Sorry, Facebook. This time you’ve crossed the line.

I read just a few moments ago in Slashdot that Facebook has replaced its users’ default email address with a facebook.com email address. I wasn’t very happy at all with Facebook before, and this, if true, would be the last straw, so I had to go and confirm it.

And yes, it is true. My profile now shows a @facebook.com email address (that I’ve never used and don’t intend to) instead of my real email address.

This is already too much. I’ve already deleted all my photo albums from my Facebook account, and over the next few days I’ll complete the process of removing as much content as possible and disabling the account. I have to write down the email address of people I want to keep in touch with, untag myself from my friends’ photos, and post a notice in my profile saying that I’m not there anymore.

I will still log in to Facebook during the next few days in order to remove all content from there, but from now on, if you want to get in touch with me, feel free to send me an email directly to my real email address: javi@lavandeira.net

There are several things going on in the world right now that I consider worrying enough to write about. These are (in no particular order):

• Religion
• WikiLeaks
• Animal abuse
• Nuclear power
• Political corruption in Europe
• Intellectual property

I’ve started writing about a couple of these (nuclear power and intellectual property), but I never seem to be able to finish because there’s always something new happening that changes my priorities: Julian Assange is denied the appeal for extradition, or a new anti-nuclear demonstration, or the political party that got Greece in all this trouble wins the national elections again.

Since I can’t decide what to write about first, I thought I’d just write this post summarizing what my opinions are, and then decide on a subject based on what gets me the most death threats. Please note that I’m not talking about posting a tweet or two, but writing multi-page posts containing real information about the subject.

So here we go.The following are my opinions.

As of today, this server (the one hosting this website you’re reading now) is now part of the NTP Pool Project. NTP is the Network Time Protocol. Your computer uses it to retrieve time information from time servers automatically adjust the time in its internal clock.

I was surprised there were so few NTP servers in the Japanese pool. Apparently there are only 21 active machines (counting mine).

You can see the server stats here.

Remember this post from a few days ago? I was talking about how Hitachi is spamming its customers (me being one of them), and I ended the post with “Buy a Western Digital instead”.

Well, after that blog post a very polite representative from Hitachi actually replied via email asking about the hard drive’s serial number and part number. I wrote back to him just a few minutes ago, and I got an automated error message from their mail server:

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has been acquired by Western Digital.  Our new name is HGST.  When sending email messages to HGST, please adjust your email address to use the “hgst.com” domain.  Example:jim.smith@hgst.com

Emphasis mine. Initially I thought it was some kind of joke from their mail server admin(s), but it’s actually true. Here’s the press release from Western Digital. The press release is actually from March, so I was three months late with my buy a Western Digital comment.

What will happen now? Will they stop spamming non-US customers regarding US-only campaigns? Or will it get worse?

Yesterday I was walking in Odaiba. I love the view from Tokyo Bay at night from there. However, it was a bit chilly, so on my way back home I decided to walk inside the DECKS shopping mall instead of the avenue outside. There on the second floor of the mall I found a shopping area decorated as the Tokyo from the 1950s. It’s called the Daiba 1-chome shopping street (台場一丁目商店街, Daiba 1-chome shotengai). In all my years in Tokyo I had never been here. I don’t know for how long it has been here, but it’s a very nice place. There are restaurants, a food court, shops where you can buy old clothes, a candy shop… all of them with an atmosphere that reminds the 50s.

I liked the place. Especially, I liked a retro game center with game machines ranging from the 70s to the early 90s.

Unfortunately I didn’t have my Nikon DSLR camera with me. I took photos with my iPhone, but the quality is quite bad because of the bad lightning. Most of the photos are from the retro game center.

Photo gallery after the pause. Enjoy.

Look at this product page from G-Technology (Hitachi):

Wow! That must be an awesome product, right? Over 90% score from almost 450 reviews!

Too bad it’s a lie. Keep reading for my experience with this external disk.

Imagine that you’re a professional photographer: you earn money by taking photos and licensing them to customers who want to use them. One day while browsing the web you find a web site using one of your commercial photos illegally. You wonder how many people are doing the same, so you run an online search and find out that there are many, many web sites using your photo illegally.

You want these people to stop using your work. You could try and contact each of the web site owners, but you know that it’s going to be pointless because most don’t have contact information, or the contact person doesn’t have access to the web code, or they will just ignore you. You decide to send DMCA takedown notices to the companies hosting each of these web sites, so they will get in touch with their customers and ask them to remove your photo from their web sites.

As a result of the DMCA takedown requests, many of the web sites remove your photo, others offer to license it, as they should have done from the beginning. It seems to be going well.

Until a crazy psychotic person enters the scene.

The Japanese music industry sucks. Look at bands like AKB48 or Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ). If you are living in Japan then you must be sick already of seeing them everywhere.

In case you hadn’t heard about them, I’m going to share the pain:

AKB48 is an all-girl band composed by *64* members, whose only talent is being young and cute. They jump around in the stage singing without much grace, but that doesn’t matter much, because their fans (mostly male otakus) only care about their looks.

They started in their own theater in Akihabara, where they performed daily in front of their fans (they still do). The group is actually named after the Akihabara district.

Last year I started developing this blog from zero, both the presentation layer (HTML and CSS) and the server-side logic (PHP and a PostgreSQL database). My intention was to get back up to speed in systems administration and PHP development, because for the last several years I hadn’t been doing any real development.

Well, it looks like I achieved that. I’m (more or less) up to date again, so there’s no point in spending more time developing the content management software, when I can instead set up a WordPress blog in the server and start using it right away.

So that’s what I did. You’ll notice that I removed the photo galleries. This is because I couldn’t find any photography plugin or application that integrates nicely with WordPress in order to present a decent-looking gallery. I will have to develop that part on my own. Until then, I’ll keep posting my photos on Flickr.

So welcome (again) to my blog.