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Mobile Data services for visitors to Japan: 2011 Fall edition

Lots of friends have been asking me of options to get mobile internet in Japan, especially for a short visit (1-2 weeks). Here's the updated version of such options.

b-mobile Data Only SIM

If you have an unlocked GSM phone that supports W-CDMA 2100Mhz, getting b-mobile's data only SIM is the cheapest path. Get their latest in the lineup b-mobile 1GB Teigaku SIM from Amazon or at stores like Bic Camera, activate it by phone (they have English menu) and put it into your SIM slot and you get 1GB data for 1 month. No contracts required and there's no 300kbps bandwidth cap which they still have with cheaper SIM (U300). Note that they have standard SIM and micro SIM, choose whichever suits your needs.

The only barrier for getting a b-mobile SIM card is that you need a working Japanese cellphone number to make a call to activate the SIM card. Welcome to the bootstrap problem. If you have a Japanese friend this would be easy, but otherwise you might have to consult store employees.

• Network: DoCoMo
• Devices: Your own unlocked W-CDMA phones (e.g. iPhone 4, Nexus S) or hotspot (e.g. Huawei E585)
• Price: 3100 JPY
• Cap: 1GB data, no bandwidth limit

Also, if you plan to use b-mobile's data-only SIM with Android 2.x devices, be aware of a possible Android's bug where it drains battery a lot when used with Data only SIM. The only workaround is to enable Airplane mode when you don't need the data network.

Using a data only SIM also means you have to give up your regular SIM. It may or may not matter to you depending on how you use your phone numbers. To me it doesn't matter since I use google voice as my primary number, and i don't receive as many phone calls anyway.

Pocket Wi-Fi/mi-fi rental

There are some rental plans available for "Pocket Wi-Fi" (e-mobile's MiFi branding).

• Rent a Pocket WiFi
• XCom Global

I haven't personally tried any of these options, so i can't recommend any specific. You can google for Pocket WiFi rental Japan to see more options.

• Network: e-mobile/b-mobile(?)
• Devices: Pocket WiFi router
• Price: 5000-7000 JPY for a week
• Cap: Unlimited data/bandwidth

WiMAX Rental

I've been trying to find a prepaid/rental WiMax rental optoins from UQ and its MVNO partners, but couldn't find one. Some have 1-month option, but it still requires a setup fee.

The only "available" option is their trial service: Try WiMAX. You can choose the hotspot option and it is FREE for 15 days.

But obviously, they want some commitments - at least you have to prove your residency in Japan, and submit your credit card information, etc. So this should only be doable if you have a kind friend or family in Japan who can help you. But if it's there, this is the most affordable option - FREE!

• Network: UQ WiMAX
• Devices: Aterm WM3300R (hotspot)
• Price: Free
• Cap: Unlimited

Data Roaming from your own provider

If you have a good Wi-Fi connection at places you stay and work, and only need mobile data services for email/twitter/chat with your mobile devices, data roaming from your own provider might be the easiest and affordable option.

You might think that data roaming should result in a crazy bill, but with AT&T's global data roaming packages, you can get 125MB of data for $49.99/mo. Note that it prorates by day, so you have to be careful when to enable this option and disable, but this worked well for my wife's stay. AT&T partners with DoCoMo and Softbank for roaming, but unless you have a specific reason to, you should choose DoCoMO as a network since it has better coverage and speed.

• Network: DoCoMo/Softbank
• Devices: Your own W-CDMA phones with AT&T SIM
• Price: $49.99 (other prices available)
• Cap: 125MB data, no speed cap

If you're on T-Mobile US, their data roaming plan is $10/1MB - you don't want to do that.

Others

There may be other options that I am not aware of, but most of them are either a) pricy or b) requires residencies in Japan. Tell me in the comments if you have other suggestions.

On Perl and backward compatibilities

Much of my thinking about the future of Perl 5 stems from the following principles:

• New versions of Perl 5 should not break your existing software 
• Backward compatibility must not stop Perl 5 from evolving

via www.nntp.perl.org

The message linked here discusses lots of insights on perl 5.16 and beyond, based on the talk Jesse Vincent has been busy giving at various conferences this year. It's a great read if you're interested in the future of perl the language.

When Perl and Ruby get compared, it is often mentioned that Perl takes a lot of care and efforts to be as backward compatible as possible while Ruby (the language and its ecosystem such as rubygems, rails etc.) do not care that much and prioritize on evolving faster by making drastic change more frequently.

I think this holds true in some sense - for example, scripts written for perl 5.8 (released more than 8 years ago) will most likely just work on perl 5.14, without any changes. That's probably not the case with Ruby 1.6 and 1.9.

This makes people feel much less worried about upgrading perl, which is a great thing, but I could imagine that the restriction ("upgrading perl should not break existing code, even a major upgrade") definitely makes the development and evolution in perl harder than otherwise.

I can say that the similar thing is happening outside the language development as well: in CPAN modules.

CPAN module's policies

Most (but not all, I know) of the CPAN modules, once uploaded to CPAN, try to keep the API interface stable and as backward compatible as possible. That's the de-facto virtue of CPAN modules. If a module keeps changing API with every release, it will be rated horribly bad, and people would eventually stop using the module/framework, thinking it's unstable/fragile.

While generally it is a good thing to keep the interface stable, and I appreciate all the heroic efforts of perl module developers putting so much efforts to keep the backward compatibilities, I could say it is unfortunate if  that prevents their software from evolving as fast.

And I personally guess that this is simply because there's no good/easy way to manage this situation.

Example

Let's take some example. Although this is not a real example (notice the version numbers that are not real :D), this is pretty much what's happening today.

In 201X, Catalyst 8 introduced some feature X, and developer Joe wrote an extension called CatalystX::Foo based on the new feature. It declares the dependency on Catalyst by saying:

requires 'Catalyst', 8.0;

in Makefile.PL, which will later be written down to MYMETA.yml. He shipped the extension to CPAN. When an end user requires CatalystX::Foo, it will pull down the latest version of Catalyst and it works fine. So far, so good.

Few months later, Catalyst dev team decided that the feature X was a good idea but needs some modifications, and had to make some API incompatible changes that breaks CatalystX::Foo, and shipped Catalyst version 9.0. 

So now, CatalystX::Foo stops working when an end user upgrades Catalyst to version 9. As long as the user keeps version 8 it's fine, but it's like a time bomb now.

How do we prevent this kind of thing from happening? Today, here's what they do.

• Catalyst developers keep the list of affected downstream modules and notify authors to upgrade to the newer API.
• Downstream (e.g. CatalystX::Foo) author uploads the new version to CPAN, declaring the dependency on Catalyst version 9.
• Catalyst gets shipped with a giant list of conflicts table (search for %conflicts) which warns users that they have to upgrade these downstream modules after installations. They can't just depend on the new version.

While I respect the effort by the upstream developers (i.e. Catalyst developers) for maintaining the list, to me it looks like a non-ideal situation here, because:

• it is odd that upstream modules have to take care of downstream, not the other way round
• this doesn't scale, and doesn't work for modules that are not on CPAN (i.e. DarkPAN, github)
• the warnings generated by the upstream (Catalyst) is useful, but there are CPAN installer that ignores Makefile.PL output (like cpanminus :)) and the output is not given attention in the case of automatic scripted installs anyway

Personally, I don't want to maintain the list of Plack::Middleware modules once (say) I decide to break the API compatiblity in Plack 2.0.

Solutions

I don't have a magic bullet that solves this situation right away, but I have some ideas, and the actual code to implement that. Here's the gist of it:

• Downstream dependencies are advised to actually use version ranges in dependency declarations
• Upstream should use semantic versioning or something similar, so that downstream can somehow predict API incompatibilities using version numbers.
• CPAN installers should install MYMETA.yml files into site_perl library path so that it can be used for later instropections.
• Every project should use a separate local::lib to have an isolated library path.
• Write a tool to rescan the whole (per project) library path to ensure there's no conflicts, and urges end users to upgrade/downgrade if there are.

Overall, this is what bundler does for Ruby gems, and I'm trying to make carton do the same thing for CPAN and local::lib.

It will make the end user happy by allowing them to lock the dependencies, and will make the module authors happy by allowing them to evolve fast, without worrying too much about backward incompatibilities on downstream (although they really care about that to some extent anyways).

I plan to incorporate all of this into Carton 1.0 release, which should happen before or during YAPC::Asia 2011 in Tokyo, which is in 2 weeks.

In other words, this is how conference driven development works :)

Renting books from SFPL using Kindle

Go to SFPL overdrive library, look for books you want to read. The catalog is not as quite nice - you might need to request a hold for popular books, which I did yesterday and received updates this morning that it is available now.

