Clockwork Evolution

Japanese sentence patterns – asking permission (~te mo ii desu ka)

Alex — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:35:40 +0000

The structure for this sentence pattern is quite simple:

action in its “te form” mo ii desu ka?

Here are some examples:

でんきをけしてもいいですか。
Is it okay if I switch off the light?

テレビをつけてもいいですか。
Is it okay if I switch on the television?

ドアをしめてもいいですか。
Is it okay if I close the door?

まどをあけてもいいですか。
Is it okay if I open the window?

しつれいします、トイレへ行ってもいいですか。
Excuse me, do you mind if I went to the toilet?

しつれいします、トイレをつかってもいいですか。
Excuse me, do you mind if I use the toilet?

しつれいします、トイレにはいってもいいですか。
Excuse me, do you mind if I go into the kitchen?

すみません、英語のパンフレットがありますか。あっ、ありがとう、このパンフレットもらってもいいですか。
Excuse me, do you have an English pamphlet. Ah, thank you, may I take this pamphlet?

Why WordPress

Alex — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:35:37 +0000

Over the years, my website has gone through many iterations, and variations (and one or two domain changes). Usually I’ve had a website running on the “latest thing”, which has been through variations of everything from static and pseudo-static sites, to my own framework, other frameworks, and mainstream CMS systems like Drupal.

The problem with using a system that I like to develop or work on, means that my site is liable to many changes, and things like adding comments, blogs, or other things that I’ve learned, or found interesting, can often get lost in an obsolete version of a site. By WordPress, I’m separating my own “controller / model” from WordPress’ “view”. So now, I will have separate projects that are installed in isolation to this site, and don’t affect it as I try out new things.

I’d also wondered what the point of having a “blog” actually was, and much of the time, I still have that feeling. However, it is useful to catalog certain events or thoughts as they occur, and although it may never actually get any useful traffic (or actually interest anyone), it can be interesting to look back on later. I’ve now got quite a good set-up for web development too, so it’s nice to be able to give feedback or updates on that.

I am likely to want to “tinker” with my WordPress installation at some point, but if I do, I’ll likely just limit that to a plugin that pulls information from another app. Anyway, in reflection, I think it’s worked out quite well using WordPress for this purpose, and I’ve never looked back again, or be tempted to change it / update it to something new. It’s just great at basic no-nonsense content.

PC-Fit2 Web Server

Alex — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:10:02 +0000

I’m now running a test web server on a PC-Fit2 which is the coolest little PC. It’s got the same footprint as a coffee mug coaster, and is just a couple of centimetres high.

On it, I’m using Ubuntu server with Apache2 and Webmin. Webmin also takes a lot of the effort out of configuring your website server, and I used ProtFTP to allow me to add users and lock them into their home folders and changed their default group to “www-data”. This also makes it easier to set-up new sites, and manage them. I’m using Mercurial, and have also installed it on the web server, although I haven’t quite got to the stage of using it to publish changes. Theoretically I could also use BitBucket to backup my own development files.

I also found a nice HTML5 base template that I’ve used as a basis for a home page for the webserver, that points to the webmin administration key areas, and also links to the main websites that I’m working on – both testing and live versions.

Before using this set-up I’d been using either a local LAMP server or a VirtualBox image. Both these worked well, but they have their own limitations. Having a LAMP (or WAMP) server has an overhead on your own PC, and it also is reliant on your own PC not changing. So if you buy a new laptop or something, then you have to set it all up again. Having a virtual image running solves this problem, but it has an overhead of its own, and especially if you’re working on the same PC as your virtualisation host, then it uses quite a few resources.

By having a dedicated (silent and efficient) web server, makes such a difference. It’s so much quicker than the other options, and it also can be configured to be almost exactly like your live site. The only caveat is that by using virtual hosts, I also need to set-up my hosts file to point my client PC to the right place. However, I’m sure that there’s also a way to set-up a local DNS server… but that’s for another day, and certainly not necessary.

One other huge benefit of the set-up I have now, is that I can take my server to and from work. This means that I can be testing directly on a site I’m working on, and do the same from home without complicated set-ups, or it taking a long time to copy files from one system to another.

