CodeRepos is a software repository space where many top-level Japanese web programmers contribute and share their source code.

Kazuhiro OOSAWA, aka Yappo, is known well by his privately running Japanese search engine iYappo for more than decade, a famous hacker among Japanese Perl community, also called "Shogun" by some geeks.

On his blog on August 31st 2007, he called for participants for his shared repository server.

The site is run by open source repository tool SubVersion/Git and issue tracking tool trac.

The most active area is Perl (which is very active in Japan), which is used in 576 modules, including Perl core code relevant to multi-bytes text handling. However, the repository also has many projects in 47 programming languages, website sources (such like a community site perl-users.jp) and even poem.

Registration is handled by Osawa manually, by reading applicant's e-mail, and often their blogs, to see if s/he is really a programmer.

There is only one rough rule that you need to name sub-directory logically when you add a new project.

Basically, everyone can modify any piece of code on the repository, which seems much looser than other English based code repository sites on where projects have its own leader, license, roles and permissions.

Amazingly, this works well and there have been only 2 times system-wide disasters which had been caused not by malicious intention but by operation mistakes, and those were resumed back quickly as some members keep taking whole copy of the repository on their local.

All updates are being reported to an IRC channel (#CodeRepos@freenode), and many geeks are watching it.

The most interesting moment on CodeRepos is, as I heard from users, suddenly a certain project in the system got attention by a single interesting change, and the change reported on the IRC channel attracts a lot of other hackers, causes a lot of editing stream involves them over hours and days to make the project source code totally re-modified and shiny, online hackathon.

Obviously the CodeRepos is getting attentions from Japanese web developers who feels difficulty to play on English-based other repository services, and it has been encouraging novice programmers to open up their code in Japanese geekosphere. I am sure that it is also useful to search talented Japanese web engineers by reading their code, if you are seeking some for hiring but have no connection with Japanese geeks.

See Also:

Poem by mala on CodeRepos [J]

Tags: Community, Japan, Technology by Akky Akimoto
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The show was broadcast nationwide in Japan during last weekend's prime time, and is a quiz show investigating whether superstitions and conventional beliefs actually work in real life.    The anchorperson introduced six blog websites as examples of information collected via the Internet, which were presented as possible clues to the questions in the show.

TV-Asahi acknowledged the suspicion that the blog sites introduced in the program were fake, and it apologized for the fraud.

TV-Asahi is well-known as the broadcaster that world media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Softbank founder Masayoshi Son attempted to buy a major stake in a dozen years ago.   Also, the broadcaster is infamous due to another scandal from two decades ago, in which it used actresses portraying crime victims in interview videos for news programming, a first in the Japanese TV industry's 50-year history.

Tags: Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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Tokyo-based ISP and web-hosting provider, Kai Creates Inc. (its services website is called "Linkclub"), recently changed its service rates without notifying its customers. A large number of customer complaints have been reported to several consumer authorities, some sources report.

Kai is famous as a time-honored Internet venture, it started business in 1990 before the dawn of Internet era in Japan.

Unlike in the U.S. and the rest of the world, most Japanese Internet users are forced to pay their bills by way of recurring credit card charges, because service providers prefer this method (which rarely fails to collect monthly dues).   Once your credit card number is received upon sign-up, the service provider no longer requires your approval to charge your card each month.   If you don't like using credit cards, you can instead choose automatic bank drafts as your method of payment.   Once you submit the signed or sealed (ie. with a Japanese seal or hanko registered to your bank) acceptance form, the bank pays your service provider without asking you (the account holder) to confirm the amount to be paid each month.

Kai's customers are reportedly complaining about a raise in price of monthly usage fees, and irregular withdrawals of 10,000 yen (approx. USD 110) from some customers' bank accounts without notice.

Kai says on its website that it is forced to change monthly usage fees from 3,900 yen to 5,700 yen (a 46 percent increase) to facilitate additional hardware to meet newly-introduced international security standards.   The number of customers who have been hit by the 10,000 yen (USD 110) withdrawal has reached more than 20,000.

Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has already started an investigation to find out whether Kai violated the telecommunication business law.

Kai's note about unscheduled and additional charges on its website [J]:

Correction: This story incorrectly reported that Kai changed its monthly usage fees from 1,800yen to 5,700 yen. However, we have learned that 1,800 yen is actually the difference between the original price and the new one.

Tags: Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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I just got back from Sony's "VAIO type P" blogger event in Ginza, Tokyo. The type P is a pretty compact machine but it still has impressive features for a notebook PC. (I'm trying to stop myself from clicking the "Buy Now" button.)

Sony's "It fits in your back pocket" promotion prompted some net users to create this hilarious parody.

Thinkpad in a pocket?

Macintosh?

How about Dell?

via Hachimakikou [J]

See Also

Sony Japan's VAIO type P product page [J]

US product page

Tags: Joke by Akky Akimoto
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Investment arm of a Tokyo-based Internet venture Cyber Agent Group, Cyber Agent Investment LTD.[J] announced to organize a business plan competition called "START", for the purpose of discovering innovative and potential tech start-up, in cooperation with  Cyber Agent, Mixi[J], Yahoo Japan[J], EC Navi[J], CA Mobile, netprice.com, DeNA and Microsoft Bizspark.

Award winning plan may get funding of 100 million yen (approx. USD 1.1 million) at the maximum from Cyber Agent Investment.   Additional funding and business partnership may be provided by the cooperators.

The competition is open to all individuals who are older than 18 years and so, and to all corporates which founded in less than three years.   Its competition entry is open from January 8th through March 11th this year.

 Website of business plan competition "START" [J]

Tags: Japan, News by Masaru IKEDA
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