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Mozilla Labs の実験的プロジェクトのひとつ、 Ubiquity の最新版、バージョン 0.5 を昨日リリースしました。 (Mozilla Labs 正式発表 [英文])

Ubiquity はウェブをより有益に、より使いやすくするために自然言語で Firefox を操作するインターフェースを提供します。ウェブ上のオープン API と機能が増えて行く一方でどのようなインターフェースが必要であるのか。その答えを追求した結果、テキスト入力の正確さとスピードと自然言語の心地よさを合わせたインターフェースができあがりました。例えば「麹町を地図で表示」、「これを (誰々) へメール」などを自分の言葉で入力してブラウザを操作することができます。新しいコマンド (動詞) も簡単に JavaScript で書けるので、拡張性も非常に高いプラットフォームです。

ユーザにとって「自然な構文」 (“natural syntax” [英文]) という目標の下、数ヶ月の研究の結果、Ubiquity 0.5 では複数の言語の異なる構文に対応できるパーサを実装しました。Ubiquity 内蔵のコマンドもローカライズ可能になり、0.5 ではすべての内蔵コマンドの日本語、デンマーク語とポルトガル語版が搭載されています。

リリース直前に Ubiquity の日本語紹介ビデオを作成しましたので、どうぞご覧ください。日本語モードでの使用方法も説明されています。

Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ from mitcho on Vimeo.

日本語サポートが入った Ubiquity 0.5 を是非ご使用ください。このインターフェースをより多くのユーザが「自然に」使えるよう、これからも開発を続けていきたいと思います。

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The name tomoshibi means “torch” in Japanese. As a new Firefox brings new technologies and possibilities to all corners of the web, so too will the tomoshibi light up the night in Japan!

The site was designed and coded by Daisuke Akatsuka of the Keio Kakehi Lab (xlab), the same fine folks who brought you interFORest.

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If you are reading this through a feed reader or planet, click on the permalink to view the banner embedded below:

Place one of these personalized canvas-powered virtual tree banners on your site to spread the word on Firefox 3.5, the Shiretoko Park and Foundation, and the power of open communities. All the cool kids are doing it. ^^

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This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.

I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

The event also coincided with Dave McClure’s Geeks on a Plane Asia tour, attracting even more interest to the event. In the end it was the largest Tokyo 2.0 event ever.

As I leave Tokyo next month, I’ll be sad to not be able to continue to be a part of Tokyo 2.0. I’ve met a lot of fascinating people and learned a lot at the monthly events. I’ll definitely make sure to schedule them in in my future travels back to Japan and I highly recommend any of you who travel to Tokyo do so as well.

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Last weekend my family (including my aunt Mikako and Bailey) took a short trip to Yugawara (湯河原) at the base of the Izu peninsula. Last weekend was possibly the peak of the cherry blossoms this year, making it a very picturesque trip. It’s quite rare for the four of us to all be in the same place at the same time, so these photos are definite keepers:

One of my personal highlights was going down a slide at Azumayama Park in Ninomiya right through a grove of cherry trees in full bloom—it was so beautiful that I had to go back down it again and take a video! Unfortunately the Flash video encoding (or my camera) doesn’t do it justice, but I hope you can fill in the gaps with your imagination.

Cherry blossom slide - 桜のすべりだい（二宮吾妻山公園） from mitcho on Vimeo.

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昨日第11回Mozilla拡張機能勉強会で Ubiquity の国際化と次世代パーサについて発表してきました。色々鋭いコメントをいただき、僕も良い勉強になりました。^^ スライドの方をslideshareに載せたので、是非参考にまた見てみてください。ライトニングトークでも Ubiquity の話で盛り上がったので、そのLTの内容で特に面白いと僕が思ったものを下に英語でちょっとまとめてみます。

1. mar of Japanese SuMo fame (not that sumo) presented on his foray into the development of an improved Japanese parser based on Jono’s. One interesting approach his parser took was to split up the input on delimiters like commas and parse each “clause” and then combining the arguments for one execution. This allows certain types of fronting constructions. For example:

   ...を   送って、 dynamisに
   ...-NOM send, dynamis-to

   “To dynamis, send …”

   This type of input, aside from being pretty natural in Japanese, has the advantage of offering the parser an unambiguous argument parse within each clause, cutting down on the possible ambiguities.

   mar’s discussion, however, also naturally touched on the limitations of the current NLParser implementation, making localization of individual commands and the suggestion of verbs quite difficult.

