Years back podpress was the undisputed best plugin for podcasting in WordPress but then the original author suddenly stopped maintaining the code. He promised to return to the project “soon” but eventually even his most ardent supporters began to disappear from the forums. Finally even the support forum got shut down, ostensibly because of spam, but more likely because the grumbling against this developer was getting pretty loud. I can’t cast stones here because it has been years since I touched my active-x controls on shrinkwrapvb.com and I still get weekly, sometimes daily requests for support on those. Life can make one busy and priorities can change. But in order to keep using Podpress I have had to hack and patch on every install and every upgrade since about WordPress 2.5. This brought me no joy since it seemed I was fighting a losing battle – with the original author being long gone, never to return. I actually almost switched to another plugin or two for the same functionality, but the problem of migrating all the back episodes of my podcasts kept me making small bugfixes to podpress.

Until – now! Once again I am using the official svn repository versions of podpress and the only hacks I need to make are on sites where I want to add Japanese text or custom features/graphics. Podpress lives on to fight another day.

DOWNLOAD LINKS FOR PODPRESS

Official page at WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/

SVN repository: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/podpress/

If you happen to be a pastor or volunteer at a small church which is trying to embrace the flood of technology available in the 21st century then perhaps the title of this article caught your eye. Did you know that if you own a domain name and have the technical expertise to set your own CNAME records (or at least have the patience to follow Google’s detailed online help), Google will give you a free, hosted, productivity suite along with some seriously significant amounts of disk space located in the cloud.

That’s right. The standard version of the GoogleApps in-the-cloud, Web 2.0+, Microsoft-busting, service suite is available for free for personal use. If you have a personal website or blog, I recommend that you try it out right away. I did this a couple years back when this was still bleeding-edge and Google marketing was calling it “Google Apps For Your Domain.” Since that time, Google has not only shortened the name, they have added feature after feature, they have had (almost) flawless uptime, and they have continually increased the disk space allowance to users. If you are a GMail user then you are probably already familiar with many of the apps – mail, calendar, contacts, chat… Adding it to your domain allows you to brand these apps with your organization’s logo and get an amazing combination of great apps, great hosting, and great collaboration tools.

My personal journey with GoogleApps went something like this:

• “Wow, that was easy to set up.”
• “I wonder why I am still using Outlook.”
• “Wow, that’s a great new feature, I can use that!”
• “Wow, I can’t believe its been over a year since I used Outlook. It sure is nice to have all my contacts, calendars, email, important docs, etc. available from any computer/OS/browser that is hooked up to the internet.”
• Sure is nice that all that stuff is backed up to the cloud too.
• “Wow, I am glad they added offline funtionality too. It’s time to uninstall Outlook permanently.”
• It is cool that I can easily add anyone I want as a user on my domains productivity apps from any computer and collaborate, share, chat, etc. etc. etc.
• Anybody want an old Windows Server box to use as a doorstop? I am tired of trying to keep up with patches and admin. Let Google do it for me!

The features keep coming

 I recently checked out the Official Google Apps blog and noticed that two of the last big hurdles to using GoogleApps as my main productivity suite have been cleared by the G. Team as we head into 2010. Just recently they (finally) released a stand-alone contacts page that can apparently be shared across everyone in your domain. The other new feature for this month is that now users can upload *any file type* to their domain accounts. This is big because it gives you an immediate “G-Drive” type of backup location. You can upload important stuff as a zip archive or whatever format you prefer and have it in case of a local computer disaster. With GoogleApps folder sharing feature you can even create a dedicated shared folder and share anything you want across your organization just like many of us do on our local area networks. Only this is hosted on the cloud… sweet! At this initial release the limit is 1 gig per user on “unconverted” files (which means files that can’t be converted to online docs, spreadsheets or presentations). Hopefully that number will also go up soon.

