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.

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”.

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.

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.

Going here and there in the interface, I found a “system log” and was not really surprised to see this kind of stuff:

Jan  1 00:00:02 (none) syslog.info syslogd started: BusyBox v1.11.1
Jan  1 00:00:54 (none) daemon.notice pppd[984]: pppd 2.4.2b1 started by root, uid 0

Yep, this pretty much looks like Linux, with BusyBox and pppd. The webserver looks like Ahead Webserver, and nmap says the Linux kernel is newer than 2.6.9. That makes a lot of opensource software on this little device, but there’s no copy of the GNU GPL anywhere, nothing about the authors of those softwares and nothing anywhere in the provided documentation (in japanese).

Since the log lines obviously shows stuff that comes from good old GPL code, the company behind the product is required, if asked, to provide the sourcecode of used software.

I made a request via a webform on their site as there’s no place on their website which states where to file such requests or download sourcecode.

For information, Japanese companies tend to not respect american licenses such as GPL as those are usually only provided in English. A non-official translation of the GPLv2 in Japanese exists, and can be used as reference.

Anyway hardware vendors tend to often forget some licensing terms when using opensource software. Mentioning names and making sourcecode available somewhere shouldn’t be that hard when you distribute mainstream products. I’ll get a response (if I ever get one) in the next days, I’ll be sure to keep you all tuned, and see if I can provide english interface too

Now, Krovanh is the one causing rain, and is getting closer. For reference I plotted the locations in Google Maps, and got something that looks like:

Looks like this one is trying to aim to Tōkyō, however it’s still small and typhoons usually don’t like going to Japan. With the typhoon currently being in point “A”, we already have rain and strong winds… more infos once the typhoon is closer (if it ever gets closer).

While in Japan 3G Internet service is usually unlimited, it gets less or more expensive depending on how you use the service. For the eMobile service via OCN it starts at ¥700/month if use it only a bit, up to ~¥3,600/month if you transmit over ~32,000 packets.
The specific part is once you reach ~32,000 packets, you don’t pay more for whatever else you transmit, and ¥3,600/month is still cheaper than the usual service in France, and the service has a far better quality.

And a final point: requesting eMobile from the OCN website is as easy as logging in, clicking “contract informations”, choosing the “EM service” and confirming the shipping address.

Login and password are the same, ATM is “ocn” and you get an OCN IP with ability to connect to port 25, run a webserver, etc…

Follow “more” to access the gallery.

Anyway I’ll also introduce a little too I made for the IRC Network: a status image. You just use http://gg.st/status/default/nickname.png in an image and get something nice like:

As you can probably see, it says if I’m online/away/offline, handles nickname groups (with IRC services) and is realtime.