I’ve been living in Japan for more than 4½ years now and tried many times to get one, always to be turned down. This especially includes applying for ones from my bank, Shinsei Bank, that I’ve used exclusively for all my time in Japan, and where I now have “platinum” status, meaning that I have many million yen entrusted at their bank, a significant part of which is in risky assests where they make a lot of profit. So they clearly rank me as one of their best customers, and I’m clearly bound to keep significant assets in their bank for the immediate future (so I cannot just “escape”), but still turn me down every time I apply for a credit card. Why is that?

Being turned down for a VISA credit card by my Japanese bank

When I visited one of Shinsei’s branch offices recently for a completely different, but somewhat time-consuming and complicated issue, I got to talk quite a lot with one of the staff there. As I have “platinum” status, they treat me quite well too, not hurriedly at all. This was one of the branches where a lot of foreigners visit, and she seemed quite used to working with foreigners, although we spoke only in Japanese. So at the end she asked if there was something else I’d like to inquire about, and I asked something along the lines of why do you turn my credit card applications down all the time, despite me being a “platinum” level customer and having millions of yen in your bank?. And surprisingly, she did have a good answer for that, not just the usual appologies.

The reason, it seems, why Shinsei Bank (which is, by the way, founded by a foreigner based on foreign capital) systematically turns down foreigners’ credit card applications is that the company that is contracted to handle credit cards for the bank doesn’t have any support line in English. Since we’d just been having a conversation about quite complicated banking matters in Japanese for half an hour, that reason obviously seemed very silly at that point. Still, that’s why. And since Japan doesn’t have any laws against racial discrimination, systematically turning down anyone with a foreign-sounding name (they don’t actually check your nationality) is just fine here.

Anyhow, at long last I went to Citibank to beg for a credit card there, since I’ve heard they’re more open to foreigners’ business. Considering the bank would have gone bankrupt if it hadn’t been bailed out by the US government, it’s not exactly my primary choice for doing banking, but anyway. And they gave me a credit card within less than a week, with a 1 million yen limit, which I think is very high. And unlike Shinsei Bank where I have the highest available “platinum” status, that was the first time I walked in to a Citibank office. I have no prior history with them at all. And they still gave me a pretty sweet credit card.

Finally got a Japanese credit card.

So what is the conclusion from all this? Go to Citibank. It seems Shinsei Bank and Citibank are the two somewhat modern banks in Japan, with Shinsei being about 10 years behind the average Swedish bank instead of the Japanese average of 50 years behind. Citibanks seems just as (comparatively) moderen. Shinsei seemed very foreigner-friendly when I opened an account there, but in the end they certainly do practice discrimination against foreigners, so I must say that I regret my decision – I should have gone with Citibank instead. That is the best advice I can give to anyone non-Japanese who’s getting a bank account and/or credit card in Japan.

However, as things have changed I have now decided to move all my web activities over to the humongous and well known DreamHost hosting service. Moving it all has been extraordinarily boring, but at least it’s finished now so I can concentrate on making new, fun stuff for the web instead of worrying about my hosting, since I’ve known for about a month that I had to make this move. This three day weekend provided a good opportunity to move things over in stages to prevent a total meltdown of all my sites at the same time (which happened quite a lot when I hosted with Binero). That last remark brings me to why I’m changing to DreamHost. These are the reasons:

1. A more stable hosting service. Binero used to be very good and all, but at some point they just started sucking. This peaked last month when I found all my sites being broken due to changes made by Binero (without informing me in advance) three times in one month. That is just a bit too often for me to tolerate. I’ve had my sites broken by Binero in the past too, but not that often. And once it took them two weeks to fix a simple problem introduced by one of their changes, by which time I had of course already worked around the it.

Binero’s tech support has always been very quick to respond, but usually had some snide, unnecessary remark in the response as well, and usually blamed me for problems caused by them randomly changing stuff. I’ve been a customer with them for a long time, so even if they’ve been telling new customers how to set things up correctly for the last five years, that doesn’t mean I know it automatically without them telling me about it. It’s not good when being a loyal customer is used against you. So I definitely can’t recommend Binero to anyone who’s thinking about getting web hosting somewhere.

