Japan Podcast

Next week I will be launching the Japan podcast with Terri MacMillan. We will be putting out episodes at the rate of one or two a week, at least until the end of the year.

The podcast is mainly aimed at people outside of Japan who want to know more about Japanese culture or people who are planning to come to Japan. I hope, however, that Japanese people with a high level of English will find the podcast useful as well.

The episodes will be about 15 minutes long although some topics will span several episodes. The episodes will be available from the site as well as iTunes.

http://www.japanpodcast.net
http://twitter.com/japanpodcast

Hot Tub Girl-On-Girl Video

I made another animation. It's called Hot Tub. I think you'll like it.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/dv_assets/plot_template_lang3.swf?movie_id=412597

Blogging About Blogs

I've started looking for, and reading, blogs of people who have recently moved to Japan. This is far more interesting than reading blogs of people who have been here for a long time, especially if the bloggers live in Tokyo. Tokyo is a wonderful place, but it does tend to fuck you up, in that it weakens your character and makes you lazy. Reading blogs written by people who have just got here is very refreshing, and has given me a much-needed energy boost.

A couple of great blogs I've found are "Hello Sandwich" and "The Get-Go Tokyo".
http://hellosandwich.blogspot.com/
Hello Sandwich is written by Ebony, who lives in Shimokitazawa. The blog deals mainly with Japanese design, and is packed with great photos of cool things and places.

http://thegetgo-tokyo.blogspot.com/
The Get-Go Tokyo is written by Gaby, a young British woman who is a pre-school teacher in Tokyo. Full of great insights into getting your shit together in Japan.

Welcome To The Cheap Seats

Went to Ikea. Ate silly Swedish food in the cafeteria. A Japanese girl was trying, exceedingly badly, to sing western jazz songs. By some miracle I had left my suicide pills at home, if I had had them with me I would have downed the whole lot. Sometimes Japan does its best to kill me.

While wondering round Ikea, looking at the shit for sale, I was struck by the similarities between Northern Europe and Japan. They are quite similar. That is all. Sorry, Ikea wiped my brain.

I Should Cocoa

My friend Alex Brooke (http://learnjapanesepod.com/) has started an iPhone development group at Tokyo Hackerspace. Despite not having an iPhone, I decided to join. Both my Macs are too old to run the iPhone SDK so I've just been doing Cocoa programming for the Mac, as opposed to Cocoa-Touch programming for the iPhone.

Much as I hate Apple, the iPhone, the iPad and Steve "cunt" Jobs, I must admit Objective-C is a very reasonably language, and Cocoa isn't as lame as it could be.

Linux Is Freedom

I've made a video about Linux. I hope it's everything you've ever wished for.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/dv_assets/plot_template_lang3.swf?movie_id=412581

Firefox Rocks

I've made a short video about the Firefox browser.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/dv_assets/plot_template_lang3.swf?movie_id=412579

BarCamp Tokyo 2010 Winter-Spring

Somehow, a year has passed since I(and many others) put together Tokyo BarCamp: As We May Think. The BarCamp was epic. I met a whole bunch of good people, a hackerspace was started, and I decided to stay in Japan..

Next week 120 BarCampers will meet up at the Oracle HQ in Aoyama. I've no idea what will happen but I'm quietly confident that it won't suck too much.

There will be BarCamp related stuff to see here:
http://www.2jpn.com/tokyo-barcamp/

Trip to Seoul

Arrived in Seoul for BarCamp Seoul 4, which is taking place tomorrow. Flying from Tokyo Haneda airport was so much more pleasant than flying from Tokyo Narita airport. Partly this was because Haneda airport is actually in Tokyo, unlike Narita airport which is in Chiba.

I took the subway from Gimpo airport to Seoul station and then walked to the Millennium Hilton hotel. The subway in Seoul is cheap, clean and not very crowded. The announcements are in Korean, English and Japanese, as are many of the signs.

The Millennium Hilton hotel is as expensive as it is cheap. Expensive hotels often look cheap because they are full of cheap, crappy people. My room was on the executive floor, because I'm an executive. I was dressed as a tramp, but I was still allowed in. The girl working at the executive reception swiped my credit card many times when I checked in. In the end it either worked or she gave up, so I was able to check in and go to my room.

As I was unpacking my stuff there was as knock on the door of my hotel room. It was a guy bringing me some chocolates and grapes. Very strange. I ate the chocolates, threw away the grapes, and proceeded to the executive lounge in order to use the Net and get some free drinks. As one might have expected, there was nothing "executive" about the people in the executive lounge. Scum.

http://barcamp.org/BarCampSeoul4

The Most Dismal Of Sciences

Computer Science (sic) is utterly pathetic. Alan Kay once said something like "If a physicist was unaware of the work of Newton, he/she would be beaten to death with an apple". I wish the same could be said of ignorant computer scientists.

Adrian Cheok's Mixed Reality Lab at Keio

This morning I visited the Mixed Reality Lab at Keio university, run by professor Adrian Cheok. I was invited along by David Sonntag, who was making the visit with Kenneth Boff, principle scientist at the Georgia Tech Tennenbaum Institute. Paul Cohen from http://sonicviz.com/ and Jonathan Coopersmith, Fulbright lecturer from the Tokyo Institute of Technology also joined the visit.

We were given demonstrations of a variety of projects involving augmented reality including:

Human Pacman
A pacman game played outside by people wearing AR HUDs.

Babbage Cabbage
A living display capable of showing slow changes in data trends though the medium of color-changing plants.

Petino
A tactile device for augmenting children's social networks, while providing parental supervision and control.

