blog.kentarok.org

It seems that blogging about origins of domain names is in fashion among Japanese bloggers, which was suggested by kaminogoya-san at this entry: "ドメイン名の由来を書いてみる - 2xup.org". I'll also take after them to catch up.

I run some domain names for several websites.

kentarok.org is for some kind of personal things like blog, code repository, repository viewer and task management tool, and some documents (it's now empty, though...). As you easily recognize, it was named after my own name, Kentaro Kuribayashi.

antipop.gs, which is obsolete but will still work until next year or so, was replaced by kentarok.org described above. It was the first domain name I took. The story about the domain name is too long to tell whole of it, so I'll explain it as shortly as I can.

When I took a procedure for connecting to the Internet for the first time and was needed to choose some phrase for my e-mail account name, I hadn't thought about it at all. Since no good idea came out to me then, I took a name from a Hip Hop group called Antipop Consortium. I was just listening to their music then. So, I started using the name, antipop, in various occasion: domain name, IDs for some websites, etc.

simpleandclean.jp was named after a song of Hikaru Utada, "Simple and Clean", which is English version of "光", but not literally. I'm an enthusiastic fan of her, and love the song the most of her works. simpleandclean.jp now hosts only some experimental things of mine so far, I'll offer something usefull things there.

I have also much more domain names except them. There may be a chance to write about them some time or other.

I've shipped a new version of Acme::MorningMusume. It's an update along with that Hitomi Yoshizawa graduated from モーニング娘。 on May 6.

• Kentaro Kuribayashi / Acme-MorningMusume-0.10 - search.cpan.org

As I wrote here before, I'm hardly interested in モーニング娘。 now. I love ℃-ute and Berryz工房!!! I have to say モーニング娘。 now doesn't matter at all.

These days, so many start-ups which have an intention of following Twitter's success have come out one after another. I think it's absolutely ridiculous that most of them stupid enough not to offer diverse way to access their services except Web forms, for instance, accessibility via open API, IM, cell-phone, and so on.

Timelog is one of such sites, but it wisely started providing API which allows its users to access most functions and data on it easily. Really great! As soon as I heard the news, I went straight to work on writing a perl interface to it. Then, I hacked it up as WebService::Timelog, and uploaded it to CPAN.

• WebService::Timelog

Here's a simple usage of this module. For more details, consult the documentation on CPAN and the official documentation of Timelog API. Enjoy!

use WebService::Timelog;

my $timelog = WebService::Timelog->new(
    username => $username,
    password => $password,
);

# update status
$timelog->new_msg(text => $text);

# or you can do so like this
$timelog->update($text);

# retrieve public messages
my $public_messages  = $timelog->public_msg(cnt => $count, since => $since);

# retrieve friends' messages
my $friends_messages = $timelog->friends_msg(cnt => $count, since => $since);

# retrieve direct messages
my $direct_messages  = $timelog->direct_msg(cnt => $count);

# retrieve some information on you
my $me               = $timelog->show();

# retrieve some informtion on your friends
my $friends          = $timelog->friends(cnt => $count);

Steven D. Levitt, well-known in Japan for the book, "Freakonomics" ("ヤバい経済学" in Japanese), expects the Internet to be of great help for fighting pandemic.

What can we do to fight global pandemics? The single most powerful tool we have is probably the internet. Pandemics tend to start in remote locations. What we need is a way to extract the information from those places quickly to get a head start on keeping the epidemic tamed. The formal networks like the CDC do not seem to work all that well.

Freakonomics Blog ? Fight Global Pandemics (Or At Least Find a Good Excuse When You’re Playing Hooky)

Great. I totally agree with it. And he describes Whoissick.org which allows people to post about their sickness, to search with zip code, to view on a map, etc. It looks very cool and really useful. But he also says:

I doubt, however, that I would want to bother to go tell Whoissick.org that I feel awful. Certainly if I was about to die from the bird flu, it would not be top of mind.

Certainly ;)

In the meanwhile, I've been really addicted to Twitter these days, where people only reply to the question, "What are you doing?".

I think that it must be tough for us to post about our sickness to such sites as Whoissick.org, when we're suffering from disease. It's just a little overreact.

But I'm sure that Twitter enables us to do so easily due to its simplicity and diversity of accessibility. Actually, when people get ill, they're twittering, "got a headache", "feel so bad", "I seem to catch a cold" or so. We may be twittering at that time we're about to dying.

"Folks! I'm about to die. Good-bye!"

No kidding.