Asiajin

(Photo by Jim Lindley (cc-by-nc))

Ruby’s creator Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto is going to become an honorary citizen of Matsue city where he lives.

The city will award three people this time but other two are awarded posthumously. Matz, a 44 years-old geek, is the youngest recipient of the award.

Matsue city considers Ruby and Matz as very important “assets” of the city. They held a conference called ‘Ruby World Conference 2009‘ in September to strengthen their presence in Ruby community.

(via Yomiuri Shimbun)

Tags: Japan, Person by Shunichi Arai
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Yesterday I introduced a crazy 14 letters twitter clone and how much Japanese are obsessed with smallness. And today I am amazed again.

A blogger Jamadam released an interesting URL shortening service, and that is the world shortest.

[Update] @miyagawa pointed out that http://tinyarro.ws/ have been making the same shortest URL, though the generator URL is not using multibyte letters.

If your browser does not support IDN (Internationalized Domain Name), for example IE6, the link above does not work. (Latest IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera should be fine)

# “縮” can be read as “shuku” or “chijime” and means “to shorten”, if you are interested in

As you see, it uses non-English domain name, a Japanese letter “縮” on its second level under “.jp”(Japan), which is totally compliant with web specification. And accessible on any modern browser.

By using Japanese letter, it realizes 4 letters domain in total, which cannot be beaten.

But there are some 4 letters URL shorteners like 2.ly, a.nf, etc. What makes this new one the shortest?

When I shortened Asiajin address, it generated

http://縮.jp/占

If you look the number of bytes it occupies, the URL is not the shortest, as those 2 Japanese letters each costs 3 bytes in Unicode(UTF-8) so byte-wise the URL is 17 bytes.

However, if you see the most occasional use case of URL shortener, Twitter, it limits comment by the number of letters, regardless how much space the tweet takes up in their server. So the shortened URL above is 13 letters.

It will be more effective later, because you can make 3.7 million patterns by 1 or 2 Japanese letters, 7.3 billion by 3 letters, as Jamadam explains [J]. Even this service becomes popular and used a lot, the length of the URL on twitter will stay in short.

# Jamadam wrote his service is a joke service, no guaranteed.

As he only uses common 1945 Japanese letters, you can make even shorter service by utilizing other multi-byte letters like Chinese, Arabic, etc. (But be careful, there are so many applications and services fail to handle such IDN domain, especially Roman alphabet countries originated ones.)

See Also:

(Shuku).jp also provides API [J]

Tags: Japan, New Service by Akky Akimoto
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China’s answer to Google, Baidu, has launched a number of search services for cell phones in Japan today. “Baidu Mobile” consists of four main elements: PC web search, mobile web search, picture and video search. But it’s also possible to look for emoji, picture characters or emoticons excessively used especially by Japan’s youth (and especially in mobile messages).

One example for the emoji search featues: If you enter the term “beer” not as written word, but rather as a beer symbol, Baidu Mobile will deliver search results based on that emoji. If you do spell out the word, the results the service retrieves will include pages containing beer emoji (see the screenshot below).

Baidu Mobile’s video search includes six sites, most importantly YouTube and Japan’s very own video portal Nico Nico Douga, and results will come from the fixed web and mobile versions of these sites.

Baidu says it will provide its mobile search engine to companies operating mobile sites, too.

Tags: Japan by Serkan Toto
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If 1,400 letters-limit macro-blog Woofer is an American answer to Twitter, 14 letters nano-blog Chuitter is from Japan, where Haiku and other short, tiny thingy are loved.

I don’t know how much serious this service is (Chuitter design seems too similar to the original Twitter), but their first day of launch seems successful. Many Japanese Twitter users are trying this clone.

In reality, 140 letters limit of Twitter is much longer in Japanese when comparing with English. As some of you may know, one letter in Kanji (China originated letter) itself has meanings so the amount of information “per letter” can be more. Even with 14 letters, it is possible to express something in Japanese.

A popular Japanese blogger Chika Watanabe showed the English/Japanese difference on tweets by using real tweets [J] last month. In the article, an example tweet by Tim O’Reilly,

IMO a SXSW panel worth voting for: Book Publishing, The New Ecosystem http://bit.ly/4nyCSG (registration required to vote)

which is 122 letters, can be translated if in Japanese like this,

思うにSXSWパネルは投票の価値有。出版、新エコシステム　http://bit.ly/4nyCSG　（投票には要登録）

which is 59 letters.

Probably there are some languages which is more difficult to write in short than English (German?), and I guess Chinese could be more descriptive than Japanese in the same number of letters.

# [Update 2009-10-12] Famous Taiwanese Hacker Audrey Tang explained how Chinese tweets can convey a lot of information in compare with English. Quite interesting.

If Twitter was designed 10 years ago, it was not counted by number of letters but by number of bytes, then 140 bytes for Japanese may fall into around 40-50 letters.

Tags: Japan, Joke by Akky Akimoto
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Billy’s Bootcamp, Core Rhythms and Figurerobics by Korean aerobics guru Jung Da Yeon(정다연) – Japanese midnight infomercial programs tempted TV shoppers to buy a variety of items to remodel their body shapes.  These items will be used in several days after the purchase, but usually they will be stored in a shed and will be never used again.   What’s wrong?   How can we motivate ourselves to continue exercising?     The main reason why we quit is we have no way to share our efforts with the people having the same issue and the same target.

Picture: NHK’s newsclip covering the 3rd Edition of the World(Tenkaichi) Computer Cowboy Championship

There was an annual software developer conference called Tenkaichi Computer Cowboy Championship[J] in late August in Akihabara, which was the third edition and held by Tokyo-based iPhone app developer Ubiquitous Entertainment’s CEO Ryo Shimizu[J], legendary PC magazine editor Satoshi Endo and former CEO of Microsoft Japan Sam Furukawa[J].   Mr. Yasuhiro Takeda[J](@chabasilah), studying at the Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Chuo University as well as working with web service developing start-up Glucose[J], won the semi-final prize in the championship’s student developer category with the gadget he invented, which allows you to tweet the result of your dumbbell exercise and to share it with your friends and colleagues very easily.

Satoshi Endo visited Mr. Takeda’s office in an on-site report segment of a weekly IT news TV show[J], and asked Mr. Takeda to explain how his intelligent dumbbell works.

The dumbbell is named Musculus, a body remodeling support module, Mr. Takeda says.   A wireless communication device and an accelerometer are embed on the dumbbell, and it counts how many times you extend your arms back and fourth and transmits those parameters to a server which is designed for collecting data.   The server will post a message including the speed and the frequency of your undergoing exercise to Twitter, as well as comparing your exercise result with those of others using the same model dumbbell.

If it does work well and succeed sufficiently for sharing the user’s exercise experiences on Twitter, we won’t need any other weight loss program and diet supplements.

Tags: Company, Japan, Joke, New Service, Technology by Masaru IKEDA
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