happylife

To sketch

I'm not an artistic person. I have never drawn or painted since I graduated from high school. I know I can't draw well, but I also know that everything gets better by practicing. I started drawing a sketch a week ago and I have drawn one or two sketches every day on my iPhone using a nice software named "netsketch." As you might know, the iPhone has a small touch screen and we can control everything by touching the screen with our fingers. Netsketch is a drawing software specially designed for the iPhone. The canvas of this software can be unlimitedly zoomed in and out by pinching two fingers. If you drew a wrong line, you can undo it as many times as you like. Every line you draw is stored as a vector data, so it never gets shaggy when it is zoomed in. Thanks to these functions, drawing a sketch with this software is really enjoyable. As the name of this software describes, we can draw collaboratively by using multiple iPhones which are connected to a same network. I'm sorry I can't experience this collaboration because I have no friend around me who has the iPhone with Netsketch!

midomi, the most impressive experience

Don't you have an irritating experience that you want to know the title of a song which you can only hum. I've had such a song for decades; it was a music which was played every day after school in my elementary school. I've sometimes asked my friends by humming the song "don't you know this song?" but no one helped me. As it was not exactly a song but an instrumental music, keyword search was useless. I found yesterday, a really helpful and almost impressive service named "midomi". It is originally a kind of web service which was released last year, but I didn't know anything about it until yesterday. When I was trying various applications on my iPhone3G, I happened to find this service and am now totally addicted to it. Can you believe that just by humming for seconds, you can get all the information about your song? As it is linked to YouTube, you can also enjoy video of your humming song if existed. Most of the search systems on the Internet have been keyword based, however, this service is based on humming and the searching accuracy is very high. I feel that the Internet service has rushed into the next generation.

remember the milk

It's a traditionally popular idea to put down what we should do on a to do list. We have been using a piece of paper as the place on which we write down the list so that we don't forget important things. Paper is still one of the most useful tool; easy, simple, handy and flexible, but it has a critical defect. The bigger the list, the more useless the list on a sheet of paper. We don't want to check a list of a hundred items on a paper list. It's a hard work to handle the list there; we can't easily search or sort each item. As the counter solution against this paper list, a lot of software tools have been developed and offered. I have used some of them, but I've not found the ultimate tool. This "remember the milk" is one of the most recent and popular tools that handle our to do lists. As it works as a free, web service, all you have to do is create your own account for the service. Once you create your account, you can put down as many to do items as you like and you can organize your list as you like later. You can also connect to this service via your mobile phone browser. It's really convenient, but I worry about an emergency case in which the service was shutdown and I lost all of my appointments. The oldest and simplest tool seems to have a great advantage on this point.

A natural ending

Microsoft reportedly gave up the plan to purchase Yahoo. Sure, it was a quite natural ending but I was more or less relieved to hear the news because the ridiculous plan had possibly come true with the vast Microsoft money. As is admitted by a lot of people, the main stage of the software business has been changed from OS or resident software running on a single machine to networking software based on the Internet, and therefore, Microsoft business has been fundamentally at a low ebb. The problem is that they have too much money and no good idea to use it efficiently. They have to increase their income according to the principle of capitalism and sometimes do evil things just like this time. I think the only way for Microsoft to survive the next generation is to divide itself into a lot of smaller companies and laboratories. I want them not to do evil things any more if they can't make beautiful things.

Parallel's world

This is the screen capture of my recent desktop. My computing environment has dramatically improved last week thanks to "Paralles Desktop" which is one of the most popular virtual machine software for Mac. It can create some so-called "virtual PCs" on your Macintosh computer so that you can run other OS including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux. Sure, I had heard a lot about it, but I didn't install it on my Mac because I was skeptical about its performance. Now, I'm regretting about my prejudice. It is way better than I expected. It is true that a virtual machine cannot be faster than a real machine on which it is running. However, in some cases on Parallels Desktop, it seems to be faster thanks to its clever algorithm. For example, XP can be restarted on Paralles in a few seconds while a real PC requires a few minutes. As you know and as you might get tired, Windows requires to be restarted several times a day and it consumes your precious minutes every day. It can be a great help for you. Another benefit of this great software is that you can make snapshots of your virtual machine whenever you like and you can get back to the point you captured the snapshot. It means that you can roll back to the past in case you made a critical mistake or your Windows hanged up. I think the world of Windows will gradually fall off and more and more people will start to transfer to Mac because you can even use Windows on your Mac just when you really need it.