Now For An Even Bigger Freebie

In part one of this article I talked about the standard edition. In part two I will tell you how I was able to use my church’s non-profit organization status to get a pro version of GoogleApps (normally $50 per user per year) for free! If you just can’t wait and want to go get this for your own church you can start here:

GoogleApps for Charities

Do you have experience with GoogleApps? Love it? Hate it? Join the forum via the link below and leave a comment or question.

The Babelfish

Japanese is hard! 

Anyone from the Western Hemisphere who has seriously tried to master the Japanese language knows that it is not a trivial task. After studying at two American universities and under two Japanese private tutors, I did what many before me have done – I focused on speaking and listening and let my puny Japanese reading and writing skills atrophy.  It would certainly be cool if there were a universal translator (ala Star Trek) – I’d even settle for a Babblefish to stick in my ear (ala Douglas Adams). In the meantime there is Google Translate. 

Translation is Hard to Automate 

However, the practical usefulness of translation software is still ridiculously limited as anyone who has actually tried to use it will quickly find out. Just try picking a phrase in English at random, translate that phrase into Japanese and then translate it back into English using the same software. Should at least be close, right?  OK, since I love the Bible  I will choose a simple passage that source. How about an excerpt from Luke 2 (as famously quoted by Linus on “A Charlie Brown Christmas“). 

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.  He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.  While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. 

The results after a round trip through Google Translate (English–>Japanese–>English): 

Because he is a line of David, Joseph, and therefore belongs to the house, the Jewish town of Nazareth in Galilee, the Bethlehem, went to the city of David. He and Mary went to register the child and was hoping that was promised to marry him. While were there, the time is coming to birth a baby, her firstborn child, gave birth to a son. 

Semi-humorous Internet History Break… 

For those of use who have studied Japanese since the dark ages of the Internet, when Al Gore and his minions were laboring selflessly to create Arpa-Net and Darpa-Net (insert sarcmark here), the greatest free gift to Japanese scholars was Jim Breen’s EDICT database. Pooling the resources of Australia’s 3 or 4 university students who were majoring in the Japanese language (insert sarcmark here), Professor Breen did something incredibly farsighted. He created a free English-Japanese dictionary for foreign students of Japanese and made it available to all on the Monash University website. 

RIKAI.COM 

Building on this great basic research, Todd Rudick built Rikai.com which can be easily used from any webbrowser for either translating Japanese text or (by entering a URL directly) browsing entire Japanese websites. The genius of Rikai.com (rikai means “understanding” in English) is that it is NOT a translator but something akin an automatic popup dictionary. If you know how to speak Japanese but your kanji skills are weak, this is better than a translator. Try it and you will see what I mean. I recommend using some kind of ad-blocker to remove the annoying dating ads that inhabit the sidebars, but the functionality is worth it. 

RIKAICHAN BROWSING PLUGIN 

Rikai.com is cool, but I have saved the best for last. Building on this idea and expanding on Todd’s initial attempt at a browser plugin version of Rikai.com, Jon Zarate has built an excellent plugin for Firefox called Rikaichan. As I write this the current stable revision is 1.07 and 1.08 is in the late beta stages. This is, hands down, the very best tool I have found for browsing Japanese websites. It is fast, slick and elegant. It also has the full power of the original EDICT database plus alpha and makes it all available as tooltip rollovers and hotkeys from your Firefox browser. There is also a work-in-progress Chrome version here called rikaikun. 

Do you know any other good tools for web-browsing in Japanese?  

OK, just to round out the list here is one more option for those who have decent Japanese skills but need a little help with the kanji. The furigana injector add-on is available for Firefox and Chrome and does just what you would expect from the name.

If you have any other tips for reading Japanese websites, let me know via the forum link below. Share your tips and be blessed!

Download this Table as a PDF file

School life is full of pressures in Japan. From an early age children learn that the university they get into will determine their success in life. Many universities have feeder high schools, which also have feeder jr. high schools, etc down to the preschool level. Parents who are forward thinkers concerning their children’s education work hard to get their children into the proper kindergarten (often starting at age 3 or 4) so their child will have the best chance to get into the “right” university. Because of this system, children may have already been labeled failures by the time they reach puberty.

