Dear Friends and Readers,
I continue to work on the hangul-to-hanja conversion function for BTRON. I am now 30 percent of the way through the sangyong hanja list of 1,800 characters, and I have created a conversion dictionary and word list (Korean-to-English dictionary), each with 5,600 words. Both are well over 100 pages now.
As a result of constant daily use of the saegim dictionary, I have discovered several errors, which are paralleled in the saegim index. Thus I am updating both of them with this update. One thing I am rapidly learning is that it is impossible to do a project of this scale without making errors, and that is particularly the case if you are working alone as am I.
We recent held our annual TRON show, and at the press conference it was revealed that yet another TRON intelligent house is under development here in Tokyo. What distinguishes this one from the previous ones is that it will be controllable from either the inside or the outside via a smart phone, and that the home server for the intelligent home will be inside cloud computing services. After it opens, I will try to obtain some pictures of it and put them in the appropriate section of TRON Web.
We also learned that TRON technologies are continuing to spread, both terrestrially and into outer space. Digital signage based on T-Kernel continues to spread, and a new microcontroller unit the size of a couple of large postage stamps has been developed to support it, among other embedded applications. A new version of T-Kernel, T-Kernel 2.0 Aerospace (T2AS), is being used in the latest Japanese research satellites, such as Hisaki (Sprint-A).
At the show's press conference, TRON Project Leader Ken Sakamura noted that the TRON Project will be 30 years old in 2014, making it one of the longest lasting computer technology development projects in Japanese history. The technologies to come out of it are as rock solid as those developed elsewhere.
That's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 26, 2013
Dear Friends and Readers,
As a result of using the Korean hanja saegim dictionary that was put on line in June, I noticed several mistakes, plus some missing characters. I made those corrections, which are being made available through this update.
In addition, I decided to update the hanja saegim list to match it to the sangyong hanja list in the second O'Reilly material mentioned at the bottom of the Web page that explains Korean B. There are now 2,014 individual characters in the Korean B saegim dictionary. The hanja have also been put in dictionary order.
The main feature of the new saegim dictionary is that there are multiple listings for hanja characters that have multiple pronunciations. This is in keeping with Korean method of listing hanja in the KS X 1001:1992 character table.
I hope you like the new saegim dictionary.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
August 9, 2013
Dear Friends and Readers,
After posting my last update, it occurred to me that certain people
among my readers might not know how to properly create a saegim
index for the saegim dictionary I created for the new Korean
B universal input module. Accordingly, I have created one, which
is distinguishable by blue characters on a light gray background.
Please go to the universal input modules section for details.
I hope this proves helpful to people who might have problems creating
their own index list.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
June 26, 2013
Dear Friends and Readers,
After my last update, I spent some time cleaning up TRON Web in ways that are not noticeable to the average reader. Then I launched into a new project, improving the Korean language functions of Personal Media Corporation's BTRON3-specification Cho Kanji operating system. I did this because the multilingual functions of Cho Kanji can easily be improved, and also because I have studied Korean, and thus am better qualified than most to engage in a project of this type.
With this new update, I am providing: (1) new key definitions to allow for the input of Korean via Romanization, and (2) a saegim dictionary to allow the input of individual hanja more easily. The former makes it possible for those of us who have non-Korean computers, particularly laptops, to easily input Korean without any modifications to the keyboard. The latter makes it possible to more easily create a hangul-to-hanja conversion dictionary, which I intend to begin after this update is successfully on line.
Although there was no programming involved in this work, it turned out to be very difficult and time consuming. For example, trying to find out what hanja are being used as Chinese characters for daily use in South Korea ultimately led me to taking a flight over to Korea and talking with people in bookstores there. Prior to going there, I had drawn up a list from an on-line material, but there were mistakes in it. Thus I had to go through the entire list, character by character, for a second time, correcting both mistakes in the original list plus some mistakes of my own. It is extremely easy to make mistakes doing this type of work, and so you have to check your work again and again. If anyone sees any mistakes I have missed, please let me know and I'll correct them.
I'm hoping to get a basic hangul-to-hanja conversion dictionary done by the end of the year. Until then, I hope you will find this update useful and interesting.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 31, 2013
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have finally finished the last chapter of the new introduction to BTRON MicroScript for beginners. This one deals with writing programs that can handle graphics on the screen, including various animations and input buttons. It also teaches beginning students how to use arrays, which are a little tricky to learn but very useful once you employ them in your programs.
This new course in BTRON MicroScript now extends over five chapters, and it contains perhaps close to 100 pages of content. Although sample programs have been included at the bottom of each chapter for advanced programmers to peruse, the course is mainly aimed at people who have never done programming before. It is meant to assist them in taking their first five steps into the world of computer programming.
If the reader is still interested in programming in BTRON MicroScript after this, there are more advanced programs available on TRON Web, such as those appended to the BTRON MicroScript Reference Manual. However, I would suggest finding a tutor and having the tutor guide you through more advanced exercises, such as writing various sorting algorithms.
Since TRON Web will be 15 years old in the near future, I will probably stop adding new content to it, and limit any new updates to housecleaning. Actually, I was planning to put TRON Web aside seven years, but there was such a demand for English language information on T-Kernel and T-Engine, that I began a long series of translations on those new technologies that latest for four years.
There is also a demand for BTRON programming information that pops up from time to time, and to meet that demand, I have spent the last three years translating and writing information about BTRON MicroScript. There is now more than enough information to allow both the beginner and the seasoned programmer to write programs in BTRON MicroScript.
I hope you enjoy this latest update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
August 1, 2012
Dear Friends and Readers,
It has come to my attention that not many people are viewing the TRON Project videos on YouTube. That is sad, because all of the videos there from the Ubiquitous ID Center are in English, and they provide a good overview of what the TRON Project is doing at present. As a result, I have created a new section on this Web site's home page that links to videos related to the TRON Project.
If you have some free time, take a look at the technologies we are developing.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 8, 2012
Dear Friends and Readers,
It has been a long time since my last update. That's because my current project of creating easier to understand materials for programming in MicroScript has proved to be a lot more difficult that I had imagined. Fortunately, I got some timely help from Personal Media Corporation, and thus I am at last able to put information about the processing characters and text on line for you. As with the previous chapter, this chapter includes things that are of interest to both the absolute beginner and the experienced programmer. I hope you find the information provided to be useful and stimulating.
We had our annual show in the middle of December of last year. A new Ubiquitous Communicator that integrates Android, the UC110, was announced, and Personal Media Corporation announced "RTH with T-Kernel," which allows you to use MS Windows and T-Kernel simultaneously on a multicore x86-based PC. Prof. Sakamura proudly stated that cooperation with Europe is going well, and that uID standards are slowly becoming international standards. The ubiquitous networking experimental zone in Tokyo is growing, and more and more engineers overseas are becoming interested in T-Kernel. There was a large contingent of them at the show, which ended well.
Well, that's all for now. If possible, I will get another chapter written by spring.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
January 10, 2012
Dear Friends and Readers,
I discovered that, in addition to the videos listed below, the Ubiquitous ID Center put on YouTube three videos, one each, on the three TRON-based intelligent homes that have been developed to date. Since intelligent homes are one of the most famous application projects of the TRON Project, and because I have received requests for such videos from overseas, I have added links to the YouiTube videos on the respective TRON Web pages that describe the intelligent houses. I hope you enjoy them.
I also did a little house cleaning. I revised the limiting values page for MicroScript.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 9, 2011
Dear Friends and Readers,
Looking through TRON Web's materials on BTRON MicroScript, I decided I was not satisfied with the existing tutorial. In particular, it is not well suited to someone who has zero programming experience and wants to start with MicroScript as a first programming language. Accordingly, for the past several months I have tried to put together some easer to understand materials for the absolute beginner. However, knowing that highly experienced programmers also look at TRON Web, I have also added some materials for them to keep them from getting bored. Please note that the new programming course starts with a traditional approach based on the processing of numerical values. This allows the absolute beginner to focus on the source code, rather than what pops up on the screen.
In other news, I discovered a couple of YouTube videos on uID ucodes. Those who are interested in that aspect of the TRON Project might want to take a look at them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo8s2S78EOc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAMXm9rzi7c
If anyone has any feedback or suggestions on the new programming course, please contact me.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 22, 2011
Dear Friends and Readers,
Well, I have at last finished the translation of the final parts of the BTRON MicroScript Reference Manual. The translation of the entire book is now on line, so you have the complete language specification at your fingertips. Some of you probably have noticed that I kept the text to 640 dots wide. That was done deliberately to allow you to use it on small screen portable computers, such as Netbooks. On larger systems, you will be able to look at explanations in one half of the screen and do coding in the other half of the screen.
Now that the translation of this book is finished, I'm not sure what I should do. BTRON, T-Engine, T-Kernel, Teaboard, and MicroScript are all pretty well described on TRON Web. There are literally hundreds of pages of technical information on line, enough to certainly teach a college course on the TRON Project and its technologies. Accordingly, I'm probably going to limit future updates to revisions and corrections of the contents already on line. If you spot any, please let me know. I appreciate constructive feedback.
