MagicalTux in Japan

Geekness brought me to Japan!

Archive for category IRL

MagicalTux vs. Microsoft – VICTORY !

Jun 19

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude, IRL | No Comments

A while ago I posted about moving in another country with a XBox 360. At this time it was cool since I still had a french credit card, but when I closed my bank account in France, things went somehow awry. I had to buy a 12 months xbox live code on eBay France to get my account working since you cannot add a japanese credit card on a french xbox live account…

However microsoft had tried to bill my french CC once more and it failed. Of course it’ll fail but for some reason Microsoft has a weird billing scheme. If it tries to bill but it fails, it will still give you what you tried to pay, then it will bug you every now and then to get your money. This is really stupid (they could just don’t give anything) or really brilliant (they can bill stuff you don’t want then try to get your money claiming you asked for that).

Anyway I had my account expire 12 months later so I didn’t care much. At some point I got annoyed by all those emails so I asked the microsoft support which replied they couldn’t help me with their tools, and told me I should contact phone support…
I just decided to ignore those emails until… until microsoft blocked my account. Yes, they just decided to suspend my account because they couldn’t get the money for 1 month, and aren’t intelligent enough to just remove one month from my current billing period… So I had an account expiring in some 10 months suspended because they couldn’t bill one month…

I then tried to add (again) my japanese credit card to see if I could re-activate my account (I really want to play a game right now to cool off a bit, and I hate it when some american based company tries to stop me) and it WORKED! Yeah! Somehow I could add a japanese credit card to a french xbox live account. I’m not sure if this is a glitch or just that microsoft suddently decided that you could want to move to another country without losing all your achievements, but yes, it worked!!!!

So here I am, finally resolved this problem with Microsoft. I posted about my success on the xbox live forums (this thread, page 14) so we’ll know if this was just a glitch, or if microsoft became intelligent.

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BP, “those morons”

Jun 4

Posted by MagicalTux in IRL | 1 Comment

Hey, it’s been a few weeks that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is spilling happily while weak humans are trying to stop it. You all know about this, I don’t have to make a drawing nor anything.

Now, you probably know James Cameron, director of movies “Avatar” and “Titanic”, the guy who is able to say that BP are “morons [who] don’t know what they’re doing“. Of course Mister Cameron is an expert in the field of oil spills, especially when they precisely happen in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hey no, he’s not ?

Well, who cares anyway. He’s not, and hopefully nobody will ever allow him to try anything. That might be exactly what he wants. Imagine: BP tries, BP fails again, oil spill grows bigger. Mister Cameron then says “Hah! I told you, if only you let me help you we wouldn’t have come to this”… Hell yeah, this way you’re the oppressed hero of the day, you just had to show off your submarines and show how intelligent you are.

Anyway the chances a movie director, whose job is to direct movies, would be allowed to work on the oil spill, which potentially means the death of many local industries, birds, etc… are really really slim. Somehow I hope they’d allow him to work on that on condition he kills himself would he fail. Don’t call people who are actually doing something morons when your only idea is to bring your 23 friends for a party where you won’t have much chances to find a better idea than BP who have experts whose job is to know oil, oil wells, and deep water conditions (and if you do, just give them your idea, you’ll be the great savior from darkness who saves the world without even having his name known… oh, that wasn’t your plan?)

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Japanese Visa Part one: change visa status!

Feb 16

Posted by MagicalTux in IRL | No Comments

If you’re reading this article, you probably did read on internet that obtaining and keeping a valid visa in Japan is a pain.

Now, I’m going to have to change my visa status. This is a pain too, but I guess it should be possible. Changing visa status is not an easy task: based on the informations I could obtain from the various official locations, changing status takes 2 to 3 months, and should be done before renewing visa, which should be done 1 month before expiration.

My visa expires half of june 2010, this makes the timeline look like this:

  • February 15th: Change visa status, start!
  • May 15th: Visa changed
  • May 15th: Start visa renewal
  • June 15th: Visa renewed

I do not know what will happen between February 15th and May 15th, however I guess the informations I gave will be verified. Japanese legal system is a pain, and unfortunately, being unable to read japanese legal kanji, I’m in great difficulties when I phone to try to get more informations. My only real solution is to go there and show what I filled, and ask people if it’s OK.

Now let’s go for part one! First part will be to fill the visa category change document, and bring it with the necessary documentation for the new visa status so the people there will know what to do.

