My thoughts on the kindle: 1 vs 2 and the iphone app
First things first: The Kindle is awesome
I read a lot. I am not like those crazy people who read a book a day or anything, but i have been reading up to about 2 books a week for the past few years. They are not crazy books, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but they are not small books. I read to chill out. My day pattern is to go to work, work, get home, nap, hang out with hiromi, play computer and then read until i fall alseep. The reading part is VERY important to get my mind and body to a place where I can actually sleep. Needless to say, I take my reading seriously.
I ordered an original Kindle way back when they first came out. I was back-ordered for quite awhile. It was enough time for me to question whether or not I would like the device. Luckily, my friend edith was also in the same place – she and i chatted incessantly about what the future would be like with the Kindle. It was a bright future.
I ended up getting it around mid january 08. The first book I read was Terror by Dan Simmons. That is a serious business book. I had started the hardcover of the book earlier in the month and finished it on the kindle. That was my test. It was successful. Although i hated the fact that kindle pages and paper pages don’t really line up – the experience was the same. I was able to read fast and was able to forget about the buttons and terrible design of the kindle (like Zach Klein said – it looked like the consumer electronics version of the Pontiac Aztec).
After Terror, I read the appropriate Diamond Age by Neal Stephenon. I felt that I was closer to the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” than I had been before. I was reading books on an electronic device that was hardy, easy to use and quick. I was able to give it a seemingly unlimited amount of content and could use it for quite some time without a battery change. Like I said above – it is awesome.
Around this time I discovered the dark and scary underworld that is ebooks on the internet. There is an awesome community of people surrounding ebooks. They are involved with liberating DRM’d ebooks, converting from one format to another, uploading mass libraries of free ebooks, cataloging ebooks, etc etc. It is awesome. If you are interested in free content – there is an almost unlimited amount of free content that is compatible with the Kindle available online. There is also an unlimited amount of pirated books too. They are harder to find and I feel terrible when I find them (I apparently would rather pay authors than musicians. hah). One thing i noticed while I was experimenting with ebooks – technical manuals and what not don’t render as well as non-technical books. I think it has to do with the number of diagrams and tables. They don’t render terribly – but often are not nearly accurate to what i imagine the author intended.
How you get the ebooks to the kindle is part of the magic. The kindle has what Amazon like to call the whispernet. It is, as far as i can tell, a sprint EVDO modem built into the device. Amazon uses this to wirelessly deliver content to your kindle that you buy from amazon.com. Once again – it is awesome. You click on a book in amazon and BAM – its on your kindle. You are not limited to using this JUST for amazon’s content. You can do it with your own ebooks as well. All you need to do is register your email address with amazon and then send books to the yourname@kindle.com email address. The books will appear on your kindle for a small cost ($0.10 i think). If you don’t want ot pay for it, you can send the content to yourname@free.kindle.com and it will return the book in the kindle format. You can do this .txt, .pdf and .doc files easily.
The kindle file format is just the .MOBI ebook format. Which in turn similar to the .PRC ebook format. The Mobi file is a remnant from the Palm days. it is basically the Palm Database format that was used for various applications on the original palm platform. What this means is that all the ebooks that end in .mobi and .prc are natively compatible with the kindle. If you had purchased books for use with the mobipocket reader (an awesome ebook reader for windows), there is a good chance that they were .mobi files. You can copy those to the documents folder of your kindle (when you plug it in to your computer via USB) and they will show up in the book list without any work. This really opens up your options for cheap or free ebooks.
The trick then is to figure out how to convert pdf files and what not to well formed, well meta data’d .mobi files. This makes your kindle happy and allows you to continue to sort by author without having your email address be listed as the author.
I went a year reading just the Kindle. I read two paper books that were not available in a digital format during this time. It was interesting. I felt as though I needed to work out to lift the heavy hardcover books. The kindle makes you forget how heavy books can be. My arms are now wusses.
When the Kindle 2 was announced, i ordered two of them. One for me and one for Hiromi.