I hope the translation of this book proves useful to PMC T-Shell programmers.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 3, 2010
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have finally finished the translation of the ninth subsection of the reference section of the MicroScript reference manual. This means that a full description of the MicroScript visual programming language is now on line. Combined with the already existing tutorial, it gives a seasoned programmer all the information he or she needs to write programs using MicroScript. This latest subsection contains a lot of information on programming devices connected to the RS-232C ports, so it is particularly of interest to programmers who are developing applications based on T-Engine. There is also interesting information on opening and closing applications, utilities, files, etc.
I plan to finish translating the MicroScript reference manual, even down to the index at the back of the book. But first I am going to correct some stylistic and HTML errors that exist in the subsections of the reference section that are already on line. If anyone has any feedback, please send it in. I would love to hear from my readers.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
July 7, 2010
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have finished translating the section on MicroScript functions, which takes up over 40 pages in the book. Since I had a difficult time understanding some of them, I took my time with the section before putting it on line. I even added a footnote to the first function to make it easier for beginners to understand. If any of my technically savvy readers spot any errors, please let me know. I will correct them immediately.
I received a couple of form e-mails from the T-Engine Forum. One stated that the latest survey showed that ITRON and T-Kernel account for more than half of the kernels used in embedded system development projects. The other announced that a Chinese T-Engine Forum was officially established in Beijing, China. It looks like the use of TRON and T-Engine is spreading throughout East and Southeast Asia.
That's all for now. I hope you find the newly translated material useful.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 14, 2010
Dear Friends and Readers,
I can't believe I did it, but I have accomplished the feat of finishing the translation of a second section of the MicroScript reference manual in a single month. This is the result of very simple graphics work in the second section. I have also corrected some stylistic errors in previous sections. I will correct stylistic errors in other sections as I spot them.
This is the first time I have attempted the translation of an entire book, and it is becoming very clear to me why this work is normally undertaken by teams of people. I could really use an editor and a graphics guy, which would allow me concentrate on the translation work. It is so easy to make mistakes in a translation of this type, particularly as you try to manage style and graphics at the same time.
Just two sections left, and then the entire MicroScript language will be described.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 31, 2010
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have another translation from the MicroScript reference manual for you, this one on state names. I'm now more than halfway through the reference section of the manual, and six out of nine subsections have been translated. Unfortunately, the remaining subsections are fairly long, 30 to 50 pages, so the pace of future postings of translations will probably slow down. My target is to finish the reference section of the MicroScript manual before the start of the summer and the hot, muggy weather.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 1, 2010
Dear Friends and Readers,
My translation of the MicroScript reference manual continues. In this update, I am giving you two more subsections of the reference section; they deal with control and input. As you will see by reading them, the MicroScript language is equipped with many of the same control and input structures that exist in other programming languages. In particular, you can set up very detailed conditions, which is one sign of a well designed language. I would suggest that beginners read and reread the items on the conditional statements, because getting those right will allow you to avoid a lot of headaches when debugging.
I hope you enjoy this update. As always, I would appreciate any feedback from my readers. I would particularly like to receive feedback from someone who is actually programming in MicroScript.
Keeping checking back for more translations.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 10, 2010
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have completed the translation of the third subsection of the reference section of the MicroScript manual. This subsection deals with "display," and it brings us up to page 109, which is about one-third of the way through the reference section of the manual. I expect some renewed interest in MicroScript, since Personal Media Corporation has come out with a new version of Teacube, Teamacaron, which is even smaller than Teacube. Like Teacube, Teamacaron comes with PMC T-Shell as standard equipment, thus allowing easing program development with MicroScript.
I was going to do a brief outline of TRON Show 2010 for you, but Mohit Sindhwani of Viometrix beat me to it. He has posted 10 articles with video clips on his Web site, which can be accessed at this link. To summarize, T-Engine has lots of traction in East Asia, it is being taken very seriously in Europe as a reference model of ubiquitous computing, and even Microsoft Corporation made an announcement of a T-Engine-based development. I suppose the biggest news is that China is getting involved in T-Engine at the national level, having created a T-Engine Forum China in the government.
I hope 2010 will be a good year for all my friends and readers.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 28, 2009
Dear Friends and Readers,
I'm a little late with the latest translation of the MicroScript reference manual. I took some time off in October to get information out about the latest version of the TRON Intelligent House, u-home, which was built in Taipei, Taiwan. TRON technology application projects like this show the world that the TRON Project is neither a failure nor an esoteric computer infrastructure project applicable only to Japan. The project has been very successful, and the technologies it has developed are highly regarded by people in foreign countries, particularly those in Asia. So it should come as no surprise that the third version of the TRON Intelligent House was built in Taiwan.
This month's update is the second subsection of the reference section of the BTRON MicroScript Reference Manual, which deals with definitions and declarations. Seasoned programmers will have no problem understanding the contents of this part of the manual. Beginners should read it carefully, particularly the information that deals with type specification. I'm hoping to get another portion of the manual done by the end of the year, and I want to have the whole manual translation finished by summer of next year. Unfortunately, I do not have staff to help me, so I have to do all the graphics by myself, which slows me down considerably. How nice it would be if all I had to worry about was translating the words.
TRON Show 2010 is less than a month away. I hope to see some of you there.
Good-bye for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 18, 2009
Dear Friends and Readers,
It's been a little while since I last updated. There have been two reasons for the delay. One is that I have been doing a long translation of the MicroScript reference manual for you, which also entailed a lot of graphics work; and the other is that the hot summer weather slowed me down, which is an annual occurrence. Fortunately, we are now headed into fall, and my productivity should pick up a little.
The reference manual dates back to 1997, so the information in it is a little old, but most of it is applicable to the latest version of MicroScript. At the time this manual was written, there was no English-language documentation or interface, so I have decided to translate literally whatever is in the manual. The error messages and the like might be different with the latest version, so please keep that in mind.
Well, that's all for now. Check back for more updates.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 30, 2009
Dear Friends and Readers,
Those of you who have been following the T-Engine project probably know that Personal Media Corporation has released a new development board based on an NEC Electronics Corporation's multicore processor, which is called the "NaviEngine 1." That's why I posted an article about using MP T-Kernel in last month's update. Since MP T-Kernel is a little easier to use on multicore processors than Linux, this new development board is expected to attract new interest in the T-Engine project.
A couple of months ago, I heard through the grapevine that there are people who are still very interested in how TRON Code works, so I decided to translate a technical article on the processing on Chinese characters using TRON Code, which is this month's update. This article was a little difficult to translate, and then there were a lot of graphics to deal with. However, it is now finished. It is significant in that it actually includes a programming example, so programmers should find it interesting.
I hope you find this new information useful.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
July 10, 2009
Dear Friends and Readers,
For this month's update, I have translated the final part of the seven-part special feature on Teaboard. Since this installment is about an electric lock control system developed for a customer, it does not include any source code. However, the description of the system and what it can do is quite interesting. This is, of course, just one application among thousands of possibilities. One could also use Teaboard in various other applications in the home or office. Personally, I'd like to see someone apply it to home energy saving or power generation, as people are now beginning to realize that energy saving and renewable energy generation are very important.
That's all for now. I hope you enjoy reading this translation.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 10, 2009
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have finally finished the sixth part of the Teaboard special feature, which according to what I have read is included among the materials that Personal Media Corporation bundles with each Teaboard. Therefore, this article will probably be of more interest to users of the regular T-Engine development boards than to Teaboard users. From the point of a view of a non-programmer, it is interesting to see how little source code you need to create a simple Web server, which is the object of development in this latest translation. That, of course, is because TCP/IP software is already included with Teaboard's operating system, so you don't have to waste a lot of time creating it yourself.
For those who may have wondered why I'm going to all the trouble of translating this seven-part special feature, it is because Teaboard is a cheap embedded systems board, and thus not just business organizations and/or educational institutions, but individuals also, can purchase it. Yes, it's a little more expensive than Linux embedded systems boards, but Teaboards aren't manufactured in large numbers, as are Linux boards. As we have seen in this series, there are a lot of things you can do with Teaboard, and making a simple Web server out of it is an outstanding idea. I hope that someone expands on this, because a simple home server is something I have dreamed about for a long time.
Well, back to my translation.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 11, 2009
Dear Friends and Readers,
With this update, I'm posting the translation of part five in the seven-part special feature on Teaboard, which appeared in Vol. 95 of TRONWARE. This one is about motor control using Teaboard, which might be a little difficult to implement, unless you have access to all the parts listed in the article. However, the basic concepts are probably applicable to other hardware control implementations, so you could consider the article a sort of starting point. All the source code is listed at the bottom of the article, and thus you don't need to have access to the original CD-ROM. It's amazing what you can do with Teaboard and its MC9328MX1 microprocessor.
