After an estimated twenty or so hours of traveling, I get off the Keisei Skyliner and find Jason thankfully waiting by the exit of Ueno station. The journey from the Airport to Tokyo on the Skyliner has gently introduced me to Japan, with views of the city and the patter of Japanese voices.

It’s getting on for lunchtime by the time I’ve dropped my bags at Jason’s from the station; the flat is a convenient five minute walk. Lunch means it is time for my first meal in Japan. We pick a restaurant from several dozen as we walk towards Akihabara, a Korean Barbecue. This particular genre involves our cooking slices of beef on a burner in the centre of the table, and is sweeping Tokyo according to my guidebook.

I’m back from Japan — I had an amazing trip. Many, many thanks to Jason for putting me up and showing me places and food stuffs I would not have been able to see without his intelligent accompaniment to my general bemusement.

I will try to write a similar narrative as I wrote for my trip to Andalucia earlier this year, hopefully over the coming week. I have to filter my photos down first, and get them onto flickr.

This year is very full of abroad: I’m off to Japan for two weeks!

I have to get up very early, take a bus, plane and then a train. It will be worth it, however.

I watched a video of the talk given by President Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, at Columbia university earlier this week.

As one would expect for a talk to an audience of academics by a politician, the talk was full of talk about Science leading the quest for knowledge and civilisation. One interesting point which I was unaware of, however, which makes the talk less pandering is that Ahmadinejad is himself a lecturing scientist, and he stated he was still teaching even whilst being president.

The Software Freedom Law Centre are bringing a case against a manufacturer of multimedia boxes, Monsoon Multimedia, on behalf of the BusyBox developers. Monsoon are distributing BusyBox in their firmware without providing source code, which is required by the GPL v2 license which BusyBox is released under.

This case is significant because it’s the first of its kind, from what I understand. That is, it is the first time a party has been the subject of a law suit for violation of the GPL. This makes it significant because the GPL is one of the corner stones of Free Software and Open Source, but one which has not yet had serious testing in court.