Hitachi GST Channels & Infineon

My manager sent the department this link. Interesting seeing a press release with our group in center focus. A search on IFX's site turns up a couple more news links, slightly dated.

Tool Lullabies

Joel sent me a link to an album of Tool songs redone as lullabies. This is wrong on so many levels.

Do you really want your baby listening to Tool? Hell, yes! Instead of distorted guitars and thunderous drums, we've used mellotron, glockenspiel and chimes to highlight Tool's dreamy melodies. These incredibly lush lullaby versions of Tool's best-known songs will captivate and engage your baby while they drift off to slumberland. Forget Baby Einstein. What about Baby Maynard? This is brain food for a whole different breed of whiz kid.

I bet Joel buys this.

Limor / Lady Ada

Wired News had an article on HOPE, where there was a presentation by "Lady Ada", aka Limor, on a cell phone jammer. I was thoroughly intrigued, because I've been wanting to design one myself. The trick is getting the frequencies and tuning right. Then you just have to build a radio that broadcasts noise instead of signal. Cool.

Anyway, Limor's website has some nifty ideas. Even if her front page menu doesn't seem to like either IE or Firefox very well (though FF works better). The "Atmex" setup also looks pretty sweet.

U.S. Poverty Guidelines for 2005

The Department of Health and Human Services publishes a table of wages that indicate the poverty cutoff based on household size. According to this, with some extrapolation, I can have quite a few people in my house before we'd be considered in poverty. Cool.

Internationalized Domain Names

Also checking for info on IDNs, this info on VeriSign's website came up. Back when I was in college I figured it'd be possible to escape Unicode characters for URLs, for example, the way some URLs have %20 to represent a space. There are some sneaky aspects of using Unicode in URLs, though, such as the varieties of spaces, minor kanji variants, and the like. There's a remapping of Unicode characters for use in IDNs. Apparently this IDN format has been submitted as IETF RFCs.

In the end, the domain name system will disappear. Until someone comes up with something better, though, we have to put up with an archaic system.

ICANN and Becoming a DNS Registrar

For one reason or another I was searching for information on how to become a DNS registrar. A quick Google search led me to a FAQ on ICANN's site. There's a page that explains the process required. The application "form" is also available online, and appears to require extensive information.

Fees for accrediation are onerous: US$2500, non-refundable, just for the application. The yearly fee is a fixed US$4000 plus an variable quarterly amount. Additionally, $70k in working capital plus insurance is required. ICANN maintains a list of accredited registrars.

Obviously they don't want just any random schmuck doing this. It's a pretty juicy setup, though, since essentially it's a cartel. Not like that's a bad thing in the case of maintaining the fragile DNS, but it means that price fixing for domains is much more likely.

The reason I was checking up on this was because I recently had some name registration trouble with BulkRegister and it got me pissed off. I should switch to a better registrar. So I was idly wondering what it would take to roll my own...now I know. Unfortunately, one has to be a heavy hitter to play the name game.

takoyaki.org

Found this site while looking for Honda Cub info in the U.S. Pretty amusing domain name.

Tomy

While looking for assembly instructions for the R/C cars Joel bought for his son, I checked out Tomy's mother site and found their subsidiary's site that sells Americanized 'gashapon' in the U.S.: Tomy Yujin Corporation. As expected, they only sell to vending operators or distributors. I suppose all one has to do is incorporate....

sci.lang.japan FAQ wiki

Once upon a time, when people used Usenet, I regularly perused sci.lang.japan to try to improve my knowledge of Japanese. I'm not sure if it helped: now I can talk about Japanese better than I can speak in Japanese!

Defence Facilities Administration Agency

K.N. received something from a cable broadcaster that claimed that had a return address in a building managed by this agency. Weird.

BSD vs Linux

I've been thinking about running FreeBSD on my upcoming new 'puter rather than Linux, but I've been looking for comparisons between the two before I make up my mind. This page is a pro-BSD stance.

Of course I'd prefer a microkernel rather than a monolithic kernel, but my options are limited.

Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard

Ok, this is cool, but I don't need Bluetooth. Where's the wired version?

$190 on ThinkGeek
Info on Gadget Review

Reflections on Digital Photographs

A great article regarding the glut of digital photographs relative to film, and what to do about it. An opinion piece from the May 2006 issue of Spectrum. Wish I'd found the online version before I scanned this out of my copy to send to people.

Javelin Press & Boston T. Party

Javelin Press publishes a collection of interesting books by a man who goes by the pseudonym of Boston T. Party. According to Wikipedia, Boston T. Party has been identified. (Actually, according to the cover of the book Hologram of Liberty, this is the case.) Another take on the way things are.

Hitch

Joel told me about this device called Hitch that allows one to copy files from one USB device to another without PC intervention. Sweet.

Merchant Accounts

Discover Network - They're a full merchant processor for Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx, including Discover.
American Express - AmEx will deal with merchants directly rather than requiring the use of an acquirer/MSP.
Visa
Mastercard

We love junkfood!

