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UK Diary #2

I wasn't aware of the fact that we use different power jack sockets in US and UK. So I'm mostly out of battery during the conference, and after the conference I borrowed one from clkao. Not sure how I could work on the slides after tonight's party.

UK diary #1

I've been overwhelmed by British accent so far. I don't really grok what people are speaking!

Other than that, it looks like London is a lovely city, but not so good to actually live. Everything is damn expensive! 3 stops subway ride is 3 GBP (= 5.6 USD), 24 hours internet connection is 10 GBP (= 19 USD) and Starbucks tall frappuccino is 2.9 GBP (= 5.4 USD). WTF.

I'm in UK

Here's a proof that shows I'm in UK. GMail is not a valid trademark and they use "Google Mail!"

Googlemail

NRT

No self check-in for flights to London. Ugh.

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stupidfool

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Beautiful Sunset

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Beer

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Beach

in Hayama

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QotD: I Just Made That Up

Remember sniglets?  Do you have any favorites?  Have you ever made up your own word?  (Now's as good a time as any.)

That would be "それPla", the abbreviation of "それPlaggerでできるよ", which means "You can do it with Plagger."

Whenever I see blog posts saying "I'd like to fetch RSS and do this based on the data", or "I have a problem with RSS reader on the web, which is ...", I tagged them "それPla" on del.icio.us.

Summary support in Plagger 0.8

From my email sent to plagger-dev list:

I've been working on summary support in hackathon-summary branch at http://plagger.org/trac/browser/branches/hackathon-summary

The point of summary feature is:

• summary, title, body and author has "is_html" or "is_text" method,
  to determine if the data it holds is HTML or plaintext.
• Plagger::Util::strip_html($html) will render HTML into text using
  HTML::FormatText (Making it pluggable is left TODO)
• $entry->summary->text and $entry->body->html does what you mean
• summary is automatically extracted from feed metadata ala RSS description or Atom:summary field. If there's not one, Summary::Auto plugin will auto-generate using Plagger::Util::summarize($entry->body)
• actually how to generate summary from body HTML is pluggable. There're couple of Summary::* plugins already checked in in the branch. http://plagger.org/trac/browser/branches/hackathon-summary/plagger/lib/Plagger/Plugin/Summary

The final thing left undone is how to declare which field to use in each Notify/Publish plugin without updating the templates. I'd like to say, "send full-content HTML mail to my gmail account, but plaintext of summary to my mobile. Use summary as HTML in Publish::Planet." with
a single config, not requiring to update the templates.

The syntax would be something like:

- module: Publish::Gmail
   config:
     mailto: ****@gmail.com
   override:
     body: $args->{entry}->body->html

- module: Publish::Gmail
   config:
     mailto: ****@mobile.example.com
   override:
     body: $args->{entry}->summary->text

- module: Publish::Planet
   config:
     mailto: ****@mobile.example.com
   override:
     body: $args->{entry}->summary->html

But not sure what would be the best syntax.

I'd like to apply the override/localize methodology to link(s) as well, ala:

- module: Notify::IM
   override:
     link: $args->{entry}->alternate_link('tinyurl')

to display link in TinyURLed (using WWW::Shorten), for instance.

Any feedbacks would be welcome on this.

I'm such a nerd because...

What's the nerdiest thing about you?

 

geek science

 Frankly I don't grok the term "nerd" or "nerdy" very well. I know it's related to something about geeks, as it's seen on Slashdot. The thinkgeek t-shirt "Talk nerdy to me" make me always smile. It has a weird Japanese translation "コンピュータ語で話そうよ" or something like that.

 

QotD: Teacher's Pet

What was (or is) your favorite subject in school?

I liked English, Math and Physics. And I hated History and Chemistry. The reason I liked them are that I don't need to remember lots of things. In Math, all you need is to understand the logic and a small number of fomula. I hate History and Chemistry (esp. Inorganic Chemistry) since I need to remember lots of things.

QotD: In Heavy Rotation

What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?

I've been listnening to Dashboard Confessional's "Dusk and Summer", and Ellegarden's "Riot on the Grill." Both albums are really emotional.

 

Plagger Hackathon 2 in Cybozu Labs

This weekend we had our 2nd Hackathon dedicated to Plagger in Cybozu Labs, Akasaka Tokyo.

The biggest event during this Hackathon was TestAThon. Most of our committers have went wild to create unit test files for plugins without test. Now # of .t files jumped up from 32 to 102, which is amazing. Kudos to our testathoners team: youpy, takesako, 33rpm, tomi-ru, hakobe & charsbar (on-site) and mizzy, hsbt & drawnbody for off-site remote testing. Thank you ALL!

