Vice Versa: Tokyo Bossa Nova

I happened upon this band by chance one night soon after coming to Tokyo. Since then, I’ve seen them a couple of times. I’m posting this link now because I always forget the name (some kind of weird mental block). Anyway, if you like Bossa Nova and you’re in Tokyo, they are a nice band to watch: Vice Versa.

Furigana.jp has launched

I have been working during my free time, over the last month, on a new website called Furigana.jp. The aim of the site is to help people “read Japanese today”.

In a nutshell, Japanese is hard to read. It is hard to read because there are actually four “alphabets” that are used to write Japanese: kanji, hiragana, katakana and romaji. Two of these alphabets, hiragana and katakana, are phoenetic alphabets collectively known as kana. The forth, romaji, is a formalized phoenetic form base on the Latin characters, which are commonly used in European languages like English. If these were it, most foreigners living in Japan and students of Japanese wouldn’t have such a hard time; these can basically be learned in a week or so. The one that is the cause of so much anguish for people learning Japanese is kanji.

Kanji is a form of writing that is a modification of the Chinese writing system. It was brought to Japan a long time ago (see Wikipedia). It basically consists of over 2000 characters that everyone is expected to learn to graduate from school and more than 8000 others that range in usage from common to obsolete. If that didn’t make matters bad enough, each symbol has up to eight different pronunciations depending on how they are used in a sentence or with other characters. Let’s just say that kanji is really hard.

For foreigners living in Japan, going about your daily life is hard enough without trying to learn such a complicated system of writing. That is why I decided to create Furigana.jp.

I receive between 10 and 20 emails each day that are written in kanji. I’m sure many other foreigners working in Japan receive even more. Up until now, I would copy the text of these emails into the Excite Translater and turn them into a mangled conglomeration of words that roughly resemble English and can almost be understand as having a vague sort of meaning; in other words, it turns it into jibberish. That’s not really a slight against Excite as it has the best translator out there. Back to the point… There was no way for me to read these emails since they were all in kanji.

Furigana.jp solves this problem and makes it possible for me (and everyone else) to “read Japanese today”. The site will take web pages or text, written in Japanese (aka kanji), and convert it into one of three readable formats:

• furigana – adds hiragana above the kanji from the original text
• kana – replaces the original kanji with hiragana
• romaji – replaces all Japanese text (kanji, hiragana and katakana) with Latin characters (modified Hepburn notation)

I should mention, this isn’t the first site that has these functions. There are a couple of others that offer part of what I am offering. The difference is that I have brought it together in a cleaner package that is easier to use as a daily tool. After trying to use the other tools I was left frustrated, which is why I decided to build my own tool. So, I hope this tool will be useful to people. Time will tell. If nothing else, I will be using the tool every day. Enjoy!

iLike brings more community to iTunes

I was first introduced to iLike because I received a reference to them through a friend who knows the president, Hadi Partovi. At the time I was really interested in their business, but I was still committed to my position here at Groove Digital Entertainment in Tokyo. Anyway, a few weeks ago I received an invitation from Mr. Partovi to join the iLike service and I did. Since then, I have spent some time customizing my profile page, adding friends, navigating through friend connections and the like. I have already discovered new music that I like and that is the entire goal of the service; discovering what iLike…

The service works through a program that you download and install locally on your PC. Once you’ve installed it, the application will launch concurrently with iTunes every time iTunes is launched. As you listen to music, the iLike sidebar will show information about the currently playing song including recommendations for similar songs/artist. You can also navigate to other user’s data as well as search playlists in the sidebar.

Overall, I think the service is a hit. If you can get your friends to join or if you start connecting to people with similar tastes, it can be a very effective way to discover new music and to add a nice community aspect to your music listening.

Math illiteracy is really painful…

Verizon reps cannot do math… [Slashdot][audio]

Minako Honda track for sale

Here at Groove, we recently launched our first customer on our new music sales service. The service allows artists to sell music directly on their websites without having to worry about the complications of DRM, credit card transactions, downloading, etc.

We plan on launching more very soon.

