soak over night – one pack ftw.

next morning, get some salt, 1 onion, teaspoon of curry powder and boil until soft.

in a separate fry pan get some garlic 2 buds about half an inch of ginger, one tomato, and some pepper (cayenne optional). olive oil. crush / grate ginger and garlic. heat olive oil, couple of spoons. saute ginger and garlic about 5 mins, add tomato, saute till becomes a sauce. poor into lentils

***

soup

lentils. olive oil, onions, saute onions and lentils, low heat for 5- 10 mins.

add water 125-150 mls. (depending on consistency wanted)
cook that till done.

then get a big bunch of parsley. chop it up fine. once boiled add parsley. add a big whack of grated ginger (4-9 tbs).

turn heat off and add ginger.

nom nom with bread or rice.

nb: both of these are untested!

cat /etc/redhat-release

For me it was:

CentOS release 5.5 (Final)

If you want to download Adobe Reader in English and you live in Japan for example, you will need to change the url they redirect you to from:

http://get.adobe.com/jp/reader/

to:

http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/

For example:

mysql -u root -p

enter your mysql password (and of course you shouldn’t use root for live deployments).

select your database:

USE wordpress;

change local host to your IP address (if this is DCHP generated, it may change…)

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value='http://192.168.10.44/wordpress/' WHERE option_name='siteurl' OR option_name='home';

And you should be good to go!

This issue features a really promising Japanese start-up – Inferret – who are doing some really interesting work in the field of natural language recognition for both text and spoken language. And we introduce a great little hotel IP phone made by Japanese manufacturer Nakayo (pictured above). While a lot of people still have a negative image of VoIP (due to cheap calling networks) this phone has top-notch sound quality and is a wonderful device. There is also a howto I wrote explaining how to get twitter feeds to display on Polycom phones (although it will also work on Cisco IP phones with a bit of tinkering).

Also, I should mention that we will be exhibiting at our first tradeshow –

Denphone to exhibit at Call Center/CRM Demo & Conference Tokyo

Denphone is proud to announce that they will be exhibiting at this years Call Center/CRM Demo & Conference Tokyo to be held November 12th and 13th at Sunshine City in Ikebukero.

The Call Center/CRM Demo & Conference Tokyo is Japan’s leading tradeshow for Call Center and CRM solutions with vendors exhibiting a wide range of hardware, software and services for the call center and customer center industries.

Denphone will be focusing their SIP and IAX2 trunking solutions, as well as managed voice services. This is a good chance to meet up with a representative from Denphone to find out how telephony related technology is moving forward and what new solutions there are now available to both reduce your company’s expenditure while increasing employee effectiveness.

Denphone will be giving away 2 IP phones to people who visit their booth – so visit us to be in to win!

The event will be held at Sunshine City Ikebukuro: (http://www.sunshinecity.co.jp/ (Japanese language only).)

For more information (Japanese only) please see http://www.callcenter-japan.com/.

Look forward to seeing you there, and I hope you enjoy Denphone’s magazine.

This evening, I was trying to leave a comment on another blog, and it was a blogger blog. It seems the options have changed for comments, so I was offered either to use a blogger ID or an Open ID. I prefer to use my own website (ie. www.blizzardboy.net) as my ID, rather than going through some other service, but it would appear that that option has disappeared.

So I got curious – I did start a blogger blog back in 2006 so I wanted to see what happened to that. Actually it is still there at http://psy-ke.blogspot.com/. I wanted to see what would happen if I chose the blogger option. And lo and behold the blog was still there.

But when I went to log in, every thing was in Japanese! I guess no matter where you are from it will display the navigation and everything in the language of the region you are in.

Despite Japan having a foreign population of over a million people, blogger (and other google sites including analytics, adsense, adwords and youtube) as well as a large number of other sites choose to send web pages in the language of the country which your IP address indicates, rather than the language your browser indicates.

This means we get web pages in Japanese when we want them in English. Now, I can work in Japanese, but I prefer not to. From a webmasters perspective this is easy enough to change. But for the end user can be a real nuisance.

Anyway after a little googling I found the solution here and I have copied the pertinent parts for your (and my!) reference here:

From: Mishka OP

You need to make sure you have the language set in all three locations for it to stick and if you delete cookies it will revert and you’ll have to do the settings again.

Here are the instructions that you can use even if you can’t read the language being displayed.

Okay, a few things. First, you need to go into your browser settings and make sure that English is chosen as your preferred language.

Okay, if you are logged into blogger and on your blog’s main page, you can click on the little blogger icon on the left top corner and it will take you to your dashboard. When you are on your dashboard, you should see your blog names below and your profile picture and name to the right. The third bullet down from the picture is the Change Language link. Click on that and select English and save (English should be the top one, and Save is the big orange button).

After you save, it should take you right back to your dashboard. Underneath the title to your blog, there should be a little gear icon on the right side. The second link is the one for the blogs settings, click on that. Formatting is the third link over from the left underneath the settings tab (which should be where you are if you came from the dashboard). The language settings is the 6th down from the top of the page. The save button is bright orange at the bottom of the page.

It is more of a google thing than it is a blogger thing (they think they are helping you out by adjusting the language based on IP address but it is supposed to default to your browser’s language).

This is quite useful advice even if you are just traveling to Japan (or to any other country that uses a different language).

I was planning just to return the mobile broadband device to Docomo yesterday, but we have a phone system install to do in a rural part of Japan over the weekend, and I found out that there wont be internet access on site while we are doing the install. As we are working with offshore vendors on this, not having the internet would be a hindrance, so I decided to keep the foma connection for a few days.

Thing is, I am not a big fan of Windows, so I wanted to be able to use the A2505 with linux. There isn’t much information around for setting this up (of course NTT don’t support Linux, and aren’t likely to until somewhere around 2030 – they are a little backward). There is a bit of information for setting up emobile clients on linux (here is a good article: http://nlweb.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~iwase/tips/fc6emobile.html ).

After a fair bit of playing around (not least since the screen on the averatec 1000 is so small, but that is another story), we got it working on the netbook which is running Fedora 10.

To start off, from the command line, check dmesg to see if it recognizes the A2505 as a device.
Then from the command line type:

sudo modprobe vendor=0x16d5 product=0x6202

This will set tell linux what the device is.

If you want to, and you probably will, automate this (ie. so you don’t have to do it every time you reboot), create a file

sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/50-anydata-a2502.rules