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KalyHost – Domain names now available

Feb 14

Posted by MagicalTux in Tibanne | No Comments

After some months of work, we finally are able to have our first shop online, with domain names sales and management.

You can see this on the KalyHost page for domains, where you can order many extensions for cheap (.NET are on sale until 27 february).

Sale is done via Paypal, and domain is usable immediatly after sale. You can then manage your domain as you want to. Once we finish setting up webhosting and some other services (affiliation, etc) KalyHost will finally be ready for the real show. For now cheap domains are already a great thing, and I wish more people could have a look at it.

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Google Translation and Japanese (half-width katakana)

Jan 19

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude, Japan | 3 Comments

Google Translation seems to have some difficulties with half-width katakana in google translate.

My text “ｸﾞ-ｸﾞﾙｲﾝｸ ﾌﾘｺﾐ” reads as “Go-goruinku furikomi”, which I’d translate as “Google Inc Bank transfer”. I’m just wondering how google reached a translation of “¸ – ¸ Ý Ù ² ¸ Ø º Ì Ð”.

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New AkihabaraNews website released

Jan 9

Posted by MagicalTux in IRL, Tibanne | No Comments

After a really long development period full of unknows, problems and troubles, the new version of AkihabaraNews.com website has been released.

It took a really long time until we finally reached release, and I must say we can be proud of the result.

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Visa Credit Cards and expirations

Jan 7

Posted by MagicalTux in IRL | No Comments

If you got a credit card, you most likely got an expiration date written on it, which you must give to any website you want to pay to. On many websites, submitting transaction to the credit card processor costs money, and to avoid paying money for nothing something that will fail anyway, many stores will apply some checks beforehand, including luhn check and expiration check.

Now here’s the thing, as far as I can tell, when we implemented our store, our credit card processors didn’t give us any information about expiration date. The documentation explains how to submit a transaction, and not how to check for credit card informations validity (probably because they want us to submit it to them – and pay – in every case). I guess it’s the case for many other online stores. Now here’s the catch: I believe most shops do not know the exact rule behind the expiration date. Some will consider a card expired on the first day of the expiration month, some on the last day…
They are both wrong. I my card is expiring this month, I asked my credit card company and was told that my VISA card is expiring 30 days after the last day of the month written on it. An “expired card” is still valid for 30 days, however it will not work on some online shops which implements extra checks by themselves.

Now I’m stuck for one month on a card which doesn’t work on some stores, and started receiving “please give us your new card” emails from some subscriptions I have.

Anyway this “30 days after” rule isn’t documented anyway in the doc from our credit card processors, so I guess writing about it somewhere can be a good idea.

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NoSpam – Getting rid of email spam when registering to suspicious websites

Dec 27

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude, News, Tibanne | No Comments

Ever wanted to avoid receiving a mountain of spam when registering on a website you don’t know? NoSpam.st is made for you.

The basic idea is simple: you tell NoSpam.st your email, and you get a temporary email from us. You can then use this email on the website you don’t trust. If you indeed get subscribed to many spam lists, it will be with the nospam.st email, which will be automatically disabled when the time comes. Once disabled, any email attempt to this address will be refused.

I am also preparing a nice feature for webmasters: the ability to make a mailto link on your site via NoSpam.st: you login on NoSpam.st, enter your email address, the expiration time you wish (default would be 4 hours) and get a snippet of javascript you can include on your website. Each time someone sees the page, a different email address will be generated. A normal user will usually send an email within the next minutes if he really want to contact you about your site, and not spam you for the next years.
With this system you might get some spam if spammers are fast enough (usually spam is sent a few days/weeks/months after email address has been crawled), but in this case you’ll get informations about the crawl (ip and date) in the email headers, and anyway you won’t get much spam as the email will soon be disabled.

Anyway a lot can be do to fight email spam. Also as soon as spammers see that emails @nospam.st are soon blocked, they might even consider automatically removing @nospam.st emails from their lists (we can dream).

By the way if you have nice spam-related domain names you don’t use, you can give them to us and we’ll make them available for email addresses.

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Incorporation in Japan

Dec 22

Posted by MagicalTux in IRL | No Comments

This is an official announcement.

While being in Japan, I finally decided to start once again the experience. For those who knew me for a while, they know I’ve been involved in many web-hosting company creations, either indirectly (RYA-Network) or directly (ooKoo, etc).