Lately they’ve started hyping a new system they call Binero 2.0, which is exactly what I don’t want – even more changes, bound to break stuff if I know Binero correctly. On the other hand, the sysadmin at work has had sites running at DreamHost for many years without any breakage or changes. That kind of stability is what I want. I also like DreamHost’s attitude that you can essentially do whatever you want as long as it’s not a security risk or malicious. Binero on the other hand disabled sftp (encrypted) access, allowing only ftp (unencrypted) access for security reasons, according to their tech support. That is about as stupid as it gets. Besides, they also disabled ssh shell access (of course, unannounced), which is a pain in the ass when you need to fix something quickly, besides being just silly.

2. Better located hosting for faster response times. When I started making web sites I lived in Sweden and most people who accessed the sites were in that area as well, so it made sense to use Sweden-based hosting. Now, however, I live in Japan and most of the people accessing my sites (whatlanguageisthis.com is by far the most accessed one now) are in North America, Japan, or India, as well as from all over Europe with no country in particular standing out. My ping time to my sites on Binero’s servers was 300 ms, but DreamHost has 125 ms ping, which is a very noticeable improvement. DreamHost’s servers are located in California, which is the center of the physical Internet, unlike Sweden, which is about as far out on the fringe as you can get except Russia and Africa. (For example, Internet traffic from Japan to Sweden goes via the US, not via Russia, and all Asian countries are connected via the US west coast.)

3. Get away from Sweden due to FRA. If you don’t know what FRA (“National Defence Radio Establishment”) is, would you believe me if I said that the Swedish government/military intercepts all Internet traffic crossing the border? Hopefully you wouldn’t, since you’re thinking that Sweden is a nice, modern, democratic society that doesn’t need to spy on its citizens nor the Russians, since the Cold War is over by now. Unfortunately, that’s what they’re doing, and Sweden seems to be moving in the wrong direction in many other ways too now when it comes to information privacy. Not nice. Since I’m in Japan, and stupid Binero didn’t allow encrypted access, that meant the FRA could intercept anything I uploaded to my sites. Not that I would upload something sensitive without encrypting it first, but still, it’s just silly. The US is a better place to host web sites, so score one more for DreamHost.

Anyway, that’s the end of this rant. Finally the move is over, and I’m looking forward to not having to wake up and find my sites being broken much often any more. I’ll also be writing more interesting stuff on this blog now that I’ve finished both the moves to a better blogging platform (WordPress instead of Blogger) and hosting service (DreamHost instead of Binero). No need to procrastinate any further now that the boring stuff is done.

In the olden days, finding information on the web was hard, and good link directories were worth their bytes in gold, and good content was worth even more. Nowadays we have good search engines, thanks to Google, and lots of good content (and lots of bad content too, but that’s not really a problem).

Wikipedia is one source of good content on the web. But it’s not the only one – it’s just the most obvious one in many cases. My problem with Wikipedia is mainly how people link to it. Here’s an example:

　×　I like to feed the pigeons. I sometimes feed the sparrows too.

This I’d like to claim is by far the most common way of referring to Wikipedia. What’s wrong with it?

1. If your reader doesn’t know what a pigeon or sparrow is, it’s 99.9% certain that’s because the reader isn’t very good at English. In this case, if anything, every word ought to be linked to a dictionary, but that wouldn’t be very useful except for 0.1% of your readers. They should know how to look up words themselves if they’re not proficient in the language of the text they’re reading, don’t you think?