Ikeda-san sent me these links like a year ago, which I discovered while I was cleaning out my inbox. The cleaning was prompted by reading a David Allen book....

Check these out when you miss American food!!

Nathan's
KUA ' AINA

All About U.S. Import/Export

The Customs and Border Patrol people have a lot of info online. Under the Imports section, they list the duty required for items entering the U.S. (Harmonized Tariff Schedule).

And regarding paying duty on gifts:

It comes as a rude surprise to many people that recipients of gifts mailed from abroad will have to pay any duty owed on the item before they can receive it. Duty cannot be pre-paid by the sender (duty can't be paid until the duty rate is assessed by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer. This can't happen until the item actually arrives in the U.S.), it can only be paid by the recipient. We are aware that this can place the sender in an awkward position, but there is nothing CBP can do. We suggest you include a note with the package offering to reimburse the recipient for any CBP duty they are charged. For more information, please see our brochure, "International Mail Imports" under the Publications section on our web site at www.cbp.gov.

This can bite you in the butt if you send a $200 item but mark it up to $700 on the customs form for insurance purposes (particularly for something that has primarily sentimental value). The recipient will have to pay duty. This happened to me, and it sucked...I knew the item wasn't valued at $700, but I had to pay something like $50 in duty, high in part because it was a textile item.

"Akihabara News"

Interesting, but looks mostly like advertising.

Silk Screening

I thought I'd posted this, but evidently I didn't!

A.B. Dada's blog has a couple recent posts regarding t-shirt printing: T-shirt silk screening revisited and a follow-up post. The former links to a site with photo instructions on how to silk screen. Cool.

Japanese Language Parsing

Interesting-looking piece of software, MeCab. I had been wondering how to parse Japanese text into keywords, like search engines would have to do. Turns out it's not as easy as splitting text on spaces as in English. There are bindings for Perl, also.

MeCab apparently uses Markov models to parse text. Supposedly it doesn't need a dictionary or corpus, using "conditional random fields" to build probability data. Cool!

According to the MeCab page, other parsers include ChaSen, JUMAN, and KAKASI. In my searches, the latter was cited quite a bit.

Interesting Amazon Lists, etc.

Listmania: T-shirts - Various t-shirt books.
Listmania: for Fun and Profit - Random hobby books, many of which are interesting.
Guide: Ditch Your Designer - References to doing one's own design.
Guide: Know how a print can be original - References to traditional print-making (not t-shirts).

Airsoft Arms

Edo sent me this link to Airsoft Arms, an airsoft gun and miscellaneous military item shop near Columbus. Looks like the orange tips are mandatory; the manufacturers must make them specially for export.

Small business info & Merchant accounts

Found some useful info on merchant accounts at About.com. There's other useful-looking stuff on there too.

Another site has more detailed information. Looks like charging for others is a no-no. Unfortunate.

Why I quit the company

Yoshi has a link to this interesting article from his blog. It's about how being a salaryman sucks circa 1992. I don't think too much has changed since then, except that there are a lot more "freeters" running around.

Well, being a salaryman does suck.

Fortune: New ways to get ahead

It's easier to move up by moving sideways? That might be true for women, hee hee. Ok, that was infantile. Believe me, I've been worse.

But the fact remains that if one's current field isn't something they can enjoy, moving to a field that one can get into and therefore excel is the smart thing to do. Perhaps I need to get back into software.

Airsoft Guns Again

I wrote a post about airsoft gun sales sites in the U.S., but neglected to post the manufacturer's pages.

東京マルイ
KSC
SIIS

There's a long article on Wikipedia Japan also.

A company called Sanken does import/export of toy guns. Cool!

White Rabbit Express

Noel tipped me to this service. Competitive analysis can be depressing at times.

"White Rabbit" reminds me of this candy that I used to like as a kid. Most people probably think The Matrix movie instead.

Random Anime and Fansub Related

The Fansub FAQ - From way back in '99.
Animania - Some guy's paper on anime. He interviewed Will Ray.

I guess I was looking for references to soyokaze.biosci.ohio-state.edu, that's what brought up the spate of hits.

UMD Movies Going Bye-Bye

(Reuters) Apparently UMD as a movie format is dying. Good riddance! Sony's business decisions lately are really stupid. Why did they think consumers would pay more for a format that has inferior quality, can't be copied, and can only be played on the PSP?

This is like they are killing their music player sales by mandating that SonicStage be used. Music check-in, no re-burning—the software sucks! I probably would've gotten a Sony player rather than an iPod if they only would ditch the software. iTunes or SonicStage is no-contest from the users' perspective.

Also, it's too bad that they didn't use Hi-MD for the PSP. However, since MDs have no copy protection and are slightly larger in size, I suppose that wasn't possible. Still, the gaping hole in the UMD cassette is another blemish on the format's resume.

Sony's technology is amazing, but the people making the business decisions are idiots. If they didn't act like they think they can dictate to consumers, then they might actually take over some market share.