Thanks to the unit testing effort, I've been going far to merge the work done in Hackathon-MT branch, and do lots of core changes without worrying about the backward incompatiblity, since whenever I broke the code, those tests will notify me. Great.

So I've been working on: JSON dumper, Feed serializer, Notify::Audio and enclosure integration, decoding YAML config as UTF-8 by default, summary and pluggbale summarizer support, rewriting OPML parser using LibXML SAX, refactored XML::Feed parser into Plagger::FeedParser so plugins can use. Hmm there's a lot.

Summary and summarizer stuff is being done in hackathon-summary branch and will be merged to trunk soon.

Otsune has been working on document improvement and Nagayaman was doing the great website redesign, which will be online soon. Yappo was doing Senna hacking and per-plugin storage, and Search::Rast improvement.

Trac the changes during the Hackathon to be amazed more.

SaaS is the buzzword

So officially (or unofficially), SaaS is the next Buzzword in Japan.

"Web 2.0" is still big and nowadays you can see them even on tablet papers saying "Web 2.0 is a new generation that allows you to do everything on Free Home Page." Wow, it sounds like Geocities!

But anyway, in this couple of weeks I haven't had any day not seeing "SaaS" on news sites nor blog posts. They'll keep promoting their products as SaaS, even if they're nothing differnt from plain old "ASP".

QotD: Is This Thing On?

When was the last time you had to speak in front of a group?  How did you feel?

The last time was OSCON in Portland. Since the speech was in English, I felt like a bit nervous but the talk went well, at least I think.

Usually i like to talk to audiences, especially the speech is in my primary language Japanese. I'm relaxed and usually start writing a slide the midnight before the actual talk, whatever the length the talk will be.

Azabu Juban Festival

OMG so crowded

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Hills Festa

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Great View

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Tokyo blackout

We're having a huge blackout now in Tokyo.

Looks like some crane car on the ship touched the electric feeder line, and the electric system went down. So vulnerable.

According to the TV show right now, there're still problems with subways. And elevators in buildings aren't working yet. Hmm.

Sweet

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QotD: My Intro to the Big Screen

What was the first movie you remember seeing in a movie theater? 
Question submitted by mainmor.

 I don't remember the actual order, but the first series of the movies I saw in theaters would be: "Godzilla", "南極物語 (the original of Eight Below)" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

QotD: Something to Believe In

Nope, never. Having tatoo makes you recognised as Yakuza in Japan. 

Do you have any tattoos? If not, if you were going to get inked, what would you get?

I <3 Hiveminder

I've been using so-called GTD software and services to make my Calendar, ToDo and memo things online and most of them failed.

Back in 2000, I started writing up my todo in ~/todo.txt and setup a cronjob to email to my cellphone every day 10 AM. It actually worked really well, but i just wanted more calendarish feature, categorizing by tags and more priorities thing.

So far I tested, Basecamp (overkill for personal tasks), Backpack (Good for Wiki-like thing, not for ToDo), 30 boxes (good for calendar, but ToDo is poor), Remember the Milk (Good but the hot-key is complicated to remember) and Gmail (Not designed to be used as GTD software). But they all sucked and recently I manage them as a physical stickies on the wall of my desk, which works really well, but not searchable and reachable from my home, since it's not online.

So, recently I started using Hiveminder, the newest task management system from Best Practical Solutions, the creator of World #1 ticket system RT. To be honest I don't think the RT User interface is best in the world, but soon after I started using Hiveminder I felt "this is THE one I wanted."

Its UI is all Ajaxy and pretty easy to use. Doesn't work 100% well on IE, but works 90% and that's fine. "But first ..." and "And then ..." (tasks dependency mgmt) looks really useful, even though I never tested them yet. So far, it has everything I need for a personal task mgmt system and does syndication with Atom, plaintext and iCal. Sweet.

Now I'm using Hiveminder as Task mgmt, 30 boxes for Schedule and Gmail for personal memo. I think this is the best combo so far.

Another reason I'm biased to Hiveminder is the people behind the software: Jesse, clkao and other people in BPS. I know who they are and I believe they do the right thing.

Hiveminder is now open for everyone. Give it a shot.

London Terrorism

Hmm, London Terror. I'm flying to London on 28th to attend to YAPC::EU 2006 in Birmingham. Wishing that nothing bad happens, and nothing nasty happend to the on-craft bringing rule (I hate to check in buggage because buggage claim sucks).