One thing that I might fancy trying in the future, would be to have a virtualised server that I can have different images running on it. However, although the PC-Fit2 model I have does support hardware accelerated virtualisation, I don’t think it has enough memory or processing to handle that really effectively. Virtualisation does, however, allow for much easier back-ups and also allows you to experiment with different set-ups, or have servers configured slightly differently that you can easily swap between.

Anyway, I’m still also going to be experimenting a little with Yii among other things… at least when I get back from Japan, and have some spare time! And assuming that I haven’t got a Raspberry Pi to play with!

NetBeans on Ubuntu

Alex — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:27:06 +0000

I’ve been using NetBeans 6.9.1 which was the latest PHP version that I’d found, but also found that it wasn’t automatically updating. I also tried using the standard package install, but had the same issues (a reported proxy error). It turns out that the error is related to the version of Java SDK that NetBeans is using, and OpenSDK is what it was using.

You can get the latest version here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk-7-netbeans-download-432126.html

After downloading, right-click the file and add execute permissions to it, and run it from the command prompt. You can install the PHP plugins when it’s installed, and it checks for updates immediately.

My LAMP Server using VirtualBox

Alex — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:50:04 +0000

I’m working on a VirtualBox image for a LAMP server. There are a few good reasons to use a virtualised LAMP server:

Easy to back-up – you essentially only have a few files to back-up, rather than mirroring thousands of them.
The footprint of the backup can also be kept small as you only need to keep installed what you need.
You can play around with settings, and if anything badly goes wrong then you can drop back to a previously made version.
Your host machine’s OS (the operating system you’re computer uses) can be anything, so your own preferences needn’t be restricted to work / web development.
Testing can be configured to a set-up that’s almost exactly like your live server hosting (i.e. you can add the same apache modules, etc)
When you back-up your VirtualBox image, then you are also backing up any test sites you have installed.
It’s relatively easy to set-up XDebug and SVN (or others) and play around with those settings without it being a burden on your own operating system.
You can easily try it and see. If it doesn’t work for you, try a different image, or try installing a different set-up. It’s so easy!
If you want to, you can reasonably easily (depending on hardware) port your image from the virtual environment to an actual computer (search for VirtualBox image and CloneZilla to get some ideas where to start).

My own set-up is a host OS of Ubuntu 11.04, and a guest OS (the VirtualBox image) of Xubuntu 11.04. There are smaller distros, and it’s probably a good idea for more advanced/confident Linux users to use the server edition, but only if you want to keep the requirements low and focus only on basic LAMP.

I also wanted the installation to be as generic as possible, so I also set my main user to be webdev. It doesn’t really matter, but for me it helps distinguish the roles of the LAMP server and that of the host OS and development.

There are a few optional steps, and a few steps I’ve taken that have incomplete instruction. I’ll make references to other useful links in these cases, and mention if something is required or not. I also should point out that these are really just notes for myself, and things I found useful for the installation along the way. It won’t cover certain basics of LAMP and a basic level of understanding of both LAMP and Linux is required.

Setting up the LAMP server

First off you need to download Xubuntu (or other), mount it to the VirtualBox drive and install. You might also want to make sure that everything is up-to-date by loading up the terminal and typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Then to install the LAMP server, use the following:

sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel install lamp-server

You will be asked for a new root MySQL password (and username, I think). You can test if it’s worked by browsing to “localhost” in your browser, and you should be getting a page that says something along the lines of “It works!”

Then you will most likely want PHPMyAdmin:

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Here you will be asked if you want to use apache2 (you do) and you will be asked for a username and password for phpmyadmin and the root password that you assigned to mysql during the LAMP installation above.

Once your basic LAMP server is installed you will most likely want mod_rewrite which allows you to test “clean URLS” in your web apps:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

There is a list of commonly used modules that I also found that you can install:

sudo apt-get install php5-mysql php5-curl php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-ming php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl php5-json

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Howerver, you can always add new modules as and when they may be required, at any point. Just make sure that you restart the apache server to enable the changes (i.e. the “/etc/init.d/apache2 restart” command)

Assign a static IP

The most useful things to do once you have installed and updated your host OS (Xubuntu) are to install Guest Additions (which better supports networking and display, among other things). After that you probably would like to set-up a fixed IP for the LAMP server so it can be available to your host operating system, or even across your local network. There are many ways of accomplishing this, although I have tested just two – one method allows you to use a fixed IP that’s on the same domain as your local network (often 192.168.0.xxx) and another that adds the LAMP server to a different subdomain IP of your local network (i.e. 192.168.56.xxx). The benefit of the latter is that it won’t interfere with your local network, and as this is for testing on only one PC it’s not necessary to use an IP from your local network.