I received an e-mail from Personal Media informing me that they have written an English-language introduction for the Eclipse development environment for Teaboard, "Getting Started with Teaboard (on Eclipse)," which unfortunately is in the middle of a Japanese-language page. That makes it a little difficult for non-Japanese readers to spot, so here's the URL.
http://www.t-engine4u.com/archive/tbmx1_tutorial_ecr2_e.pdf
The company is also selling Teatouch, basically Teaboard with an LCD touch panel, at a discount (71,400 yen, tax included, versus the standard price of 81,900 yen, tax included). They are also selling PMC T-Shell/Teaboard at a discount (31,500 yen, tax included, versus the standard price of 52,500 yen, tax included). These discounts will be in place until the end of March, so if you want a full feature Teaboard this might be the time to purchase one.
I picked up a copy of the latest issue of TRONWARE, which has a special feature on TRON Show 2009. In his opinion piece at the front of the issue, Prof. Sakamura speaks enthusiastically about the collaboration with Europe and Asia, in particular that with Finland. Both the Finnish government and Nokia are going all out to merge their NoTA and cell-phone technologies with TRON ubiquitous networking technologies, and thus the future looks bright. In his editor's notes at the end of the issue, Prof. Sakamura mentions holding a TRON show overseas. That's a good idea, but it's not a new one. I suggested doing a road show in Japan, a long, long time ago. I recommend the same for Europe and East Asia.
If you spot any errors in this update, please let me know.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 13, 2009
Dear Friend and Readers,
Finally, I have finished translating and preparing the fourth installment from the Teaboard special feature in Vol. 95 of TRONWARE. This one gets you into C language programming, by showing you how to construct a roulette game using Teaboard's built-in 7-segment LEDs. It's not a complicated program, so even beginners should be able to understand it. In addition to translating the article, I also took all the source files off the attached CD-ROM and pasted them at the bottom of the translation with full English translations. Furthermore, I corrected some mistakes the original authors made the the second and third installments, which Personal Media Corp. has listed on an errata on their Web site.
Although I don't do the news any more, I thought I'd give you a brief overview of TRON SHOW 2009, which took place from Wednesday, December 10 to Friday, December 12, 2008, at Tokyo Midtown.
First, there is lots of participation by overseas organizations and companies in the T-Engine project, and they are developing their own ubiquitous solutions on top of T-Engine. The most noteworthy of these efforts is by Finland, which has ported its Network on Terminal Architecture (NoTA) to T-Kernel. However, East and Southeast Asia were also well represented. In fact, overseas participation is stronger in these two areas than anywhere else in the world. The T-Engine project's inroads into Europe, on the other hand, may have something to do with its technologies becoming ITU-T international standards (F.771 and H.621).
In Japan, of course, there is a growing list of places nationwide where Ubiquitous ID (uID) technologies are being used, including one train station just a couple of stops from my home. That is to say, these technologies are fully mature and are now gradually making their way into Japanese society. They are being used both to manage supply chains, plus help ordinary people in society. Prof. Sakamura was very proud of the fact that the read-in rate for uID RFID tags is very high, and this is a result of using a combination of both active and passive tags. Since the active tags are much more expensive than the passive tags, they have to be reused, but provisions for reuse have already been made.
Not surprisingly, among the new products announced was a new Ultra-Wideband (UWB) active tag. Prof. Sakamura said the new UWB active tag is the smallest in the world, and its battery can last for about 10 years. Most importantly, it offers high accuracy, with a positioning accuracy of around 15 centimeters, plus it has a data transfer rate at 30 meters of 250 kilobits per second. On the reading end of the uID RFIDs, there was a new PDA-type of Ubiquitous Communicator that was announced. There was also a demonstration of wheelchair that can follow uIDs, which is good news for people suffering from handicaps. One wonders if someone is developing various robots along the same lines.
Finally, I found out what happened to the T-Font character collection, which Prof. Sakamura announced a few years ago. There was a booth dedicated to T-Font at the show, and I talked with one of the people there. It turns out Prof. Sakamura jumped the gun, since the font hadn't been painstakingly checked out for accuracy. Moreover, the actual font that will be released to the public is approximately 79,000 Chinese characters, not 120,000 Chinese characters, in three fonts. Undoubtedly, like the GT-Font before it, it will also be made available to Windows, Macintosh, and Linux users. The official release is supposed to be some time this year, so stay tuned. I'll let you know when it happens.
In closing, I hope you like this update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
January 15, 2009
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have a double update for you--two more technical translations on Teaboard. One is on the hardware configuration, and the other is on the software configuration and the development environment. I decided to do two translations instead of one, as Personal Media has put on sale a new version of Teaboard called Teatouch, which is basically Teaboard with a touch panel screen. PMC T-Shell/Teaboard is an option for this platform, which will allow you to use MicroScript to rapidly develop interfaces for end users, such as this application example. The standard price for Teatouch is 81,000 yen, but there is a 10,000 yen discount for educational institutions buying in lots of 10.
I'm hoping to get another translation in the Teaboard series done for you by the end of the year. However, the fourth installment in the series is about program development, and it's filled with source code, which always slows me down. If it's not done by the end of the year, I'll definitely have it ready for you by the beginning of January.
That's all for now. I hope to meet some of you at TRON SHOW 2009 next week.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 5, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
In this update, I present you with the translation of the first of a seven-part series on Teaboard, which is both a cheap training board and a cheap development board. Based on a 200 MHz ARM CPU, it has several very good features, the most important of which is probably its ability to use the Internet right out of the box. That is to say, you don't need an expansion board for it to use the Internet, as you do with the more expensive T-Engine development kits. Of course, its biggest selling point is low cost, which is so low that even students can afford to purchase it. I'm planning to translate the rest of the series as soon as possible.
We are less than a month away from the annual show, and there is going to be a lot of foreign participation this year, particularly from Europe. The biggest news, of course, is that Finland is joining forces with the T-Engine project, although people in other areas of Europe are also interested in the fruits of the T-Engine and Ubiquitous ID projects. These people will be giving presentations at the show, but space is limited, so sign up early at the official TRON show Web site. They will also be showing off technologies in the exhibits area, so don't forget to visit there, where you will be able to see technologies from various Asian countries, too.
I hope to have one more Teaboard translation for you before the show begins, so keep checking back.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 12, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
Finally, I have finished October's update, which is a total reworking and expansion of the technical dictionary to bring it up to date. It was previously 13 A4 pages, but now it is 21, so there are a lot of new terms in there. Most of them are connected with the T-Engine project, but I have rewritten many that predate the T-Engine project, plus I have added a lot of links to Wikipedia entries. I have also added links that link back to sections of TRON Web that weren't in existence at the time I wrote the original dictionary, and there are some links to other TRON-related sites that also weren't around when TRON Web first went on line. If you spot any errors, or if there is some TRON-related term you would like me to define, please write.
I finished the posting the translation of the 1B MicroScript programming course some time ago. One thing that bothered me about it was that it was aimed at professionals who wanted to do interface parts for BTRON. That's not to say that the I consider the information I translated useless; all programming information is useful. Rather, it's not something that would appeal to hackers. I have since come across an interesting and useful script created by a Japanese hacker, which is none other than a facsimile transmission script. This script illustrates the power of the MicroScript programming language. Take a look at the photographs at the link. It's really an interesting project.
That's all for now. Please come back and check for more updates.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
October 23, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
I was looking through some of the more recent issues of TRONWARE, when I noticed an introductory article about T-Kernel Standard Extension and process programming. This is just the type of article that many of my readers require, so I translated it, and that is this month's update. Since the source code is on line, I was able to finish the translation pretty quickly, too. Just cut and paste the source code, translate the comments inside the source code, and voila, you're done. The article mentions plans for some more information along the same lines, i.e., creating child processes and carrying out communication among processes. If it is published, I will translate it for you.
It's too bad that TRONWARE is not available in English,
because there is also some interesting information about how TRON
is used. For example, in Vol. 111, there is a short news story
pointing out that ITRON is used aboard the Kaguya satellite
orbiting the Moon for communications and attitude control. This
puts ITRON in the same class as Wind River Systems Inc.'s VxWorks,
which is likewise used in mission critical applications in spacecraft.
The main difference between the two kernels is that the former
is open source and the latter is proprietary. Another difference
is that ITRON is open architecture, and thus there are many versions
of it from multiple sources. T-Kernel, on the other hand, is closer
to VxWorks, which is why it has very good development environments
available to it. In fact, it goes one step further in that it
is aimed at standardized development platforms.
That's all for now. Take care.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 3, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
With this update, I am putting on line the last two lessons in the MicroScript primer series that appeared in TRONWARE in the mid 1990s. Lesson 10 is about how to construct pop-up menus, and the final lesson is a summary of the important points that were covered previously in the series. It hasn't been easy translating this series, but I really had to do it because there wasn't much BTRON programming information on line in English. Now there is quite a lot. I hope someone will use this information to do some new and clever things with BTRON, which is a very good but not widely used operating system. Of course, the same programming knowledge can also be used on top of T-Engine, if one purchases and installs PMC T-Shell. It is very easy to port applications from one platform to the other if they are written in MicroScript.
Now that this translation project is finished, I'm probably going to clean up TRON Web and get it ready for transformation into an archive. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please contact me via the Web master's e-mail address.
