What The! This site serves one main purpose. To provide a sandbox for me to play in, as such do not expect to find anything of great interest here. I use this site to muck about with php, css, html and so on. In light of this you will find some google maps and geoip stuff here and a few notes (on mainly Linux related stuff).
bawdo.com was slowSince making this site some years ago I have let it sit about and pretty much rot. However, today I was playing around making a web crawler of sorts and was testing it against my own site. This is when I found it was taking around 14 seconds to serve the front page.
iPhone Apps Pricing Differences Between RegionsRecently I changed phones and decided to go with the iPhone. Besides battery life and the Apple iTunes lock in I'm happy with the device. Sidenote: why can't they make the device present as a USB hard drive?
However, the thing that gets me really annoyed is the way Apple locks you into iTunes by region. The really cruddy thing about this, beside the interface only being localised for the region you are in, and that some apps are missing altogether, is the price differences between region.
This is just one example, iSSH retails for 4.99 USD on the US iTunes site, and retails for 600 YEN on the Japanese. At current exchange rates that makes the local price approximalely 150 yen (1.70 USD) more.
C'mon Apple what is the justification for this kind of difference in price?
OpenSolaris 2008.11 as a DomU running on a Linux Dom0 First a blog now facebookFor no particular reason I have never been interested in social networking sites, or writing a blog. However, about a year ago a friend sent me an invitation to join Linkedin. I signed up and within a couple of days I was back in touch with people I had not seen in decades.
Tokyo Linux Users GroupTLUG is a good place to catch up with like minded Linux/Technology/FOSS/Geek friends. You can meet and greet TLUGians in Tokyo or on the mailing list...
Using the modem in KDDI phones for mobile Internet connectivityThis is related to an earlier blog I wrote about connecting my W41H up. I have recently bought a new W52T and found the setup is identical so I though I would elaborate on my earlier post within the context of a Gentoo install.
Convert a MySQL DB from utf8 to UTF8I had a utf8 collated MySQL 4.1 db that contained both English and Japanese text. I dumped the data and then tried to migrate it into my new MySQL 5.0.26 installation. Of course being a bit lazy I did not take the time to check things out properly and was not surprised to find that all Japanese text had become mojibake. I set off on a mission to fix the problem.
StarDict - an excellent replacement for gjiten and rikaichan"Gjiten is [an excellent] Japanese language dictionary program for Gnome". It has served me well for several years, but yesterday I found a better tool - StarDict.
