Ever noticed how things kinda converge at certain points in life? Just right now, I had a Japanese point of convergence. Lately, I have been learning the Ruby scripting language, whose inventor is from Japan and whose community is rooted in Japan. At work, I am having to add Japanese language support to a VB 6/Oracle application. I was just responding to a Kino support forum post about the KinoPlus plugin's effectv, and effectv comes from a Japan author. The effectv mailing list archives lead to a new, interesting media processing lib from a Japanese author for 1394 video sources, and is therefore very much related to work I do. I was just tagging some uncategorized MP3s, and one of them was The Vapor's Turning Japanese :-).

While there is certainly some collaboration with Japanese in the Free/Open Source software community, I have always wondered why there is not more? I heard it is quite popular in Japan. I am always amazed by the level of involvement of Europeans, and I enjoy that aspect of this collaboration a great deal.