I hope you enjoy this update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
August 5, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have another MicroScript double update for you. The two lessons in this update cover a desktop presentation system, plus how to create heading tabs to present lots of information in a limited screen area. Both articles are interesting, although the latter might be of more interest to professional programmers. Once again, I am impressed at how few lines of code are required to create applications on top of BTRON using MicroScript. It really can save a programmer a lot of time, which is something that will surely please professional programmers operating under the gun.
Although June was fairly cool, the hot weather finally arrived here in Tokyo in July, and I'm once again in my less productive mode. Yes, even with the air conditioner on, it is too hot for me, as my work room faces south. However, I plan to get the last two lessons of the MicroScript primer out to you next month. I want to get this finished so that I can move on to something else.
Keep checking the site for new updates.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
July 24, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have a double update for you this month, which is to say two lessons of the MicroScript programming series. Why two lessons? Well, last month I had a problem with my master disk, and I lost a little data, which fortunately I was able to recover from the server. As a result of that scare, my main goal now is to get the entire course on line as soon as possible, even if that means not checking to see whether the programs work. However, as I previously noted, working versions of the programs in the MicroScript programming series are already in the samples collection on Cho Kanji 4, which are automatically loaded when you do a standard install, so at least there is one working version available for you to check out. I hope to have the entire 11-part series on line in the next couple of months.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
June 30, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
This month's update is the fifth part of the 11-part MicroScript programming series. Since there is a simplified example of this lighting panel program in the MicroScript samples collection on the Cho Kanji 4 system disk, I didn't actually try to recreate the program. However, by comparing the contents of this lesson with the working model, you should be able to create one for yourself, especially if you are a programmer by profession. Since I'm not a programmer, I find myself making all sorts of mistakes when translating the MicroScript source code from Japanese to English. That's why preparing these lessons takes so long. Ah, if only I had a programmer working for me and helping me with the preparations. I could have this series finished in no time.
I hope you find this lesson informative.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 30, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
As promised, here is another part, part four, in the 11-part MicroScript programming series I have been translating. I was unable to get this software working from two machines, as I do not have a second machine available to test the program. However, the program that runs on the second machine is very small, so it probably will execute properly, as long as you have another machine with an RS-232C serial port. If one of my readers can get this software working for me, I would be very appreciative. Needless to say, I will now get back to work testing the rest of the programs in the MicroScript programming series. The next lesson is about a lighting panel, which is a good lesson for people who want to create control interfaces.
I plan to get the fifth part out to you as soon as possible.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 29, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
At last I have finished translating the third part of the introductory series on PMC T-Shell. This one is an explanation of how to use MicroScript in conjunction with C language, where MicroScript is used for the interface parts and the overall control. One thing I learned by translating this is that Personal Media didn't create MicroScript just to give hobbyists a way to program. They created it mainly to give programming specialists a means of rapidly developing interfaces for application software. To that it is well suited, although MicroScript can also be used for a wide range of other programming tasks. I will be giving you more information on that in the coming months as I update the MicroScript programming series.
Incidentally, this translation brings the total number of articles in the technical materials section to 47. The first 23 are on BTRON and Cho Kanji, and they are to my knowledge the largest English-language database on the BTRON subproject available on line. The latter 24 are on the T-Engine and uID projects, and they offer a complete introduction to the hardware and software of the T-Engine Architecture, plus information about how it is being applied. T-Engine and uID technologies have already been deployed at various locations throughout Japan, and they are now in practical use. The biggest task at this stage is scaling up the infrastructure to expand their use to all areas of Japan--and maybe even various places overseas.
Anyway, stay tuned for more information on MicroScript programming.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 28, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
Well, I have another translation for you, the second in a three-part series about PMC T-Shell. This one is considerably longer than the last, and it is filled with technical details and sample programs for curious programmers.. What's really interesting is that it explains the difference between programming with C language and MicroScript. Programming in C language requires considerable knowledge of the software specifications, but once you have mastered them, there is a considerable degree of freedom. MicroScript, on the other hand, on requires only a knowledge of the language itself, which makes it well suited for beginners and professional programmers aiming to create prototypes in a short period of time.
Although it is not mentioned in the article I translated, there is a third programming option for T-Engine and BTRON, which is to use WideStudio. That seems to be the best way to move existing applications on other architectures to T-Engine or BTRON. There are, of course, limits to what can be accomplished with WideStudio, and once you encounter them, the only thing that can be done is to sit down with the specifications and master them. That's why I'm trying to get information about MicroScript up on TRON Web. Once I get this three-part series on PMC T-Shell finished, I will get back to posting more articles on MicroScript programming, which will appear in the educational section.
I hope this update's translation proves useful to programmers.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 8, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
I'm sorry I haven't been able to update TRON Web for seven months, but I haven't been sick, lazy, or on vacation. I've just been trying to get some old MicroScript programs to work, and one of them requires that I connect two machines together via their RS-232C serial ports, which I still can't do as I have only one computer with no RS-232C. Once I get this done, I will be able to rapidly update, since I have finished translating their entire 11-part MicroScript series. In the meantime, I have begun translating a three-part series on PMC T-Shell, the first of which I am posting with this update. PMC T-Shell will allow developers to use BTRON in their applications.
Although I don't do the news anymore, I would like to point out that Vol. 106 of TRONWARE has articles on two versions of T-Kernel equipped with POSIX APIs. One is from NEC Soft, Ltd., and the other is from eSOL Co., Ltd. For those who are having problems using Linux in embedded systems, this might be the chance to try something new. It will certainly open up new markets for you in Japan, where embedded systems are actually more important than personal computers in many respects. Japan is widely known as a gadget crazy country, and as a result of its rush to develop the best ubiquitous computing networks, it is going to become more so.
A few weeks ago, we had the annual TRON show, and there was a lot of foreign participation, especially from Southeast Asia. During his keynote speech, Prof. Sakamura showed slides of himself in Europe, where there is considerable interest in Japan's advances in ubiquitous computing technology. Japan leads the pack when it comes to ubiquitous computing, and RFIDs are now in practical use in various industries here. Oh, and the T-Font has been updated to approximately 130,000 characters. Next April it will be released in three fonts to the world, and it will be made available to users of non-TRON architectures, too.
More translations are on the way. Check back for them periodically.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
January 8, 2008
Dear Friends and Readers,
I finally finished the third translation in the MicroScript primer series for you. This one deals with using the EXECUTE statement for parallel execution, which is a very useful software device to have available when creating programs. There were a couple of small errors in the program, which I corrected after porting the program script to my Cho Kanji 4 partition and executing it there. I also added the translation of a similar program to the one in the lesson, as it is in the MicroScript collection of samples that is installed on your hard disk when you do a standard install of the Cho Kanji operating system. Please try out both versions of the program.
I hope that you keep in mind that if you install PMC T-Shell on T-Engine, you can run these programs there also, as PMC T-Shell too is equipped with a MicroScript interpreter. MicroScript is a cross platform programming environment that you can use on a standard IBM-PC/AT compatible or one of the many T-Engine implementations. On the basis of what I have seen so far, it is a dandy tool for doing software prototypes, particularly those aimed at ubiquitous network applications. What amazes me is how compact the source code is. It seems like MicroScript can do in 100 lines of code what other languages require several hundred lines of code to do.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 28, 2007
Dear Friends and Readers,
It took a little more time than usual to get my latest update ready, although once you see it, you will immediately know why--it contains a lot of MicroScript source code. Since I'm not a programmer by profession, it took quite some time to understand it and figure out how to render it in English. However, the result is a program that can do something useful, so I hope my readers will come to the conclusion that it was worth the wait. If anyone actually tries to run the program and encounters any difficulties, please contact me and I will try to rectify them. I've gone through the source code with a careful eye a couple of times, so that shouldn't be the case.
My friend Mohit Sindhwani down in Singapore celebrated the second anniversary of his T-Engine development Web site with a series of articles written himself and others, myself included. I wrote an opinion piece on real-time processing in networks, a topic that is extremely important to the TRON Project. Mr. Sindhwani's Web site also boasts a list serve forum as a new feature, so all of you who have technical questions about T-Engine-related topics can register and post them there. Of course, I realize that outside of Asia, there aren't that many people interested in T-Engine, but it is an option if you want to do something new that cannot be handled with Linux.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 27, 2007
Dear Friends and Readers,
I finally finished my translation of the first in a series of articles on how to program using the MicroScript programming language. This series appeared in TRONWARE from 1993 to 1994, but the information in the series is still valid to those wishing to write scripts using MicroScript. In fact, as I point out in the translator's notes, a modified version of the program in the article I translated is included in the Cho Kanji samples collection, which is installed on your hard disk when you install from the Cho Kanji CD-ROM using the basic or maximum configuration installation options. In the translator's notes, I have included a translation of the path to follow when looking for the MicroScript samples programs. I suggest that you take the pieces of it out and remake it into English-based program.
I'm a little late with this translation because I had problems getting the graphics done. I couldn't cut and paste them from the CD-ROM, which seems to be locked. Rather, I had to blow them up and take screen shots of them and then cut and paste from there. Moreover, they seem to have been copied off of old paper that was dirty, and so I had to clean them up before putting them together with my translation. On top of that, the translation, as you will discover by reading it, was aimed at Japanese readers, and so I had to figure out a way to make it understandable to foreign readers reading it in English. Anyway, I have now worked out a methodology for doing the series, so I should be able to get subsequent translations to you faster. I want to have this series of translations finished before the next TRON show.