The kindle 2 is a huge improvement on the Kindle 1. It is thinner, better performing and a bit easier to use. It is not as easy to turn a page – but it is also not as easy to accidentally turn a page either. I like the new design. The optional leather case is amazing. It works VERY well. i was having to remove the leather case from the original when I would read it – i don’t have that problem with the new one.
There are a lot of small software tweaks that have trickled their way to the Kindle 1 as well. They are separating out your uploaded content from the content that came from directly Amazon. I am also having a hard time finding things that are lost on the kindle. I suppose i could search – but i never think of that when I am looking for content. The interface on the Kindle 2 is much faster. The pages turn faster and the books load faster. The screen is amazing. I really like it. I don’t like the fact that I can’t easily turn off the wireless with a hardware switch. I liked being able to not interrupt my reading to turn wireless on or off.
All in all – the Kindle 2 is a huge improvment over the Kindle 1. If you are able to upgrade, do it. And then give your original kindle to someone close to you who wants one. That is the best plan.
Hiromi loves hers. I was worried that she wouldn’t like it – but it turns out that it works very well for her. She likes the size and the ease of use. She took to it very quickly.
When I got my kindle 2 I was showing a couple of my coworkers some of the data about it. Specifically the whispersync stuff. I told them that I wouldn’t be surprised if they released an iPhone app that allowed ebook reading on the Kindle. I based this on the success of the Stanza app. I stated to my buddies that I was only confused as to the strategy to release such an app, especially on how it could accidently stifle the Kindle 2 sales.
Then a couple days later the Kindle app was released. Like the Kindle – it is awesome. hah. With the Kindle app for the iphone and the Kindle, you are able to sync your placemarks on the books you are reading. You could read to a certain point in a novel while on your commute – then go to a meeting and pick up your iphone and continue reading from where you left off on your kindle. Then you coudl pick up the kindle and it would sync to where you left off on the iphone. That is cool. I tried it and it works. It is a bit wonky – but for the most part it works great. The only issue i have with the app is that it doesn’t have ANY of the content that you upload via email. It is only amazon purchased content. Lame. I read a lot of “found” books and a lot of purchased books. An example is a series of books where 2-4 are in the amazon kindle store, but book 1 isn’t. I find book 1 elsewhere and then buy 2-4. However, I can’t read book 1 on my iphone. Only the kindle. WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO. ;) I understand amazon’s reasoning for this – and I don’t expect it to change. I do wish i could push my emailed books into their cloud and handle them a bit better (with metadata, etc). I doubt that will happen.
If you read a lot and want a great reading experience, you should buy a kindle.
Python Oauth Client ? Excla.im
I built Excla.im quite awhile ago, well before Twitter unleased their oauth beta program. Regardless, Chris Messina tagged the Excla.im sign up process as an anty pattern within his flickr stream. I was bummed because i would have loved to use Oauth to authenticate Excla.im. But because of the tagging, i was constantly thinking about how to remove the anti pattern.
Finally, Twitter released the Oauth Beta and I was able to bribe @Al3x to give me access (which reminds me, i need to send my bribe). I then sat for a month looking at the various python examples for OAuth and basically said “What The Fuck” over and over again. There were no solid examples and my experience with OAuth in PHP was a total hack so i could post shit to fireeagle. I was SOL as to finding a guide.
Then abrah.am released his PHP twitter OAuth lib. It worked really well and was pretty much just plug and play to use it in a PHP app. Nice. I wanted that but in python. I decided to spend a minute or two and create it.
The base library my client is using is the the OAuth lib from google gdata-python-client project. I figure it is a working client and is in production use – so it should be solid. There are very few changes between it and the official client that is released through oauth.net.
The client is rather simple, in fact it should work with other api providers with very little work. You can check it out at github. Please let me know feedback. i am a python n00b – so give me your best shot/code review. I am using Google Code as a issue tracker, so feel free to post some bugs.