Kitchen Media
A research project aiming at developing augmentation devices for use in the kitchen.

Wiz Qubes
A augmented story book system in which the child interacts with a computerized book using physical blocks.

Age Invaders
A space invaders game resembling Dance-Dance-Revolution in which elderly people can play with their family from a remote location.

I was very impressed by Adrian's team, it was clear that the lab is made up of a very wide rage of people from a variety of backgrounds, it's not just a bunch of techies. I plan to visit the lab in the near future to give a presentation on some the of the tech stuff I'm involved with, such at the Tokyo Hackerspace.

Tokyo BarCamp Happened...

Tokyo BarCamp 2006 "As We May Think" still seems like a dream, but there are quite a few photos online that seem to suggest it really did take place: www.flickr.com/groups/barcamptokyo/

I'm trying not to think too much about what went well and what could have been better at BarCamp. I just think we need to do loads more stuff. There should be worth-while something happening every day of the week in Tokyo. Tokyo is big, and there are plenty of cool people in and around Tokyo who are doing cool things so there's really no excuse for slackness.

Tokyo BarCamp: Location And Date Confirmed!

I'm exceedingly pleased to announce that Sun Microsystems will be hosting Tokyo BarCamp on Saturday, 16th May. Places are very limited so please sign up here: Tokyo BarCamp When you sign up please include a link so we can contact you directly. Alternatively you can email me daac2000(at)yahoo(dot)com

Many thanks to Jim Grisanzio and Shoji Haraguchi who will be our hosts are Sun. Also thanks to all our other sponsors who are helping to make Tokyo BarCamp 2009 a reality.

Tokyo Barcamp 2009: As We May Think

The theme for Tokyo Barcamp is "As We May Think". Participate in Tokyo BarCamp, exploring the future of technology and how we might use it to augment every aspect of our lives.

"As We May Think" is a seminal essay by Vannevar Bush written in 1945. You can read it here: As We May Think I strongly suggest you do. Here are some more resources:

Videos you probably ought to watch
The Web That Wasn't Google Tech Talk by Alex Wright
Hyperland 1990 BBC programme by Douglas Adams about emerging Internet
The Demo The mother of all demos by Doug Engelbart
Transclusion: Fixing Electronic Literature Google Tech Talk by Ted Nelson
Starfire 1994 Sun Mircrosystems concept video.
Douglas Engelbart Doug Engelbart interviewed at Google.
The Politics of Internet Software Ted Nelson talk at the Oxford Internet Institute

Books you probably ought to read:
Geeks Bearing Gifts by Ted Nelson
Tools For Thought by Howard Reingold
Literary Machines by Ted Nelson
Virtual Communities by Howard Reingold
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
Glut: The Deep History of Information Science by Alex Wright
From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn

Geeks Bearing Gifts by Ted Nelson

You. Must. Read. This. Book. Now.

Tokyo Barcamp Brain Dump

Some wikipedia articles that you should read in order to understand the concept of BarCamp:
BarCamp
Unconference
Foo Camp
Open Space Technology
Self-organization
Emergence
Temporary Autonomous Zone

The Four Principles and The One Law

Are you still struggling to understand the concept of Barcamp? Maybe understanding Open Space Technology will help:

The four principles of Open Space Technology:

1. Whoever comes is the right people: this alerts the participants that attendees of a session class as "right" simply because they care to attend
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have: this tells the attendees to pay attention to events of the moment, instead of worrying about what could possibly happen
3. Whenever it starts is the right time: clarifies the lack of any given schedule or structure and emphasizes creativity and innovation
4. When it's over, it's over: encourages the participants not to waste time, but to move on to something else when the fruitful discussion ends

The one law:
If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.

You Are Standing In A Wiki. What Now?

There's been a great deal of interest in Tokyo barcamp but some people still seem to be confused about what it exactly is and how it differs from regular tech events.

One way of thinking about barcamp is to imagine yourself standing inside a wiki. You want to learn, teach and discuss. Barcamp provides you with a small amount of structure in order to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, skills, opinions and ideas. What makes barcamp so different though is that you can "edit" barcamp in the same way that you can edit a wiki. Think about that for a while...

When a group of enthusiastic, open-minded and knowledgeable people are in a small space together for an extended period of time, amazing things tend to happen. Difficult problems are solved, projects are born, minds are expanded. The whole is far, far greater than the sum of the parts. This is the real-world manifestation of Web 2.0. This is self-organization. This is emergence. This is the most intense thing you will ever experience.

Bar Camp Tokyo 2009

I've decided to organize a Bar Camp in Tokyo for late May. (See the entry Wikipedia for background on Bar Camp).

Please sign up here if you want to attend: Tokyo BarCamp

You can follow Tokyo Barcamp on Twatter: www.twitter.com/tokyobarcamp

Bar Camp differs from other tech conferences in that everyone must participate. There are no presentations/workshops/discussions scheduled in advance, instead attendees sign up to do events on the day, usually by writing their events on huge pieces of paper on the walls. Also, Bar Camp is free.

At Tokyo Bar Camp expect presentations/workshops/discussions on blogging, podcasting, Perl, AJAX, the theory of hypertext, web spidering, smart mobs, wiki, Ruby-On-Rails, wearable computers, augmented reality, startups, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Web 4.0, the maker revolution and maybe even teledildonics.

A Change Of Focus

Although I will still follow infosec, my main focus from this point on will be building Web 4.0. Somebody has to. The Web is too important to leave to a bunch of dickheads who think Starbucks is cool...

I aim to start with a Web 4.0 Intranet, possibly something running over a Bluetooth PAN. Anyone want to give me some startup money?