I hope you enjoy this first translation in the MicroScript programming series.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 8, 2007
Dear Friends and Readers,
We had an interesting TRON show at the beginning of December, where a lot of new things were put on display for the general public to see. Just prior to the show, the T-Engine Forum announced a tiny, new Ubiquitous Communicator weighing only 145 grams, a new TRON keyboard, a T-Kernel/SE-based car navigation system, RFID-embedded concrete ("talking concrete," which can be used for identifying sections of a building during a collapse), an active IC tag flashing "Dice" application, and a new 860~960 MHz passive RFID tag from Hitachi, "µ-Chip Hibiki." Personal Media also had its Cho Kanji V operating system on display, and it drew a lot of attention.
Speaking of Cho Kanji, in this update, I am providing you with a translation of the language module section in the Cho Kanji operating system manual, which will allow you to both use and program foreign language modules for Cho Kanji. At present, there are 31 language modules, mainly for East Asian and European languages. I hope that some enterprising people will take the information in this translation and go on to create some more language modules. Since they are all interpreted, you can look at the existing ones to get ideas on how to create new ones. If the characters you want to process are not in Cho Kanji, please supply a font to to TRON Character Resource Center.
For the rest of this year, I'm going to be doing translations on how to write programs using MicroScript, the scripting language that comes as standard equipment with the Cho Kanji operating system. MicroScript is actually easy enough for beginners to create programs immediately, which is to say, you don't have to read through massive system manuals prior to taking your first steps. On the other hand, it is also powerful enough for seasoned programmers to write impressive programs. And since it runs on top of a multilingual hypertext file system, it also allows you to create new and original applications that cannot be created on other personal computer architectures.
Stay tuned for more interesting programming information.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
January 17, 2007
Dear Friends and Readers,
I finished the forty-fourth item for TRON Web's technical materials section. This is going to be the last translation for that section, which now sports 23 articles related to BTRON and 21 articles related to the T-Engine project. This latest translation is on a version of T-Kernel under development that is aimed at applications where multiprocessors are used. I also received a notice yesterday from the T-Engine Forum that µT-Kernel, which is aimed at small devices, will be announced on December 1, so the T-Kernel implementations are spreading both upward and downward. Basing products on T-Kernel will certainly allow an incredible amount of scalability.
The annual TRON show will be held next week once again at the centrally located Tokyo International Forum, where I hope I'll be able to meet some of my readers. After the show concludes, I plan to devote my translation talents exclusively to BTRON, in particular scripting on top of BTRON. My goal is to have sufficient materials on programming by the end of next year so that people who wish to develop application programs will be able to do so. After that, I plan to turn TRON Web into an archive. Believe it or not, I have been doing TRON Web for almost 10 years now, so it will definitely be time to move onto to something new in a year's time.
Anyway, I hope you find November's update interesting.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 30, 2006
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have another translation for you. This new one deals with the migration of software from the T-Kernel environment to the recently announced T-Kernel/Standard Extension (T-Kernel/SE) environment. You can obtain the English specification for T-Kernel/SE from the T-Engine Forum's Web site, where it is available for downloading. The source code for T-Kernel/SE appears to be available only in Japanese at the time of this writing, so continue to check the T-Engine Forum Web site to see when the source code will become available in English. In the meantime, you can read the articles about it on TRON Web, plus the specification. As the latest TRON Web translation makes clear, it is necessary to read the specification prior to replacing T-Kernel system calls with T-Kernel/SE system calls.
I am planning to do one more T-Engine-related translation for my technical documents section. After that, the technical documents section will be closed, and I will devote myself to translating articles on MicroScript to help those who would like to program in the BTRON environment. As the T-Engine project becomes more popular, I expect that people overseas will start to use BTRON, and among the first of those folks will probably be programmers. There are already non-Japanese programmers inside Japan who know how to program using MicroScript, so you will probably be able to get some help on line. My goal is to put the MicroScript programming basics on line, plus a good selection of programs written in MicroScript. Then, that section also will be closed and TRON Web will become an archive.
TRON SHOW 2007 is only about a month away. I hope I get to see some of you there.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
October 27, 2006
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have another update for you. This one is two translations of articles on T-Kernel/Standard Extension, or T-Kernel/SE, which appeared in Vol. 99 of TRONWARE. As the articles point out, this extension takes T-Kernel into a new frontier, in particular the frontier occupied by information-type operating systems such as MS Windows and GNU/Linux. Undoubtedly, the proponents of those operating systems will see this as some sort of threat to their favorite operating system platform. However, in reality, what is happening is that yet another choice is appearing on a technological smorgasbord. In fact, it might be the right choice for those who are interested in developing true ubiquitous computing networks, particularly for those network designers who want to stress real-time performance and security.
TRON SHOW 2007 is not too far away now, although you wouldn't know that from the hot, muggy weather we've been having here in Tokyo. Since we are now five years into the T-Engine project, which is literally the rebirth of the TRON Project, there are probably going to be a lot of interesting new products to see and try out. TRONWARE Vol. 99, for example, has articles on a high-quality voice synthesis system by Hitachi ULSI Systems Co. called "Ruby Talk" and a new HTML4.01-based Web browser by Fujitsu called "Inspirium." Both of these can run on top of T-Engine, and the latter can also run on top of PMC T-Shell, which is BTRON by another name. All we need now is some ambitious company to come along and market a T-Engine-based BTRON machine to the masses.
Oh, and for those of you who use BTRON3-specification-based Cho Kanji operating system on top of IBM-PC/AT compatibles, good news--Personal Media Corporation recently announced a new version. "Cho Kanji V," that comes with improved character sets, particularly an improved unabridged kanji character set for writing Japanese, plus VMware Player, which allows it to be used on top of Microsoft Corporation's Windows XP SP2 operating system, both Home Edition and Professional. The price is 18,900 yen for new users and 14,700 yen for registered users who upgrade (both prices include consumption tax). Sales begin on Friday, October 27.
Needless to say, there are more technical translations in the pipeline, so check back in again.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 22, 2006
Dear Friends and Readers,
It has been a few months since my last update, but I haven't forgotten you. Rather, I have been busy translating articles about how to load and use BTRON applications on a personal computer. This required me to upgrade the version of Cho Kanji installed in my system, and then translate dozens of graphic images based on it. I don't think I've ever had to deal with this many graphic images for an update before, and switching back and forth between the two operating systems has been a real pain. However, I am happy with the results, particularly since they will allow people overseas to learn the basics of using the very fine operating system based on the BTRON3 Specification.
The first article deal with how to use the Basic Text Editor, the Basic Figure Editor, the Basic Spreadsheet, and MicroCard. The second article deals with how to use the Basic Browser and Cho Kanji Mail, plus there is an appended article on how to install and use Mozilla for Cho Kanji. Not all of these applications are compatible with the English-language interface kit available from Personal Media's Web site, but by comparing the translations with the Japanese language interface parts, you should be able to make use of all of them. I believe that this will particularly be the case with Cho Kanji Mail, which is Japanese only but very easy to use.
Some of you might be wondering what the big advantage of using Cho Kanji 4 might be, and at this point in time I would suggest that it is "security." Using Cho Kanji to send and receive e-mail will eliminate attacks on your MS Windows partition by virus laden attachments to unsolicited e-mail messages, and switching to the Cho Kanji partition to use the Basic Browser and Mozilla/Firebird to view Web sites that seem dangerous will alleviate the need to worry about spyware and other types malware that frequently get loaded into MS Windows-based systems. In a way, Cho Kanji is like a firewall, even though it doesn't have a firewall function built into it.
I hope you enjoy this update. There will be more translations before the end of the year, so please visit again.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
July 20, 2006
Dear Friends and Readers,
It has been over nine years since I started doing TRON Web, and I have learned a lot from this work in that time. In particular, I've learned how a single guy with no budget and a standard personal computer system on his desk can reach out to the world and inform them of some of the greatest computer technology that has ever been developed--as long as he's got Internet access. The mainstream U.S. media doesn't spend much time reporting on the TRON Project, even today when it has roared back to life, so TRON Web is probably the greatest English language source of information on the project on the World Wide Web. I'm particularly proud of the technical documents section, which contains enough information to teach a college course on TRON.
However, it is now time to move onto something different, and so as of this update TRON Web is going to be turned into an archive and all news and opinion piece writing/translation will cease. I was originally planning to do this a year ago, but the after listening to the pleas of the engineers at TRON SHOW 2005, I decided to postpone my departure for another year to do more technical translations on T-Engine and T-Kernel. Since there is still insufficient information on BTRON, I'm planning to do a further five translations on BTRON. This is because, believe it or not, people overseas have inquired about how to use BTRON and how to program on top of it. When those translations are finished, TRON Web will finally be completely in archive mode, and I will be doing new things in the TRON Project.