It is rather pluggable. I was able to launch excla.im (on app engine) with oauth support in no time. I am currently not holding passwords for anyone. It is an awesome feeling.
Seven Things (goddamn internet friends)
I was tagged by both Eli White and Brian Fling in this dastardly meme regarding 7 things. I am usually a HUGE fan of all things meme – and kind of regard myself as a certified meme expert. However this whole meme that requires a lot of work – I.E. blogging is something entirely different. I think i actually like it, but i am not entirely sure yet ;).
I do find it hilarious that almost every blog post regarding this seven things starts with a bit of self deprecation and surprise at how this meme stumbled upon innocent them. Well, it did come as a surprise – so I guess i understand.
Well here it goes. Seven things about me:
One:
I grew up without a TV. When I was quite young (~3) my parents got rid of their TV. I am not completely sure why. I imagine it had something to do with money (the lack of) and priorities being making sure my brother and I were clothed and fed. My parents got their first TV after getting rid of the previous one when I was about 21. My parents used to rent a TV for big events (war, olympics, etc) and my brother and I would watch the TV manically until it was returned to the rental place. We also used to rent a TV and VCR about once or twice a year to watch all the movies we could in the time alloted. Those were awesome times. I currently don’t have a TV.
Two:
I have been paid to YoYo and Juggle in front of a LOT of people. I guess that makes me a professional. Heh. In college my two best buddies (Matiss and Brian) and myself started a “circus” group. We juggled and did shows for all sorts of things. We opened for Incubus, Sir Mix A Lot, and a few other boring bands. We protest juggled as a group called Jugglers against homophobia – protesting people like Elizabeth Dole and her homophobic antics. After college I continued to support my friends by juggling on the side. It was a really fun time. I don’t juggle as much as i would like, but i still try to make it to conventions and what not. It is a lot of fun.
Three:
My first computer was an Apple ][c. My dad got it in some trade. My brother and I would build text games in basic. Shortly after that I got in to BBSs. Mostly we called places like &totse and downloaded things that would get me in trouble. It was an awesome time. I suggest checking out the BBS Documentary to get an idea of how awesome it actually was.
Four:
I met my lovely wife Hiromi while in college in iowa. We moved to Chicago together in 2001 to live together as roommates. Eventually, it became clear that our relationship was much more than that. We got married in 2006 and happily live in Chicago. She is awesome.
Five:
I read a lot. I always have. Growing up without a TV will do that to a person. I read mostly fiction, but will stray to the dark side and read non-fiction every once and awhile. I usually read about an hour before going to bed. It helps calm me down and is a good way for me to get into the sleeping groove. I have recently been into ebooks and use a Amazon Kindle to read them. I find that I do miss regularly reading paper books, but the convenience of reading ebooks is awesome. I can’t wait until the eInk displays and associated readers are smaller, easier to use and cheaper.
Six:
I love David Bowie. It isn’t a love that requires posters and discussion or anything. It is kind of similar to how people who grew up catholic talk about religion. David Bowie has just always been there for me. My first record I picked for myself was Ziggy Stardust. My first concert was the Bowie’s Sound + Vision tour. When I was quite younger, my mom took me to get my hair cut and I brought along my Labyrinth LP to show the stylist that I wanted David Bowie hair. I ended up with a rat tail.
Seven:
Although I always knew I would end up with a Computer Science degree – I fought it as long as I could. In college I studied the history of Catholicism for a couple years before actually jumping into computer science. It was awesome. I ended up concentrating on Giordano Bruno and the his (untimely) multi-world theory. It was a lot of fun and lead me to have an unnatural interest in the mechanics of theology.
That’s it!
To make this official, I now have to tag 7 people to make a Seven Things list on their blog.
Ready? These Seven People please report to the meme office and make a Seven Things entry on your blog:
The rules of this ?game? for those that I have tagged:
There yea have it. I continued the meme. I am not one to be a meme killer ;) This was fun. Thanks to Eli and Brian for making it happen!
2008 was a great year.
