Of the app that me and wifey is currently working on :)

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Have you checked out DragonDrop App for Mac? A very useful and amazing little app. You should try it by downloading the trial version. If you find it useful after trying it, you have to buy it. I mean, just look at the picture. The cutest app registration window I've ever seen :D

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Exactly 4 years ago, I landed in Japan. Eight (or six?) hours of starving flight began the amazing journey in the land of the rising sun that change my life. It was a journey full of surprises, music, laughters, cries, embarrassment, pictures, love, anger, disappointment, joy, monsters, elves, wizards, … and many more! :D

The Companions

"A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles." - Tim Cahill

What made my journey in Japan so great and memorable is the four strangers I met during the early days in Osaka. It just happened. We magically connect with each other. We came from different countries, yet we understood each other jokes instantly, or not :p Great great time :)

The Passion

"Something leads to something. Nothing leads to nothing." - Danny Choo

Officially I came to Japan to study. Unfortunately I wasn't really fond of what I was doing. But I had no choice. I didn't have anything else to do. I didn't have any passion for anything. I thought I would just finish my master, continue to PhD, then find a job somewhere. This resulted in disappointing work during my master program. My papers got rejected many times. When you are enrolled in master or PhD program in universities in Japan, number of papers published in international conferences is the indicator of success. 

But funny unexpected thing happened. I stumbled upon Danny Choo's website. Reading his post about pursuing passion, and many things he had done, inspired me. His interests in Apple products greatly effected me. I got my first iPhone, 3GS, and iMac after looking at his. From there I also learned about Steve Jobs. He became my hero ever since. 

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle." - Steve Jobs

One thing led to another, I bought the Apple developer program, thinking I would learn how to make iPhone app one day. I just tried. During my free time, I learned Objective-C. And after successfully running my first app on the phone, I became addicted. It was a great feeling to create something tangible, something I can see, something I can show. That was what I've been looking for. That was what I could not find in my research life before. 

Then I created another app, ScribeIt, and tried to sell it in the App Store. Beyond my expectation, people bought it. It wasn't a hit like Angry Birds. It never got to the top 25. But people bought. Some liked it. Some hated it. It was and is still full of bugs. But ever since I released it, ScribeIt has been giving me around 30k JPY (roughly USD 300, Rp. 3000.000,-) per month without me doing anything. It was only small amount of money. But the fact that some people are downloading it is a great joy for me. I have found my passion.

And this passion led me to another big decision I made in my life. I quit my PhD and started working in FlutterScape. Where will I go from here? Let's see :)

The One

"Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with." - Paulo Coelho

The biggest thing happened to me after coming to Japan was meeting her. It's hard not to sound corny to talk about her, but she's the best! :) Who would've thought I would find my wife in a foreign country? :)

You should come to Japan too …

Or any other countries. Go abroad. Experience the world. You might find what you've been searching for. Even better, things you didn't search for. :)

Cheers for amazing 4 years and for awesome years to come! 乾杯！:)

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It’s 2012 already. Do you reflect on what you have done in 2011? If so, how do you do that? Me, having kinda short-term-memory, resorted to my thoughts repository, a.k.a Twitter. I can go to Facebook of course, but Twitter is where I post my life updates most of the time. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy thing to do. In Twitter website, I cannot search for my all my tweets during the year 2011, or in other words tweets from January 2011 to December 2011. Couldn’t find any third parties app that can do this either. With Snapbird, I can only read my recent 3200 tweets, which seems like the limit of Twitter API call. If anybody knows how to achieve what I’m trying to do, please let me know!

In the meantime, to avoid “losing” my tweets anymore, I decided to backup my tweets. To do this, I created three tasks in ifttt:

1. Tweets to Dropbox. Everytime I tweet, a new file will be added to my dropbox containing the link the tweets.
2. Tweets to Google Calendar. Every tweet will be added to Google Calendar as an event. Kinda look messy in GCal website, but looks pretty interesting Lion’s iCal :D
3. Tweets to Email. I decided to make one more task to backup my tweets, to my email, since my Yahoo mail seems to have unlimited storage. I created a filter to move emails from ifttt to a folder.