This update consists of seven opinion pieces. I cover some topics that have been on my mind in four of them, and Prof. Sakamura tells us about his travels, which literally take him everywhere in the world, in the other three. It's very nice to see that TRON is so well accepted both in East Asia and Europe. I'm particularly impressed that universities throughout East Asia are establishing courses to teach their students about embedded systems. A lot of interesting applications for ubiquitous computing networks will probably be developed by these people in the coming decades. I'd sure like to see them develop a T-Engine-based low-cost BTRON machine for the Japanese market.
Anyway, I hope you like this last update of the opinions section.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 10, 2006
Dear Friends and Readers,
For this month's update, I have another translation for you. This one is a very detailed description about IC tag technology, which originally appeared in Vol. 89 of TRONWARE. What's remarkable about this article is that it points out all the problems and limitations of IC tags. Human rights and privacy advocates who worry the misuse of IC tags will be heartened to learn that a single, worldwide standard for UHF band tags is impossible simply due to the fact that the bandwidths available for their use vary from region to region. Then there are the problems with the range of the readers, plus interference from various sources. Prof. Sakamura has decided to get around these problems by using active IC tags for long range use, and passive tags for short range use. He's also looking beyond supply change management applications.
As I did last year, I'm going to give you the news for December and January together at the beginning of February. Since the majority of each year's TRON news comes in like an avalanche in December, it's impossible to do translation and news research and writing together. If you remember, I told you that I would extend my planned retirement for a year to load TRON Web with all sorts of useful technical information for my technical readers, and thus translations have had priority over the last year. I believe at this point, there is enough information on TRON Web for any engineer to obtain a sound understanding of T-Engine and T-Kernel, plus even how to create programs. There are now 38 articles in the technical documents section, 21 dealing with BTRON and 17 dealing with T-Engine project technologies and their application.
Stay tuned for my report on TRON SHOW 2006.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
January 19, 2006
Dear Friends and Readers,
November's update includes a couple of more translations for you. One is a primer on T-Kernel, and the other is a collection of frequently asked questions about the T-Engine Forum and the Ubiquitous ID Center. I think both translations will be valuable to the readers who have been attracted to this Web site. Since I'm not a programming professional, I would appreciate feedback from programmers who spot errors in the source code that I have posted on TRON Web. It is very easy to miss errors in contents that you are not used to viewing. This technical translation, by the way, completes my attempt to put the basics of T-Kernel programming on line. I believe that there is now enough material on line to allow anyone to go from no knowledge at all about T-Kernel to successfully write and/or port programs.
As for TRON-related news, the largest men's suit retailer in Japan is about to begin RFID trials to track men's business suits made in a Chinese factory and shipped to Japan. These trials use both active and passive RFID tags, which were demonstrated at the YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory in a press conference on December 1 in Tokyo. Prof. Sakamura believes these trials are the first of their kind. In the world of BTRON, Personal Media continues to develop its Cho Kanji operating system. In November, they announced an integrated dictionary and dictionary options based on EPWING, which is a standard for ensuring data compatibility among electronic publishers. Needless to say, all these things and more will be available for your perusal at TRON SHOW 2006, which will run from December 14 through 16.
See you at TRON SHOW 2006.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 7, 2005
Dear Friends and Readers,
TRON SHOW 2006 , which will run from December 14 through 16, is only about a month away now. This year's show is going to be very interesting, because the number of foreign exhibitors is going to be greater than at last year's show. According to information posted on the Web, we are going to have exhibitors from Australia, Thailand, and Vietnam, in addition to China, Korea, and India. I'm really happy to see the TRON and T-Engine projects internationalizing in this manner, because these projects are, and have always been, open technology projects aimed at the people of the world. In addition, six Japanese ministries are going to be exhibiting at the show, plus the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency will be an exhibitor this year. Is T-Engine headed for outer space?
As you can see, I have been busy working on more technical translations for my technical readers, and I am posting two new ones with this update for October. These new translations cover the downloading of the source code from T-Engine Forum's Web site, plus a description of T-License, which as most of you know by now is quite different from the GPL licensing arrangement that governs the Linux and GNU software movements. I'm planning to have a further two translations completed before the beginning of TRON SHOW 2006, after which I'll go back to work on the opinion piece section of TRON Web. I want to get all caught up with everything before the end of January. Fortunately, the weather here in Tokyo is very mild, so working is not as hard as it was during the hot summer months.
I hope you enjoy October's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 10, 2005
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have a double update for you this time, both August and September's news together. I have also done another technical translation to help beginners get started on T-Engine--this one on how to create a network capable electronic eye that was demonstrated at a TRON show a few years back. Both this translation and the previous translation require the reader to have PMC T-Shell, but that's a good purchase that will allow a developer to do a lot more things a lot more quickly on top of T-Engine. I plan to do a few more technical translations before the next TRON show, which will take place in the middle of December. I would also like to get caught up in the opinion pieces, which are way behind schedule.
As for opinion pieces, I am presenting two more with this update. One by me deals with the issue of character codes, which are as much of a mess as ever, and I have brazenly proposed a new international standard to solve the many problems. The other by Prof. Sakamura deals with RFIDs. Apparently, Japanese companies are bending over backwards to try to get EPCglobal's 900 MHz passive RFID chips to work, but things aren't going very well, which is to say that accurate, long distance reading of passive electronic tags is not practical at present. Fortunately, a solution does exist, which is an active electronic tag that Prof. Sakamura announced and demonstrated at the end of April in Tokyo.
Stay tuned for more TRON-related news and information.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
October 3, 2005
Dear Friends and Readers,
Well, it's been about five months since I last wrote to you, but I haven't forgotten about you. I know that there are a lot of you out there who are working very hard trying to learn how to program on top of T-Engine/T-Kernel, and so this month I have completed yet another translation for you. This one is on how to use a FAT file system with T-Engine/T-Kernel. I have gone to the trouble of listing all the source code from the CD-ROM (since this is cut and paste, let me know if you spot any errors in the source code), and I have even translated the read-me file. You should be able to get the programs up and running in no time. The FAT file system is popular for image applications, such as digital cameras.
I was pleased to see that Personal Media has developed an English-language version of its Disk Shredder HDD erasure software. This is a very good, very easy to use software application built on top of Personal Media's compact BTRON3-specification operating system. I wish they would do the same with the entire Cho Kanji 4 operating system package, because there are people who really want to try BTRON, and there are probably even software developers overseas who would like to port their applications to BTRON. If you're in the latter category, please write to Personal Media and let them know that you are highly interested in an English language version of Cho Kanji 4.
That's all for now. I hope you enjoy the update for July.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
August 24, 2005
Dear Friends and Readers,
As I told you in my opinion piece for January, the news and opinions sections of TRON Web are going to suffer as I put more effort into doing technical translations. However, with this update, I have caught up on the news and opinion pieces. I'm posting the news for March and April, plus three new opinion pieces. There is a lot of interesting information in these updates, which I hope you will find useful. Prof. Sakamura seems to be drawing huge technical audiences wherever he goes, and that's in spite of the fact that very little is mentioned about T-Engine in English language news media. It is nice to learn that lots of people overseas are taking an interest in and cooperating with the project.
Now that I've caught up on the news and opinions, I am now going to start a new batch of translations for you. My goal, based on a list I have drawn up, is to get another 11 translations done for you by the end of the year and prior to the start of TRON SHOW 2006. These translations together with those already on TRON Web will give you enough information to completely understand the T-Engine project, ubiquitous computing, and programming on top of T-Kernel. After that, it will be a matter of you putting into practice what you have learned, which is not to mention dreaming up new things to do on top of T-Engine. Thinking about unique solutions to local problems would be a good place to start.
Time to get back to my translations.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 20, 2005
Dear Friends and Readers,
The reason I have another update for you slightly earlier than usual is that I started working on a long technical translation in January, which was one of the reasons the December and January updates were a little late in coming. A person wrote in saying that he really needed the ITRON-to-T-Kernel migration guidelines, so I translated them for him. This is a 30 page document, which brings the total of T-Engine-related translation on TRON Web up to around 60 pages. I hope this translation proves to be useful to others, also. That might be the case, as there are a lot of stealth ITRON users in the world, who would equally benefit by migrating their software applications from ITRON to T-Kernel.
The biggest news item is that Personal Media is now marketing a new PHS-based "UC-Phone Evaluation Kit" that actually allows users to construct and experiment with traceability systems based on RFIDs and new generation barcodes. If the experiments are successful and you want to implement a system on a larger scale, Personal Media is also offering support. So the door has been opened to ubiquitous computing and networking, and the entry level is not that high--it's even within reach of the individual. In other news, another food traceability trial has taken place, Personal Media has announced new T-Engine products, updated Cho Kanji 4, and the company is moving its headquarters.
More news and more translations are on the way next month, so stay tuned.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 8, 2005
Dear Friends and Readers,
I have another double update for you this year. I'm updating with the news for both December and January, and I'm also putting some more opinion pieces up. Usually I fall behind in the opinion pieces at this time of the year. As I state in one of the opinion pieces, I was planning to turn TRON Web into an archive after writing up TRON SHOW 2005, but I met some of my readers at the show--all of them hackers--and they were very eager to receive more information about T-Engine and T-Kernel programming. So I have decided to stay around for another year, with the focus for the coming year on the translation of technical materials.