Anyway, if you do want your virtual LAMP server to work as an extension of your local network then you simply need to set-up the network card in VirtualBox to “Bridged Network“. To use a separate subdomain IP then set Adapter 1 to NAT (using default DHCP settings) and Adapter 2 to Host-only Adapter. In your Xubuntu LAMP server Adapter 2 will probably appear as Auto eth1 and you can change it to a static IP of something like 192.168.56.101 and use 192.168.56.1 as the Gateway and DNS server (you can additionally use Google DNS 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 or something like OpenDNS).

Once you have a static IP, then it’s easy to add things like FTP, SSH and hosts aliases for your test websites.

SSH (secure shell)

It can be a good idea (but not essential), especially if you would like to use the LAMP image more flexibly, to install SSH. Then you can have the option to make certain changes (like to apache.conf or php.ini without actually using the guest operating system, the LAMP server, directly):

sudo apt-get install ssh

You can connect to the LAMP server from your host computer with:

ssh webdev@server.dev

“webdev” is your username and “server.dev” is the name of your lamp server. To determine these (if you’re unsure), in your LAMP server you can use “whoami” and “hostname” at the command prompt.

You might also want to set-up Nautilus (Ubuntu’s file browser) to be able to access the virtual LAMP server’s files using SSH. This allows you to browse the files almost like they’re local files. There is an option “Connect to server…” where you can add those details: the static IP address, username, and folder “/var/www”

Adding a test site

Now you have a choice where your site files can be located. For this example I’m using /home/webdev/Projects, but they could also be in the default location of “/var/www”. You only need to be aware of the permissions. I’m not really going to discuss permissions in any detail as it’s outside of the scope of this article. Create your Projects folder; from the command prompt type:

cd ~
mkdir Projects
cd Projects
mkdir -p testside.local/public_html

Then you will need to point apache to that site (also notice that I’m using “public_html” which allows you to have a different public root folder to the root of your site, and you can have an exact duplicate of your live site. Of course, it could be “htdocs” rather than “public_html” depending on your live environment (note, we’re not setting up a live web server, only a testing LAMP server!).

Enter the code, substituting “gedit” with your preferred editor (“kate” on Kubuntu; “mousepad” on Xubuntu, or “scite” as a cool alternative)

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/testsite.local

In the text editor, put in something like this (you might also need to create the weblogs folder):


ServerName testsite.local
DocumentRoot /home/webdev/Projects/testsite.local/public_html
ErrorLog /home/webdev/WebLogs/testsite-error.log
CustomLog /home/webdev/WebLogs/testsite-access.log common
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

Then save the file and enable it with:

sudo a2ensite testsite.local
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

As an additional step you may find it useful to be able to access your test site from the host OS’s browser by using “testsite.local”. In order to do this you need to add a line to the /etc/hosts file:

sudo gedit /etc/hosts

And in this file, add a line like:

192.168.56.101 testsite.local

Optional things

Some optional things might be to install FTP access to your LAMP server:

sudo apt-get install pure-ftpd

And also add the group “www-data” to your server’s “webdev” user. If you’re lazy, like me, you can just change the permissions of the files on your website files to 777 (“chmod -R 777 /home/webdev/Projects”) and use your “webdev” user to access the FTP. It doesn’t really matter for these files as it’s only for testing, but I’ll perhaps write another article delving into the correct permissions / settings at a later stage.

XDebug

Copy the output of phpinfo() into the site http://xdebug.org/find-binary.php and follow the instructions.

Content versioning

I’m currently investigating the best options for myself. Bzr is really easy to work with and install, especially using Eclipse as your IDE, but it’s support is less good for NetBeans so I’m looking now at Git which purportedly has better performance than Bzr, and is certainly more widely used (although it’s harder to set-up initially).