2. If your reader suddenly becomes very interested in pigeons or sparrows by reading your text, I’m sure one of the first places your reader would look for informations on said birds is Wikipedia. There is no need to point people to Wikipedia, because everyone knows how to find Wikipedia articles anyway. In Firefox, just type “wikipedia pigeon” in the address bar, and you’ll get redirected to the page. In other browsers, go to google.com and type it in and press “I’m feeling lucky”. It’s real easy.
3. The reader might think that you’re linking to some really interesting tidbit about pigeons or sparrows, or maybe a funny Youtube video. But to find out, the reader has to mouse over the links and check the status bar where they point. Only to find out they just point to the Wikipedia entries, which the reader could easily have found without your assistance. This makes reading cumbersome.
4. It degrades the quality of interlinking on the web. All you’re doing is helping Wikipedia get a higher PageRank – and their PageRank is already as high as it can get. You’re not helping the guy who has spent serious time documenting pigeons and sparrows and runs a really interesting web site on the subject that your readers may actually enjoy if you had only taken the time to find and link to it – like in the old days.

In the example above, it’d be easy to argue that “pigeons” and “sparrows” don’t need to be linked at all. But this is how thoughtlessly people use hyperlinks. So let’s change the example to something similar yet where hyperlinking a word might be more appropriate:

　×　But the pronunciation doesn’t change since the word is a dvandva.

I bet you don’t know what a dvandva is. It doesn’t matter here anyway since I’m just using it as an example but I’m sure you’ve already went and read the Wikipedia article. The Wikipedia entry comes out first on Google for a search on “dvandva”. Why? Probably because of hyperlinks like the above example. But the article sucks. Here’s an example of good use of hyperlinking:

　○　But the pronunciation doesn’t change since the word is a dvandva.

The target of this link is a paper written at a university regarding dvandvas in Japanese. Of course, if the context isn’t about Japanese then it might not be the best link target, but I’m sure there are more good articles about dvandvas. I thought that paper was da proverbial bomb. Really good reading. That’s why I link to it – to encourage my readers to read it, and to promote it in the search rankings. (Of course this is hypothetical since I’m actually writing about something else right now but if I were writing about dvandvas…)

It takes time to find good link targets – but please take the time! For your own, your readers’, and the authors’ of those link targets sake. And for the future of the Internet.

Note that I am not opposed to linking to Wikipedia completely. If the Wikipedia article on a subject really is the best piece of information on it on the whole web, and the subject demands a hyperlink in order to be understood by most people, then indeed it’s the corresponding Wikipedia article you should link to.

Also of course when discussing Wikipedia itself it is highly appropriate to link to Wikipedia sources. But even in this case, I see it go wrong, for instance like this:

　×　Wikipedia recently started adding the “” attribute to outgoing links.

That “nofollow” link to the Wikipedia article on the “nofollow” attribute violates the point outlined above in the same way “pigeons” did. Here’s a better way of linking it:

　○　Wikipedia recently started adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links.

which links to Wikipedia’s meta wiki describing the policy. That’s a good way of linking to Wikipedia. Here’s an even better way of doing it:

　☆　Wikipedia recently started adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links.

That links to the most interesting text on the subject that I could find in a couple of minutes. I’ll gladly share that good piece of writing on this subject with you – that’s why I link to it.

Lastly, I’d like to mention that I think said Wikipedia policy of adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links on Wikipedia is stupid and bad. I think that if you read my above argumentation, you’ll see why I think that. People are linking to Wikipedia en masse for no good reason, bloating its PageRank and diminishing the chance of other, better, sources of information to get found. If at least being cited in a Wikipedia entry boosted the PageRank of the source, then the chance of someone finding it would improve just a little. Not to mention it would be fair. The paper on dvandva above and Ed Felten’s blog entry deserve that.

[No interwebs were hurt in the writing of this blog post; all links to Wikipedia have the "nofollow" attribute set.]

The methodology used by TIOBE to calculate a language’s popularity is basically the good old google hits ad-hoc voodoo index, using “[language] programming” as the query. This measures the “web presence” of a programming language.

First of all, it’s obvious to you and me that this measures something, that something being the amount of web pages including the term “[language] programming”, obviously. There’s nothing wrong with this method, as long as one is aware of what they’re measuring. But is it fair to call this the popularity of a language?