2. Hitoshi SASAKI of the Sasaki Lab at Takushoku University discussed some possible applications of Ubiquity in an educational context. In particular he demoed a `hiragana` command which takes some sentence in kanji and rewrites it in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic alphabet. What’s more, the command lets you specify the appropriate grade level for the substitution, making it appropriate for elementary school kids and non-native speakers alike. Sasaki thought the ability to access this kind of functionality right from the content page was of great benefit to this application.

Thanks to dynamis for supporting my Japanese presentation and making this happen! ^^

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Here’s a picture of an ad for Gaba, a big English conversation school in Japan, I snapped on a train recently. I felt the English sentence about Gaba’s satisfaction was extremely awkward, so I put it up on twitter to check with some other native speakers. My friends concurred. What do you think?

I personally think the sentence would be improved by removing the “the” in “the satisfaction.” Others offered “continues to rise” as possibly preferable to “continually rise.” English articles, especially the definiteness of abstract nouns, is very difficult for many non-native speakers. That being said, it’s sad for a sentence of such questionable acceptability to come from a company which, in theory, prides itself in its English ability and surely hires many native speakers. Gaba, shame on you.

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My trip began with the three-hour bullet train (新幹線 shinkansen) ride out to Osaka. I hadn’t purchased a ticket in advance, so that meant standing in a non-reserved seating car for most of the way there, the sole consolation being the great view of Mt. Fuji. Lesson learned: buy reserved tickets for holiday weekends.

大阪城

Our first stop was the Osaka castle (大阪城 ōsaka jyō). Located at the center of the city, the castle is surrounded by a moat and a pretty big park. Many of the paths are lined with cherry trees, making it a popular cherry blossom viewing venue in the spring.

The castle seen today is actually not the original but the end product of the history of its complicated history. Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉) built the castle began its construction in 1583 but were stripped of its outer baileys at the end of the Toyotomi era in 1615. Since then many have tried to rebuild parts of it while it endured lightning strikes, Meiji restoration civil unrest, and World War II bombings.

Here Bailey reconnected with her inner Bailey:

道頓堀 and 文楽

We continued on to Dōtonbori (道頓堀), the flashy and touristy part of the town. Particularly famous is the crab restaurant with the huge mechanized crab sign. The main strip runs parallel to a boardwalk which offered a comfortable contrast to all the shops.

We also had たいやき (taiyaki), the fish-shaped cake with red bean paste inside. No fish were harmed in the making of our taiyaki.

Afterwards we met up with Bailey’s classmates and professor from her nō (能) and kyōgen (狂言) course to see a bunraku (文楽) performance. Buraku is a Japanese puppet theater tradition which originally began as street performances in Osaka and registered as a UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Bunraku today is only performed regularly in Osaka and, compared to other traditional theaters such as nō or kabuki, has an uncertain future for its continued performance and teaching.

A bunraku performance consists of key scenes from a few different famous stories (or, stories that were famous 300 years ago), like a review show. The puppeteers are accompanied by the storytellers who have a distinct style of sing-speaking, much like in opera. The language they use is an older style of Japanese (think Shakespearean English, say), so the theater has supertitles. These storytellers are in turn accompanied by a handful of musicians.

Each puppet is controlled by often four different people, with only the lead puppeteer’s (who controls the head and right hand) face visible. You can obviously see all the puppeteers, but if you ignore all the people dressed in black and just look at one of the dolls, they really do move like people and express human emotions. It’s riveting. Unfortunately we weren’t able to take any pictures.

We love Ikeda and Momofuku Ando

The next morning we went up to Ikeda, a northern suburb in Osaka prefecture, in search of Momofuku.

Earlier this year Elvis Costello released the album Momofuku with The Imposters. The album features Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis. But this is not the Momofuku we were looking for.

We went to Ikeda for the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum. Andō Momofuku (安藤 百福) was of course the inventor of instant ramen and cup ramen and founder of Nissin foods.

The museum is a beautifully designed building full of cute ramen-related displays and, on that day, dozens of elementary school groups. The display first takes you through the history of instant ramen—its discovery, marketing, evolution, and ultimate world (and space) domination. Have you ever wondered why the ramen in cup ramen cups are floating towards the top? Or why he decided to seal the packages with an aluminum foil top? Well, if you went to the museum, you would know these answers.

There was also a huge “Instant Ramen Tunnel”: a genealogical timeline of all the Nissin product lines, beginning with the original 1958 package.