Hm, now ANA denies bringing in laptops. I wonder until when the restriction will last...

Meme: Metros from the world

They're Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, Taipei, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York. Create Yours on b3co.com.

SAKK Plagger Hackathon #1: MT meets Plagger!

Today we had a Plagger Hackathon in Six Apart KK. We had most of MT and TypePad engineers coming around the couch and hacked together to build a Movable Type plugin for Plagger and couple more search extensions. You're curious why Vox engineers are not there. Yeah, they are all in San Francisco now :)

今日は赤坂の Six Apart KK オフィスで Plagger Hackathon。MT/TypePad のエンジニアがカウチに集まって MT-Plagger プラグインと Search 系のエンハンスメントをハック。Vox エンジニアはいま San Francisco にいってるので不参加です :)

So let's see MT-Plagger demo. The basic idea of the plugin is so simple. When you create or update a new post on Movable Type CMS, new MT::Entry object will be transformed to Plagger::Feed (where MT::Blog corresponds to Feed and MT::Entry to Plagger::Entry) and it will bootstrap the Plagger context to run the later pharses than Filter.

まずは MT-Plagger のデモをどうぞ。このプラグインがやっていることはシンプルで、MT で新しいエントリをつくったり、更新したりしたときに、MT::Entry をベースに Plagger::Feed と Plagger::Entry をつくって Plagger プロセス（Filter:: 以降のフェーズ) を bootstrap します。

You can see in the demo how it works with Publish::Gmail to notify email, and Notify::IRC to do realtime notification to the IRC channel. Integration with Search::* to build a better search engine for MT would be a nice hack. Making it work with new Comment (rather than Entry) would be cool for pluggable Comment notification. Using Publish::Delicious and you'll always get your entry bookmarked on del.icio.us first :)

デモでは Publish::Gmail をつくってメールを送信したり、Notify::IRC をつかってリアルタイムに IRC アナウンスしたりしてます。Search::* と連動して MT 検索を改善してみたり、エントリだけでなくてコメントがきたときに Notify にとばすなんてのも面白そう。Publish::HatenaBookmark でつねにセルクマ 1 get とかもできますね。夢が広がりんぐ。

MT Plagger code is now in hackathon-mt branch and will be merged down to the trunk soon.

QotD: Hello, Cleveland!

If you had a band, what would you call yourselves?
Question submitted by Zoot.

I was a bassist and vocalist of the band called "Coconut Crush". The name comes from one of the finishing moves of a famous wrestler in Japan. We played so-called melodic punk and did 20-30 gigs in 2 years around Tokyo and Yokohama, when I was 20-22 years old. Good old days!

Plagger competitive services

Planet and newspipe are examples of the Plagger competitive "software". What about services? Well, there're a couple of competitive web 2.0 sites that do things pretty close to what Plagger does.

Feed Rinse: "Feed Rinse is an easy to use tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren't interested in. It's like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions"

Touchstone: "Subscribe to changes on your favourite website. Set rules for what’s important. Have alerts appear on your desktop while you work." They call subscription/notify/publish plugins as Input/Output Adapters.

Dapper: "Dapper’s mission is to allow you to use any web based content in any way you can imagine. And by use, we mean going beyond just reading or viewing a webpage."

xFruits: "XFruits makes possible the Mashup RSS creation in a very simple way thanks to the Composer. You can assemble the bricks together so as to build your own feed-based service.
"xFruiter" service's users are referenced. "

Miyako wrap-up

Good: beautiful landscape, sunny beach, Orion beer, Miyako beef & yummy BBQ

Bad: Injured foot (during Kayak), Sunburnt kind of hurted my leg skin, me getting fat (Orion Beer and good food).

Party with Hatena

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Yakisoba

Finale

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Awamori

Party!!

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BBQ

miyako beef = yum

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Beach

Miyako!

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ANA cards suck

It turns me out that ANA mileage system sucks. When you fly United, or other Star Alliance airlines using PEX, the discounted economy ticket, you'll only get 50-70% of actual miles. That's why I only get 8500 miles or so with a roundtrip flight to San Francisco, which should be over 10k miles.

With United Mileage Plus, you're always guaranteed to get 100% of miles even if you fly with discounted price, and there're no problems if you're crazy for ANA: you can get miles to your UA mileage even when you fly ANA Japan domestic flights.

Sad.

Looks like I should switch my mileage (and possibly my credit card) to United's. I know that United sucks too, but it should "suck less" in terms of mileage.