All the services used are FREE. So what are you waiting for? Backup your tweets! :) You can follow me on Twitter if you like :)

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What is

Another weekend project of mine, my first HTML5 app. Aruku is a simple HTML5 Web app to make a request to alc.co.jp to translate Japanese from and to English. I really like alc cause the result of their translation is more useful than other services I’ve tried like Google Translate. The source is in my Github.

Demo

Open Safari in your iPhone/iPod, go to http://nicosakura.no-ip.info:8888/Aruku/

Screenshots

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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It can be done using iMovie, but isn’t it cooler to do it in command line using FFmpeg :D Found a tutorial to slowdown video using FFmpeg:

1. First, install FFmpeg and mjpegtool. I used port. It took a long time though. Open terminal and run

   sudo port install ffmpeg mjpegtool

2. Use the following command to slowdown the video.

   ffmpeg -i source_video.mp4 -f yuv4mpegpipe - | yuvfps -s 30:1 -r 30:1 | ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i  - -b 28800k  destination_video.mp4

   The 30:1 is the frame rate. For the video sample in this post, I used 30:1 and 15:1 to slowdown the video to 30 and 15 fps.

Just be noted that you need to set the GoPro to record in r3 mode. Tried to speedup the video using the same command but didn’t work. Found another way to speed up, but that will be for another post :D

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Yeay! GoPro has arrived! Time to tinker with it! ^^ So far, very satisfied with this little monster.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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When I sort by kind in Mac’s FInder, I expect the folders to be on top of the list. But it’s not like that. I blogged about the workaround for this in Snow Leopard a long time ago. Fortunately, it can still be applied to Lion with two additional steps. So this is how to do it:

1. Open Terminal.

2. Type this command:

   cd /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/

3. Now, the file we want to mess around is the InfoPlist.strings. But unfortunately, this file cannot be edited directly using text editor in Lion. But no worries. Run this command to make it editable.

   sudo plutil -convert xml1 InfoPlist.strings

4. Now the file should be editable and readable. Use your favorite text editor and open InfoPlist.strings. I just used vim

   sudo vim InfoPlist.strings

5. Inside you’ll find XML document. Go to the following lines:

   <key>Folder</key>
   <string>Folder</string>

6. All you have to do is to add a space before the second Folder like this:

   <key>Folder</key>
   <string> Folder</string>

7. Save the file. Convert the file to binary again using the following command.

   sudo plutil -convert binary1 InfoPlist.strings

8. Restart Finder.

   killall Finder

That’s it!

Update with screenshots

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Had problem with curl from the Terminal just now. It didn’t send GET parameters after the first parameter. For example,

curl http://localhost/somemethod?param1=value_of_param1&param2=value_of_param2

param2 was not sent to the server. Took me some time to find the solution in Google. Thanks to this thread in curl-users mailing list, the solution is to simply double quote the url as follows

curl "http://localhost/somemethod?param1=value_of_param1&param2=value_of_param2"

Problem solved. Learned something new again today.

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VirtualHost with MAMP

Spent a long time to setup a virtual host using MAMP, turned out just needed to add the nonstandard port when connecting. For example,

http://virtualhost.local:8888

Step by step tutorial here.

Showing Git’s branch in Mac’s Terminal

1. Add the following to .profile file in your home directory

   parse_git_branch() {
       git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/\ →\ \1/'
   }
   export PS1='\[\e[1;37m\][\[\e[1;35m\]\u\[\e[1;37m\]@\[\e[1;32m\]\h\[\e[1;37m\]:\[\e[1;36m\]\w\[\e[1;33m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\e[1;37m\]]$ \[\e[0m\]'

2. Logout then login. Or reboot.

Komodo Edit is a Cool Editor

I’ve been using TextWrangler as my default editor for some time, but I’m not really satisfied somehow. After looking around, some suggestions came out, like TextMate, Coda, Komodo Edit, etc. Since I cannot afford TextMate nor Coda, I gave Komodo Edit a try. And I liked it. It’s pretty light, fast, cool name, and has Project management. And it’s FREE. Remember, it’s not the Komodo IDE. It’s the Komodo Edit.

Use FileMerge to graphically compare or merge file or directories

In Mac, if you have installed XCode, you can use FileMerge to graphically compare file/directories. FileMerge can be executed from command line using opendiff

opendiff file1.txt file2.txt

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