I may add / amend anything in here as it’s a reference for myself as much as anyone else. I’ve tested the entire process a few times now, so the theory is sound, even if I may have made a few typos or errors writing this

Email Server

I haven’t done much with this yet, but you can install basic support for email, on the LAMP server, simply by installing sendmail (which php’s mail() function uses):

sudo apt-get install sendmail

However, you may or may not need to make changes to the configuration to get it working (correctly). Again, all I’m interested in is getting something basic that I can make tests with.

Update: for sendmail, I also needed to add my hostname (server.dev) and localhost.localdomain. This fixed a problem where it was taking ages to send an email via PHP.

127.0.0.1    localhost localhost.localdomain server.dev

Beauty in simplicity – CSS

Alex — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:21:22 +0000

I haven’t always worked with CSS, as much of my work is involved with coding. However I love playing with CSS, and I love that in its purest sense it’s so very elegant and powerful. I’ve always been of the philosophy that you should be able to take one basic html structure, and apply virtually any style you like to it. It’s the zen CSS and it’s a proven technique.

I’ve known about the grid system for CSS for quite some time, as there have always been templates available that use it, but I’d never really investigated in more detail as to what it actually meant. I’d made do with basic templates, and tweaked them to my liking. The grid system boils down that philosophy even more, by dividing up the standard 960 pixel width site into 60 pixel blocks. Group together those blocks in different arrangements and you have a very flexible yet easy to manage layout. Actually the 60 pixel blocks allow for 18 columns in the page. In a way it takes me back to when I started writing games way back when I was a child. I’d use graph paper to design the sprites, and block out the pixels to design a sprite for a character or an object.

Now web development is taking those same practices… we have the grid system, which is like the lego of design, and we have CSS sprite maps and even Javascript frameworks for handling sprites, vectors, sounds, physics, animation and tweening, and even parallax scrolling. That was something that caused excitement back in the 80s, and now there’s a new revolution with modern web development. It’s like the joy of discovery in development has begun again, but this time the development platforms are ubiquitous. OS’s may be proprietary, but thankfully the internet is still driven by open standards. Long may it last!

It’s never been a more exciting time to be in web / application development.

Sony – are they really treating their loyal customers with respect?

Alex — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 21:44:27 +0000

Today I got this email:

Tell us what you think of PlayStation® apps/services

Dear Alex

We value your opinion. Please help us by completing a short survey on your views on some PlayStation® apps/services. The questionnaire should take 5-10 minutes to complete.

Simply click on the link below to take part…

http://survey.euro.confirmit.com/wix/p999999.aspx?r=9999&s=IVQKWILF

(If you encounter problems with the link please try copying it and pasting it into your browser’s address bar)

Please note that this survey is being conducted by an independent research company, Join The Dots Ltd. If you have any problems with the survey itself, please contact andy.smithATjointhedotsmr.com. Join The Dots subscribes to the MRS code of conduct and would therefore like to assure you that your answers are completely confidential and that your responses will not be passed onto anyone at an individual level.

Thank you very much for your help.

The PlayStation® Team

I really don’t know what it is about Sony’s thinking. I guess it is a valid email but I seem to have got a lot more of these type of emails since Sony was hacked. Additionally there is nothing in the main ‘survey’ that actually links back to Sony’s official website, what point there is in anyone taking it, or what their reasons are for making it. The footer section looks like it was from a Sony newsletter though, with the usual gubbins. If it is from an official Sony survey, then it’s really poor. I’d advise anyone not sure about it, just to delete it.

Are they really testing to see how gullible, or willing to divulge personal information without any sort of reasonable justification we all are? It does irritate me that they continue to disregard the sanctity of personal information. After all, it wasn’t 5 minutes after they went live after the site went down before they ‘realised’ (someone warned them) that their password reset process had a fundamental vulnerability.

Back in the 21st of May I wrote an email to Sony expressing my concerns. Not necessarily objective or completely rational and considered as I was a little annoyed at the time, but it was how I thought at the time:

Firstly I do want to thank everyone at Sony for (eventually) being open and candid about the attacks and progress to getting it working again. I’ve been following the blog and all updates that I could to track progress.

So when I was able to change my password, I did so as soon as I could.

