Akatombo Web Log
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Google Translate Bookmarklet for Firefox
I was just messing around on my personalized Google news page which contains items in both English and Japanese, and it occurred to me that it would be really nice to have google’s machine translation available at the click of a button for Japanese news stories I was viewing. I knocked together a bookmarklet really quick, just drag this link: [ J»E ] into your Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox and then click the bookmarklet from any Japanese webpage to get google’s attempt at translating it to English.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Japanese blogging and stuff
I’m on the train to Tokyo to meet with a client, give a brief training session on how to operate their new system and hand over the project. We’ve set up their site so that they can easily update most of the content, and there are four pages (two in English and two in Japanese) that are essentially blogs. It will be interesting to see where they take it from here. I’ve found it quite difficult so far to update the Japanese blog on this site—who am I kidding, I find it hard to update the English blog; I find it just about impossible to update the Japanese one.
I think it is very important that I update both blogs. I want Akatombo Media to be the kind of company that is as transparent as possible in what it is doing. I have to get over some of my business school training to accomplish that goal, but I’m working on it. As part of that I’ll need to do something about making sure that both of Akatombo Media’s blogs get updated. I guess the options are as follows:
- Devote a much larger chunk of my day to blogging, and make it a set part of my schedule, not something I try to make time for
- get a member of the staff to write the Japanese blog, and let me focus solely on the English blog
- get a staff member to translate each post as it comes out
- Write for the English and Japanese blogs on alternating days
I’ll think about these options, and try to find some mix of these or whatever else I think of to make sure that things start to be updated more frequently. I’ve been missing quite a few days once again on the English site too, but I’m working on improving that. Limiting my input media, to the extent I’ve been able to keep up with it, has given me more time to think about things, much of which will probably become fodder for future topics.
I hope to write some more a little bit later about the ecommerce functionality we enabled in this project and will likely to that in a later post, but for know the train is about to arrive, so I’d better pack Calculon (my powerbook) away and get ready to go meet the client.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Tip Monkies
I’ve missed quite a few days recently, but none of you care so I’ll stop talking about it. I just wanted to leave a link to Tip Monkies here because it looks like it’s got a lot of great content, I want to go back and read it, and don’t have access to my rss reader right now.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Missing Days
I missed yesterday, and don’t want to miss today too, but I just got back from a meeting in Tokyo and need to go to bed, so this sorry excuse for a post will have to suffice.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Incremental Progress on many fronts
My decision to cut down the amount of media I take in yesterday only translated into a partial shift in actual practice today. I spent very little time surfing the Internet today, and almost no time in my RSS reader, but I spent a lot of time with podcast playing in the background while I worked on other things, which is probably keeping me from working at peak efficiency. Tomorrow I will limit my podcast listening time to the commute to and from the office (about an hour) and the trip to and from the dentist (another half hour); that should be enough podcast listening time anyway.
Today my attention was spread over work on a lot of things, and though I didn’t make huge progress in any one thing, I knocked quite a few things off of my to do list. We are preparing a more powerful server to take over for the server that is currently hosting all of our websites so I have slowly been getting it ready to go. It will run on FreeBSD 6 and I already had that installed. Today I finished up installing all the ports that I need and did some planning for the data and configuration migration that will need to take place before things are ready to go. I hope to get the server up and going over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays so I’m not spending many large blocks of time on it.
I came much closer to finishing a client project that involves translation, web design, and programming work. I just have four more items on my list of things I need to do on it before I can hand it over to the client so I hope to have it done tomorrow if all goes well. I keep finding little ways that the site could function more smoothly, so I have been doing quite a bit of complimentary programming work to fix little annoyances in the underlying content management system. I always try to throw a little bit extra in for free, but this particular client was very patient when the illustrator he hired didn’t get things done in time to meet the deadline for getting the project finished before we had to start on the CEATEC JAPAN 2005 website, a project that pretty much monopolizes our time for a good portion of the year.
I also did quite a bit of work on organizing the tools we use to manage our work-flow—trying to consolidate where our information is kept so that we minimize the number of repositories we need to keep an eye on. Finally on the personal side I did some updating on a wiki that my girlfriend and I are maintaining containing information related to our house hunt (we are working on buying a new house, remodelling an old one, or buying some land and building a new one). Well, I’m sure that I am the only one that could possibly be interested in this, and it is getting pretty late so I’ll wrap it up here.