When you click "Get for Kindle" you'll be redirected to Kindle site, and you're ready to go:

Like a normal Kindle book, you can sync wirelessly to any device from here. I chose my iPad but am now at work and can't read it here - so I launched the Android app and Kindle cloud reader, confirmed that I can read the book in any of the devices. (What is the pulldown for, if I can pull from them on any device anyway?)

This is really nice.

The SFPL account also gives access to O'Reilly Safari bookshelf (not all, but most of the catalog). Something you should really have if you live in the city :)

Going to London Perl Workshop 2011

Dotcloud sponsors my flight to London and LPW guys let me do the 2 hour tutorial for "Deploying Perl/Plack web apps to the cloud".

Looking forward to seeing my fellow hackers in London! The conference is free and you can register from London Perl Workshop website.

Game Center CX filming

via www.flickr.com

Game Center CX (Retro Game Master in USA) has been my favorite TV show all the time. The show is all about retro video games, and Shinya Arino, aka Kacho, does the challenge to beat these games in a day. He and the rest of the crew came to San Francisco to do the filming of upcoming episode for the show at Musee Mecanique.

If you haven't heard of the show, Kotaku is streaming old episodes with English dubs/subs for free.

Quite a few fans showed up to watch the filming, and I just talked to Kacho Arino and exchange my card with him!  I also talked to Kibe-san and Kan the producer, who told me about this event. They were super friendly and awesome.

More pictures can be found on my Flickr page.

The episode will be broadcasted in Japan in October apparently. Can't wait to see it :)

iOS 5 gets Japan earthquake notifications

Note that it isn't officially confirmed that iOS 5 would have the access to Japanese Earthquake warnings/alerts. The linked post discusses about it based on the rumors and speculations. Yet, this blog post could be useful to explain how this alert system works, even if the rumor turns out to be false.

If an earthquake hits, users will be alerted with a notification giving them information on the earthquake.

via news.cnet.com

OK, none of the CNET reporter and commenters on this link seems to understand how Japanese earthquake warnings works.

What's the point of being told an earthquake is happening or just happened if you're in the earthquake zone? Hey, a bookshelf just fell on me, let me look at my phone to see what happened.

They seem to assume two things: a) If an earthquake hits, you will be alerted later. b) If the earthquake happened to your area, you must feel it anyway, knowing the information is quite useless.

They're both incorrect. Let me tell you why.

a) You will most likely receive the alert a few seconds before the earthquake hits your area.

Most of the big earthquakes these days have an epicenter in the sea, like the big one in North Japan on March 11th. In that case, there's a big delay, depending on how far the epicenter is, before the shake reaches the land.  The alert system will notify all the connected cellphones, as well as on TV broadcast during this delay.

When I visited Japan, I received notifications on TV as well as to my Android phones (via a third-party app on the Market), and a few seconds later the actual shake came. So it worked.

You might wonder if a few seconds makes any difference - it indeed does. High-speed trains (Shinkansen) immediately stop when an alert is received, which helps a lot to avoid crashes. If you're cooking at home you can shut down the gas and turn off fire, if you're near heavy shelves you can stay away from there. Lot of things you can do if you know a quake is coming in advance, even for a few seconds.

b) If you feel an earthquake, should the detailed information be useless? Not at all. Even if your area only has a small shake, like Seismic Intensity 2, the quake's epicenter could be far away in the sea, which could be much bigger magnitude and could bring a terrifying tsunamis like it did in March.

See more about this notification system on Wikipedia.

You might have already noticed, but these benefits of the alert system doesn't work well if an earthquake's epicenter is at the land area and close to or directly below the observer. There won't be any delays before it hits the land area, and there won't be any tsunamis in that case in the first place. I heard they're working on it to make the system work more efficient in those situations as well.

Joining DotCloud

So, here's the update I promised last week: I'm thrilled to join DotCloud as a software engineer, starting May.

Many of you have seen the news that they recently shipped the support for its Perl stack that I know a lot of Perl hackers are excited about. As they point out in the post, I contributed my experience and knowledge for them to build the perl support, but it was actually an hour of whiteboarding session to figure out what the right stack would be (i.e. uWSGI and PSGI, perlbrew, local::lib and cpanminus for a start, but more support to come), and the following few hours of hacking to just build it.

It was so much fun and inspiring to collaborate with the co-founders Solomon Hykes and Sebstien Pahl and software engineers Sam Alba and Jerome Petazzoni, and can't wait to see what I can do to make DotCloud even more awesome Platform-as-a-Service provider.

A few quick notes to address your potential concerns. I'm joining DotCloud as a "Software Engineer", not something like "Perl Service Architect". This basically means two things.

a) My ownership on PSGI and Plack software remains the same: No license changes or whatsoever - great thing for all of us. You can expect more improvements now that it's essentially part of my real job, though :)

b) I will spend more time coding Python than Perl at work, since DotCloud is mostly written in Python. If you're upset about hearing that, you just haven't noticed that the past 12 months of my previous job was mostly coding in Python :) Using two different languages and stealing great ideas from each other is a natural thing, especially since I do that for spoken languages as well!

If you have questions, feel free to poke me at miyagawa AT gmail.com or on twitter, and I'll be happy to answer as much as I can. Also, if you want DotCloud invites, I have a few beta codes to give away - tell me what/how you're excited about Perl on DotCloud on Twitter, blog or email, and I will randomly give you invites.

I hope to see Perl deployments beat Ruby and Node.js on DotCloud some day :)

SAY goodbye

OK, so I have some news to share with you. Today, April 22nd, is my last day at SAY Media.

Including 2 years at SAKK and 4 years at Six Apart headquarters in 548 4th street, this has been an incredible venture and terrific experience for me to work with all of smart people on numerous exciting projects, but I figured it's time to move on.

I should have a lot to write, but instead i'll dump some memorable pictures :)

Man, that's a lot of memories. I'll send everyone a big hug and thank you for making my days at Six Apart/SAY so much fun!

P.S. I'll take a quick vacation next week, and will start a new gig in May. Yes, the new job will be still in San Francisco and everything is brand new for me which is quite exciting, but let me tell you about that later on this blog - till then I'm teasing :)

cpanm 1.4 is out - the greatest release ever

cpanm 1.4 is out last night. This is a major update and includes bunch of good things, and let me introduce two of them.

-q is the real quiet option

One of the things people love about cpanm is its quiet output, compared to CPAN.pm's default verbosity level. cpanm by default only prints 4 lines per module installation, namely "Fetching, Configuring, Building, Installed". We also used to have -q option since day 1, which silences all output, which is not really that useful unless you run it from another program.

1.4 makes the -q option less quiet - it shows only the line "Successfully installed module-ver" per one module install (or a failure message if the installation fails). This is a major achievement, and I already love this output, and now put "--quiet" into my PERL_CPANM_OPT environment variable.

> cpanm -q DBI Plack Catalyst
Successfully reinstalled DBI-1.616
Successfully reinstalled Plack-0.9974
Successfully reinstalled Catalyst-Runtime-5.80032
3 distributions installed

Now you see it prints the number of distribution installed in the last output as well? I like it too :)

If you want the original, absolute no output option, you can just pipe the stdout and stderr output to /dev/null.

--scandeps, --format

Another great feature cpanm 1.4 brings in is the new --scandeps command. This is now built in to the cpanminus dependency resolution system, and instead of building and installing a distribution, it scans the dependency tree and prints them as a text tree format, by default.

> cpanm -q --scandeps Catalyst::Runtime
Catalyst-Runtime-5.80032
\_ Sub-Exporter-0.982
 \_ Params-Util-1.03
 \_ Sub-Install-0.925
 \_ Data-OptList-0.106
\_ MooseX-Emulate-Class-Accessor-Fast-0.00903
 \_ namespace-clean-0.20
...

This takes into consideration that which modules you already have in your library path, so only the modules that you have to install or upgrade will be printed. If you try to see the dep tree against the vanilla perl, you can combine it with the -L option.

--scandeps command now takes --format option too, so that you can print this information as a JSON/YAML format to use in a different program, or the dists format which is pretty interesting: it prints out the AUTHOR/Dist-ver.tar.gz format in the depth first search order, which means you can replay the installation in other machines by saving the output and the tarball as well, which you can do with the new --save-dists option.

There are some occasions where --scandeps doesn't work like expected. See the Wiki page first if the Known Issues there explains your situation.

There are other improvements like a better core module detection in -L, and the support for Bundle:: modules.

Try out the new great cpanm 1.4 by running cpanm --self-upgrade.

