I believe you can learn a lot about a culture by looking at the things the people eat and how they eat them. Before I came to Japan all I knew about Japanese food was sushi rolls filled with avocado and tuna, so when I came here, and since I like fish ...

On a recent trip to Obama we had the chance to stay at a traditional Japanese inn or Ryokan. It was located in the countryside, all surrounded by nature about 2 hours by car from Nagoya. Ryokan.Upon entering the hotel ...

Etegami is a postcard with a drawing or painting and a short message. Etegami postcardEtegami typically shows season related drawings such as fruits, flowers, hina dolls (hinamatsuri) ogers (setsubun) etc. Children's day etegamiHina matsuri etegami...

If you are in Nagoya and want to try something original from this area you should try kishimen, a flat and wide noodle thicker than udon. You can try it at a restaurant called Ebisuya. The noodles are prepared in a bonito stock along with deep-fried...

I think this topic matters to all of us. The question is: which is the worst problem in our planet? Which do you think it is?Hungry is definitely one of the biggest problems in our planet. About 826 million of people do not have enough to eat in a day...

Here are some tips to help you keep warm and reduce your heating costs at the same time. Remember: the less you use your heater (whether it is electric or gas) the less you contribute to global warming...

Here are some tips to help you keep cool and reduce your air-conditioning costs at the same time. Remember: the less you use your air conditioner the less you contribute to global warming.Use summer fabrics. As a rule of thumb natural materials keep you...

We all know that most of the papers we use for printing/copying comes form the trees. We all know that trees are an essential for our environment and for our lives.How we can apply this 3-R in our office or home to help our environment? This article is...

My first *nix experience was during my first job, working with AIX servers.Two years later, I started to use Linux (around 1998). My first distribution was RedHat, however it was really difficult to setup my video card. I was really interested in Linux...

I have used XMMS for several years in every linux distribution I have had the opportunity to use. However, because I'm using Ubuntu (Xubuntu), Debian decided to kill xmms since Ubuntu Hardy version.You can see some of the reasons and follow-up here...

If you are like me, who migrated from Photoshop to gimp, you may miss the save for the web option that Photoshop has.There is a plugin for gimp that will do almost exactly the same task. However, it seems that has not been distribuited for...

What is a DNS server? In few words, a DNS server (or nameserver) helps you to resolve names into IP addresses. For example, if you want to access another computer using a easy-to-remember name instead of its IP address...

This is a list of quick how-to's that I personally consider them very useful:How to benchmark a web site:# install apache2-utils (apache ab tool)# then:ab -n 1000 -c 100 http://server/index.php-n = number of conections-c = multiple connections at on...

Versions: Hardy (8.04), Intrepid (8.10) and Jaunty (9.04)Setting up a Mail Server in Linux may be sometimes not as easy as other services (eg. ftp, ssh, web, etc). I needed to set up a Mail server in few days, so I went through several tutorials, manual...

Zend Framework has some classes to manage cache through PHP, however, based in my personal experience with cache managers, it is not the best option if you want to speed-up your web sites.I'm using XCache (http://xcache.lighttpd.net/). It has...

I had the opportunity recently (2008) to develop a crawler in Java. Even it is very basic, but I think you may find it easier to understand than many of the codes you can see around. I hope you find it useful. The crawler system was developed entirely...

If you have downloaded more than one file from RapidShare FREE service, you may agree that is a slow process that becomes tiresome after a while. I developed an application to make your life easier in that process. I named it "Akachan RapidShare...

There are many ways to try to hide emails from spammers. However many of them fail in more advanced spammers systems. For example, many people suggest to use entities to display part or all the email. I can be sure that this method...

Free Software. The concept of "Software Piracy" and the term itself remain highly controversial nowadays. Some computer industry executives claim that so-called "piracy" is by far the largest problem facing the software industry. ...

This article is about what I think about Visual Basic...I started programming when I was 8 years old in basic in an Atari computer. Then I programmed in QBasic, GWBasic and some other flavors... Then, I met Visual Basic 3.0 (around 1993?) and I really...

Recently (Jun, 2008), some of the computers in my University's laboratory were infected by a Trojan Virus. The name of the virus differ according to some companies:Trojan-PSW.Win32.OnLineGames.alex [Kaspersky Lab]Packed.Generic.61 [Symantec]W32/Auto...