Findory: personalized news based on usage

Findory is a website that watches your news reading habits to personalize articles that it presents to you on its homepage [findory.com]. In addition to using Findory through their website, you can also integrate Findory into your normal news reader. I created a custom RSS feed through Findory that I added to Google Reader. This is a very cool idea and one that I have been thinking of in one way or another for a while now. I’ll have to give it a shot to see how good of a job it does for me.

A few Web 2.0 sites that caught my attention

I spent a good part of the day today reviewing Web 2.0 sites that were featured on SEOmox Web 2.0 Awards [web2.0awards.org]. The following lists some of the sites that I thought were interesting and that I would probably use.

• Basecamp – Provides a project management “extranet” that pulls together a number of important tools into a single focal point. Includes calendaring, people, tasks, milestones, document management and discussions.
• PBwiki – I think the site’s tagline says it all, “Make a free wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich”. They live up to it to. It was incredibly easy to setup my wiki. They have me my own hostname when I registered and I could choose to make the wiki public or private. The editor used standard wiki markup, but also provided a toolbar to create the markup. Good for me since I always forget.
• CSS Beauty – A nice example of how concepts of weblogging and syndication can be brought together in an elegant and targeted content website.
• Pandora Internet Radio – Create custom, dynamically generated radio stations to help you discover new music. Based on the Music Genome Project.
• SWiK – OSS project database

There are many more sites out there… I will be looking for ones that have anything interesting.

Fair use and the state of digital media online

The other day, a friend of mine asked the following simple question. Though the question is simple, it highlights the current state of confusion among consumers when it comes to purchasing and using digital media online.

Can you give me a brief tutorial on how purchased digital music (single tracks) work in terms of copyright stuff? For example, if I purchase a DRM-protected song off the web, say from MSN music for 99c in WMA format, am I able to play it on another computer or burn it onto a cd and then play it on another machine or cd player? I’m thinking not, but that would be real prohibitive to genuine users like myself who do NOT intend to distribute the song, but to be able to play it in the car, on the home entertainment center, or on any of my laptops. For these “genuine” users, is there cheat software off the web that removes the DRM stuff (or encryption) or what have you, and just generates an mp3 or simple WMA for you?

In an attempt to clarify the options available, I will briefly try to cover a little bit about RIAA restrictions on digital music sales, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the sources of licensed as well as unlicensed music on the Internet.

First a little about the RIAA… The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the organization that is primarily responsible for the confusion that consumers feel around digital media. Of course, the RIAA simply represents the major labels and does their bidding. Currently, in the U.S., the major labels place restrictions on legal sales of digitally downloadable music. These restrictions usually include playback on 5 machines, transfer to a limited number of portable devices and a limit on the number of times a track may be burned to CD. In order to legally sell music, music sellers, such as iTunes or MSN must adhere to these restrictions.

In order to conform to these restrictions, resellers must implement technology that allows them to constrain how the consumer actually uses the content. This technology is known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). There are a number of DRM technology providers, but only two have gained any appreciable amount of market share; Windows Media DRM and FairPlay.

FairPlay is a DRM technology to which Apple has exclusive control. Because of this control and Apple’s desire to remain closed, FairPlay is not licensed to any other resellers or device manufacturers. Apple uses the FairPlay DRM to limit content purchased throughout the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). Furthermore, FairPlay technology may not be used on any device other than the Apple iPod. This creates the current situation where iTMS downloads may only be used on the iPod. Since Apple does not implement any other DRM technology on the iPod, the only store that iPod users can use is iTMS.

Windows Media DRM has essentially become the fallback DRM for everyone else. Windows Media DRM is supported on a large number of consumer devices as well as desktop players and applications. Yet, despite this advantage, Windows Media has yet to displace FairPlay due to the huge success of the iPod. This may be starting to change as growth in iPod sales has begun to decrease [The Observer].

