Summer in Japan

Its been a while since I’ve posted anything here…

Google buzz and reader are to way to share the news but i guess to create news it would not hurt to use a good old blog post.

I’ve been in Japan for about 5 months now. I’ve been studying Japanese in a community center near by. Its quite fun, I can read and write hiragana a little, でもまだじょうずじゃありません.

I’m enjoying been in Japan quite a bit. I’m staying kind of in the country side near Tokyo/Yokohama. There are many old houses and farms.

Its not uncommon to buy vegetables directly from small producers who leave them unattended with the price next to them. The climate here is tropical so its very hot and humid and it rains a lot.

Sometimes its so hot i have to take 3-4 showers a day. Thats one of the reasons I came up with the “idea” to collect rain water and use the sun to purify it (trough distillation) so i came up with a small prototype which i call the water panel The cool thing about it is that it can keep the water evenly distributed even when it is tilted at an angle.

Japan is quite up there with  green energy appliances which they usually label ECO. I’ve uploaded couple of pictures of my prototype, a Solar water heater and a roof mounted Sollar PV pannels. I have not seen roof mounted Solar personal water purification system in Japan so far.

Apple vs Adobe

I think Steve Jobs should cool down before he gets at odds with developers again… We all love Apple devices but we remember the history too… this is getting out of proportion. No software is perfect but Adobe has been filling the gaps for developers and artists for a long time… HTML5 has its place, but to forbid MDD and generated code from executing on I(x)Device is a bit too much. Developers and users should be the judge of what is a good platform and what is not… My family owns 4 iPhones but after this i’m looking more and more into Adroid (most likely the next smart phone for us).

Google Code Jam

I’m thinking about participating in Google Code Jam competition. A while ago (back in school i guess) many of us use to be crazy about all kinds of regional and national competitions and i know that there are quite few “medalists” here. I wonder if we still have the will, speed ++

Blog / CMS software ?

We talked about installing plugins in WP and moving the blog to our own server.  Since we may want to do more that blogging, for example: Multilingual Posts, Projects, Some metrics and Analytics, (Nikolay was taking about Trust Metric), Event organizing, Advertising, Fund raising, add more… I wonder what software is best suited to handle all ?

Solar in Las Vegas

I was in Las Vegas for a while and decided to upload some pictures of my home renovation solar experiments. This is a 500 feet black hose that is connected to an old water heater. The hot water should circulate using D5 Solar circulation pump. My goal eventually is to concentrate solar energy with computer controlled mirrors or by pointing an old C-Band satellite towards the sun.

It would be cool if one can find funding for organizing green development camps. For example a group of enthusiasts can get together once a year and dedicate 7 days to get their ideas into a working prototype. A demo session at the end should show the final  result. The funding is necessary for materials, travel and accommodation. Videos and pictures can be published so that the joy is shared

Software in Flash

A friend of mine – Bertrand, showed me a nice collaborative whiteboard/canvas  software in flash.
Collaborative mind-map for google-wave, anyone ?

While on the subject here are some other interesting flash-based apps & libs:

• Use nodes to build http://sourcebinder.org/
• Diagrams, UML http://www.gliffy.com/
• 3D libs  papervision, away, sandy, alternativa (paid,russian), jiglibflash (physics)

I was thinking again that it would be cool to motivate people to translate the blog so when someone posts something interesting there is a greater chance that it will be translated to other languages. I’m positive that we can find support for Bulgarian, French and Japanese so I’ve asked Yuka to translate some posts to Japanese. While doing so initially we used Google spreadsheets and ImportFeed and GoogleTranslate functions, than i thought that it would be nice if we use WPML plug-in so i found a free PHP hosting http://www.justfree.com and installed WPMU but failed to install WPML. Has anyone had better luck with multilingual WP ?

The Ascent of Money

An interesting documentary on the history of banking part 1, part 2 ,on PBS and as a playlist on youtube

Algae take over beaches in northern France

I wonder if any company will be doing a partnership with the French government to use the algae as fuel. My understanding is that one can press algae and produce oil pretty much the way olive oil is produced. I can picture an old water powered mill pressing algae instead of grinding wheat and producing algae oil and fertilizer. Ahh, i guess it might not be as easy as one may think.

NLP and Ontologies

For a while now I’ve been thinking about using knowledge representation – Ontologies as a base for creating a modular Natural Language Processing system focused on extracting structured data from unstructured. For example we can create/use Ontologies (models) that describe “simple” concepts like: Address, Time, Task, Expense, Transaction etc… and use them to “match” information from a text stream. The reason i’m writing this is because i think that there is a common ground for collaboration… I know Stefan is interested in RDF/OWL,  the company that Neven is involved is in a very near domain and finally i was playing with Google Wave which i think is a good platform for creating intelligent bots that will be very easy to distribute if they turn out to be useful :)

Here are some references:
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
http://protege.stanford.edu/
http://jena.sourceforge.net/
http://www.openrdf.org/
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html