August 2007 Archives

One of the biggest changes for me with computing on the Macintosh has been the amount of PDFs I generate. The Mac OS allows any application to "print to PDF" which is an amazing feature for obvious reasons. That and these PDFs are all indexed by Spotlight makes it really handy to search for things that I've saved to my HDD for posterity.

Recently Mac OSX Hints covered a free "virtual printer" called CUPS-PDF, which basically takes a few of the steps out of "printing to PDF" and makes it even easier and faster. I've just installed this new "virtual printer" and can highly recommend it.

Popular avatar-based virtual community Habbo Hotel has closed their China site.

Dear visitors:
unfortunately we have some bad news for you: since August 24, 2007 Habbo.cn has been closed at least temporarily, and possibly for a long time. :( Our Habbo Staff is currently working hard to find a way to continue the service in the future - you will be informed about the situation as soon as we know. We are really sorry about this. Meanwhile you can choose to visit other Habbo services all over the world.

Living in the Mission, originally uploaded by JJ San.

Ah, San Francisco....

I read that Fotolog has been sold to Hi-Media for $90 million.

Congrats to John Borthwick (whom I know from his time at AOL), Scott Heiferman (whom I met once during the iTraffic days.)

Fotolog is one of the few East Coast, nay, New York City-based Internet ventures and so it's great to see them doing well. While I know that NYC will never equal Sand Hill Road, it's nice to see good people doing Internet work and their work being valued in NYC.

This is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel I suppose but I note that the next day after Abe announces his new cabinet (shuffling chairs on the deck of the...) Wikipedia "Cabinet of Japan" is updated, but the English Kantei page is not.

If you're going to trouble of having an English site for the Kantei, why not update content at the same time? Don't tell me that the Japanese government doesn't have the resources.

David from Low Light Mixes has a very quiet ambient mix called There Will Come Soft Rains that I am really enjoying.

The music in this mix is a collection of tunes I thought would work well with the sound of rain. Most of the rain you hear in this mix was added by me. I hope I didn't over do it. The listening environment has a lot to do with how the rain is perceived. While mixing in a quiet room I kept worrying about too many rain fx, but then listening in my office at work, I couldn't hear half of the rain sounds. Hopefully I managed to strike the right balance.

Chas Smith - Santa Fe
Elegi - Despotiets Vesen

Fenton - Neon Giraffe
Max Richter - Harmonium & Time Passing
Julien Neto - Vi
Loscil - Steam
Loren Connors - Airs #6
Rameses III - Night Blossom Written in Sanskrit
Leo Abrams - Scene Memory
Daniel Lanois - Telco
Popol Vuh - Listen He Who Ventures
Rameses III - Theme Three
Lawrence - A Quiet Day
Max Richter - Fragment

Fascinating look at the small but growing market for catastrophe bonds by Michael Lewis in the NY Times Magazine.

Insurance companies, John Seo says, are charging customers too much — or avoiding their customers altogether — instead of sharing their risk with others, like himself, who would be glad to take it. New Orleans, as a result, is slower than it otherwise would be to rebuild. “The insurance companies are basically running away from society,” he says. “What they need to do is take the risk and kick it up to us.” They need to spread it as widely as possible across the investment world and, in the process, minimize the cost of insuring potential losses from catastrophes.

If this means that insurance will get cheaper in the future or that insurers will be able to cover places and situations that they don't cover currently, I hope this market will grow- it's in the best interests for almost all of us that this market grows.

W. David Marx, who writes both the not-to-be-missed Neomarxisme blog as well as the not-to-be-missed Clast blog, has a fascinating post on the NBR Forum about the impact of Japanese popular music and why Japanese musicians have never "made it big" outside of Japan. Marx studied the Japanese popular music market for his masters thesis at Keio so you are getting insightful commentary. I was going to write about why I felt that Japanese pop musicians would never cross over outside of Japan but Marx explains this a lot better than I could ever do.

Very nice mix from Rob Heenan at Deeper.co.za.

ARTIST – TRACK (Remix) – LABEL

Westpark Unit - Blaxrotation Suite Mix - Farside
Karizma - Tech This Out - Hustle
Projam - Into The Groove - Running Back
Telepopmusik - Love Can Damage Your Health - Objectivity
Franck Roger - Rubycube - Real Tone
Figurines - Silver Ponds (Ben Watt dub) - Strange Feeling
Audio Soul Project - Community (Fish Go Deeper vocal) - NRK
Patrice Scott - Raw Fusion - Sistrum
Patrice Scott - Atmospheric Emotions - Sistrum
Vincenzo - We Wait, Right Here (Charles Webster dub) - Dessous
Westpark Unit - Audio Brand - Farside
Outlines - Listen To The Drums (Jazzanova rmx / Dixon edit) - Sonar Kollektiv
The Return - New Day (Reprise) - 4th Floor

Very nice profile of Haruki Murakami in Time.

Though he says he doesn't want to talk about Japanese politics, he returns to the subject again and again throughout a 212-hour conversation, bushy eyebrows bobbing as he worries about "politicians who rewrite history," and the growing tendency in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Japan to forget about wartime atrocities. Japanese history has always been in the background of his works — and his best novel, 1994's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, dissected the groupthink that led Japan into a catastrophic war — but now he wants to act. "Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer," he admits. "But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil and these are my roots. You cannot get away from your country."

Very glad to hear that Murakami's politics seem similar to mine.