Look at this blog, for example. I mostly mention JavaScript and PHP here, just like everyone else. Throw in some Ruby and Python too to max out the buzz factor. There is no mention of relics such as C in this blog. But you know what language I use ten times more than any other? C. I’d love to have a job hacking away in JavaScript, Ruby, and Python all days, but I’d have to settle with half the salary. So here it goes: C programming. Index that. Embedded, heavily multi-threaded, efficient, minimum memory, hardcore badass C programming, that’s what I do, and I love doing it.

Most coders can’t do C. That’s why you see all these Visual This and Dot That and scripting languages on the ranking, because these kids blog about every little insignificant hobby project they manage to cut and paste together, just like I do. But let there be no mistake about it: real programmers can code in C. They do syntactically correct typedefs of function pointers in their sleep. (just kidding that’s impossible.)

At work I also hack in Python, Perl, and Makefile. At home it’s mostly JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python… Lately Python has replaced Ruby as my language of choice for home hacking because of its decent unicode support. (Although I’ve had to hack the Python standard library in some places where it didn’t properly support unicode. I read the next version of Python (2.6?) will use unicode strings by default, which is great, and only ten years late.) I also sold my soul the other day and installed Visual C# 2008 Express Edition for some hobby hacking. Turned out not very fun though, but I haven’t given up yet.

At my previous job I used C++ for doing essentially the same thing as I do in C now. I’m completely convinced that C is the right tool for the job. I’m also convinced C does object orientation better than C++, but that is a topic for another post. And I used to be a Java fan, but now I’m considering Java the best examples of software suckiness ever. It’s a volatile industry, technologies come and go, but no amount of blogging will convince me that the C programming language is anything but #1.

I’m saying it because it’s true: We’ll always have C. Because we’ve got jobs to do.

But as anyone who uses The Gimp can tell you, its interface sucks. It has always sucked and continues to suck to this day. Interestingly, quite often some discussion pops up regarding this sucky interface, and whether anyone should do anything about it – or whether war is actually peace.

Just the other day there was this article linked on Slashdot about some academic-type dudes who have developed a modified gimp that collects usage data, to analyze how people use it and possible be able to improve the interface.

Ok, it’s done at a university so I realize it’s just someone’s waste of time and government money, but still… Anyone who’s ever used gimp can tell you that there’s just one simple, outstanding issue that accounts for roughly half of its suckiness: The Windows (imagine that in place of “The Horror” from Apocalypse Now!). The Gimp opens gazillions of windows – and they’re not contained in one parent window, like every other application in the world, no – they behave like independent application windows. You don’t need academic studies to figure that out. So if you’re editing the graphics to a web app for instance, you switch to Firefox to see the result, and then back to The Gimp, and you have to open like 8 separate windows to get your UI back to the state it was before switching to another application. This gets deadly tedious.

If I were tasked with designing a commercial car – and I’m a software engineer, mind you – when I got to the matter of how many wheels to equip the vehicle with, I would go with 4. Just like that – it’s a no brainer. Every other car out there has 4 wheels. I think it must make structural sense, and people are used to cars having 4 wheels. A mechanical engineer or a car marketing specialist could probably tell you more. The gods know how many wheels The Gimp’s designers would fit on their cars.

Guys! Don’t go buying that Photoshop license just yet! I have a solution to the problem! (If you run Linux you can skip the rest of this paragraph.) Just use a virtual desktop manager – like the *nix guys do. I use one called Yod’m 3d. Unfortunately it’s been bought up by some suspicious company and made commercial, but the last freeware version, 1.4, works good enough and can be downloaded (legally) for instance from The Pirate Bay. Just run The Gimp on a virtual desktop of its own. Linux people have been doing this for ages, but it’s never been habit in the real world, although I heard the next version of Mac OS will have virtual desktops. Anyway, you can have it today, in your Windows. (I used to run only Linux for many years, so I got this habit of using virtual desktops extensively back then.)

There are still a few nuances to work out of The Gimp though. But it doesn’t require a Ph.D. to figure them out. If you, like me, never start using Photoshop, then at least you won’t be annoyed simply because The Gimp is different – it should be!

I wish it had a line drawing tool though.