Bullying or ijime is a common problem, making some students fear attending school. Often this behavior is overt and sometimes the teacher is involved as well. The scapegoat student, picked as different for whatever reason, has no recourse and no way of escaping daily verbal, mental, emotional, and sometimes even physical abuse. Exam Hell or juken in Jr. High and High School is well-known even outside of Japan because of television and investigative journalism.

The pressures caused by the educational system in Japan have not only led to a high suicide rate among Japan’s youth it has also led more and more young people to rebel against traditional society. Some forms of disobedience have been well-known for years, such as the bosozuku motorcycle gangs that roam city and country streets after midnight. But in recent years there have been at least four new trends among the youth here that might be even more troubling than the open defiance of the bosozoku.

Parasite Singles – furita and hikikomori

A new class of young adult called “parasite single” has emerged in Japan, especially in the major cities, most notably Tokyo where 25% of the nation’s 127 million population resides. These teens and young adults have grown up in an affluent society and have not lacked training or opportunity. Yet more and more are electing to drop out of society altogether. They typically live with their parents and grandparents and do not go to school or pursue any kind of career. Some of these may be simply rebelling against the structured and high-pressure lifestyle of their fathers. But others seem to have deeper problems, difficult to fathom and rooted in a kind of spiritual bondage.

In the 1980’s a new word was coined in Japan; the furita, which means essentially “free part-time worker.” Many youth, especially those who do not pass the rigorous college entrance exams required by popular universities, decide that they do not care about advancing in their career. They find that they prefer to work low paying part-time jobs and have free time to do what they want. This type of attitude is revolutionary in a society where image and social status are obtained largely by what school you graduate from and from which company hires you. According to Imidas, an annual Japanese-language publication that chronicles current trends and statistics in Japan, the number of furita in Japan ages 15 to 34 more than doubled from 1991 to 2001. In 1991, 10.1% of the Japanese work force fit into the category of furita. By 2001 this figure had risen to 21.2%.

There is another type of parasite single which is even more troubling than the furita. There is a growing trend among young people today to simply lock themselves in their bedrooms and refuse to talk to anyone or go anywhere. Significant numbers of youth are refusing to go to school or to their job and are not only dropping out of society but of any contact with reality. This behavior has also prompted a new Japanese term; hikikomori. Tim Larimer of TIME magazine did an article on this phenomenon in the August, 2001 edition titled “Staying In And Tuning Out.” An excerpt from this article shows the seriousness of the problem:

Fantasy and Escapism

Many youth in the world of the hikikomori spend all of their waking hours lost in a fantasy world of video games, animated movies called anime, or on the internet, interacting with others only through virtual personas. Even the older generation in Japan, especially in larger cities, has an obvious addiction to fantasy and escapism. A favorite pastime of the Japanese salaryman (company employee), for example, is reading manga. These thick comic books are almost an art-form in Japan but unfortunately many are filled with violence, sensuality and perversion. There are different types of manga written to target every age group in Japan. It is a common site to see people on crowded trains intensely reading and lost in the plot of their favorite manga, while the reality of being crushed into crowded commuter trains daily for hours at a time is blissfully ignored.

Another form of escape from a pressure filled existence is the Role Playing Game or RPG where players can assume the character of any type of creature he prefers, real or imaginary and get away with behavior which would never be tolerated in the strict Japanese society. RPGs are very popular in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan. Most youth have a game console or a personal computer with a broadband internet connection and if the pressures of everyday life get too great, the temptation is to lock oneself away in one’s room and become hikikomori.

Violence and Death Fascination

One of the most frightening trends among Japanese youth today is their fascination with violence and death. The suicide rate in Japan is epidemic. It is one of the highest suicide rates of any modern industrialized nation and is double that of the United States. In 2003 there was a suicide about every 15 minutes in Japan and there is no sign that the rising trend has slowed since that point. Statistically, in Tokyo one is five times more likely to die by his own hand than by a traffic accident. There are new types of suicide reported in the news media every year. Websites have been set up on the internet where those who are considering suicide can meet online and get information on various methods for ending one’s life. Recently a string of internet suicide pact deaths shocked Japan.

