Jason’s Random Thoughts

Do you keep your phone on vibrate?  How often do you feel it ring, then realize you’re not even wearing it?  If you said “never”, then you are a very lucky person.

It’s been a full three months since I was in a position that required high degrees of availability.  Servers would email me if there was a problem.  People would call, email or text message me for everything from resetting a database password to creating a complex SQL query for some critical custom report.  Because I can’t stand ring tones of any kind, I leave my phone on vibrate.  However, after years of feeling a little device vibrate at my side, I’m feeling a little disconnected from the world.  That said, it doesn’t stop my brain from thinking an email is coming in.

So to that end, I’m thinking a sexy little XTC mobile phone is in order.  My current PDA (an HP iPaq 2210) is over three years old and has long outlived its usefulness.  While I can still use it for writing blog entries (like I’m doing right now), reading eBooks and keeping schedules, it’s kind of useless without some type of internet connectivity.

A little while ago, Nick Ramsay over at LongCountdown let us know about the upcoming changes with Japanese cell phone plans and it’s making me look a little more at potential plans and phones.  I think that SoftBank would be my best bet, but I’m not too sure whether Reiko and I can get a decent couples plan with the phones we want.

Well … I guess we’ll just have to see and find out.

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There’s been quite a bit of talk about privacy concerns at Facebook recently since last week when the general public learned that employees have been seeing what profiles people look at.  In the days that followed there have been cries of foul and others shouting about “breach of privacy”.  So, in an effort to help people with their privacy concerns, I’m going to tell you how to keep yourself out of Facebook’s data collection system:  Don’t use Facebook.

Every website has logs that tell us who is connected, when, and (in some cases) for how long.  That’s billions of websites that collect, at the very least, an IP address.  What do people do with this information?  It depends on the person.

I’ll admit that I’ve been collecting information on my readers ever since this blog started.  Why?  So that I can see what posts are popular, who comes here more often, and how long people stay.  By looking at this data in an aggregated form, I’m able to change my writing style to suit the people that actually read my content.  This also gives me plenty to work with in terms of topics as the most popular posts are often the ones I expect the least amount of readership for.  Heck, if it wasn’t for this type of data analysis, I’d likely still be writing about things that nobody cares about (not that I have a huge readership to lose).  Would I ever sell this information?  No.  Would I ever use this information against somebody?  Only if you try and hack my site.

Privacy is a very big concern to millions of people and I agree that it’s something that we should keep an eye on, but every internet user needs to understand that no matter where you go, and no matter what you do, your online actions are recorded.  Did you go to a website and add something to a shopping cart, then leave before giving out credit card information?  Web administrators can ask this question and get an answer.  Did you talk about baseball with a friend on MSN?  Web administrators can know this, too.  Heck, they may even have a record of what you said.  Do you check your account balances online during your lunch break at work?  Not only does your bank know this but, chances are, your employer knows this, too.

99% of the time, the only thing administrators know about us is an IP address.  This rarely tells anybody anything unless you’ve also given out personal information that can be matched to that IP.  Signing up for an account on Facebook gives that company the ability to match a name with an IP.  Surfing some obscure blog (like this one) gives me just an IP.  The only way I could ever figure out who you were was if you left a comment, and that might not be enough for me to figure out who you are.

So the fact that a handful of Facebook employees are querying the database to find out who’s looking at their profiles, or who has the most popular profile on their site is nothing.  The company has a solid record regarding protection of our privacy, and nothing has been lost or given away.  If you’re really worried about someone knowing what you’re doing on their website, then I strongly suggest you stop visiting websites.  Not just Facebook, but all of them.  Because no matter where you go, someone knows you stopped by.

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The people over at DailyApps recently let us know how to install the latest version of Mac OSX (Leopard) on our non-Mac computers and it makes me wonder if this is truly a “hack”.

When Apple moved the Mac from PowerPC to Intel x86-based processors two years ago, everyone was talking about running Windows on their sexy little MacBook Pro’s. Could it be done? Would Windows handle the Apple-brand hardware? Would it be something that people would want?

Within weeks of the Intel-based MacBooks hitting the market, an application called XOM was released giving people the ability to boot Windows on these machines. A few months later, Apple released a beta of BootCamp and the rest is history. But for a long time, people were left wondering what it would take to install the Intel version of Mac OSX on their PCs. Well … now it can be done.

