2012 May 08, 10:36 h
This is something I just stumbled upon and because it’s tricky to install the first time I decided to grab the pieces that make it work. It’s so useful I had to post about it.
If you’re learning Japanese this will definitely prove to be an invaluable tool. I am Japanese but I didn’t payed attention to proper Kanji training when I was a child. It shows now, as I can read Kanji only to what would be considered below high-school level in Japan. Still very useful, but it means I can’t read most websites in Japanese fast enough.
I’ve known of a Firefox add-on I’m very fond of for a long time now called Rikaichan. When enabled, you have hover your mouse over the kanji text and it will popup a box with the translation. You must install the Firefox add-on in the previous link and a proper dictionary to your native language from Rikaichan’s webpage. And that’s it.
2011 November 28, 02:40 h
It’s been a while since I’ve written about my Ruby Kaigi 2011 trip. Since then I’ve been really busy and I left out lots of great material shamelessly accumulating dust in my hard drive, but no more. Today I was finally able to edit some of that and upload the interviews I have recorded with some of the most well known Japanese Ruby contributors. Wonderful people that I was lucky to meet and that were very friendly to me and eager to tell their stories.
These are the first versions of the edited videos, I still didn’t have time to add English subtitles, but I wanted to upload them as soon as possible so the Japanese community could check them out first. I will try to add the subtitles in the following days (help would be appreciated). The Matz interview in particular has the worst audio as we were in the middle of an after-party in a small bar with very bad acoustics, so I apologize for its quality, I hope you can get most out of it.
Alencar Koga helped me out a lot during the interviews. Coincidentally he is a Brazilian just like me, but he’s been living in Japan for a long time and was able to build a great career, being now the CTO of MTI Japan, one of the largest mobile app developers in the country. Akira Matsuda also helped me a lot, and he is also a very well known Rubyist in Japan. Both were edited out of the videos to make them shorter to watch. I appreciate their help a lot as they will be very useful when I do the English subtitles.
2011 August 05, 09:13 h
I hope you enjoyed my first article in the series Exploring Tokyo City. Now let me tell my impressions of the RubyKaigi Conference itself.
What many may not know is that RubyKaigi is in its 6th iteration and it has always been organized by volunteers effort. Their leader is Masayoshi Takahashi-san. He is also the founder of Nihon Ruby-no-kai (Japan Ruby Group) which also helds the e-zine Rubyist Magazine. You should check those resources out to see what the Japanese Rubyists are doing. Great resource.
The main group seems to surround around Takahashi-san and then Shintaro Kakutani-san who works for Eiwa System Management and he is the main Ruby Evangelist in Japan, doing talks all around the country, helping create and organize Regional RubyKaigi, translating books such as the recently released Agile Samurai (from Pragmatic Programmers). As an Evangelist myself, I have to honestly say that Kakutani-san puts me to shame (which inspires me to try harder!). He is doing a remarkable work and if you didn’t know him, you should.
The Program Chair for the conference is no other than Dr. Koichi Sasada, PhD in Information Science and Engineering from The University of Tokyo, he runs the Sasada Labs researching on programming languages and its processors. Oh, and did I mention that he is the creator and current maintainer of “YARV”, the Ruby 1.9 series’ heart? You can read a small interview with him from the Rails Magazine.
There are several individual contributors for RubyKaigi that you really should spend some time knowing about. They are very active and very committed. “Friendship”, “effort”, “unity” and most specially “respect”, were words that came to mind knowing some of them.
2011 July 26, 02:54 h
This is the first article in a series that will use the Japanese RubyKaigi trip as the background – and a kind of excuse – for something else entirely that I’ll attempt to achieve, though I am not sure if I will be able to succeed.
If you don’t know me, my name is Fabio Makoto Akita. Fabio is my Brazilian first name. Makoto is my Japanese first name (considered a middle name in the Western world) and Akita is my family name. I am a 3rd generation Brazilian-Japanese born and raised in Brazil. Many people in Japan asked me about this, hence the explanation here.
Brazil is an Emerging and Developing Country, former Third World. Some assume that the Brazilian culture is very much similar to the US culture, being from the same Western world and having some of the same European roots. And that Japan has a very different culture from both, being from the Far East, the Orient.
Ruby is one of the few open source projects that I am aware of that has a strong US derived community and at the same time another strong Japanese one.
2011 July 23, 21:33 h
Eu participei da RubyKaigi 2011 e foi uma viagem muito emocionante para mim. Meus avós nasceram no Japão. Eu sou japonês nascido no Brasil de 3a geração. Esta foi a primeira vez que visitei o país de origem dos meus avós. Portanto também foi a primeira vez que decidi participar da RubyKaigi, a conferência mais famosa de Ruby do Japão. E como se isso já não fosse suficiente, ainda pude participar como palestrante, o primeiro da América do Sul. Não poderia ser melhor. Retornei ao Brasil ontem e...
2011 July 23, 21:30 h
I attended RubyKaigi 2011 and it was a very exciting trip for me. My grandparents were born in Japan, I am 3rd generation Japanese born and raised in Brazil. This was my first time visiting my grandparents home country. It was therefore the first time I decided to attend RubyKaigi, the most famous Japanese Ruby conference. And if it couldn’t be exciting enough, I was able to attend it as a speaker, the first from South America. It couldn’t be better. I came back to Brazil yesterday and I am s...
2011 July 11, 00:26 h
Vocês devem ter notado que estou blogando bem pouco ultimamente, é só uma fase, estou bastante atarefado na Gonow, que está consumindo todo meu tempo. Mas estamos fazendo mudanças para que eu consiga retornar às minhas atividade aqui também.
Algo que veio meio por acaso é minha viagem para Tokyo. Desde o ano passado eu estava pensando que já estava na hora de ir ao Japão. Não só por causa do Ruby, mas também porque eu sou japonês e também tenho essa “vontade” de conhecer um pouco das minhas raízes.
Conversei na Gonow e eles concordaram em me mandar para a RubyKaigi. Por causa da correria dos projetos acabei decidindo ir meio em cima da hora. Mandei um email para o Akira Matsuda que é committer do Rails e evangelista de Rails no Japão. Ele me respondeu dizendo que, por coincidência, um dos palestrantes disse que não poderia mais ir e por isso havia um slot de palestra vago, de 30 min, e me perguntou se eu não gostaria de participar. Relutante, concordei. Daí foi uma correria porque fui ao consulado segunda-feira passada (dia 4), felizmente meu visto saiu dois dias depois. Já tenho hotel reservado, passagens compradas, e a menos que Murphy esteja muito entediado, terça-feira, dia 12/7 parto de São Paulo e no dia 14/7 aterrisso no Narita International Airport.