Note that this is probably the last major update for cpanminus. I'll react to bug fixes and toolchain updates, but the effort to make a great, minimal CPAN client has reached its goal.

I still have a plan to write a new client, and that's in the works already :)

cpanm 1.3 will disable --uninst-shadows by default for perl >= 5.12

This is more of a note to self than an announcement.

cpanminus 1.3 will be released soon, with just one fix - it will disable the --unint-shadows option by default if your perl is newer than 5.12.

Uninstalling shadow module files has been only necessary when you upgrade core modules that gets installed to 'site' library path, or upgrade modules that once has been implemented in XS but switched to pure perl. Because perl prior to 5.12 had its perl library path before site_perl, you have to remove those shadows in perl path, so that the updated one can be picked up.

Perl 5.12 fixed this problem by reorganizing the library include path: site_perl path now comes before the core perl path, so you actually don't need to remove the shadows. Removing those files now do more harm than good, with the awesome cpanm's -L (--local-lib-contained) option, since now you have one module in core 'perl' directory while those dependencies are installed into 'site' - so when you try to isolate perl's "core-only" perl environment, you have a broken installation such as Module::Build.

Disabling uninst-shadows is not a complete solution to this either. This keeps the copy of modules that come with perl in 'perl' directory, while modules that get installed into 'perl' still get updated inside 'perl', which makes it hard for cpanm -L to work properly.

We may need to be able to have a way to isolate the "virgin perl" library path by probably copying the files once you install a fresh perl with tools like perlbrew.

The alternative is to not use lib::core::only as a way to figure out the core module dependency, and instead use Module::CoreList as a dictionary, which has the benefit of being able to say "installs non-core modules for 5.8.x" even if you build on, say, perl 5.13 which has more core modules than previous versions.

FindBin, __FILE__, $0 and PSGI woes

tl;dr: Do not use if (__FILE__ eq $0) in your .psgi code, that's not supposed to work since Plack 0.9971.

There's been a known issue in Starman and Plack based Perl web servers in general, where FindBin module used in your application doesn't return an expected value.

To make things even worse with Starman, when it hits the --max-requests and tries to restart the worker, it eventually crashes the process because the FindBin module can't even find the value of $0 and gets confused.

Today, after a quick discussion around this too frequently asked issues on the #plack IRC channel, I added a very simple commit that localizes the value of $0 to the path of .psgi file. It seems to solve those issues nicely: the use of FindBin correctly returns the expected path of .psgi file, and Starman doesn't crash when restarting.

However it turns out (thanks to clkao for the heads up), there're lots of .psgi files in the wild that has the following idiom, including my own scripts:

my $app = sub { ... };

if (__FILE__ eq $0) { 
    # called from the command line
    run_server_with($app);
} else {
    # called from PSGI web servers
    return $app;
}

It basically checks if __FILE__ is the same value as $0 and if it is so, consider that the .psgi (or .pl) script is being run from the command line, and try to launch the application with a server using modules like Plack::Runner. And the commit in question (already shipped as 0.9971 on CPAN) breaks this assumption.

The quick workaround we can think of are the use of other conditions, such as:

# PLACK_ENV is set by plackup etc.
unless ($ENV{PLACK_ENV}) { ... }

# caller is set if .psgi is evaluated
unless (caller) { ... }

# when Plack::Util::load_psgi() is called, package is automatically mangled
# similar to the Python equivalent idiom
if (__PACKAGE__ eq 'main') { ... }

I'm not 100% sure yet, whether it's better to revert the change, or to recommend everyone to stop using the if ($0 eq __FILE__) idiom in .psgi scripts and switch to one of these other conditions.

If you suffer from this bug, my apologies. You can either revert to earlier Plack release, or switch to one of those suggested other conditions, since they're meant to be safer and don't get affected by the $0 change.

If you have a really strong opinion that we should revert the change, chime in on a comment or on the irc channel #plack on irc.perl.org.

UPDATE: After another round of discussion, we agreed that this is a good change, and 0.9972 added a quick check in the development environment to see if your .psgi file contains that idiom (with a regular expression :)) to give you a warning in that case.

b-mobile now revealed their IDEOS, too, with new VOIP service

Following up my Japanese mobile plan hackery post, e-mobile just announced that they will release the new Android device dubbed "Pocket WiFi S".

via bulknews.typepad.com

Looks like Huawei's cheap unlocked Android phone IDEOS is to open the pandora's box of Japanese smartphone market.

Now the popular prepaid SIM carrier b-mobile also sells the IDEOS. Of course it's unlocked, runs 2.2 and allows tethering like e-mobile will do with their Pocket WiFi S.

The only difference with e-mobile is that b-mobile doesn't require contract, and because it doesn't provide voice service by default (unless you get the "tallkng SIM") you don't need to even sign nor provide your personal information at all. That's great for travelers too.

The other surprising news is that they will ship IDEOS with the SIP client (which I guess is based on sipdroid from the look of it), and they will start 050- based VOIP service in January, and it costs 480 JPY/mo with 10 minutes call, and then 10 JPY / 30 secs for more calls. I believe the service could be used with any unlocked phones when you put a b-mobile SIM card on it, like iPhone 4, Galaxy S or Nexus S. This is a huge deal.

It'd be awesome if it allows forwarding to Skype or GV/Gizmo for really cheap... Let's wait for the details from them.

Running Eugene's Ginger clone on Vibrant

via yfrog.com

I've been using Samsung's Galaxy S from T-Mobile aka Vibrant since July. Overall I'm happy with this phone except its GPS is crap and the software is laggy. But now that Nexus S is out with Gingerbread, still running 2.1 (Eclair) and waiting for T-Mobile/Samsung to update to Froyo sounds ridiculous, and i decided to take on the root thing.

It turns out, as mostly expected, that the rooting and installation process is very painless and the result is pleasant. You can just go to XDA to root the phone, install ClockworkMod recovery, backup the current stock ROM (JI6 for me) and install Eugene_373's Ginger Clone R2. Took me like half an hour and now I'm on Android 2.2, without Samsung bloatware, with 2.3 based UI and keyboard. This ROM runs really snappy, the battery life is greatly improved and it has Wi-Fi tethering and I have an unlock code so I could use this phone with b-mobile SIM next time I visit Japan. 

Oh, you might ask why not CyanogenMod. It's just not ready for Galaxy S Family yet.

I'm not envious for Nexus S anymore, except the front-facing camera that i don't have :)

Re: Percent-encoding URIs in Perl - Mark Stosberg

utf8::encode $_[0] if utf8::is_utf8 $_[0];

via mark.stosberg.com

`utf8::encode if utf8::is_utf8` is a bug. Don't do it.

There are reasons URI::Escape provides two functions, uri_escape and uri_escape_utf8. The former handles arbitrary byte strings, whether it's utf-8 or not, and the latter handles given strings as (possibly wide) characters.

Doing utf8::encode based on the utf8 flag is so wrong. It just tells the internal representation of a scalar and some latin-1 range characters might be encoded in a bogus way unless you explicitly call utf8::ugprade on it before passing to the function.

Nothing's wrong with URI::Escape providing the uri_escape that handles arbitrary encodings. While I agree most web pages should just use UTF-8 for everything in 2010, using other text encodings such as EUC-JP, or even arbitrary binary data (such as JPEG data) in URL is not invalid either.

Mark's quote from RFC3986 is done without its context. It says "When a new URI scheme defines a component that represents textual data consisting of characters from [UCS] ..." which doesn't apply when we encode parameters for the web URLs. It's not a new URI scheme, it shouldn't necessarily represent "textual data" either.

Don't rely on utf8 flags of the strings. See perlunitut and perlunifaq for more details.

Emobile to Release Pocket Wifi S

Dubbed “S” for Simple and Smart, the new Pocket Wifi is not just a portable wireless router, but is also a fully functional smartphone running Android 2.2.

via mobileinjapan.com

Following up my Japanese mobile plan hackery post, e-mobile just announced that they will release the new Android device dubbed "Pocket WiFi S".

I'd call whoever decided to name this device "Pocket WiFi S" a marketing genius. This phone is just an unlocked Android 2.2 device from the Chinese manufacturer Huawei. It is unique that it's totally unlocked and speaks 1700MHz that's compatible to e-mobile HPSA band, but otherwise this is just an Android phone.

E-mobile, unlike other evil carriers, instead of deleting the WiFi tethering option, fully enables it and embraces it by installing the one-click toggle widget in the home screen, and calls the device like a mobile wi-fi router that has voice capabilities.