A lot of fun things happened. I started speaking more. I started using linux as my desktop. Obama won. I played with XMPP manically. I built some neat applications and Threadless continued to be awesome.
On my blog, the following entires got a decent amount of attention:
The theme seemed to be XMPP and Hosting – which, if you have hung out with me recently, is rather close to what i like to talk about in real life ;). I think that I will continue this trend into 2009, but hopefully blog about it more.
I did notice that I ended up blogging less this year than almost any year before (2008: 30 entries, 2007: 84 entries, 2006: 154 entries, 2005: 166 entries, 2004: 275 entries, 2003: 290 entries, 2002: 266 entries, 2001: 103 entries, 2000: 27 entries). I have been blogging for about 8 years for a total of about 1395 entries – which means that this 1 year accounts for about ~2% of my blog entries. haha. I am guessing that 2% accounts for about 90% of my blog traffic. I am not a new years resolution type of guy, but I would like to blog more regularly. Hopefully get my percentage up a bit. maybe 100 posts. It isn’t THAT hard. ;)
To offset the lack of blogging, I twittered a lot. In fact, I updated twitter around 3251 times (this number is approximate because of the twitter api and paging). Of the 3251 tweets, 852 were replies. I replied to paulsmith the most with 25 replies. ryankanno was second with 20 replies. I said awesome around 249 times. I talked about sleep 71 times. I mentioned Hiromi 122 times. I said fuck about 46 times. I talked about work 238 times. My fake new years resolution about twitter is to stop having twitter steal blog entries. I saw that written somewhere and I laughed at how often that happens. I think of a blog and instead just twitter about it. It kills the entry and doesn’t flesh out my thoughts as much. I think the best plan is to integrate and use both mediums to develop a post.
My flickr usage dropped significantly this year. Kind of a bummer because i LOVE taking pictures. Hiromi is currently telling me that we don’t take enough picture together. It looks like i took only ~800 pictures in 2008. I blame this on the iPhone and how slow its camera is. In previous years i have used shozu and a 360 device. This let me upload picture directly after i took them and most often in the background. I need to take more pictures. I wish i had more insight into my flickr pictures. I need to build out my archive a bit more to keep track of everything like i did with twitter. It is quite handy.
Work was awesome in 2008. We had some large projects that launched a bit rougher than i would have liked, but they turned out awesome. Typetees.com, theselectseries.com, threadlesskids.com and the new threadless.com are all awesome. The team that worked on them are all amazing. I couldn’t ask for a better team of technologists, production people, operations people and warehouse people to help make technology at Threadless be awesome. I can’t wait to see what is in the pipeline for 2009.
Seriously – 2008 was a great year. I can’t wait to see what 2009 brings. I hope more fun, more blog entires, more tweets and more pictures.
Hello everyone.
I have been busy. Threadless just ended its annual holiday sale (went out with a bang). Hiromi and I have been busy getting read for our holiday party with my parents on christmas (today!) and i have been hacking on a bunch of stuff in my spare time. Hiromi made an amazing dinner and we ate it. ;) It was a great time. We missed Dylan and Sarah, but we will hopefully see them soon.
This year has been great thus far and I will attempt to memorialize it in a year end post around the 1st. However, in the meantime I wanted to take a moment and say “HI” and go ahead and wish everyone a Happy Holidays. I hope everyone discovered their proper amount of conspicuous consumer. I know that we did.
Although, I certainly don’t update my blog quite as often as I would like (or my mom would like) – I do update my twitter status quite often and post a number of pictures to flickr. I am hopefully going to start updating this blog a bit more, but in the meantime you are welcome to check out my interweb activity aggregation page and the associated RSS feed (props to broox who showed me his, which I copied).
I have been working hard to release the work that I have been doing to expose some of the more interesting real time data about chicago transit. Currently it is very bus-centric, but that is hopefully changing.
The genesis for this API is some work I did awhile ago reverse engineering the CTA Bus Tracker mashup. I was able to expose the endpoints that powered their google maps mashup. In its original state – you can get some pretty awesome functionality and data. I am attempting to clean it up and make it more robust.
