Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Eric Alterman: “The death and life of the American newspaper”

The always enriching New Yorker has a fascinating article in the March 31st issue by Eric Alterman, titled “Out Of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper“. While covering the trials and tribulations of the current newspaper / print-media industry and “that sucking sound” caused by the Internet, one snippet stood out because [...]

*sigh*, the music industry

A twit (I forget which one I have so many; distractions!) pointed me towards the announcement of Sell-A-Band receiving a new round of funding.
Since one of my current projects is 音レボ (Otorevo), which despite the struggles is growing organically, I eagerly read through the comments. Two in particular that made me think:
commenter 1:

the problem with [...]

Google Checkout now in Japan!

Hey cool – looks like Google Checkout is now available in Japanese!
I’m clapping my hands and lickin’ my chops!

My buddy Jun

He’s back! w00t!

UTF-8, PHP headers, and BOMs

BOMs in a php file just killed 5 hours of my time. Ugh.
The gist of it is, if you call PHP’s header() and you have a BOM in a file that was loaded by PHP (in my case, a language file; the BOM was <feff>), the BOM will actually trigger a header call before *your* [...]

Converse or be cast aside

A little bit of Craigslist history and some food for thought on the importance of engaging your audience. Thanks Gen.

Good Crew releases a music video

Good Crew releases a PV! (PV = “promotional video” in Japanese English parlance).
Give it a spin, then let me share how much was spent on making it:

15,000 yen.
Update: The YouTube link is here. Thanks Gen!

日本国内CodeIgniterユーザー会 & カンファレンス

For English speakers living in Japan and enthusiastic about CodeIgniter, there will be a lecture / gathering (and ostensibly a party afterwards) at the Open Source Conference next week / end.
最近話題のCode Igniterにご興味を持っている方へ、来週のオープンソースカンファレンスでCodeIgniterのセミナーが行われます。是非参加を！
CodeIgniter is a wonderfully light yet robust and easily extendable PHP framework that has helped me develop miistation.com, kirakirajin.com (now defunct), and 2kurabe.com quickly [...]

Flickr photo used commercially!

Very minor highlight, but one of my Flickr photos from exactly a year ago in Las Vegas was recently chosen for Schmaps Guides. Click on the “Tournament of Kings” and watch the rotating set of images in the upper right. Just kinda cool to me that hip-pocket “photographers” like me get to see our images [...]

Some broadband stats and rankings, particularly regarding Japan

During my weekend morning routine of reviewing the past week’s events, I was reminded of a brief discussion on Japan’s placement in worldwide broadband rankings. The term “broadband” can have a few different meanings depending on the user, but a quick search pulled up some recent statistics. The OECD basically defines broadband as anything greater [...]