The museum was also filled with the adorable instant ramen chicken character. We found a huge one on the second floor.

The highlight, however, might have been Mister Ando himself. Just look at him:

Frankly, that looks way more like an album cover than the actual Elvis Costello Momofuku album art.¹

勝尾寺

We took a train and then an expensive taxi up to Katsuō-ji (勝尾寺), a beautiful temple up on a mountain. The leaves were turning so it was the perfect time of the year to go.

Walking up the mountain, we started finding a bunch of daruma dolls—little dolls based on Bodhidharma, a prince-turned-monk important in the early history of Zen Buddhism. Legend has it that Daruma went into a dark cave to mediate for nine years and his eyes fell off. Even now in Japan, you buy daruma dolls with blank eyes, filling in one eye when you make a wish and filling in the other once the wish has come true.

It turns out the daruma dolls are a kind of symbol of the temple. Most temples have omikuji (おみくじ) fortunes that you draw and if you like the fortune² you can tie it to a string or tree in the temple. This temple sells omikuji that come in little daruma dolls, so many people will take their daruma and leave it someplace in the temple grounds for good luck.

The temple also had something else bizarre. A little background: there’s a famous pilgrimage route of 88 Buddhist temples on Shikoku island in western Japan. Well, why would you bother taking time to visit all those temples when someone can bring some of the ground from each of those temples into a central location!? This is what they did at Katsuō-ji… neither Bailey nor I are Buddhism experts, but we agreed it’s bizarre, to say the least.

Overall, though, Katsuō-ji and the mountains were beautiful. We had a great weekend.

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When I ask Shai if he’s worried about a competitor stealing his idea, he stares at me like I’m an idiot. “The mission is to end oil,” he says, “not create a company.”

UPDATE: This story just came much closer to home.

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Softbank Mobile announced today to release 1-seg digital TV tuner device for iPhone in the middle of December. The 80-gram device provides the feature of TV over WiFi (converting TV signal received to IP-based data for iPhone) and doubles as a battery extender. Three hours continuous TV viewing is available.

I’ve seen a number of these ワンセグ (wansegu, 1seg) digital TV tuner-enabled phones around the office and in trains. I’m not a huge TV watcher, even in Japan,¹ but I have to say these phones are pretty cool. In the land of one-hour train commutes, there’s definitely both appeal and demand. I’ve sat on trains next to everyone from hip high schoolers to grandparents watching TV on these phones.

Frankly, however, I think the fact that it’s a separate device (even if it can be unwired) will still limit its attractiveness. I’ll be curious to see what the interface is like.

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The store down the street is called ichifuku (一福). Not only is it one of the closest restaurants to my house, it’s also been featured on a number of ramen restaurants and websites. The store is known for its delicious miso ramen but also for its more creative, Western-style arrangements. The female shopkeeper is often running everything by herself, gardening out front as well as cooking and playing great music.

Here are some pictures of the great food they serve:

If you ever come by the Hatsudai area, I highly recommend a visit. The address is: 東京都渋谷区本町６−６−４.

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A mansion? By Japanese standards, yes.¹ A palace? Um… not quite. Take a look—here are some pictures from my move-in.

The apartment has three bedrooms and shared small kitchen/dining room, bath, and toilet. I live here with two other Japanese salary-men who are older than I. We all live pretty busy lives and don’t run into each other much. And, believe it or not, I found it on Tokyo Craigslist.

While it may not resemble a “palace mansion,” it definitely has its perks. For starters, it’s a fifteen-twenty minute walk from my work, which is a great plus in a land of long train commutes. It’s in a quiet, down-to-earth neighborhood—right next to the Children’s Center and a block or two from a old-style shopping district (商店街 shōtengai)—while also one train station away from Shinjuku station, which is a major transit hub.² There’s a fabulous (and apparently slightly famous) ramen a couple doors down. And finally, while small, it’s definitely one of the cheapest places I saw.

But let’s back up a moment and let you in on how I got here.

I moved from Taiwan to Japan at the end of June after the end of my Fulbright. ³ While doing the regular job search⁴ I registered with a search firm with a focus on bilinguals, Robert Walters. I had a great experience with them and ultimately accepted a position introduced to me by them. I started on August first as Online Game Programmer at Gameloft.⁵

I was weary of blogging about my job search at all during it, but I hope to break the radio silence and start blogging again about my new life here in Tokyo. ^^

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Three Mondays ago, Nanao had their annual sports day.¹ The sports day reminded me of the years of Japanese school sports days I used to go to, complete with the representative student’s pledge of sportsmanship, a three legged race, and concluding relay, though it was only half a day.² It also was billed as the Nan’ao town and school joint sports day (村校聯合運動大會) and indeed many parents, families, and other miscellaneous townspeople were there to join in the festivities.