Last night I went to the wake of my friends' father here in Tokyo, a man who used to be a prominent government employee (ex-ambassador). I was able to catch up with a group of friends which was more than small solace.

Today I wake up to the news of another old friend's passing in an accident in Southeast Asia. He left us doing what he loved, which is all I can hope for any of us, but he left us too early.

It has been a while since a passing has moved me like these have. I am not myself for the moment.

U-sama, rest in peace.

Nat, rest in peace.

Everyone else, please don't forget to tell the people you love that you love them.

Clayton Christensen has an engaging piece in Forbes around how Nintendo's Wii has run circles around Sony and their PS3.

Christensen believes that there are 3 possible approaches for Sony to take vs. Nintendo:

1. "The seemingly simplest option is to just come up with a copy-cat version of Nintendo’s controller that works with one of Sony’s existing consoles."
2. "repurpose Sony’s “legacy” product (PlayStation 2) into a me-too version of the Wii."
3. "The final option is for Sony to try to 'disrupt the disruptor.' Instead of following a me-too strategy, Sony could seek to truly develop a category-changing project. While this approach would take more time and require greater investment, it has the most long-term potential—if Sony can figure out a different measure of performance on which to compete in the video game market."

The article is long and is worth reading if you are interested in this fascinating business case study that is unfolding in front of all of us. If we go back to the news pre-launch of these new consoles, the media was busy lapping up the PR from Kutaragi and everyone thought that Nintendo was on their way out. Fascinating how situations can shift in a few months. Amazing to see Nintendo's market cap pass Sony's.

While these options are all open for debate, Roger Ehrenberg brings up the reality of corporate change:

So before I would begin even thinking about answering the question "What should Sony do next with respect to its gaming strategy?", I'd want to answer the question "How can Sony re-shape its organization, culture and product development approach in order to be more flexible, customer-centric and innovative in a rapidly-shifting market?" Because without a good answer to the latter, you might as well take the former, write it on a piece of paper, crumple it into a ball and toss it in the garbage can. Because that is all the value good strategy is worth in the absence of good culture.

I'm with Ehrenberg, if it's not already clear.

The NY Times has a front page piece on the status of working women in Japan. I was trying to find a short portion to quote, but I failed. I think it will take a significant change in the financial status of Japan before Japan will force change that will allow women to rise higher in business. Right now Japan does not have to change, so while it looks bad in the future, at present there's not enough pressure to change.

If Japan fell to the same rank as it's current standing on the United Nations Development Program’s “'gender empowerment measure,' an index of female participation in a nation’s economy and politics" which is to say 42nd among 75 nations surveyed in 2006, then I'm sure there'd be too much pressure not to give de facto and not just de jure equal rights to women.

In 1985, women held just 6.6 percent of all management jobs in Japanese companies and government, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. By 2005, that number had risen to only 10.1 percent, though Japan’s 27 million working women made up nearly half of its work force. By contrast, women held 42.5 percent of managerial jobs in the United States in 2005, the organization said.

Experts on women’s issues say outright prejudice is only part of Japan’s problem. An even bigger barrier to the advancement of women is the nation’s notoriously demanding corporate culture, particularly its expectation of morning-to-midnight work hours.

Government statistics show that many women drop out of management-track jobs when they reach their late 20s and early 30s and start having children. As Japan’s birthrate rapidly declines and its population ages, there are growing concerns that Japan can ill afford to lose so much potential.

“If expected to work 15 hours a day, then most women will give up,” said Kuniko Inoguchi, a former cabinet minister in charge of gender equality. “Japan is losing half of its brainpower as it faces a labor shortage.”

Even with cases of blatant discrimination, lawsuits remain rare because of a cultural aversion to litigation. Another big problem has been that the equal opportunity law is essentially toothless. Despite two revisions, the law includes no real punishment for companies that continue to discriminate. The worst that the Labor Ministry can do is to threaten to publish the names of violators, and the ministry has never done that. As a result, Japan ranks as the most unequal of the world’s rich countries, according to the United Nations Development Program’s “gender empowerment measure,” an index of female participation in a nation’s economy and politics. The country placed 42nd among 75 nations surveyed in 2006 — just above Macedonia and far below other developed nations like the United States, ranked 12th, and top-ranked Norway.

Career Women in Japan Find a Blocked Path - New York Times

Actually a very savvy move.

Livedoor recently announced that they are planning to move their users from their own mail system to Gmail. Quite a smart move for Livedoor. I'd imagine that the users would be happy too (once they get over the shock...)

livedoorメールにGmail採用　「黒字化へ最後の一押し」 - ITmedia News

If you think the RIAA is bad, just visit Japan...

Techdirt: Japanese Entertainment Industry Still Very Confused, Very Wrong About YouTube

UPDATE: Ken Worsley weighs in with good comments too.

...it certainly shows the [Japanese] artists that their management is hell-bent on keeping their collective heads in the sand.

Ouch. Product not yet released and already in the shadow of the iPhone.

People who have seen Google's prototype devices say they aren't as revolutionary as the iPhone. One was likened to a slim Nokia Corp. phone with a keyboard that slides out. Another phone format presented by Google looked more like a Treo or a BlackBerry.

Google Pushes Tailored Phones To Win Lucrative Ad Market - WSJ.com

Stephen O'Grady, one of my must-reads, has very insightful commentary coming out of OSCON '07 (O'Reilly's open source conference.) With respect to Web 2.0 vs. open source:

For those of us on newer Intel Macs who need to access Windows PCs remotely...

Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2.0 (Beta)