Many people know that I’m not a very big fan of Apple. I don’t like many of their practises, nor am I a fan of their leader. Do they make some good looking hardware? Sometimes. I liked the Mac Mini design, and the 4th generation iPod. The others are a little iffy, though. Do they make some decent software? Sometimes. In my experience, the Apple software crashes while the non-Apple software keeps on working. All software has a bug or two, but in terms of reliability, the Apple stuff was the worst. So what do I think of running Mac on a PC?

I think it’s about time.

I will not be running OSX in the near future, but if someone was able to get it operational on a non-Apple computer within a day of Leopard’s release, it’s because Apple is likely getting ready to market their OS to Windows users. It’s not enough to sell a ridiculously over-priced Intel-based computer anymore … you need to cater to people on any budget. MacBooks sell for about $1600 come with the same hardware we find on $900 notebooks. Desktop models also seem to sell for almost twice as much as they should. Because of the high entry costs, many people stay away from Apple computers and buy lame Gateway or Dell machines that can barely handle Vista and manage a half-assed job with XP. Apple knows this. Microsoft knows this. Everybody in the industry knows this. So why not change the playing field?

We can’t go one week without seeing a high-profile rant against Windows Vista or some other blunder at Microsoft. I stayed true to the Redmond team for as long as possible, but even I knew it was time to walk away from Windows and try something else. So with Apple releasing Leopard and someone making it run on a Plain-Jane PC within a day, we can assume that Mr. Jobs is about to try and gain some more market share while promising a low sticker price.

Will people switch over to Mac in droves? No. Most people are happy with their computers just the way they are. If something works, why fix it? But for people who want to try something new, or who just want to save themselves a few hundred dollars when buying something that runs Mac software, this ability is going to be a God-send.

Hopefully this will mark the start of a true migration from Windows. For far too long, Microsoft has been very slow on giving customers what they want. In many cases, they tell people what they want, and we’re forced to listen. Palm tried to do this (several times), and look where they are today. So if Big Redmond starts losing a significant amount of market share — say 5 to 10% — to other operating systems like OSX, Ubuntu or any of the other quality OSes, they’ll be forced to sit down and think long and hard about what customers actually want to see in an operating system. Once this happens, they’ll likely churn out one of the most incredible platforms ever seen in computing history and potentially win back much of the market they lost. But until that day comes, we need to start moving away from Windows.

Microsoft has the resources to give us something truly incredible. They have the best hardware support in the industry. They also have some of the world’s best applications written for their systems. Microsoft is very prominent in data centers and other businesses, and there’s no denying the incredible robustness of their development platforms. All in all, Microsoft is in the best position to give people what we need. We just need to send a message to help them listen.

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It’s been about a week since making the switch from WindowsXP to Ubuntu, and I’m quite happy with the experience so far.  My old HP zt3000 notebook runs pretty quick (the boot time is about the same as XP Pro, though) and I haven’t seen one single application failure message yet.  Happy times, indeed.

But one area where I’ve always had trouble with Linux is in the hardware arena.  Most quality system hardware is supported, but it’s the peripherals that we often struggle with.  Printers, scanners, game controllers, PDAs … you name it, and there’s a lack of drivers for it.  Ubuntu, however, is a little different.

Earlier today, I needed to connect my wife’s Canon Prixa MP600 All-in-One printer to scan some images and print them after a little editing.  In Windows, I’d only need to connect the device to an available USB port, install a simple drivers package from the Canon site, and that’d be that.  In Ubuntu, however, it’s not always that easy.

After connecting the device, I was given a happy little message box saying that the specific driver required was not found, and a generic text driver would be used instead.  Kudos to the Ubuntu team for giving us a plain-text driver, as this is often all we need in a pinch, but how could I go about using colour, fonts or the scanner?

I went to the Canon Australia site and found some Linux drivers, but they were rpm’s for a different flavour of *nix … I needed deb files.  To use these, I would need to install another program called Alien, then convert the rpm’s to deb’s and install.  Hardly the simple installation I was hoping for, but since I didn’t know of any other option, it was time to try it.

Installing Alien was pretty easy.  In a terminal window, type: sudo apt-get install alien.  You can also choose to install from the Synaptic application, but I prefer terminals.  You’ll also need the rpm files from the Canon driver site.  Once these are downloaded and Alien is installed, go to the directory with the driver rpm’s and type: sudo alien [name of the file]  (eg; sudo alien cnijfilter-mp600-2.70-2.i386.rpm).  You will need to do this for each rpm file.  After all the rpm’s have been converted, you’ll need to finish the job by typing: sudo dpkg -i cnijfilter-*.  You’ll then have installed all the necessary drivers to print.