TEPS 2005 and TRON SHOW 2005 were outstanding successes. Combined attendance for both events was over 10,000, which is excellent for show dedicated to computer technology that usually goes unbranded. There were a lot of interesting products demonstrated at the show, and I was very happy to see that more of them were developed on top of PMC T-Shell. Compared to last year's show, there were a lot of high ranking dignitaries this year, and Prof. Sakamura and trusted staff were really busy showing them around the exhibits area. After 20 years of struggling, it looks like the TRON Project is finally on its way to success.
I hope you like the updates for December and January.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 10, 2005
Dear Friends and Readers,
November's update is a little late, which is a result of the annual TRON show and the Enableware symposium having come a little early in the month of December. Normally, these events take place in the middle of the month, which would have given me enough time to get the November update written and out the door before the show started. In addition, I have also been busy helping people overseas obtain information about T-Engine and T-Kernel. There is a lot of interest overseas in the project, which is a good thing. But since TRON Web has a staff of only one worker, more interest from overseas means less time for research and writing.
Anyway, in the month of November, there was some interesting activity. At the University of Tokyo, there was another 21st century Center of Excellence symposium, which drew about 1,000 people to Yasuda Auditorium. Of particular interest was the fact that there were multiple speakers from Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, which means there is tremendous backing for the T-Engine project at the government level. In other news, Personal Media announced an upgrade to its unique Japanese-language manuscript processing software, which means the company is very determined to create a successful product on the BTRON operating system.
I hope you like November's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 17, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
The update for October is pretty large. I have added three more pieces in the opinions section, and I have completed another T-Engine technical translation, which is probably going to be the last. As Prof. Sakamura noted in one of his opinion pieces, T-Engine development centers are sprouting up all over East Asia, and one of the main things they are focusing on at this time is technical training. The four T-Engine technical articles I have translated and put on line, however, do form a complete introductory course to this marvelous development platform. I hope hackers throughout the world will make use of them to get into T-Engine in a big way.
As for October's news, there was a lot of interesting stuff. The University of Tokyo is launching a 21st Century Center of Excellence project to put its numerous collections on line and turn its campus in a giant ubiquitous computing network. In Korea, meanwhile, a T-Engine support center has just opened. One of its main jobs will be translating T-Engine documentation into Korean, which is actually quite easy since Korean and Japanese are structurally similar, and holding training workshops. Then there was also an interesting tidbit released in TRONWARE about the kernel used for Palm OS.
Finally, we are less than one month away from the annual TRON show. Please check here for information in English about the program and exhibits, plus information on how to sign up for the theater sessions. Registration is required to attend theater sessions.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 12, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
September was a bad month. During the middle of the month, I lost control of my Windows XP partition, the partition with my peripherals that I do my work on. As a result, I had to wipe my hard disk, which I did with Personal Media's "Disk Shredder" application (an excellent, easy-to-use application for the job), and reinstall the operating system. During the reinstallation, my system became infested again--my ISP told me this was a result of not having the firewall function on--and so I had to repeat the process. It took about a week to get the system built back up to what it was before. And for those of you who are wondering, yes, I use anti-virus software, and, yes, I update it daily. The fact of the matter is that Internet is a very, very dangerous place for a Windows XP user who goes browsing with his firewall function off, which apparently is the default setting. I didn't know before, but I know it now!
Anyway, there was a very important announcement on September 15 at the YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory. Prof. Sakamura introduced to a large group of Japanese reporters (it would be nice if we could get some Tokyo-based western reporters to attend these press conferences) the latest version of the Ubiquitous Communicator, the sixth to be developed since the laboratory was founded a couple of years ago. This one is based on a specially developed ASIC chip, which accelerates JPEG/MPEG encoding and decoding, and it also captures, spins, and scales images rapidly. Most interestingly, this new UC sports a 480 x 640 dot color screen, which means you'll be able to watch television on it in VGA resolution. The device has already been put into verification trials in the port city of Kobe, where people are getting a chance to see what ubiquitous computing in real living spaces is like.
That's all for now. I hope you enjoy the update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
October 6, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
It was unusually hot in Tokyo this summer, and according one report an unofficial record of 42 degrees centigrade was set in one section of the city. I can believe it. I walked to the bank the next day, and my face was very red when I went into a department store to put some water on it to cool off. Since I'm a northerner, my productivity in this weather drops way down. And then, to make matters worse, at the end of August, my Windows XP partition was the victim of a successful browser hijack attempt, which means I had to clean my hard disk, reformat it, create partitions, and reload software. And then I found out more spybots had infected my system during reloading!
Yes, it's been quite a summer, but the good news is that the T-Engine project is moving along nicely, and in August Personal Media Corporation won an award for its unique Japanese language manuscript processor called Cho Kanji Genkoo Purosessa, which is sold as a separate application for its Cho Kanji 4 operating system. Cho Kanji 4 doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Windows XP, but you can create a partition for it, format the partition, and load Cho Kanji 4 into it in about the same time it takes to download and install Windows XP updates. Also, since hackers know nothing about it, you can safely send e-mail on it and surf the Web without nuisances.
The update for August is brief, but I hope you enjoy it.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 10, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
In June, the TRON Project celebrated its 20th anniversary. To mark the occasion, a special ceremony was held at the Hotel Laforet Tokyo on June 2, and it was packed with lots of smiling, familiar faces. The TRON Project has not only survived, it has successfully revived itself to become a huge worldwide success, although the technical news media in the West doesn't have much time to report on it, it seems. The focus of the project is now T-Engine and T-Kernel, plus uIDs. Also, Prof. Sakamura revealed in the press conference on June 2 that he is currently developing a new set of network protocols for creating the ubiquitous networks he has long envisioned.
In order to give my technical readers a little more to chew on, so to speak, I have translated another article on T-Engine, this one on how to use the free GDB debugger with T-Engine. This article, by the way, completes the translation of all the articles in T-Engine programming introduction that appeared in Vol. 81 of TRONWARE. I am planning to do a few more translations of T-Engine technical materials prior to the holding of the annual TRON show in December. Although TRON Web is not a Web site for developers, I believe it should contain enough information to help developers gain a basic understanding of T-Engine and T-Kernel and start using them.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
July 16, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
There wasn't much news in May, just the announcement of the sale of a new T-Engine model, the T-Engine/TX4596. This model, which offers high processing speeds with very low power consumption--supposed the lowest available--was previous displayed to the public at TRON SHOW 2004. The thing that interests me about this particular model is that is is being promoted together with Macromedia Inc.'s Flash Player as a solution for embedded devices in wireless networks. I hope the people interested in this solution study universal design principles and standardized HMI features before they design their human-machine interfaces.
Although there wasn't much news in May, there was a huge TRON event at the beginning on June to mark the 20th anniversary of the official launch of the TRON Project. Yes, the TRON Project has been around for 20 years now, although there are still a lot of people who have never heard of it, particularly in the West. That is the subject of an opinion piece I have written for this update. The U.S. and European technical press seem to go out of their way to avoid reporting anything about the TRON Project, even though it has produced the world leading operating system and the best technologies for building ubiquitous networks.
That's all for now. I hope you enjoy the update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
June 11, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
I'm sorry I couldn't get an update out to you in April, but I came down with severe case of influenza, or something very similar to it, at the end of March, and it took a lot longer than usual for my health to recover. What was worse was that I lost my writing spirit during the course of my convalescence. Just like a boxer has to be fired up with the fighting spirit to get into a boxing ring, a writer has to be fired up with the writing spirit to sit down and start pounding away at his keyboard. In fact, even translating requires a translator's spirit, which is to say you really have to want to make information in the source language available to people who know only the target language.
With this update, you'll be all caught up on the news for March and April, and there was a lot of it. In March, there were two events, one on the TRON Font Traceability System and the other on a system using TRON ubiquitous computing technology to allow people to get around society on their own. There are also four new opinion pieces for you, two by myself and two by Prof. Sakamura. Prof. Sakamura's opinion pieces are interesting in that he points out the remarkable progress the T-Engine project is making while sounding the alarm that once again dark forces are at work in Japan trying to undercut the TRON Project for the benefit of people elsewhere.
Now that I'm all caught up, I plan to do some more technical translation for you about T-Engine. T-Engine is big and getting bigger by the month. Eventually, universities overseas will start buying T-Engine boards for their students, and those students are going to want more information. Therefore, I plan to include enough information on TRON Web to provide a sort of on-line primer for them. Right now, the only people overseas interested in T-Engine are in companies, and some of them have doubts about its future, because the western technical press isn't reporting on T-Engine very much. More dark forces again, it seems.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the updates for March and April.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 17, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
There wasn't much news in the month of February. The license agreement for T-Kernel was finally released, and I translated that for you. Please keep in mind that this is a "reference translation" of the license agreement, which is mainly aimed at giving you the contents of the license agreement. For legal purposes, both form and content are important, but only the duly authorized legal representatives of the T-Engine Forum can supply the exact form of the license agreement that the T-Engine Forum management wish to propagate into the world. For the exact translation, you will have to get it from them.
