Samurai Coder

Nova videos on YouTube. I would call this ‘Bankrupcy 2.0’.

BBC News:

The Japanese have one of the lowest crime rates in the developed world.

But 99% of all people accused of breaking laws there are found guilty.

Translation: don’t get arrested.

Jaiku | Google Q&A:

Jaiku is joining Google. While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation.

This was announced on 9th, yet didn’t attract enough attention from the media, to be exact, RSS feeds I’m subscribing to. Download Squad covered this acquisition, but there’s only one comment. Was Jaiku fever over?

Walter Gibbs - New York Times:

[Gore] said the peace prize is only a message of encouragement, adding, “the Nobel committee has never given a kick in the leg to anyone.”

The nobel prize has nothing to do with what’s happening with tomorrow’s climate. I sincerely hope that the Nobel committe will have more effect to people, governments, counties and such, not just sending money to the winner.

The peace prize is more than an academy award. But people don’t take that way.

Doreen Caravajal:

So many Japanese wedding tourists are trading golden rings in the peak summer and autumn seasons that the interdenominational American Church enlisted retired pastors for the marriage ministry dominated by the couples. A towering Adventist church outside Paris and the American Cathedral, which offers Episcopal ceremonies, also perform large numbers of the ceremonies.

For those who can’t travel there are many Americans, Canadians and Australians who pretend to ministers. This is a popular dayjob for foreigners here in Japan.

Wedding ceremonies in churches by Japanese couples are simply a business, not a tiny bit of enlightment of Christianity.

2Decide.com Election ‘08 Chart of Where the Candidates Stand:

A great breakdown of how the candidates feel about each hot topic. All the democrats agree with the net neutrality. It is likely that the fence in the Mexican border will be made. To all the Mexicans: Do hurry up!

Download Squad:

How much would you pay for a blog template? $49.95, $29.95? Or how about free with a little homegrown modification? That’s what most of us would opt for. There is a market for pay templates, but we wonder quite seriously if there is a solid market for this one. This $4000 template for Movable Type is designed for an online newspaper, but frankly doesn’t look so super special to us.

When I first saw the template, I thought this whole thing was a joke. But it isn’t unfortunately.

Leo Laporte:

As you may have noticed, I have changed TWiT.tv into a read-only web site, without logins and commenting (much as Alex has done at pixelcorps.tv).

It’s not that I don’t welcome your comments, but I’m having all sorts of difficulties with the software over cookies and log-ins. Add to that the difficulty of moderating thousands of entries for spam, and I think you’ll see that it’s impractical for now to keep things as they are.

Personally, I rarely check the listners’ comments, but I do for looking for possible errata. I hope that we can find user comments especially on misinformation that TWiT makes.

Oliver Reichenstein in iA Notebook » Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0:

The 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. We have done it again – and better. Upon popular demand – here is iA’s next Web Trend Map:

Maps are available as graphics, PDFs and a screensaver. Some Japanese companies made it to the list. (Note: This map was made by, supposedly, a Japanese or Japan-savvy guy.) Yahoo! Japan, Hatena, livedoor, 2ch.net and mixi are in the map. By the way, I love the location of Fake Steve Jobs.

Personally I live near Google Checkout and Gmail.

Update: Correction. I live near Digg.

Madebysofa Does It with Python and Cocoa in the ADC article:

Using Python and the PyObjC bridge gives you the best of all worlds—Python and Cocoa. Python is great for unit testing and agile development. Because Checkout manages critical business information, we swear by writing unit tests for everything that even comes close to any financial data. And since Python is interpreted and not compiled, launching a debug session takes seconds. You can make a modification and see the effect of the change immediately.

They are European. They also mention localization as an advantage of Mac OS X software development. The company name, Madebysofa, might not be well-recognized, but they are the guys who made a much controversial app, Disco. The UI and icons are made by Jasper Hauser of Camino and Adium fame. They are the “Delicious Generation”.