They sell it for 19800 JPY for the full retail, and with the Smartphone Lite plan it's as low as 280 JPY to keep it while you don't use. I might consider switching to this one once my current Touch Diamond 2 year contract is up in April. I don't use the TD anymore. The phone is crap and it only does USB/BT tethering and WiFi hotspot feature is a paid option and is fleaky anyway.

Whenever i visit Japan, I insert their SIM card into NTT's portable router and use it as a data sim rather than voice.

Home audio stuff (Does HDMI/3D surround matter?)

lazyweb high-def audio geeks,

I just sold my current YAMAHA receiver RX-V659BL from 2006 today, because its depth is way beyond the new TV rack's depth I bought at IKEA (how lame reason is that!), and am now thinking of buying a new receiver to replace that.

My only requirement for the receiver is that its depth should be less than 15 inches and should have more than 5.1 channels.

So far I've been looking at: Sony's STR-DN1010, Pioneer's VSX-1020-K and Onkyo's HT-RC260. They are mostly the same: priced around $300-400, 7.1 channel surround systems and have multiple HDMI inputs and supports HDMI 1.4 for 3D audio. Out of three, Sony looks the best to me since my new TV will also be Sony's.

However, my question is simple: Do I need these fancy HDMI/3D things in the new setup?

My TV display will be Sony's BRAVIA HX800 that is 3D ready apparently, and has multiple HDMI inputs and optical/toslink outputs. The devices I play on TV will be: Mac mini (2009, no HDMI out), Apple TV (HDMI) and Xbox 360 (HDMI). So far, no real plan for the 3D sources like PS3 or standalone BD players. And I have 5.1 Yamaha speakers set.

In this simple setup, I think I can just connect all devices to the TV with HDMI rather than to the receiver, and then connect TV's toslink output back to the receiver. My understanding is that the setup won't do high-end surround stuff like HDMI 1.4 3D or Dolby TrueHD, but so far as I don't have 3D sources nor 7 speakers yet it doesn't seem to matter.

Am I missing something?

cpanm 1.1.2 - now with clean work directory

cpanm 1.1.2 is now shipped to CPAN with a small but great improvement: now it automatically cleans up the stale "work directories", so you don't need to worry about the ~/.cpanm/work/* taking up a lot of disk space after a heavy use of cpanm for 1 year etc.

The reason I tried to avoid implementing the cleanup was that I really dislike the default behavior of CPAN.pm, which is:

• It does the cleanup before your installation begins. This feels rude to me, like when you make a phone call to a customer support, they take the call but go on hold, saying "Hey I need to pee. Can you hold on for a minute?"
• The expiration is based on file sizes, which might have been nice when the disks are expensive. But disks are cheap now, and doing based on file size requires a lot of stat() calls.

So cpanm's cleanup behavior is solely based on the timestamps. By default it cleans up all the work directories older than 7 days. And the nice thing about this is that the work directories have its creation timestamp as its filename, so there won't be any stat() calls required for each work directories, even if you have many.

And yes, cleanup happens after your installation has finished. You won't really notice that it's happening.

cpanm 1.1 hearts minicpan and darkpan

App-cpanminus 1.1000 by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa - CPAN - FriendFeed

cpanm 1.1 is shipped, and with `--mirror-only` option, you can use it with your local minicpan mirror, or your own company's CPAN index (aka DarkPAN).

The only reason for a few experienced perl programmers who loves cpanm but can't use cpanm offline or at work was the lack of the proper mirror index querying support.

cpanm always has required an internet connection to resolve module name and dependencies, and always relies on CPAN Meta DB and search.cpan.org to query package index.

It's been a fair requirement for 95% of the usage, but again, for an experienced hacker who spends their most of airplane's time hacking code on their laptops, the offline support to fallback to local minicpan would be really nice. (Even though many airlines nowadays provide in-flight Wi-Fi :))

So I opened a bug to support `--mirror-only` option to bypass these internet queries and parse mirror's own 02packages.txt.gz file for module resolution a while ago, and a couple of people have tried implementing it in their own branches. (Thank you!)

Today I merged one of those implementations, and improved a little bit to make it run even faster and more network efficient.  The way to use it is really simple, just run cpanm with options such as:

cpanm --mirror ~/minicpan --mirror-only Plack

and it will use your minicpan local mirror as the only place to resolve module names and download tarballs from. (TIP: you can alias this like `minicpanm` to save typing) 

The current code extracts the gzipped file and reads the whole in memory and does a quick regular expression, which is very fast and not /that/ RAM hoggy (02packages is like 6MB file when uncompressed), but i hope this could be improved to be even more RAM efficient and still fast enough in the upcoming 1.1.x releases.

This is a huge step in cpanm history and makes it even more useful. You can upgrade your cpanm to the latest version by running `cpanm --self-upgrade`.

Enjoy!

The Notorious SGK38: Japan Sells T-Shirts with Logo of the Anonymous User Sengoku38 Who Leaked Video Footage of the Japan-China Boat Collision on YouTube - Japan Real Time - WSJ

Sengoku38, the notorious online handle of the person who leaked video clips of the Japan-China trawler collision on YouTube, can now claim the kind of fame that accompanies such recognition. Online shop ClubT began selling T-shirts emblazoned with “SGK38”, a shorthand version of the anonymous video poster’s online identity, the day after reels of the collision were published on YouTube on November 4. Why SGK38? Because it’s not a million miles from the acronym for all-conquering chart-toppers AKB48 – and it looks pretty similar too.

via blogs.wsj.com

Wow this is so awesome and I want the t-shirt.

Re: What Versions of Core Perl Should Module Authors Support?

Module authors, especially authors of widely used modules, should start thinking about this soon. Perl 5.14 should be out in early 2011, making it the second major version on the new release schedule. Once 5.16 comes out in 2012, I think we'll officially be in a new era of Perl 5. I hope that Moose and other major Perl modules will have a clearly defined policy for Perl version support before 5.16 comes out.

via blog.urth.org

Interesing post from Dave Rolsky on which version of perl should the CPAN module authors support.

I've been doing "5.8.1 as maximum *and* minimum" for almost all of my CPAN modules for 7 years or so, and probably will continue doing it for another 3 years, until when perl 5.18 is supposed to be shipped.

If that becomes more painful, i.e. the new core features in perl 5.14 or later becomes too attempting to not use, I'd probably change my mind and categorize my modules for three levels, based on its popularity (i.e. audience of the module).

First, modules that are extremely popular, widely used or have many downtstream dependents should have a better compatiblity support than other modules. Candidates are cpanminus and Plack. Their current perl minimum dependency is 5.8.1, and I see no problems at this point, doing so for another 3 years or so.

Second, new modules I create could be less conservative. Because they are new and don't have existing users, I could worry less about the breakage by depending on new versions of perl. Their current code won't be screwed - they just get upset when installing modules to see their version of perl is not supported :p So, if I make a new module that heavily uses smartmatch, or relies on the improved Unicode regular expression semantics in perl 5.14, I'm happy to do so.

Lastly, upgrading existing modules will be something in-between. I won't stick 5.8 to those things forever, but will definitely think twice about ditching 5.8. Honestly, most of my modules are write-only per se, except the one that has been actively developed such as cpanm or Plack. So the only chance they drop 5.8 support to prefer later version of perl would be when we want to rewrite everything, or when the module in question has a bug because of core perl's known problems.

see you FTTH, for now

I've been using the FTTH (Fiber to the Home) internet speed since 2004 when I was in Tokyo.

I moved to San Francisco in 2006 and used Comcast for just a few weeks and found that my apartment building has a better option, webpass that provides a shared FTTH 100 Mbps up/down and have been a happy customer since then.

Next week I'm moving to a new place, which is actually just a few blocks from the current place, but the place is not the lucky one that has webpass installed. I contacted webpass sales, and while my new landlord agrees to install the service, webpass claims that I need an approval from Home Owners Association at the new place that the majority of the tenants/owners would use it as a primary service, which might be possible but would take time.

So for now I signed up for sonic.net fusion. It's an ADSL 2+ service with unlimited landline voice, priced 20Mbps for $50. Not terrible, but it's a huge step down from FTTH that I've been spoiled for 7 years. I really wish sonic.net moves on to the fiber development soon, or that HOA approves webpass or Verizon FiOS coming to SF.

Amazon.co.jp MP3 launches

Amazon MP3、日本版スタート　DRMフリーで音楽配信 - ITmedia News

Amazon finally launches MP3 store in Japan. Like the one in US, their catalog is entirely DRM free.

It lacks supports from most major labels except EMI, so people are skeptical for the success of the service, but I believe it's a good step to the right direction.

Japan is the only country where iTunes Music Store still implements its DRM system, FairPlay. I don't quite understand why those music publishers still "demand" DRM they sell on the internet. They sell the CDs and even rent(!) them, which can be ripped to your computer without any protection, in a few seconds.