Here is a list of companies involved in web hosting I’ve been involved in:

  • 1999: Upsilon Studio (legally declared as “association” in France), my first involvement in web hosting, without servers, and with free domains from namezero and hosting from various places…
  • 2001: FF.ST (declared as a company mid-2001, collapsed end of 2001 at the same time the WTC did) created, first servers in USA. Automated web hosting system, and various things…
  • 2002: helped in Kalyweb/Kalyone while still managing FF.ST (and installed my own server there too). Was going nice, but there was some problems I’m not fully aware of (was too young), and the whole thing went down without any second though about customers (searching for “kalyone” on Google France might give some results)
    One of my best experience there was R&D work, and configuration of Cisco hardware (especially Cisco 6204VXR, and cisco switches)
  • 2003: RYA-Network (with some of the guys from Kalyone), where I could use some of my past experience and improve many things. This allowed me to discover the datacenters world in Paris, with visits in different datacenters. Soon problems arised with unhappy customers, mainly because of poor sales methods, and I got kicked out while customers were sold to a third party (or so it seems).
    Today the RYA Network website is still up, displaying offers from another time (who wants a 10MB webhosting? A dedicated server with 500Mhz CPU/64MB ram/786kbps bandwidth under Debian 3.0?), and the company seems to be still existing.
  • 2006: Created “ooKoo” as a company, while overseas. This went pretty good until war started, which virtually made every customer go away, mainly because of frequent power loss at our “office” (power loss itself wasn’t a problem, but the fact ISP was going down with power too wasn’t nice). Had to go back to France in hurry (and of course the area we were in, while experiencing half-day long power losses, was not in an area covered by the country for war-related problems).
  • 2007: Back in France, creation of “Kinoko“, with less focus on web hosting and more focus on software development. Because I’m working full-time in another company, haven’t got enough time to make it work as it should.
  • 2009: finally, while in Japan, creation of K.K. Tibanne. I believe past experience have taught me many things including (but not limited to):
    • Working fulltime at the same time is a bad idea, unless there is a point in time where “things must work no matter what”. I resigned from my current work, and still have a few weeks there. I’m a bit sleep deprivated lately (mainly because I’m handling two works at the same time) but things are progressing at a good pace.
    • Having external investors is a pain, and can become a risk when they start to have their own ideas about how the company should be run while they were silent for the mast months and have no idea of how webhosting works
    • Sales staff can mess up everything if they do not have strict rules  they need to abide to. In one of the previous company I heared a story of a sales guy selling lifetime server at MacDonald’s, getting cash money from the customer, and few weeks/months later customer came back wondering when he’ll get his server (and ended punching someone).
    • Being nice with competitors and avoiding to attack market when the opportunity appears is a bad thing. They won’t care about you anyway.
    • Going in a country with unstable borders and war history can be really bad for overseas business. In a global world like the one we live in today, this is not acceptable.

I also accumulated a nice amount of networking experience (thanks to full-time jobs too, where I also could peek at some cisco IOS/CATOS configurations for a complex network with two AS, BGP uplinks, etc) and have a global understanding of how internet works (ip announces, dns system, etc). Created companies also taught me a lot about company management, legal requirements, taxes, etc (while laws in Japan are different, they are not that different).

Now, let’s make things work and start with web hosting, which is an activity requiring a lot of technical knowledge and that if done right can attract a lot of customers.

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Netindex RS-LJ01, is it GPL compliant?

Nov 15

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude, Japan | No Comments

Being in Japan allows one to find some extraordinary things at the big place which sells almost everything, ranging from bikes to computer parts, health products, video games and food.

My latest discovery is known as RS-LJ01. It is a small Wifi router made to be used anywhere (got a battery for 4 hours of routing) and an USB port to connect a 3G usb stick. With this you can have your Wifi hotspot in your pocket, and bring it anywhere.

The device is interesting, but the interface is all in japanese and I had some troubles with my basic japanese knowledge and some help from Google Translation to understand what was happening. I first configured my 3G login/password and got internet working, then tried to configure the device to use WPA and not WEP, but then I wasn’t able to login to the WPA network. Took me a while to find the reset button. I made new attempt at WPA using the “secondary SSID” option, without much success either.
I would really love to see what’s wrong with the WPA encryption myself (and maybe fix it), but without more informations about the device, it’s not going to be easy.

Read the rest of this entry »

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