Of course, DRM places limitations on consumers, afterall, that is what it was designed to do. But, as my friend asks, what about honest users that just want to download and listen to music? Well, I’m sorry, but the RIAA does not trust you or anyone else. They are trying to find a technological solution to a social problem. Interstingly, it is technology (the record, then the CD) that put the recording industry where it is today. However, those were technologies that were good for the consumer. Again, the recording industry is trying to maintain their position using technology (DRM), but in this case the technology is bad for the consumer. Will technology win? Yes, but DRM will lose. Be prepared to wait a while, though…

So, what options are available to honest users?
1) Purchase and rip the physical CD. This is the best solution as it results in high quality content with metadata and absolutely no DRM. The irony of digital downloads is that the Labels are spending so much attention on putting DRM on low quality downloads when CDs are sold without DRM and provide a much higher quality digital file.
2) Burn the “purchased” tracks to CD and the re-rip them to your computer. This will effectively “strip” the DRM, but is time consuming, especially since metadata about the downloaded track will also be lost once the track is burned.
3) Windows Media DRM has recently been cracked and there is now a tool available for stripping DRM [FairUse4WM]. Microsoft quickly came out with a “patch”, but the tool was quickly updated to work around this patch. The cat and mouse game has started and DRM will ultimately lose. Of course, even this solution is troublesome to the consumer and, AFAIK, only works for subscription content. At least you can fairly use subscription content now…
4) QTFairUse6 strips FairPlay DRM from tracks downloaded from iTMS. The cat and mouse game has also begun here with successive versions of iTunes patching the holes and subsequent versions of QTFairUse6 opening them back up [ArsTechnica].

Where can I purchase music online?
If you still insist on downloading music, instead of purchasing the CD, here are some of the more popular options:
1) iTunes: Despite their closed environment, iTunes still provides the best end-to-end experience. Of course, you are locking yourself into Apple and the iPod.
2) MSN, Napster, Rhapsody: Take your pick… In addition to downloads, these services offer subscriptions that give unlimited downloads that expire at the end of the month.
3) eMusic: Unlike everyone else, eMusic does not use any DRM. The reason they can do this is that they do not distribute any major label content. The advantage is that you can avoid the pains of DRM and play your music anywhere as often and how you like. The disadvantage is that much of the most desirable music is not available on their service. eMusic also offers a subscription service. It varies from other subscription services in that the content never expires (it is also DRM-free), but the number of downloads is limited. Instead, you get a limited number of downloads per month at a reduced price.

Where can I get free music online?
There are many people who want to “steal” music from the free sites. However, many more of us use the free sites to try new music or to download music that we may have already purchased, but without the hassles of DRM.
1) The Pirate Bay: This is the number one BitTorrent tracker on the web. You can go here to search for music, videos and other goodies online
2) uTorrent: You will need a BitTorrent client to use The Pirate Bay. I would recommend uTorrent.
3) SpiralFrog: This is a new service that has yet to launch, but recently signed agreements with Universal and now, EMI, to distribute these catalogs on their service. So, in addition to (probably) all of the content that you find on eMusic, this site will actually have some good music. The general thought is that where one major Label goes, the others will soon follow so it is a reasonable guess that this site may soon be able to offer the same catalog as iTunes. The unique aspect here is that SpiralFrog is ad supported. The content will still be DRM restricted, but, in this case, you get what you pay for.

There are many other topics that I could cover and a lot more detail to cover on these topics, but I hope this article will help answer a few people’s questions. Good luck!

Rounding Doubles to Integers in C#

I looked all over the place in the C# libraries for a simple method to round a Double to an Integer. I finally gave up and decided that such a thing may not actually exist. So, I went out on the net to find someone else’s implementation, but I didn’t like the one that I did find. So, here is my take on the problem…

public static long Round(double d) {   double ceilD = (double)Math.Ceiling(d);   double floorD = (double)Math.Floor(d);

   // is the original double closer to the ceiling?   return ((ceilD - d) < (d - floorD)) ?             (long)ceilD : (long)floorD;}

I’m not sure about efficiency, but there is a certain elegance to this approach. Hope it is useful for someone.

UPDATE: don’t know how I missed this one… [abstracttb.com]

Mycelio is getting off the ground

Back in January, I ventured down to Oaxaca, Mexico with my good friend, Matt Brown. I was going for time off and a little adventure, but his goals were far more ambitious. Matt was embarking to start an organization to promote sustainability in a region that will soon be affected by growth.

Since January, he has managed to establish himself in Playa Zipolite, has bought and is developing property, and is now working with some local projects. I invite you to check out his website [Mycelio.org] where he explains everything in detail.