The day started with a performance by our school’s very own orchestra (well, after the national anthem, of course). This was followed by a communal running-around-the-track, Atayal dance performance by community members (mostly middle-aged), and the kids dancing to Buklavu.

This was followed by a judo performance. The judo offering is one of the four “special characteristics” (特色) of the school; the other three are the orchestra, aboriginal dance, and reading.

A special event offered particularly for the parents and other community members was the log sawing competition. It took the form of a relay, with teams organized based on the “neighborhood” (鄰), of which there are six in Nan’ao village.

The festivities concluded with the aforementioned relay.

The kids had a lot of fun throughout the day, probably particularly enjoying the fact that school was then dismissed at noon. Kids bought food at the night-market-like stands right outside the school.

Hot spring

We teachers were then invited to a banquet at the head of the PTA’s house. Having the rest of the afternoon off, a few of us teachers decided to go to the Nanao hot springs. There were some major renovations there since I last went and took a bath… there’s even a roof now! The water was, unfortunately, pretty lukewarm, though.

Sayun’s bell (莎韻之鐘)

Special ed. teacher Mr. Cai was kind enough to take us around in his car, so we next stopped by Sayun’s bell (Chinese: 莎勇之鐘, Japanese: サヨンの鐘). The Sayun bell is a memorial to an actual Atayal girl named sayun hayung who died in 1938, located right near a truck stop/gift shop/coffee shop off of the 蘇花公路 (sūhūagōnglù, Suao-Hualien highway).³

The story goes, sayun greatly respected her Japanese teacher and was saddened to learn that he would leave and go back to Japan. She was carrying his luggage for him and was going to send him off when a big storm knocked her off a bridge and into the river, drowning her. The story was picked up by Japanese mainland news (read “propaganda”) as a hear-wrenching story of the Taiwanese indigenous people respecting and loving their Japanese teachers and, by extension, Japanese rule. There was two Japanese songs written about this incident (1941, see lyrics below, courtesy of Chienese wiki) and a Japanese movie (1943) was made as well.

The story was also recently referred to in the popular (in Taiwan) 2007 film Island Etude (練習曲 liànxíqǔ), which has a little five minute segment retelling the story at the bell (complete with historical rendition featuring a guy I know who lives in Nanao!).

The original memorial bell is apparently owned by the family (or was thrown away, according to the Japanese wikipedia article) but this newer bell and memorial was built in 1998. It’s an interesting relic of the Japanese era right in my backyard.

Gaofeng (高峰)

高峰 (gāofēng) in Chinese simply means “peak,” and that’s the only name I know for our next destination. We drove up a steep one-way path up a mountain (an unmarked road off the highway between 武塔 (wǔtǎ) and 漢本 (hànběn) stations) and went up to the top. Along the way we could see some beautiful scenery over the ocean, though it was a cloudy day so we couldn’t see too far.

Up on the peak we first walked around a traditional Chinese-style single-clan courtyard with a few houses around it. There didn’t seem to be anyone home. They seemed to have some fascination with game pieces… there were some dominos scattered in one part of their lot, 象棋 (xiàngqí, Chinese chess) pieces elsewhere, and some 麻將 (májiàng) tiles actually stuck in the concrete in another place. I felt like it would make for a good setting for a mystery novel.

All around us were some beautiful 日日春 (rìrìchūn, Catharanthus roseus (Madagascar Periwinkle)) and not-so-wonderful 檳榔 (bīnláng, betel nut, a kind of palm) trees.

There was a beautiful stream nearby as well as a hose with water from a small man-made reservoir, which Mr. Cai used to clean the car.

Going further into the mountain, we saw even more houses and some beautiful farms, mostly with cabbage. Mr. Cai explained that many of these farmers were actually relatively well off people (and retirees) from Luodong or Yilan who bought this land and come to farm there as a hobby or in retirement. We found a small Daoist shrine as well, as a testament to his statement that these farmers were not aboriginal but of Han Chinese descent.⁴ At this point, though, it started raining more heavily, and we decided to call it a day and head back home. All of us had a wonderful and relaxing day exploring Nanao!

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Here’s one to get you started:

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