It just doesn't make sense at all.

I pay for music. A lot. Because I like music, and I'd love to listen to my favorite music anywhere on any devices. With DRM, that's just impossible. If I pirate music, that's all possible.

That's just wrong.

宇多田ヒカル - Goodbye Happiness

via www.youtube.com

Absolutely loving this video. Awesome self references to Traveling and Automatic videoclip :)

Hacking Japanese mobile plans for geeks (or travelers)

For this trip to Japan I've tried some new plans and gadgets (3G SIM, phones and mobile routers) to stay online in Japan. Here are some of the tips I can share with you.

b-mobile

If all you need is a data SIM that gives you EDGE~3G speed (300kbps up/down), go get b-mobile SIM. It's an MVNO of NTT DoCoMo so it's covered wherever you go, and it's cheap (2980 JPY/mo). All you need is an unlocked phone that has tethering option and can do 2100MHz, like unlocked iPhone 4, Nexus One or Samsung I-9000 (Galaxy S international model). They have an micro SIM option for the iPhone 4 or iPad as well.

There's no contract required, but beware that you have to buy from their online site if you want the 30 day plan. You can also buy longer term plan (for 6 months and 12 months) at stores like Bic Camera or Yodobashi. Read more about b-mobile to know the details.

This time I borrowed one b-mobile SIM from my friend and use it with Nexus One. It works well with my wife's iPhone 4 and macbook albeit the bandwidth is not that fast.

e-mobile

e-mobile has various (so complicated) phone plans with unlimited 3G data, but for travelers the most interesting one is EM charge. It's much faster than b-mobile (7.2 Mbps) and is still reasonably priced (4410 JPY/mo) for unlimited data.

The biggest problem with e-mobile though is that they use 1700MHz, which most internationalphones don't support. US T-Mobile phones has 1700MHz support but as far as I know it's not really compatible.

So you have to get a router or USB stick that works with this band. For this trip, I found a friend who has the good portable wifi router with the support for this band, but otherwise you could buy "Pocket Wi-Fi" for $100 or so, or can rent 光ポータブル (PWR-100F) wi-fi router from NTT for 300 JPY/mo, if you (or your parents) are the Flet's 光 FTTH customer.

UPDATE (12/13/2010): e-mobile will release a new Android phone that has Froyo's WiFi tethering fully enabled, for $200 initial cost and $3-45/mo.

UQ WiMAX

There's a new WiMAX service being deployed in the central Tokyo and it's UQ WiMAX. 

It's too bad that they don't have prepaid (no contract) plans other than 600 JPY/day, which is kind of ridiculous. The most sensible plan for now is 380 JPY for unused months and 4980 JPY for unlimited WiMAX speeds. So it might be interesting for you if you often visit Japan. The coverage is still very limited, and if you go outside the JR yamanote line area, chances are that they're not covered yet.

Voice Calls

These days the necessity for voice calls gets really rare, but sometimes when you meet with someone or talk to your parents who don't savvy computers, you might still need the voice phone calls.

However with this unlimited data connection you can do whatever you want with your laptop and cellphones, without turning on the expensive roaming for your own carrier. For this trip I didn't enable T-Mobile's roaming at all, although the phone can use DoCoMo or Softbank band for voice calls.

The easiest option to make phone calls is obviously Skype. SkypeOut gives you the ability to make phone calls for a reasonable price, if you want to receive the call you have to buy SkypeIn for the Japanese numbers, which is about $6/mo.

Unfortunately the latest release of Skype Android app doesn't support my cellphone, T-Mobile Vibrant Galaxy S (annoying!). That made me go the other, more complicated way, to make and receive phone calls on my Android for free (or for cheap) over WiFi.

The tools you need are: Google Voice account, Gizmo5 account and SIP client sipdroid (or Fring). The setup is quite straightforward, and with this, now you can make free calls to US numbers from anywhere you have the WiFi or 3G (via a mobile router).

One day I got a voice message from my doctor, and I immediately got a notification from Android GV app, and i could call back within a minute to actually schedule the next appointment, for free. It was amazing.

To receive a phone call from local numbers, the easiest is to ask them to call international phone calls to your GV number. Since GV numbers are US only right now, that might be expensive to the callers depending on which plans they're using. Again, you can get SkypeIn number and forward that to your GV number.

With this setup you have to pay a few extra cents whenever you receive phone calls since they're multiple forwardings included, but it's only a SkypeOut rate to US numbers (2-3c/min) that actually costs, and Google Voice to US numbers or gizmo5 via SIP is free for now, so it's not a huge deal.

 

YAPC::Asia 2010

YAPC::Asia 2010 is now over. Actually it gets over once you blog it, so if you haven't, blog it now ;)

This year i am invited by the organizer JPA to give a keynote. It is actually the first time for a Japanese speaker to give a keynote, but it is a great honor to be back to the conference I started as a guest speaker :)

I talked about Plack and PSGI, but without anything about code, but more about the philosophical stuff - basically the best practice we employed with or without being aware, that made this Plack project successful.

It seemed to be accepted well, and hope it inspired everyone, especially the part I stole from best practice solution's slogan: JFDI and STFUAWSC.

Just in case if it was misunderstood (because I was asked to clarify by some people at the party yesterday): i did not mean that you should always avoid deep hierarchical namespace and use top-level namespace. It's quite opposite. You have to be really careful choosing top-level namespace, but once you do it, you have to be explicitly aware that you're giving your software/module an actual "name".

Larry's Keynote

Larry's beginning keynote was really interesting. Like always, he gives an interesting insight about programming language differences compared with the natural language differences, in this case obviously English vs. Japanese.

In English you can say "must" and Japanese you should say "しなくてはならない". If you say the opposite, English gets "must not" and Japanese gets "いけない". So Japanese is shorter when you say about things you should NOT do. 

Larry explains that the difference of language does not matter what you can say with the language, but what you must say when you use the language. The restriction that a language gives you, that is.

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are always fun to watch, and this year is no exception. The talk where a rubyist guy was DISsing the whole PHP stuff and created a new Sinatra-like framework "Vicious" (Sinatra -> My Way -> Sid Vicious) and Phack (PHP + Rack) was so funny. 

Also there was a talk about embedding Perl to OpenCOBOL to let COBOL/JCL talk to MySQL using Perl's DBI as a bridge. It's called cob_perl and the guy explained "It actually works."

Anyhow, it always makes me happy to get back to Japanese perl community, like it feels like real home. I hope to see all of you, and probably more new people coming in as well, next year.

RIP Satoshi Kon

There are some elements that often appear in the movies and almost never fail to make me cry.

One of them is a message (letter, hidden gifts, photos) from a dead person, and the other is unconditional love of a parent for their children, which is often hidden because of their bad relationship. Yeah, they are often pretty cheesy but i might be an easy person to cry of those things.

Satoshi Kon has passed away yesterday, and honestly I just barely knew him of Millennium Actress and Paprika and didn't realize that he's such a popular director, especially outside Japan.

Anyhow, his last message as a farewall blog post (mirror) is a really personal message and has both of those "elements" to bring tears to me, and although it's painful to read, it is really really touching.

The first half of his post has been translated but yet the best part has not been, as of this writing. It's when he finally decided to meet their parents before dying, and on the next day they flew out of Sapporo, north of Japan to his home in Tokyo:

寝たきりとなった私を一目見るなり母が言った言葉が忘れられない。
「ごめんねぇ！丈夫に産んでやれなくて！」
何も言えなかった。

I will never forget what my mother told me right after she saw me, who's now unable to get out of the bed.

"I'm sorry! For not bringing you into this world with a stronger body!"

I was speechless.

OMG. This literally made me cry aloud.

May he rest in peace - and I'm looking forward to his next and final work The Dreaming Machine.

UPDATE: now the full post is translated.

K-ON!! ep20

It's no embarrassment to confess that K-ON!! ep20 just made me cry. The way they talked after the live show was so touching, and the actors played it really nicely. It also sort of reminds me of the days when I played with my friends at schools and a college.

K-ON! in general is just a good comedy with cute girls, sometimes playing music (but not always). Kyo-ani has proven that they can make a really touching episode out of it, like they did with Lucky Star ep22.

Samsung Galaxy S GPS-gate: two problems, not one (and what to do about it)

You may have noticed the update on our Epic 4G review from yesterday where we lauded the fact that Samsung seemed to have fixed the GPS problem plaguing every other Galaxy S flavor released thus far, but it turns out there are actually two distinct issues.

via www.engadget.com

I've been using Samsung's Vibrant (T-Mobile's subsidized Galaxy S) and yes there's an issue with GPS. It takes a while to get GPS locks if you're inside a building or in the bus in San Francisco. It just takes forever, or even worse it freezes your phone and force reboots.