The native endpoints thus far are:
I have created a proxy for the endpoints that will do some caching and hopefully alleviate any crazy load the CTA servers would have if this API becomes popular.
I also did some work to push the UPOC alerts from the CTA riders community into a usable form. That endpoint is the first of hopefully many that can be used to grab real time information about the CTA. You can access it at:
Dan X O’Neil and myself hacked these alerts into the CTA Tweet bot that sends CTA updates via twitter. Pretty neat.
Moving forward with the API, I want to do a couple key things. The first is to return JSON instead of that terrible XML. The second is to create a couple endpoints that will help with finding the right bus at the right location. I am always looking for help with this stuff – so if you have any ideas – please let me know in the comments.
So far, there are not a whole lot of applications using this API. The only ones I have thus far are:
If you know of any others – let me know. I have a couple projects brewing myself that will hopefully add a shortcode, and a jabber bot for bus notifications and queries. Are there any things yall would like to see? I personally want a really solid native iphone app. It would be awesome to be able to have the iphone pinpoint your location and then tell you what the nearest buses are that are arriving soon. Also – replicating the bus tracker in an easier to use fashion would be excellent.
All of this API work wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Dylan Richard, Dan X O’Neil and Kevin Zolkiewicz. The CTA has also been amazingly cool with all of this – I really like those guys.
Release your applications inner API. Please.
I have recently been involved in talking to a local chicago entity about their unofficial API. It has been fun and deserves a blog entry of its own. However, this is not that blog entry – this blog entry is about mashups and the not so public APIs they often create.
In the past couple years i have constantly been tearing apart webapps. Either because I wearing my developer hat at work or because i am rocking on something at home. I have always been trying to figure out what goes on behind the scenes and wondering if i coudl use that to do something cool.
A couple weeks ago i decided to figure out what powered the CTA Bustracker Google Maps mash up and was able to expose the “hidden” api that powered the mashup. In a conversation I had with Dan x O’Neil about the unofficial API I was able to expose – he asked a question about mashups and APIs. It led me to rant about how there is so much untapped APIs out on the internet currently powering mashups, and other rich internet appliances. These APIs are not documented, are unofficial and will of course change. But think of the data and functionality that could come from all these mashups and startups who are building an API for internal use but could release it and empower their users to build something neat.
If you have built an application recently that has endpoints that is returning JSON for js frontend work, or is integrating with google maps, or is exposing endpoints for fun – PLEASE, please document it a bit, throw an API link on your site and let some enterprising and bored nerds build something on the thing you made. Don’t try to imagine how someone would use your endpoints – but expect to be surprised.
I need to do this with threadless – we built it to be very easy to break down and integrate into other peoples sites (image urls, etc). But, there is a secret API that we should be releasing, documenting and letting people use. Stay tuned.
Anyone who hung out with me in the last couple months has probably heard me rant and roll about my new stereo. It is awesome. I can’t shut up about it. I am addicted.
It all started a couple years ago when the SI Tripath Amp emerged on the market. It was a little amp that was reviewed as being MUCH bigger than its cost or its physical size. It was about 40 bucks at target and reviewed the same as amps costing thousands more. Pretty sweet.
I purchased a couple of these and immediately blew at least 2 of them fucking around, recasing and generally attempting to make them sound better than they sound stock. After giving my final one away to a former coworker of Hiromi’s – I stopped paying attention to the various blogs and audio reviews of the T Amps.
Until about 1.5 months ago. heh.
I read an article about building speakers on hackaday. It lead me to another article about building your own speaker hi-end cables. Which lead me to an article about reboxing a SI T-Amp. Full circle.
The T-Amp article lead me to start reading diyaudio.com for about 2 weeks straight. It was madness. I stopped programming, stopped hacking stuff and just started building out a new HiFi system in my head.