If you’d also like to scan, there are scanner rpm’s on the site as well, and you’ll need to use the very same process there.

All in all, this took about 20 minutes from start to finish for both the printer and scanner.  It wasn’t bad, but once everything was said and done, I was missing the ease and simplicity of Windows.  I use to say that Ubuntu was the operating system that I would have no problem letting my parents use, but it’s time to revise that statement: Ubuntu is the operating system that I would have no problem letting my parents use after I set everything up for them.

What if you don’t want to do all that, you say?  Well … after doing all that work with Alien and converting rpm’s to deb’s, I found out that we can use the MP500 driver (bundled with Ubuntu 7.04 and up) just fine.  15 seconds of clicking, and it would have been running.

Whoops.

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Language teachers in Japan have been watching the decline of Nova for several months, and many have jumped ship as soon as another company offered a position.  The gradual collapse of this language school leaves thousands of people without work and, to add insult to injury, without any chance of recovering payment due.

Chris Salzberg at GlobalVoicesOnline gives a pretty good rundown of the problems many employees have faced in recent weeks, with administrative staff not receiving their September 27th and (now) October 27th paychecks, and language instructors not receiving their October 15th pay.

I really feel bad for these stranded employees.  Not just the teachers, but the administrative staff, too.  They’ve all given quite a bit of their time and effort, but will get nothing in return.  Bills don’t stop coming just because we have no income
Earlier today the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo had sent an email out to let us know what our options were, and there aren’t many.  Here’s an exerpt:

As you may have already heard in the news today (October 26), NOVA English school has filed for bankruptcy.  In this message, the Embassy endeavours to communicate as much information as possible to assist you in planning your next steps.

The Canadian Embassy is monitoring the situation and remains ready to receive enquiries and provide the best advice we can.

Employees with concerns should consider contacting one of the two regional Nova offices which have been tasked with responding to employee queries, the workers’ union representing Nova employees, and their local labour advisory office.  Contact details are:

- West Japan: Osaka Office (06) 7688-0404
- East Japan: Tokyo Office (03) 6688-4441

Nova has advised that it is in the process of putting related information for employees including questions and answers up on its website at www.nova.ne.jp.

General Union - Nova Branch: (06) 6352-9619
http://www.generalunion.org/nova/main.htm

The Osaka Labor Bureau, a local branch of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, has launched a consulting counter with five interpreters for foreign Nova instructors. Its phone number is 06-6344-1135

The assistance that the Embassy of Canada is able to provide you is limited to that which is stipulated in the Consular Service Standards page, http://www.voyage.gc.ca/main/about/service_standards-en.asp.

The Embassy is neither legal expert nor labour law specialist; we do not possess the expertise to be able to advise you on these topics thus we have been, and continue in, encouraging individuals to seek out subject-expert advice from local providers.  The following is a list of contacts for services and official Japanese advisory organisations that may be of assistance.  Many are Tokyo-based but they should be able to direct you to resources in your vicinity.

If you did wish to look into the option of hiring a private lawyer, the Embassy can provide a list of lawyers, some with English speaking services.

They go on to say some more, including this little bit about financial struggles:

We understand that many of you have major concerns about this.  The Embassy is available to assist you to contact your family or friends in Canada and facilitate private funds transfers between you and them should the need arise; however, we cannot provide financial funding for Canadians to remain overseas.

Money transfer methods include wire deposits into a personal Japanese bank account (or a Canadian bank account accessible from Japan e.g. by ATM card), credit card account, or instant transfers via Western Union - Please note that the Japanese agent of which is Suruga Bank with branches located in the Tokyo, Kanagawa, Shizuoka and Aichi areas.  Alternatively, your family member can contact the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada in Ottawa to obtain information on how to transfer funds through the department.

If you are seeking alternative work in order to stay in Japan, you may wish to discuss your situation with your family and friends to ensure you have arrangements in place should the necessity for emergency funds arise.  Also, please ensure to contact your nearest Immigration Bureau Office to obtain more information about changing jobs.

If you are planning to go home to Canada anytime between now and the holiday season, we strongly encourage you to start making travel arrangements immediately.  Mid-December marks the beginning of the holiday/Christmas high season; consequently, airfares will rise significantly, and ticket availability will become scarce.

If I were a recently unemployed language instructor who just lost employment as well as a month’s wages, I’d be pretty upset, scared, and frantic to get out of Japan and back to a country where I know I could be employed in a short period of time.   That said, I’d probably be out of luck due to some serious financial constraints myself.

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