late reading specs, and trying out new soft ware. Flock has introduced me to social bookmarking, something that sounded like a fad to me before, but with it built into the browser, I am finding it useful, if only to keep my bookmarks in sync between the different PC's I use.

The other main features of Flock are a built-in RSS aggregator, but it is not as good as BlogBridge which I've also discovered recently, and a built in blogging client, which looks suspciously like Qumana, but does not work with Roller, so is useless to me. Qumana on the other hand does work with Roller, but not with non-Latin languages, so for now I'm sticking with the web based "editor" built into Roller.

Part of the thinking about projects I could start has been thinking of names. The main criteria is whether a domain name is available. I thought briefly about placing dot's strangely, a la del.icio.us, but then I thought of the first site I'd heard of that did that - goatse.cx (not linked for a reason!), which put me off that idea. If I hadn't been put off already, I would have been today, after reading about the upcoming social bookmarking site ma.gnolia.com. Too much bandwagon jumping for me, and with the .com on the end they seem a bit confused about whether they want to be a hip Web 2.0 co.mpa.ny or a so last millenium dotcom. I'm sure the VCs are banging down the doors.

Looking at the latest buzz around Web 2.0, my impression is that tagging is to the Semantic Web what the web (or HTML) is to Xanadu. Its the inferior technology that comes along much later and steals your thunder. Its a simpler idea, and is here now and gaining mindshare quickly.

Sashimi - 刺身

2005-10-21T00:58:00.002+01:00

Often what the uninitiated think of when they imagine sushi, sashimi is raw fish, dipped in soy sauce and wasabi, and accompanied by ginger to clear the taste buds between bites. The fish has to be fresh, which is the main reason why it seldom tastes as good outside Japan.

Sashimi chef's will go to the fish market early in the morning to choose their fish for the day, in some towns, they may buy it straight off the boat as soon as it comes in. Being a good sashimi chef means expert knifework, as well as being at the fish market early and being able to spot the best fish.

This fish was prepared in my former host family's kitchen by my host brother, Ichiyo, who is now a chef in nearby Matsusaka, after working in Hawaii for a number of years. It was served on a bed of shredded daikon and shiso leaves, filled with slices of tuna in addition to its own meat.

Boys' Toys

2005-10-13T00:30:00.002+01:00

With Chizuko and Arata away, I have spent the last week stocking up on "toys" of my own. A new hard drive for the web server, which has dropped the background noise in the spare bedroom by several decibels, as well as giving us plenty of space to backup Arata's photos and videos to. A bluetooth headset for my phone (which I got as an upgrade last month), and a spare charger for it. The last two items have highlighted a trend. USB is becoming the new standard for power cables.

I deliberately ordered a travel power supply for the phone, as I'm going to Japan at the end of the month to chaffeur my family home, and to New Zealand for Christmas. I need a spare charger, as I'm forever going to work with an almost flat battery and not realising until I get there. The contents of the package were a USB to Ericsson cable (to charge from a PC), a car cigarette lighter to USB adapter, and a mains to USB adapter with clip on US, Euro and UK plugs. No NZ plug, but I'm sure I can find a PC or car when I'm there.

The bluetooth headset, I also intend to try out with my PC for Skype. Chizu complained that she couldn't hear properly last time I called, and forced me back to a real telephone, so hopefully the headset will do better than the built in microphone of my laptop. It also came with a USB charger, plus a mains and car charger, but they weren't smart enough to leave the cables off those and put a USB socket there instead. I guess I'll just use the USB cable and the adapters I got with my phone.

As for the phone itself, its a Sony Ericsson V800. I got a 3G phone, not so I can waste vast amounts of money downloading video and music from Vodafone, but so I can roam in Japan. The guy that sold it to me was a bit disappointed I think when I declined an "upgrade" to one of their 3G price plans for the bargain price of £40/month. "But it comes with free video, you'll have to pay lots more if you stay with your current plan", "Not if I don't download video". "But you get 200 minutes of calls and 300 free text messages a month", "I don't even use the 25 free minutes and 50 free text messages I get now". I guess his eyes lit up when I asked for a 3G phone straight away, but he ended up having to do the sales pitch in vain in the end.

As an MP3 player, its rubbish. You can't use any headphones other than the handsfree kit that came with it because of the stupid non-standard plug. After 3 uses, there's already a broken wire in there somewhere and the sound comes and goes from my left ear as I walk. The sound is flat and lifeless, and having listened to the same tracks on a Gizmondo with decent headphones, I know its not just badly encoded MP3s.