I read a bunch of reviews about amps, speakers, and all sorts of random topics – until i found this awesome 6moons review of the Trends Audio TA-10.1. The thing that was interesting about this review is that the 3rd page of the review mentioned some Klipsch speakers that i happen to own and have in my living room. The review mentioned how awesome the TA 10.1 was when matched with the Klipsch speakers, especially in a horizontal bi-amping configuration.
So I went ahead and picked up two of them from Audio Magus to bi-amp my klipsch monsters. I also picked up a CHEAP preamp from phonopreamps.com. In total i spent about $325 and picked up 2 amps and 1 preamp.
After they arrived, i was able to hook everything up and after a bit of burn in really hear how awesome it actually is. I am very happy with the results. I am not going to talk about soundstage or anything like that – just that it sounds awesome.
Since I am bi-amping my speakers – I went ahead and set both amps as poweramps (by a jumper inside the amp) and am using the preamp as the volume control. This works very well. My only gripe is that there is no remote, but that is a future addition.
For audio sources, i have an airport express, my turntable and a poor CD player.
The future of this system is exciting.
I am planning on getting a solid preamp. Probably a Dared SL 2000A. It seems that adding a tube preamp to my “digital” amp setup could offer some warmth to the system. It also has a remote for volume control. The only downside is that it only has 2 channels for input – which means that I will have to figure out one source to get rid of (turntable most likely).
The next thing I would like to add is a couple DACs to do the D/A conversion for my Airport Express and my CD transport. I am looking at the Super Pro DAC707SE. It is cheap, well reviewed and has USB support if I choose to add the DAC to one of my computers as a source. Having a DAC should make my Airport Express experience better when listening to lossless audio files. It will also make the shitty CD player sound a lot better. Ultimately, I would like to get a better cd player – which leads me to my next plan.
The CD transport is world is pretty nuts. It seems that every single transport available is in the thousands, and that there isn’t any really a DIY CD transport option that is accessible. There is one compelling option for DIY – the Shigaclone. It is a direct clone of the Shigaraki Transport, however the insides are from a JVC boombox (JVC RC-EZ31). The details are at diyaudio. Unlike the other clones out there, the Shigaclone seems to be VERY hands on and just a bit past my skill level. I am waiting for a dedicated howto that explains all the various parts of the shigaclone and how I can make one without reading 1800 forum posts. In the meantime, i will have to find an alternative.
The alternative I have thus far is a 1994 NEC Multispin CDR-401G external CD-ROM. It has play/pause/forward/back buttons and has a digital coax out. It apparently sounds terrible, however once it is hooked to a DAC, it works wonderfully. It is VERY hard to find.
So for a CD transport, unless i want to spend a million bucks, I have two choices. Build a clone or buy a vintage CDROM.
I decided that the part of this i liked the best is the chase. I am very happy that I have a good sound system, but I am MORE excited about attempting to find the best system for cheap. Its a GREAT game.
I just need to make sure that i don’t fall for the tricks. I don’t want to spend ANY money on cables, nor money on speaker wire. Metal is metal.
Excla.im ? a replacement jabber bot
I use twitter quite a bit. I like to post to twitter in the most unobtrusive way possible. I don’t like to interupt my workflow to post a quick thought or update. When they used to have their Jabber bot running – it was easy for me to just type in my update and get on with my gmail session or work. I didn’t have to load a page that was often down, or use some other tool. I was bummed when the jabber bot went away. I needed it back to keep up with my use case.
I got tired of waiting, so i made Excla.im. It is a simple App Engine hosted application that allows a person to very simply update their twitter status from any jabber account. It is not very feature full, doesn’t update all the other sites and doesn’t do much else besides just interact with the twitter API. It is very simple.
The technology behind it is just as simple. The GAE app is written in python and uses the django helper. It is super simple and is basically a storage container for account info. It was a breeze to develop and fun to work with.
