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.

New Search Engine

I have a question !

I would like to know the actual possibilitys of making a “smart” search engine that could give you answers of your questions.

For example, let say that i want to know the birth date of Napoleon, i’m going first on google and type Napoleon brithdate, i find few links and by habit, i click on Wikipedia. There, i look in first lines to find what i’m looking for.

Is there a way of finding directly this information by asking a simple question like this? I mean noone care about looking stuff in search engine or encyclopedia but the answers.

Even better, what if i speak directly in mic asking my questions and get replyed by voice. Avoiding typing and mousing gesture for earn time.  Imagine a children playing with such application for years! Or this could in reverse made the learning process almost unusefull for most people.

Until where could we go about question complexity?

John told me few years ago about ontologie and this really blow my mind but what now? Is there something like Wikipedia but ontologie oriented more open than a “simple” dictionary?

What we should do with our (small) community site?

I think before we start “just-another-place-to-share-everything-we-do” or “the-ultimate-place-for-doing-cool-stuff” we should try to get the maximum out of what we have right now, which is WP.com for one reason or another. I’m afraid that we will start wasting time, resources and much effort creating one place after another instead of doing things.

Does anyone have clear idea what exactly we would like to do?
Let’s answer this first.

OR

Let’s just let everyone talk here and may be something will come out of it. The Universe is a perfect place, it’s built of random (although the existence of the randomness is a controversial philosophical question) stuff and events. Let’s see what the chance will bring to us.

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 ?

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)