However it didn’t go smoothly. I tried several times and every time I either got a server time-out problem or got the same error code that happened before the “psn is down for maintenance” error. At no time did it say that my password change was successful, on my Playstation. While I was trying, I did get an email stating that the password change was successful… although I never got that message on my Playstation.

I am able to log in successfully now, but it worries me that you subsequently stated that there was a vulnerability in the URL for password resets. I’m sorry, but I work in website development, and that is such a fundamental and inexcusable omission, especially after spending so long to get things back up and running.

I’m also concerned that Sony’s own home country isn’t willing to allow the network to go live until they are absolutely happy with it. Yet, you launch it in the UK and several other countries and immediately there is another vulnerability. It’s simply not good enough.

As for your Welcome Back package… it’s a nice gesture, sure, and I understand that it’s impossible to keep everyone happy, but…

Your most valued customers are those of us who have been loyal to Sony. I’ve had a Playstation 1, 2 and now the PS3. I regularly buy online games and commercial games, and always buy any game that I’m interested in usually as quickly as I can. Therefore offering 2 games from a limited selection of existing titles is a meaningless offer to someone who either already has them or has no interest in them.

The extra month’s subscription is also moot as the network was down for one month, and I heard it’s expected that the market will be down for another week or two, so there’s no benefit for me there. I pay for Playstation Plus for the benefits in the service, rather than any online gaming, so I’m getting absolutely nothing from that either.

Then there is the fraud protection scheme. Thus far you have only provided us with details on companies. I know this is a complicated process, but it’s one that’s going to cost me money, and I imagine Sony get referral commission on, so again this is a valueless offer.

I’m already getting spam sent to me with my own full name. I’ve never had spam get through Google’s filtering (it’s genuinely very good) until now, and it’s too much of a coincidence to assume that it’s anything other than data obtained illegally via your hacked data. And actually, again as a web programming professional, the notion that you had unencrypted passwords (encoded or not) is absolutely unthinkable. Calling it negligent is being far too kind.

So, I can I ask of you a few things, please:

That we are all able to change our online usernames (i.e. change mine from user123 to something else) free of charge. I’ve heard this is available in Japan, so I have no idea why we can’t do that here too. I personally see this now as a necessary additional security step. I hope that you share my opinion.

I want reassurance that my account wasn’t hacked again while I was trying to reset it (and getting the error messages on my Playstation). I also want unbiased and professional support to protect the data I have and to properly assure me that I’m as safe as can be from identity theft / fraud, etc.

I’d suggest that as an option in case someone (a loyal customer) isn’t interested in any of the free titles on offer, that either a cash value that could be used in the Market, or discount codes that could be used for any online games.

I also suggest that you somehow need to convince us in the UK (and other countries) as much as you do for the Japanese government that our data is safe with us. As it stands you have already lost the data that could potentially destroy the lives of your users through identity theft, fraud, phishing scams, etc, etc. The password reset vulnerability, and hacked website have done a lot more damage to our trust…

Also, can you please provide detailed information (on your blog) to users that may not know the intricacies and scope of the breach – how they can help secure their other accounts, etc. Many ordinary people don’t understand about “phishing” “spam”, etc, so they need to know exactly what was stolen, and how it could be used illegally, and how they can best act to prevent that from happening. Other websites and companies have provided advice, but I think it’s best to summarise that candidly. The fact that you’ve stated that “credit card data may have been stolen” means that one should assume that it HAS been stolen, and may well be used if/when it’s deciphered by whomever gains access to it. Even if no card data has been abused for months afterwards, it’s no guarantee that it will never be used…

The damage done is not just to Sony. It’s to all your millions of loyal supporters and those of us that love games. I don’t blame anyone at Sony for the problem, even though there was obvious negligence that has taken place, it’s a harsh lesson to all companies that run services online and rely on the internet for commerce.

It’s not what has been done that could destroy Sony, but what you do now. So please do the right things for us. Show us your commitment to us, and that our loyalty is rewarded.

Thanks for your time reading this,

Yours Faithfully,

I haven’t had a reply from them…

Clive Barker exhibition at the Crown Gallery

Alex — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 20:22:42 +0000

There was a rather cool exhibition at the Crown Gallery earlier today. Clive Barker made a rare visit to show his work and to sign autographs for his fans.