The Jabber bot was a bit more complicated. I ended up using the sleekxmpp library to do all the XMPP heavy lifting. It is an awesome library. Makes all the hard stuff easy. I then used Shane Hathaway’s daemon.py to help daemonize the bot (btw thanks to Anders for talking me through the dirtiness of daemonizing). To hook into twitter I used the python twitter library. It is featureful and super easy to use. It also supports in newer versions (post r112) setting the source.
I was then able to wrap this all up in a fancy little bot that on receiving a message, grabs encrypted credentials from the GAE app, sends the message to twitter’s api and then chills out. Pretty sweet. Currently all the heavy lifting is on the bot side, instead of on the webapp side – but i may change that.
At some point, I would like to be able to grab a users twitter friends updates and push them to their jabber ids. However – I have yet to figure out a nice and clean way to get the updates without having them seem batched. I have some ideas and a couple things fleshed out – but i don’t want to totally replicate twitter just to get my friends updates.
I am toying with putting the bot up on google code since it is pretty simple and could easily be hooked into almost any webapp. I think that the idea of a simple (simpler than sleekbot) webapp integrated jabber bot would have been helpful in writing this – and i imagine that people looking to do a similar thing may have use for my hacked together code.
A couple take aways from doing this project. First off – python is fun. Second – working with a designer makes things look a LOT better. Aaron Salmon took some time to make excla.im look MUCH better than it did. Check out his stuff and hire him.
A couple weeks ago, I was in japan for some family events. It was a great trip. Hanging out with Hiromi’s family and friends was awesome. Since we were going to be spending some free time in Tokyo, i decided to reach out to the Tokyo tech community and meet some people. I emailed my friend, Kristin, who had just been to Japan and asked her to hook me up with some cool cats in the tech scene.
She obliged and I was able to meet with an awesome group of people for a barcamp like event, and then hang out with another awesome guy who should be the tech tour guide of tokyo. I sadly missed some people from ibm, who were out of town on business – but there is always next time.
The barcamp like event was called AA-Camp. It was hosted by Akky AKIMOTO who is from Cybozu Labs. Cybozu labs is a really neat incubator ran by the Cubozu company. It seems that the goal of the lab is to create the next big thing in japanese technology. They give a lot of autonomy to their engineers and really allow them to flouish. The idea of incubators always seem so fun. Akky had two other technologists at the event besides myself. We worked on our own projects, then we presented about ourselves. A
The presentations were pretty biographical, covering what we were up to, currently working on and our employers. The first to present was Shin Ohno. He is a developer working with Akky to create a neat site for creating comparison tables called Narabe. Shin has an awesome plan. He travels and does development from his travels. Since all he needs is internet and a laptop, he is well connected no matter where he finds himself.
The next presenter was Akky. He ran through his work, cybozu, cybozu labs and some of their applications they have created. They have launched a number of neat applications – my favorite is mylingual – which is a firefox script that translates site from one language to another. sweet stuff. The other applications were PathTraq (alexa like site ranking) and Japanize (translating sites into japanese), doukaku (coding challenges) and S6 (a presentation framework). You can seem a summary of Akky’s presentation here. Its a bit different – but basically the same.
The next presenter was ARAI Shunichi. He was working in Ruby doing some neat things related to a startup in stealth mode. He showed us a Ruby framework he had written called Egalite which is supposed to be even simpler than rails.
It was awesome to hang out with technologists who were doing neat things and interested in talking about their projects. I hope i get another chance to go to an AA-Camp.
A couple days later, I met up with Tsutomu Kodama. He works for Japan Hopper, a site for backpackers and travelers in japan. it looks to be a google maps wiki mashup allow for people to annotate places and add cool traveler info. Neat. He took us to the small streets behind Omotesando and Harajuku. I was able to find some awesome shoes, check out amazing eyeglasses and eat at a really neat small resturant. I think that any technology person who is in Tokyo and wants to see neat things should attempt to contact Kodama. He is full of awesome places and good tips. He is also quite similar to myself (in a eeire way) and we got along quite well. A great afternoon.
Its exciting to have friends in Japan that are technologists. Now i know that next time i am there i will have the opportunity to network more and meet others.