The highest rate of suicide is among the older generation and health and economic worries are widely believed to be the main causes. But the number of suicides among the youth is growing at an alarming rate. According to a an Asia Times article titled “Suicide also rises in the land of rising sun” the suicide rate for elementary and middle-school children in Japan rose 57.6% from 2001 to 2002. The high suicide rate is an indication of the growing sense of helplessness and lack of purpose in the youth of Japan. Another grim trend is violence among the very young.

Through the last half of the 20th century, Japan was noted for its lack of violent crime, even in the cities. In 1997 however, a 14-year old boy shocked the nation by cutting off the head of an 11-year old student and leaving it at the entrance gate to his school. Since that time violent incidents among young students and even hikikomori youth have occurred with startling regularity. An article in the Washington Post in August, 2004 states:

Immorality

Along with the increasing violence and escapism in the youth, there is a rapidly growing immorality problem. For years, Japan has been the largest sex industry market for Asian women. Japanese men constitute the largest number of sex tourists in Asia. Researchers at the University of Rhode Island website report this about Tokyo:

The following is from a collection of facts on Japan at a website at http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/japan.htm called “Factbook on Global Sexual Exploitation” under the heading Japan.

1. In 1998, Japan was the world’s biggest producer of child pornography and Parliament recently refused to pass a law banning the production of child pornography, citing “business reasons.”
2. Until 1997, Tokyo and Nagano were the only areas in Japan where sex with children was not illegal.
3. The legal age of consent for sex in Tokyo and Nagano is 13, not 18 like the rest of the country.

Enjokosai, or enko for short, which means “teenage girls’ compensated dating” is a new word coined to describe the large number of teenage girls who are working for dating services, phone clubs or simply on their own, to offer prostitution services to older men. Researcher Fukutomi Mamoru has done detailed research among Jr. High and High School girls and found that reasons for engaging in this form of prostitution include being “too lazy to work”, the “trend to have brand-named goods”, and even that there “may be a certain glamour in being involved in enjokosai… Enjokosai has become fashionable.”

Conclusion

This is a key generation in Japan. The previous four trends clearly indicate that there is a generation in Japan right now that has lost its purpose. The secular authorities and experts have no solutions for the gross darkness which has overtaken the youth of Japan. The promise of a rigorously structured life of service to the company and duty to society holds little attraction to the youth of Japan today because they have seen the spiritual emptiness of the previous generations. This has led to an unprecedented “dropping out” of an entire generation into a life of parasite singles, escapism, immorality, violence and even suicide.

The Bible promises that the Church will have answers for the problems in Japanese society today, and that the “nations will come to her light” (Isaiah 60). This is the opportune time for Japan, the moment when there are felt needs that can be met by the Church. In this new generation of crisis, the church must redouble her efforts to reach the youth of Japan.

• ANTI-VIRUS FOR WINDOWS
• My recommendation: PandaCloud Antivirus upside: best free choice. possible downside: need stable internet connection.
• Japanese installer for the above: http://www.cloudantivirus.jp/
• My second choice: AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition upside: free, mature product. possible downside: beginning the slide towards bloat.
• Other free options: Avast!, Kingsoft (Japanese only)
• ROOT-KIT CHECKER
• F-Secure Blacklight
• FOR WINDOWS XP USERS
• Along with a good anti-virus software like PandaCloud or AVG AntiVirus Free, you should install Microsoft Windows Defender. (*note Windows Defender is installed by default in Vista and Windows 7)
• And finally – always keep your system updated with Windows Update and install all Service Packs from Microsoft.