Many years ago I read Weaveworld, and it was my favourite fiction book for quite a long time. I also read (and recommend) The Great and Secret Show, and his Books of Blood. He is probably most well known for his film Hellraiser, and has also been a prolific artist.

It was amazing to see him after being a fan for a long time, and he signed copies of Weaveworld and the catalog for me.

Successful web application design

Alex — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:56:52 +0000

As an application developer I sometimes get a little frustrated with some attitudes towards functionality. There is all too often too much temptation to throw in as many different aspects and functions to a design rather than to focus on streamlining the user experience for the core of what you’re developing.

As an example, you might have a resource booking system; just because it ends up having certain functionality that allows users to communicate with one-another, it doesn’t mean that it should have full social interactivity built-in.

Another example might be if you’re adding WYSIWYG editing to content areas, then does the client really need to be able to choose purple text in “Comic Sans”, and add images anywhere in the content? Do they really need to be able to add nested tables?

It’s a case really of evaluating what actually adds real value to the end-user (not you, or even the client), rather than what might add extra cost or something else that you could sell to them. It might also be that the client is asking you to do add spurious functionality, and it doesn’t always actually make sense to add it just because they think they need it.

Often someone who wants a new website will start to look around at what other websites to, and want to take elements of what they do. Sure, some of those bells and whistles will be appreciated by some visitors, but do you really want to be faced by a myriad options, and a smörgåsbord of links on a website you’ve never seen before.

To look at it another way, try to think about what websites have been the most successful (and also how they may be starting to get it “wrong”):

YouTube allows you to look for, upload, and watch videos – the elegance of simply being able to upload your own video, and comment on other people’s is something that’s proven to work.Other things have evolved from then, like the favourites, play-lists, adverts and interactive elements embedded in the movies. Of course advertisers and maintainers of YouTube love the advertising, and companies like the revenue and publicity from it, does that benefit the end-user? Do you really enjoy sitting through an advert before you watch a video you have no idea about, or have your video tutorial obfuscated with adverts? No, I didn’t think so.
Google started with their logo, and a search box. The search engine worked extremely fast, and gave you the results you needed. Their simplistic approach to design and aesthetic has carried over pretty much throughout their other applications, although they did stumble a bit when amending the way their search results worked; their is intelligent design, and there is design that condescends to or makes too many assumptions to be useful (something that Microsoft have been guilty of many times).
Facebook arguably beat MySpace through making the interface and design so much more consistent and clean. This is a classic example of when not to allow the end-user (or client) too much control over design aspects of your site. People love to have things to tinker with like adding huge, animated images, videos and music to their personal page, but not everyone else wants to see it. Facebook stripped it back down to keeping in touch. Now Google Plus have stripped it down yet again, while adding extra subtle functionality that is intuitive and non-obtrusive.
Twitter, I think, will outlast Facebook and not even be a competitor to Google+ as they really have the simplicity sewn up. There is so much you can do, and so little that you need do with 140 characters…

So I do believe that the message is to focus on only one or two main points of your design, and only consider additions if they are truly adding value to the end-user. Those extra bits and pieces may seem cool at first, and they may draw users in for curiosity, but as soon as the novelty wears off you really just want to do what you need to as quickly and easily as possible. It’s much better to streamline that key USP, and make it as simple and effective as possible for the end-user to get from A to Z.

Oomiwa Jinja Shrine in Nara, Japan

Alex — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 21:35:23 +0000

大神神社、奈良

Next year is going to introduce some big changes to my life, and I’m really looking forward to it. Sometimes life has hard lessons, and just sometimes it seems that fate plays you the most wonderful cards. One of the things that I’m looking forward to most is a rather significant trip to a beautiful shrine in Nara:

http://www.japan-hopper.com/2008/08/15_182101.php
http://www.kotodamaya.com/oomiwa-jinja/

I started learning Japanese more seriously from sometime around late 2009, and joined a certain website called Lang-8.com in mid December that year. I lapse at times, but writing journals on it is a fantastic way to learn and engage with other language learners on a variety of topics.

It can be really hard work, and something that takes dedication, but just occasionally it opens up the most amazing opportunities. Make the most of life, push the limits, stay optimistic, and you never know what may happen.