Akatombo Web Log
Friday, May 21, 2004
Office move - server downtime
The Akatombo Media site as well as the other sites hosted on our server will be down for a (hopefully) short time on Saturday (Japan Time). The reason for this downtime is that we will be moving into a new office located in Yokosuka, Japan. The new office will provide us with more space, and will provide me with a nice long bicycle ride to work to help me get rid of some extra pounds.
I can still be reached at the same mobile phone number of course (090-5390-4081), and our old office telephone/fax number 0468-73-0456 will still reach us, though we may take some time getting back to you. The new number is shared so it will be given out upon request to clients who need to reach us with urgent faxes.
We apologize for the inconvenience of our site downtime, but we are confident that our move to the new location will allow us to do better/faster work for our clients, especially with all the noisy construction going on around our current location.
UPDATE: The server was down for just over three hours, nearly all of it transit and move in time. We are happy to report that there were no problems at all (that we know of) with getting things back up (knock on wood). If you notice any strangeness, please let us know.
We had another few hours of downtime the evening of the 23rd, when someone saw a cable plugged in that wasn’t plugged in before and decided to unplug it, and plug their laptop in. I feel fairly confident that this won’t happen again, and even more confident that if it does I’ll lose my temper. :(
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Mac OS X: Highly critical security flaw
From Jay Allen via Jim O’Connel of Wirefarm comes news of a very easy to exploit problem effecting pretty much all browsers in Mac OS X. This problem is extremely dangerous, and extremely easy to fix. If you are running Mac OS X, please go visit Jim’s post for information on how to fix it. He also has an example of the exploit on his site if you know and trust him enough to try it out, or understand by looking at the code what the link is going to do on your computer.
Boy, if this happens about about 3 times a week, it’ll be nearly as bad as windows 
UPDATE: Daring Fireball, on of my favorite websites on Macs and programming, has instructions for disabling this exploit that disable the exploit a bit more completely.
REUPDATE Daring Fireball has new, comprehensive instructions for fixing this problem. They include things that are not included in the Mac OS X security update (especially the Panther version which doesn’t fix the telnet hole for some reason) so I recomment having another look.
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Icons that mean English
Some of the pages in the CEATEC JAPAN 2004 website for languages other than Japanese and English will not be translated and will instead appear in English. For this reason it is our task to let the user know as intuitively as possible, which links will lead them to English pages. On last year’s website, we indicated this with a red asterisk and a legend in the header explaining what it meant, but aside from being ugly this strikes us as being rather unintuitive.
We have been trying to come up with an icon that will intuitively convey that these links point to English pages, and it has proven to be a very interesting and difficult challenge.
First we came up with an ‘e’ icon (
) which we like the look of, but doesn’t inherintly do much in the way of expressing the nature of the link.
Our second effort was a blend of the national flags of the United States and the United Kingdom (
) . We think this does a slightly better job of conveying the message, but would still require some explanation on our part, which is what we would like to avoid.
What are your thoughts on this? What type of icon would effectively convey that the link it marks points at an English page? Is it better to place an explanation of the icon’s meaning on every page? Is the header the most appropriate place for such an explanation or do you think you would tend to skip over it?
We look forward to your comments!
UPDATE: We have a solution that we are not totally happy with, but is the best we came up with in a few days of brainstorming. We’ll do a followup post when the committee has approved it.
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
CEATEC JAPAN 2004 - fr de kr es gb pages launch
We are proud to announce that the French, German, Korean, Spanish, and Chinese pages of the CEATEC JAPAN 2004 website launched early yesterday afternoon.
We were responsible for the French, Korean, and German pages, while Export-Japan provided the Spanish and Chinese pages.As always your comments, criticism, suggestions, and whatever else is on your mind is very welcome! If there is information that you need that isn’t there or if something is difficult to find or understand, please don’t hesitate to contact us, the CEATEC organizing committee, or both. We’ll do our best to remedy any trouble spots as quickly as possible.
Friday, May 07, 2004
Tokyo PC Users Group
I had a very good time at the Tokyo PC User’s Group meeting yesterday which was pretty much a Q&A session about websites. Anyway, many of the questions were right up my alley, and we didn’t have time to go through them in much depth. If any of you are visiting from that session and would like to have us go into a little more depth about a question you have about the issues involved in having a web page, we’d be happy to do it. Please comment here and we’ll put up an answer as quick as we can. Also, we generally know what we like and are not afraid to make reccomendations, so we’ll tell you what we think is good.