Anti-Virus Products – Fear and Bloat
Virus software is sold based on fear. For most users it is the fear of the unknown – because they hear the buzzwords like “worm”, “trojan”, “hacker”, “rootkit”, and don’t really have any technical understanding of what these dangers actually refer to. Virus companies always tend to take advantage of this fact by adding more and more unnecessary features instead of focusing on the basic core feature set which is really all that most users need – anti-virus. So as product lines mature, the product usually goes from “virus protection” to “firewall”, “link scanner”, “e-mail scanner”, “malware”, and even into meaningless items like “shields”, “innoculation”, “cleaner”, and so on.
My History with Anti-Virus (skip this if you are not into geeky details)
Even back in the days when Microsoft was making the radical switch from (16-bit) Windows 3.1 to (32-bit) Windows 95 I felt that virus companies were adding too much bloat. Years ago, I switched from using McAfee’s anti-virus to Norton’s anti virus product. Norton began to evolve its product line to include products like “Total Internet Security Suite.” Well, who wouldn’t want total safety, right? The problem was, these companies started focusing more and more on feature bloat and less and less on efficient use of system resources like memory and cpu. So eventually the virus “suite” in my computer was using just as much processor time and memory as my office productivity suite and slowing my computer down to a crawl. I stuck with Norton Anti-Virus for several years – always using the basic package and not installing the huge bloated versions. ( I also looked at ClamAV for my servers because I was administrating a couple of email servers and I realized early that the best way to deal with email virii was on the server *before* the email ever got to a Windows client. Now I am a big fan of GMail for email anti-virus – let them do the work. Much better!)

 About this same time, a few years back now, I discovered Grisoft free AVG. Not only was it apparently built to use modest system resources, it also consistently scored very well on major comparisons of virus software. But the amazing thing was that it was free for personal use!
AVG is still a good choice for Windows users who want a good, free anti-virus software. But there are a couple of negatives that have creeped in over time that have finally caused me to abandon AVG. Firstly, about once a year AVG does a major version upgrade and cuts support for the previous version – forcing the user to upgrade to the new version. This is not such a bad thing in itself because the product is free anyway, right? Theoretically it is even good because the product has good suport and all resources are being devoted to the latest and greatest – no need to try to continue legacy support on old versions. The problem is that everytime they make users upgrade, they shuffle their website and hide the free version very deeply. So I recommend AVG Free to all my friends (believe me, a *lot* of people ask me which virus software they should use) and then my friends go to the AVG site and see the paid version only. Some of them grumble and just pay the fee (which, like most anti-virus products these days is an annual fee) and some of them come back to me and complain because they can’t find it. I guess it is not as bad as products that nag or show constant ads but it is a little irritating that they have to “trick” users into paying like this. Speaking of ads, they have also started showing ads on the product in the last couple of versions. Again this, by itself, is not enough to make me switch if the product is good enough. But the final straw is that I am starting to sense the same bloat in AVG’s product that I saw happen in Norton’s. The newest version (9.0) seemed a bit heavier, and there are now many other options – toolbars, rootkit protection, link scanners, business versions, etc etc etc.

The Current State of Affairs – My Choice For Best Free Anti-Virus Software! (As of December, 2009)
A few months ago I began watching a free anti-virus contender called PandaCloud AntiVirus. The philosophy is right – minimal system resources – and there is a new technology in this product which finally feels like its time has come – Cloud Computing. PandaCloud installs a minimal client app but the virus definitions and most of the processing is done in the “cloud” (another way of saying on their servers). So your personal computer doesn’t have to use so many resources. I like that! Also, I watched this year as PandaCloud beat AVG in a couple of big computer magazine’s test results. These test ranked products based on how well they detect viruses (which is why I use an anti-virus product!) I installed PandaCloud on one computer to try it out about a month ago and within a couple of weeks I had removed AVG and installed PandaCloud on every one of my personal computers at home and at church. I like it! I ran a few test virii at it and they were all easily handled. It is simple, lightweight and unobtrusive. If the computer magazines can be believed it is also better at detecting viruses than any other free anti-virus available and just as good as the most expensive commercial products. PandaCloud is supposed to release a major upgrade in the next month or two. If they show that they can handle upgrades better than AVG I am definitely going to be recommending this product to all my friends and churches that I work with in 2010.