If you're walking outside without any tall buildings you can often get a lock pretty quickly so I don't think it's a broken hardware but an issue with software/firmware. For now I disable GPS most of the time since I don't drive a car and don't need GPS navigation. Wireless networks based location service just works for the most of my use case such as Maps, Yelp and Foursquare.

Hope Samsung fixes this with the firmware update with the Froyo release in September.

ramen

This is a test post.
Sent from my Galaxy S

New Phone!

Thought it's high time to get a decent, non-dumb phone. I've been investigating which phone to buy, namely iPhone 4, EVO 4G, Droid X, HTC Incredible, Captivate, Nexus One to name a few.

And today I decided to buy this gizmo from Samsung: T-Mobile Vibrant Galaxy S. This has the beautiful Super AMOLED display and runs Android 2.1 (upgradable to 2.2 later this year), and has 1GHz Coretex Hummingbird processor. I walked in to the T-MO shop at the 3rd and Market this morning around 9:30 and there was literally no customer at all and getting this phone was a snap :)

I got it with the Even More Plus plan, which I should pay with the full retail price ($499) to get the unlimited text and web + 500 minutes for $59 monthly. It's $20 cheaper than getting with the 2 year contract, so i thought it's a better deal. And since there's no contract, there's no early termination fee either.

So far i've been really liking the phone. I set up Google, facebook, Twitter accounts to the system, and the calendar, emails and contact lists have been all synced wirelessly without any issues so far. It comes with the Swype keyboard and it's really easy to type English. I installed Simeji to type Japanese but it definitely needs some time to get used to.

The biggest problem with this phone, if any, is that the design is a total rip-off of iPhone from the hardware to the Samsung's own customization of the Android OS (home screen and application drawer). I wouldn't really mind that much but some people might not like that.

Some of the things I've done so far, working and not working:

• Galaxy S has Twitter/Facebook/Myspace integration in the system (like you see with Froyo as well) and I configured them, but when I installed Twitter/Facebook Android apps, I needed to enter the information again, and now I see two Twitter configs in the "Accounts/Sync" section, which is not nice.
• I installed 1password and copied the .agilekeychain file in the root of /sd/ as it's specified, but it doesn't work (Can't find the file in the SD card) UPDATE: it's apparently Galaxy S mounts SD card path in a weird way, /sdcard and /sdcard/sd. I copied the file to the actual root of the mounted SD rather than /sd and now it seems to work.
• Tethering! Bluetooth DUN didn't seem to work, but tethering via USB + pdanet software works nicely. No rooting required.
• I'll try rooting once 2.2 port or anything shiny like cyanogenmod gets available, but so far i updated the launcher to ADWLauncher to get the best of 2.2/Sense/Galaxy drawer and nice widgets.
• The accounts preference has "Flickr" account type and it has [ ... ]@photos.flickr.com. I wonder what I should enter and what kind of syncing it gives to me.
• Apps I installed: ADWLauncher, 1password, Dropbox, Facebook, fourquare, Goggles, K-9 Mail, Kindle, mSpot, PdaNet, Remember the Milk, Simeji, Twitter. If you have more suggestions, let me know in the comment :)
• The screen gets locked really quickly when i leave it for only a few secs and requiring the pass code every time it gets locked is pain in the nut. Anyway to customize this? I tried lockbot, but the security code features seems like a paid one, and I'd love to get it for free ;) UPDATE: Autolock app available on the market seems to do this. I wonder how much battery life apps like this would drain by always running, but I'll see.
• I sometimes see a lag/stalling screen when the OS writes something to the filesystem e.g. changing config and saving it. It apparently is due to the Samsung's own filesystem configuration which makes the app data writes slow. If you want to fix it, you apparently have to root the phone and  symlink the path to SD card or load the kernel that supports ext3 and format and mount the SD card . As I said I'd see how annoying it gets (so far, not a huge deal yet) and once I can't put up with it I'll try root it.

The Tatami Galaxy

via www.hulu.com

Just finished the series - it's without doubt the best anime of this spring season! (well, putting the fantastic K-ON aside :)) Directed by Masaaki Yuasa of Kemonozume and Kaiba. All episodes are available on Hulu with English subs. Highly recommended.

Back from YAPC::NA 2010

via www.flickr.com

Just got back from the wonderful YAPC::NA 2010.

I enjoyed the great hospitality at Ohio State Union, with lots of interesting talks and always wonderful hallway tracks, with ESPN playing TV in the lobby to watch the world cup soccer, where three keynotes from Jesse vincent, Stevan Little and Matt S. Trout all mentioned Plack and cpanminus.

It's good to meet everyone from the community again - feels really like home.

Hats off to the hard working organizers from Columbus.

mod_status for Starman and Starlet

最近リリースされた Hatena::Let (ラボ) や、1年ぐらい前にリリースしたはてなコピィ (ラボ) は PSGI を喋るように対応した Ridge (はてな社内フレームワーク) を使っています。 (過程で Plack を利用させてもらっています)。今のところは現状それぞれ、let は Starman, copie は mod_perl2 で動いています (copie も mod_perl2 でなくす予定です)。

via subtech.g.hatena.ne.jp

cho45 works for Hatena and there they converted their web framework Ridge to run on PSGI (nice).

For the operation/monitoring purpose they need something similar to Apache's mod_status to see which workers is handling which URLs. He added that feature to Starman and Starlet, so the output of ps can show the status and requests in the terminal. He also hacked up Plack middleware for ServerStatus which shows mod_status like HTML in /server-status URL.

All of these look great - I'll take a look at them to see if it's possible to merge them down.

2010 by Clammbon

via itunes.apple.com

Loving this album.

Starman 0.2000, delayed and --preload-app

I just shipped Starman 0.2000 to CPAN. This release contains bug fixes from Graham Barr and Patrick Donelan on rare 100% cpu spin loops and a bug in Keep-alive handling on HTTP/1.0, but also has a major incompatible feature: preloading apps.

Preloading applications

plackup and all of its handlers, by default loads your application before running it on the server. So if you say:

  plackup -s Starlet myapp.psgi

the myapp.psgi file is compiled in the master (parent) process and then the Starlet server preforks off children to run the compiled application. This saves a lot of memory in copy-on-write friendly environment, but might cause problems, if you want to initialize resources in the myapp.psgi compilation time, such as opening sockets or doing database connections.

Delayed loader

To solve this problem and make Starman's default safer, I introduced a new loader for Plack: Delayed. This is close to the Shotgun loader but it delays the compilation of the application until the first request time. It also passes the callback web servers can call to initialize the application earlier than the runtime, which Starman 0.2000's starman exeuctable now makes use of by default.

All plackup handlers still use the default loader by default, so if you want to use this loader with Starlet, you should say:

  plackup -L Delayed -s Starlet myapp.psgi

but Starman's starman command automatically adds -L Delayed by default, so you don't need to. To continue preloading the app in the master to save memory (and you're sure that loading your app doesn't cause any shared resource issues), you can say:

  starman --preload-app myapp.psgi

to keep the behavior pre 0.2000. Alternatively you can also say:

  starman -MCatalyst -MDBIx::Class myapp.psgi

to load modules in the master, but delays the compilation of application until the per-children init hook.

BTW with this change the default behavior of Starman becomes the same with Rack's Unicorn. Read more about this in starman -h.

cpanminus 1.0 is coming

I'm now in Vienna, Austria to join the Perl QA Hackathon 2010.

The hackathon is sponsored by Vienna perl mongers and 123people, and all the accommodation and flights are paid by them. I appreciate their help to make CPAN QA/Testing toolchain better.

On day 1 and 2 i've been working on fixing bugs and wishlists for cpanminus supposedly, and just now i shipped cpanminus 0.999_01, the first release candidate for cpanminus 1.0. I'll tell you what's new for this release.

Less Features

The name cpan "minus" has just started as a counter joke for the CPANPLUS client, and adding features to what's supposed to be config-free and deps-free and tiny/light/whatever just doesn't sound right. So i deleted all the developers-oriented features from cpanminus, such as:

• plugins support
• --recent command

Some of you, like only 8-10 people on the planet who enjoyed the early adaptation of the plugin system might be disappointed that the plugins are not supported anymore. No worries, i'm starting to write another CPAN client (temporary codenamed "jam" :)), that works on top of cpanminus and supports all of the plugins we developed for cpanminus, just as they are. 

Until that happens, you can continue using the cpanminus 0.9934, which is the last version of the cpanm that supports plugins.