Server down

My business server has been down for about ten hours and I couldn't sleep at all last night. Fortunately, all the data had been perfectly backed up and the damage was limited. The reason for the problem is clear; the hosting company of my site was closed! I had to find another company, acquire the new domain name, transfer the backup data to the new server, configure the system so that it can run perfectly on the new environment, and make an announcement to my service users. I had to do all the things in a very short term. It was extremely hectic and of course I don't like to experience such a thing again, but it was surely thrilling and exciting. Anyway, the old server was in Texas and more than 80 percent of my users were in Japan. I was thinking that it was a kind of waste of the Internet resources because most of the data had to be transfered via the submarine cable under the Pacific Ocean. Now, the new server is in Japan and
waste of resources would be reduced.

Connectivity

This white box, which is shorter and lighter than a pen, is a new USB modem. It can be used only in major cities in Japan, but its speed is faster than the so-called high-speed Internet in Vancouver and we can use it as much as we like for less than 5,000 yen per month. 7.2Mbps is the claimed best speed, which is fast enough for most purposes including movie downloads or video chatting. The number of home telephones in Japan is decreasing year by year owing to the development of cellphones. I think just the same thing would possibly happen in terms of the home Internet connections; the number of high-speed Internet connections at home would decrease because they can be replaced with this tiny mobile gadget. Which do you like better, to connect the Internet only from the designated place such as your room or to connect from anywhere you like including cafes, trains, friend's house and your home? I think the day when we can connect to anyone in the world from anywhere in the world will come soon.

Same as in my room

I have recently set up a VPN server in my room. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network which makes it possible to connect to the servers in my room from outside through the Internet as if it is a local area network. It is often described that VPN is just like a private tunnel built in the Internet. It is very secure because making a hole on the tunnel wall is a very tough work. It is true that security requires some costs and in this case, the network speed is traded off with the security. However, I am living in one of the happiest areas in the world in which the ultra high-speed Internet is provided for a reasonable price and now the trade-off of VPN is no longer the problem. I tried to enjoy watching movie and music in Mac Mini in my room from outside using my note PC connected via the wireless Internet. The experiment is successful and I could enjoy the movie and music as if I were in my room.

Digital print service

Seven Eleven is one of the largest convenience store chains in the world and it is especially successful in Japan. As you know, this type of store, lots of items and services in a small store, is extremely popular in Japan and we can find a couple of convenience stores every block in a small city and on each national road in the suburbs. Making good use of this popularity and universality, lots of new services are offered almost every week. This digital print service is one of them. We can get prints from our digital camera then and there by using this service. All we have to do is whipping out the memory card from the digital camera, inserting it into the copy machine in the store, selecting our favorite shots and number of prints and waiting for a few minutes. It's really easy and speedy. The cost of printing is 30 yen per print and in terms of the printing quality, I can't distinguish from the traditional DPE service. If you go on a trip with your friends and take a lot of pictures, you can exchange your pictures in the end of the trip before breaking up.

My work place as a hideaway

I have set up my three old computers in the new room in Obihiro. The prepared Internet connection had a few problems and it took a few days for me to solve all of them. Now I can do anything I like in this hideaway. It reminds me of my dream in my childhood; I was fascinated in the secret base in sci-fi movies in which white hat people facing towards radar screens were fighting with the enemy. Anyway, my computers consist of VAIO, DELL and Mac mini which are all connected with each other by wireless and wired LAN. VAIO has two displays and is running Windows XP, DELL is running Fedora6 distribution of LINUX and Mac mini is running OS-X Tiger. You might think why I need so many computers. The reason is that VAIO is the main computer, DELL is working as a local server and Mac mini is necessary to check whether my programs work on Mac. It is also used as an iTunes music server. After coming to Obihiro, I have installed a great free software called "Synergy" into my three computers and I can now control three of them with only one keyboard and mouse; when I move the mouse cursor from left to right or right to left, it moves through the four displays seamlessly and I can type into the computer on which the mouse cursor is staying. It's very pleasant!