As a camera, its not bad. Not good either, but better than I expected. In low light the pictures get very noisy, and despite having the brightest LED spotlight of any phone I've seen, they're not bright enough to eliminate the noise. In decent light though, the pictures are OK. Probably comparable to the cardboard throwaway cameras you buy when you're normal camera breaks or gets left behind, but you just have to take some pictures.

My internet usage has gone up slightly, but its still well within the free allowance that I get pooled with the text messages. I've set up a SyncML server, so I can take a backup of my phonebook whereever I am (I could have used Vodafone's server for this like everyone else, but setting up my own was more fun, and I'm always suspicious about giving out my entire contact list to some third party to use for marketing purposes). It is slightly better browsing the web than my old GPRS phone, as long as there's a 3G signal, but its still pretty painful, especially if you have to type something. I set up the email to check my work account, but I mostly get spam, so I don't think I'll get much use out of that.

I might have to revisit the Java midlet I wrote a while ago, based on an idea that Chizu had for an alarm clock. At the time I found that my phone didn't support enough of the Midlet 2.0 spec for it to work, but hopefully, 2 years on, J2ME implementations have improved.

You might have noticed the addition of a "Mobile" category at the top of the page. I almost got the phone set up for mobile photo-blogging. Almost. Actually its the server that's still a problem.

Kishimen - きしめん

2005-09-08T02:40:00.002+01:00

There are many types of noodle in Japan. Fat, thin, white, yellow, brown, served in hot soup, with cold sauce or fried. Kishimen is a flat semi-transparent white noodle from Aichi, in this case served in a hot soup with mochi (rice cakes), fish balls and nori (seaweed). The restaurant was conveyer-belt style, only instead of a conveyer belt, there was a narrow moat with a continuous stream of bowls floating around with customers' orders on them.

Yakiniku (Barbeque) - 焼肉

2005-08-29T03:21:00.002+01:00

Yakiniku literally means grilled meat. The best Yakiniku is found in Seoul, but if you're stuck this side of the Korea Strait, you can still get your red meat fix from an "viking" yakiniku restaurant like this one in Akihabara. Raw meat and vegetables are laid out smörgåsbord style and you take what you want back to your table to cook on the gas barbeque provided (maybe charcoal if you're lucky enough to find a genuine Korean style barbeque restaurant). Eat your fill of ロース (sirloin), カルビ (beef ribs), タン (ox tounge) レバー (liver) and other bovine organs wrapped in lettuce, with pumpkin, capsicum, side salads, rice, and something approximating kimchi within two hours for around ￥1000 each at lunchtime, and wash it down with a ￥800 not-quite-a-pint of beer while pondering where the restaurant makes its money. In the evenings and weekends, when the customers don't have to get back to work and can spend the full two hours stuffing themselves, expect to pay a lot more.

"All you can eat" is not the only option for yakiniku. Japanese beef restaurants range up to the ridiculously expensive, often serving Kobe or Matsusaka beef. Teppanyaki is a popular choice of Japanese cuisine outside of Japan largely due to the theatrics of the chefs, though they are hard to find within Japan, and when you do find one, you'll probably be cooking for yourself on an electric frypan (as opposed to a gas or charcoal grill of Korean style yakiniku) with no show off chefs in sight.

Ekiben - 駅弁

2005-08-20T03:25:00.002+01:00

Eki 駅　- railway station

Bento　弁当 - Lunchbox

Ekiben is the name given to prepared lunchboxes, sold from stalls in railway station concourses and platforms. You can buy identical looking bento boxes from supermarkets and convenience stores too, even in restaurants, though there they are likely to be nice lacquer trays instead of cheap throwaway plastic. But only bento boxes bought from railway stations are ekiben.

The contents of bento boxes varies but typically there is rice, sometimes noodles instead, fish or meat, breadcrumbed with a worcester-like sauce or plain with soy sauce, vegetables (beans, bamboo shoot, tofu), cakes of unidentified processed seafood, and pickles.

This Ekiben was bought from a stall in Hiroshima Station for ¥840.

Sushi - 寿司

2005-08-11T03:17:00.002+01:00

Sushi is probably the most well known Japanese dish, though most people are more familiar with Nigiri (topped, often but not neccesarily with raw fish) and Maki (roll) forms. Home Cooked sushi though often takes the form of Temaki (hand-rolled - usually cone shaped) or Chirashi (mixed up in a big bowl) Sushi. Temaki sushi is sometimes on the menu of sushi restaurants outside Japan, but the rolls are premade, you don't roll them with your own hand, which is part of the fun of eating sushi at home. This spread shows the variety of fillings you can add to your cone of nori and sushi rice. Except the strawberries. We'd just been strawberry picking, those were for dessert.

Temaki Sushi Recipe