More metadata retrieval

I refactored the code base so cpanm always resolves the package name to distribution using CPAN Meta DB and then use search.cpan.org's metadata index service before downloading the tarball. This makes lots of command run faster, especially the --skip-installed option.

Prompts on failures

One of the thing that annoys you when installing CPAN modules is the test failures. I mean, testing is a great culture of Perl and CPAN but when the test fails, CPAN clients refuses to install without the 'force' mode, and it's so annoying.

cpanminus default behavior is consistent to other clients as CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS: the module is not installed when the test fails (unless --force is specified). 

In 1.0 we add --prompt option, which gives you the chance to fix the failures. When you run cpanm with --prompt option (which you can set by default if you set it in PERL_CPANM_OPT environment variable), and the test fails, it asks you:

  Testing CPAN-Test-Dummy-Perl5-Build-Fails-1.03 failed.
  You can s)kip, r)etry, f)orce install or l)ook ? [s] 

It might be obvious, but "skip", the default choice is to skip installing the module and proceed with other dependencies. "retry" re-runs the test again to see if it was a temporary failure. "force" would, obviously, force install the module, which is very handy if you're really sure that it's just a bad test failure that doesn't matter.

Also, the "look" command is pretty nice. It allows you to open the working directory with the shell, pretty much like CPAN.pm's 'look' command, to see if there's any missing configuration in your system, and you can fix there. And you exit the sub shell and type 'r' to retry installing the module.

Of course you can hit Control-c in the prompt to bail out the entire installation process.

Bailing out when dependencies fail

This is related to the previous section, but cpanminus 1.0 changed the behavior when one ore more dependencies failed to install.

Say, you're trying to install Plack and all of its dependencies. Imagine one of its dependencies, like HTTP::Body, failed the test and hence not installed.

Previously, cpanminus still continues the build process of Plack itself, and if Plack doesn't define an unit test that uses HTTP::Body, the test accidentally passes and cpanminus succeeds to install Plack. The end result is that Plack is installed to your system, however when you're trying to use Plack::Request, you'll get a runtime error like "Can't locate HTTP/Body.pm in @INC ...".

This is a broken installation and should be avoided.

cpanminus 1.0 will bail out the build process when one or more dependencies failed to install, by default. With --prompt option enabled, cpanminus will ask you:

  Installing the following dependencies failed:
  ==> HTTP::Body
  Do you want to continue building Plack-0.9928 anyway? [n] 

So if you're really sure that the dependency failure doesn't matter, you can still continue installing the module by hitting 'y'. Of course you can also use the --force option to force install anything, like you've always been able to.

(Note that Plack thing is just an example, and since Plack has tests that uses HTTP::Body, it won't happen :D)

Minor improvements

These are the major improvements and changes in cpanminus 1.0 but there are more minor improvements. Such as setting a proper exit code, better error messages, uninstalling shadows by default and being able to specify your favorite mirror with --mirror. See the Changes file or the newly added `man cpanm` to see all the details.

I'll start working on a new CPAN client, as well as specifying cpanminus API so that the new client can make use of it. Stay tuned :) 

Sunaba - Perl web apps in the cloud

It is a great pleasure that my 4 hour hack last night lets me now introduce: Sunaba the perl sandbox environment to run any PSGI/Plack applications.

Since we started the Plack project, it has always been my hope that someday we can port this PSGI interface on the "Cloud" infrastructure like Google AppEngine or Heroku for Ruby Rack applications.

The hardest part to implement that is to create a sandbox perl runtime environment, and fortunately Dan Kogai did the hardest part already. Like an year ago he created this lleval API which runs your code in a sandbox (chroot + FreeBSD ptrace) and Shibuya.pm folks tried to jailbreak it, with some interesting results. You can read the slides how he implemented this sandbox.

I wouldn't say this is completely secure, but it works pretty well - you can't open local files, run arbitrary XS code nor system("rm -fr /"). while(1) would be killed in 1 second timeout. Meanwhile there are some popular modules besides core modules installed such as LWP, YAML and JSON.

My Sunaba application is just a web frontend with Tatsumaki + Twiggy + SQLite, that basically allows you to create and edit applications on the browser, as well as a runner PSGI application that serializes the current PSGI $env and sends it into Dan's box to get the response back.

All the service restrictions apply, and NO WARRANTY. But it's a good playground to toy with the PSGI interface. Well, Sunaba means "sandbox" in Japanese so you can play and make your hands dirty :)

I can think of more enhancements to this, such as minimal/tiny framework support (i wonder what's the source code size limit of Dan's service - maybe 8K or something?) and the ability to install middleware components etc. etc. Also, for now Kogai-san's server is the best I can think of, but theoretically we can run the apps on other sandbox environments such as CodePad or Ideone. The only difference is that Kogai-san is my friend and it's less likely to be banned for the excessive use :)

Frequently Asked Questions

• Is there a limit for the code size? - Sunaba doesn't have any limit on the code size at this moment but the backend server appears to limit the source code size up to something like 4K.
• How do you determine who can edit the application? - It's currently based on your IP address and User-Agent string. Yes, it's not a very good authentication.
• Are the application URLs permanent? - No, I plan to clean up applications periodically. It's a sandbox after all, you know :)

The future of cpanminus

I started developing cpanminus one night in February when i got stuck with running CPAN.pm on linode VPS, and you may have noticed from its name, it's rather some kind of toy/fun project that's not meant to be serious. I was even considering to put it under Acme:: namespace.

But in a few days, it turned out people got really excited and think it's really a great idea. That was my surprise as well as a pleasure. One week later I started implementing more features such as local::lib bootstrap and a plugin system, which is still a developer-only easter egg feature (you need to look at the source code how to enable that :)).

Simple and Hackable

I know a lot of people who have switched from CPAN.pm/CPANPLUS to cpanm just because cpanminus just does what they want. I also know a couple of hacker type of users who uses cpanm because they want to use its bleeding edge features such as showing changes automatically or to be growled when installation was successful.

I also know there's an use case to use cpanm as a bootstrapping tool, using curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - Module, or to use it as the default installation tool for Module::AutoInstall, Dist::Zilla or Acme::Everything.

So I guess there are two use cases, or major interests to cpanminus. One is that they want a CPAN client that is tiny, config-free, deps-free and just works with sane defaults for 99% of the users. The other is a CPAN client that is easy to understand, hackable and can be extended.

Conflicts

I think those two use cases will conflict eventually. Although the plugin system is written carefully, adding features like growl notification or cpanratings integration to a tool that is meant to "just work" is very weird. Features such as "checking out the code from github and build using dzil" shouldn't be used by 99% of the people. There've been criticisms on cpanratings as well as on IRC that cpanminus SLOC is now getting bigger than CPAN's CPAN::Dist which i think is fair.

Plans

So here's a quick strawman proposal.

1) I will fix the remaining tasks and wishlist for cpanminus such as "proper mirror configuration support" or "prompt when the installation fails", and drop cpanminus current plugin architecture and make it a 1.0 release, then freeze the features.

2) A separate tool that meets the purpose of "cpanm for hackers" will be created. Let's call it foo here because that obviously won't be the official name. foo will inherit the existing plugin features of cpanminus and actually uses cpanm (as a command line or with scripting API interface, not sure yet) when building things.

foo can be of course bootstrapped by cpanminus, but won't have the restrictions that cpanminus has -- you can use LWP or JSON, and can assume perl 5.8.1 etc. However it should still be kept as lightweight and has as minimal dependencies as possible. Features such as cpan-outdated or uninstalling modules would become a subcommand for foo. 

The biggest change i want to make for it actually is to make the subcommand system the default -- so it will be `foo install Plack` rather than `cpan Plack`. (and of course plugins can register its own sub commands).

I guess if there's a criticism against this plan, that'd be "So you're now REALLY reimplementing the rest of CPAN.pm/CPANPLUS. Why not contributing them back?", and i think it's a fair argument. But at the same time that's exactly the reason to separate out foo from cpanminus and keep it as simple as possible.

Let me know what your thoughts are -- i plan to work on these changes at the QA hackathon next weekend in Vienna. 

PSGI standalone web servers

Now we have 4 (or actually more) PSGI standalone web servers. Here's a quick cheat sheet to compare them:

• HTTP::Server::PSGI - core in Plack. Should work on all systems with perl 5.8.1 or later. No preforking nor keep-alives. Best for the quick development with plackup and testing with Plack::Test.
• HTTP::Server::Simple::PSGI - only dependent on HTTP::Server::Simple which is absolute core-only and should work back to perl 5.6. Best to write PSGI embedded web server application even without Plack.
• Starman - High performance preforking web server with HTTP/1.1 and UNIX domain socket support. it's based on Andy Grundma's Catalyst::Engine::HTTP::Prefork, and works exactly like Rack's Unicorn. nginx's best friend.
• Starlet - HTTP::Server::PSGI + Server::Starter + Parallel::Prefork. Much simpler than Starman and less features, best to run behind proxy.

Personally I recommend Starman for the production use, running it behind nginx, Varnish or lighttpd. Starlet would be great if you don't need Starman's fancy features like dynamic server pool configuration or HTTP/1.1 support, and if you're a big fan of Kazuho Oku's software, which I myself am :)

All of them have Plack adapters so you can change the backend easily with plackup -s Starman etc. to test your application in your system.

Plack Blog

There is no main project on github that gathers people, even though we can see a fair amount of MooseX:: projects. Most of the developers will work on different modules, that may not have the same purpose. Lately we have seen a fair amount of work on various Plack stuff, mainly middleware, but also HTTP servers (twiggy, starman, …) and web framework (dancer).

via blog.plackperl.org

Plack has now its own (re)Blog where I will microblog and reblog what's been hot around Plack.

No worries, It doesn't mean I would stop talking about Plack here - instead I will talk (probably more) about my thoughts here while lightly reblogging people's great stuff on Plack's own dedicate blog.

Keep blogging everyone!

"Practical" modern Perl for Ruby/Python people

"Modern Perl" people usually focus on stuff like Catalyst, Moose and DBIx::Class -- they're awesome modules and Web/ORM thing you should look at, but here's another take to show off what "recent" perl would look like to Ruby/Python web developers who are familiar with Rack and WSGI.

This is a PSGI application that connects to Twitter streaming API and displays the recent 10 tweets received from the firehose.

It uses some modern tools worth explaining:

PSGI and Plack to abstract web servers (like WSGI and Rack), autobox.pm for autoboxing, Markapl for templating (like Markaby in Camping), AnyEvent for non-blocking event loops (like eventmachine) and Twiggy to run the non-blocking PSGI apps on AnyEvent (like Thin or node.js).

_{Note for Perl developers: Original script was using perl5i to enable autoboxing, which should make my code slightly more similar to Ruby/Python code where everything is an object, because otherwise they'd pick it up and say "Argh look at that ugly array slicing syntax!" which nukes the entire point of this post. However perl5i has some global side effects to interfere with some AnyEvent code if you're using perl 5.10.0 - i updated it to use autobox::Core directly.}

Perfume new videoclip

via www.youtube.com

This is so lovely.

Surprised that this is actually uploaded to Tokuma Japan's official YouTube account -- it's one step away from Perfume songs being available on iTunes, eh?

Perl and Plack: Big in Japan (and TechCrunch compliant!)

Japan has been known as a country where a shiny new technologies such as weird USB gadgets, cellphone TV/wallets or RFID devices are introduced first and adapted in a really early stage. Plack is not an exception.

Yesterday at the DeNA's technology seminar two of the biggest social networking sites in Japan, mixi and mobage-town (both articles on TechCrunch) revealed and explained that they are running their OpenSocial providers on Plack, using Starman and Twiggy (*1).

Also the mega portal livedoor is experimenting Plack stuff on their popular RSS/Atom feed reader livedoor reader API, combined with Coro, AnyEvent and nginx. I'm pretty sure Kyoto-based blogging and digg-like social news site Hatena also is testing Plack and hopefully we can get some news on that in upcoming YAPC in Tokyo.

Think Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Google Reader all use Perl, Plack and deploy their apps on all of those PSGI web servers. That's what's happening there!

Oh just in case you're curious: livedoor uses Sledge, the framework I developed 7 years ago while mixi, mobage-town and Hatena use their own in-house web frameworks rather than the ones on CPAN like Catalyst.

_{[1] Technically they're deploying the old Plack::Server::* versions on production but they consider switching to the new versions soon.}

Plack/PSGI URL dispatchers

miyagawa's plack-dispatching-samples at master - GitHub

I've been toying with Plack and PSGI URL dispatching a little bit and wanted to see what those dispatching modules on CPAN and PSGI/Plack frameworks are capable of and how the code would look like.

This github repository contains a bunch of examples PSGI applications using dispatcher modules on CPAN such as Path::Dispatcher or HTTP::Router to impelment the same functionalities.

This is to serve as a "cookbook" style of quick comparison as well as a basis of my improvement against Plack::Request and Tatsumaki's URL dispatchers i've been planning to do before making a Plack 1.0 release.

Take a look, and fork your own if you add more examples.

Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (no spoilers)

via www.kyotoanimation.co.jp

Just watched the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya movie at Tokyo Shinjuku Wald9 yesterday.

It was awesome. It's a long movie (2h42m) but i'd dare say it's totally worth it, and the quality of the movie is totally worth watching in a theater.

I'm not a deep fan of Haruhi series so I only know about the TV and DVD anime series (haven't read any of those light novels) but this disappearance story is probably the best for filming. It's somewhat related to most of the scenes you're familiar with and explains some missing pieces (but adds more as well) from "Sasanoha Rhapsody".

There were some scenes that actually made me cry. I'll give it 9.5 stars out of 10, which is probably the highest rank for an anime movie i've ever seen -- as good as "The girl who leapt through time".

There were two british girls next to me watching the movie and after the movie I talked to them; they apparently enjoyed the movie i.e. the quality of moving pictures but without a proper Japanese skill it's hard for them to grasp this complex story.

It might take some time before it gets a non-JP release with subs but I totally recommend this if you enjoyed the first season and the Sasanoha Rhapsody episode. (All other eps from season 2 are just crap - you can ignore them :))

On cpanminus

The Perl community seems abuzz about the cool new cpanminus client by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. After about two weeks of development, this is a reasonably functional CPAN client with just a fraction of the overhead, complexity and verbosity of the CPAN and CPANPLUS clients that come with the Perl core.

via www.dagolden.com

I've been working on yet another CPAN client cpanminus and it's got a lot of attentions and great feedbacks so far. I don't have yet much time to write about it but David Golden who maintains a lot of CPAN ecosystem infrastructure such as Module::Build, Test::Reporter and CPAN.pm, has kindly written a great post reflecting the views from CPAN toolchain people. You must read.

Also, I appreciate your excitement and kind words on cpanminus but please do not just trash CPAN(PLUS). Criticism is fine, but calling them bloated is just too lame. They have reasons for their flexibilities and verbosities to make sure it works everywhere everytime, which cpanminus can fortunately ignore.

PLAYER by capsule

via itunes.apple.com

Thank you YAMAHA for releasing PLAYER first on iTunes for $9.9 without DRM. You made my day.

Japanese Funk?

Perfume - Monochrome Effect on TV

via www.dailymotion.com

OMG Perfume's "Monochrome Effect", one my favorite Japanese electro girls band played on American Dad!!

"Give it a chance everybody loves it in the future."

Good name for Perl UNIX forking web server?

I've been working on Perl based UNIX-y preforking high-performance web server for PSGI. 

I named it Nomo after the baseball player Nomo because his favorite is "fork"ball and his nick is Tornado which reminds you of another web server. However it seems the term has some offensive/negative meanings. You could argue that Urban Dictionary can make up offensive meanings for any words but searching the term on twitter gives me a sad feeling for sure.

So i think i should rename this since it's fairly premature and hasn't released to CPAN and nobody's really using it yet. I have a few candidates in my mind. Since this software is heavily inspired by Unicorn, rack web server most of them have some inspirations from Unicorn.

• Qilin or Kirin - Chinese/Japanese myth animal like Unicorn. Also known as a Japanese beer maker. Cons: Qilin is hard to tell the spellings over speeches, Kirin is sort of taken.
• Starman - My favorite song by the Japanese rock band Unicorn. Also known as a song by David Bowie, and a character from my favorite video game Earthbound.
• Nijinsky - After T-Rex's "She was born to be my Unicorn" lyrics. Nijinsky is a dancer from Russia so it plays well with nginx as well :) 
• HTTP::Server::PSGI::Net::Server::Prefork - This is the most boring but most Perl/CPAN-ish descriptive name. Hard to say on the speech and people would end up calling it HSPNSP on IRC.

My current favorite is Starman, but tell me your thoughts in the comments :)

Famous on github

San Francisco

1. Chris Wanstrath, GitHub
2. Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, Six Apart
3. Leah Culver, Six Apart
4. Square Inc
5. Aman Gupta, ruby eventmachine maintainer

via www.hackdiary.com

I'm apparently the most famous/active/influential/social/whatever developer on github who lives in SF and is not a github founder :)