On the product scene, there was another T-Engine development kit released by Personal Media Corporation. This new kit is aimed at the automotive electronics market. Personal Media said it's ideal for developing car navigation systems, which are very popular here in Japan. Personal Media has also established a support center for T-Kernel, the standard operating system for the T-Engine family of open development platforms. Since they're selling the development kits, they're probably better qualified to support T-Kernel than anyone else. I hope some of their customers will ask about porting BTRON to their embedded applications.
There is some interesting BTRON-related news for March. Stay tuned.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 12, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
I'm sorry I was unable to get an update out to you in January, but there were just too many events that took place in December. Specifically, there were three major events in December: AUCNC 2003, TRON SHOW 2004, and TEPS 2004. They left me with 75 pages of notes and piles of handout materials. Since reading through all these materials, writing them up, and getting some nice graphics together for you was going to take a little time, I decided to do a double update, i.e., December and January together. Fortunately, not that much happened in January, although what did happen was very important.
TRON SHOW 2004 was really impressive. There were some great new products that were unveiled at the show, and there was a superb demonstration of Ubiquitous ID technology applied to the retail industry. What was most noteworthy--and gratifying--to me was to sit in a huge hall and watch Prof. Sakamura give a keynote speech to several hundred people. Several years ago, that wasn't the case. TRON shows normally took place in the basement of the Tokyo Design Center, where only about 200 people at the most can listen. In that sense, the project has fully revived itself, and the fact that Japan's prime minister showed up indicates TRON is here to stay.
I hope you like the double update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 9, 2004
Dear Friends and Readers,
There wasn't much TRON-related news in November, although what news there was was important. Singapore, leading the pack once again, has established a T-Engine support center in Singapore. On top of that, the Singapore government is going to lend financial assistance to the undertaking. This has shocked the pants off Prof. Sakamura, who is used to dealing with Japanese business and government leaders who usually create impediments for the TRON Project. Why is it that people outside Japan recognize the great value of the TRON Project, but people within Japan's borders are constantly seeking ways to undermine the project?
The annual TRON show is now only a few days away. It will be interesting to see what products have been developed on the basis of T-Engine. BTRON users were a little disappointed that Personal Media Corporation didn't announce Cho Kanji 5, but the company is very busy bringing the various T-Engine development kits to market. The thing BTRON users should remember is that once large amounts of middleware are created on top of T-Engine, a huge portion of it will migrate to the BTRON-specification operating system. I know you've been waiting for a long time, about 15 years to be exact, but great BTRON developments are just around the corner now.
This year's show promises to be very exciting. I hope I get to meet some of my readers at TRON SHOW 2004.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 8, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
October's update brings you a little more technical information on T-Engine, plus an exciting, new application based on it. I translated another technical paper on T-Engine programming basics, this latest one only intelligible to Linux hackers. But since TRON Web occasionally receives inquiries from the technically proficient, I felt obligated to give them some of the information they seem to crave. The non-technical folks should concentrate their attention on the new, compact Ubiquitous Communicator, which is described in the news section. That was unveiled to the local press on October 24. As the name implies, it can communicate with all sorts of things in all sorts of environments.
We are now less than a month away from the start of TRON SHOW 2004, which is going to be held in Hall B7 of the Tokyo International Forum near Tokyo Station from December 11 through 13. Needless to say, I will try to get the theater schedule translated and posted on line for you as soon as possible. Since there are going to be more people in attendance this year, those wishing to attend the project leader's keynote speech or any of the individual lectures, which is not to mention TEPS 2004 (the Enableware Symposium) on Saturday, December 13, must register in advance. Advance registration begins on November 18.
I hope my technical readers in particular enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 17, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
In September, Microsoft Corporation joined the T-Engine Forum, and it announced at a joint press conference that it would be porting its operating system for embedded devices, Windows CE .NET, to T-Engine, where it will ride atop T-Kernel as another non-native kernel extension. Exactly what motivated Microsoft to join the T-Engine Forum is unclear, but the Japanese Web was flooded with all sorts of rumors, opinions, and warnings. The mainstream media, unfortunately, didn't do much to clear up matters; rather, they added to the confusion by talking about "joint operating system development." If that were actually the case, Microsoft would have announced that it is developing native extensions to T-Kernel, not porting a non-native middleware environment to the platform.
Whatever the case may be, it is clear that T-Engine is going to draw even more attention now that Microsoft and its alliance partners will be developing on top of it. For that reason, I have decided to translate some basic technical information about T-Engine programming that has appeared in TRONWARE. The first installment deals with the basic hardware and software facts, and it dispels the myth that T-Kernel is a direct continuation of ITRON. In fact, there are major differences between ITRON and T-Kernel, and programs written for ITRON cannot merely be recompiled to run on T-Kernel. They have to be rewritten. On the other hand, T-Kernel is easy for people who have mastered ITRON to understand. It also offers them some new features to take advantage of.
With TRON and T-Engine frequently in the local news now, it seems like we are going to have a very successful TRON show this year. We might even set a record for the number of attendees. I hope you can be among them.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
October 15, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
September in Tokyo has turned out to be much hotter than July or August, which were cloud covered and fairly cool. Since your Web master doesn't work well in hot weather, it took a little longer than usual to get TRON Web updated. Fortunately, the update for August is substantial. I have finally finished my introduction to the MTRON architecture, which is probably going to be realized in the near future as new TRON intelligent building projects get under way. It's amazing that this architecture, which anticipated ubiquitous computing even before the term ubiquitous computing was invented in the U.S., is only now coming into existence. Japan's leaders, unfortunately, are too slow to recognize new trends, particularly when those new trends emanate from Japan.
Following Prof. Sakamura's interview with Reuters in July, I have received a lot requests for information about the "free TRON operating system," so I have put a page with links to the TOPPERS/JSP download page. Only professional developers will probably be able to take advantage of this, although I have read on the Japanese Web that Dr. Hiroaki Takada, who is in change of the ITRON kernel and its development, has written a textbook on how to write programs for it. Unfortunately, there is no free BTRON-specification operating, although it would be nice to see someone take a crack at developing a GNU/µITRON or GNU/µCTRON operating system. With Linux under attack, it might be nice to have something to fall back on in case The SCO Group wins its court battles.
Anyway, I hope you like this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 18, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
The TRON Project was all over the news in July, mainly as a result of the TRON Project Leader speaking at various events. He gave out some interesting information, in particular that T-Java is going to be made compatible with Cho Kanji. Considering how much interest it is drawing in the local press, the T-Engine project seems destined for success. One thing it has going for it is that it incorporates multiple middleware environments, including Linux and Java, which means it is immune to the legal shenanigans currently being aimed at the Linux movement. The TRON Project encountered the political version of this "attack the open systems" game back in the late 1980s, and it raised havoc with the BTRON subproject, which is about 15 years behind schedule as a result of U.S. government interference.
For those of you who haven't heard, SCO Group, which claims that the Linux movement has illegally incorporated SCO Group's proprietary code into its open source, has "set prices" for those wishing to use Linux in the future. The price for desktop PC users is $199, for single-CPU server users $699 (which jumps to $1,399 after October 15), and for embedded devices $32 per device. If SCO Group's claims are held up in court, it seems highly likely that the Linux movement will be taxed out of existence. Fortunately, even if Linux is stamped out of existence, there are alternative open systems movements, such as FreeBSD and the TRON Project, which will allow developers to to do most of what they are doing today in a different but similar environment.
In other news, I'm still working on my MTRON piece, but hot weather, the occasional typhoon, and painters crawling all over the building where I live/work are slowing me down. Hang on. Eventually, I will finish it.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
August 12, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
I am uploading June's news items today, but actually there is more in the pipeline. Currently, I am at working on a description of the MTRON subarchitecture for you, which I will upload as soon as it's finished. Originally, I didn't know whether I should put information on MTRON on TRON Web, since I didn't know if that subarchitecture would be actively pursued. However, with the announcement that Toyota Motor Corp. would be leading a TRON Intelligent House project, it became clear that the MTRON subproject was no longer dormant. You cannot build an intelligent house without MTRON, which has features for dealing with the concept of position dependency.
As for June's news items, Personal Media announced yet another T-Engine implementation, this one based on a CPU with the SH-4 core. This is the seventh implementation of the T-Engine development board architecture, so there are lots of options for companies that want to develop embedded systems using T-Engine. Also, the Ubiquitous ID Center certified three IC tags as standard IC tags for ubiquitous computing networks in June. For those of you who are worried about privacy concerns, I am feeding Web materials critical of RFIDs to my Japanese colleagues. Prof. Sakamura is shocked that his name keeps coming up in warnings about future police states based on RFIDs.
By the way, June's update is a little late because I switched computer systems. Learning where all the old things are in the new system takes time. On the other hand, I now have my own image scanner, which will allow me to get very visual with my readers. Stay tuned for exciting illustrations.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
July 11, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
Well, I got a technical translation up for you on May 22. This one was about creating language modules for the BTRON3-specification operating system, which is one of my favorite topics. I actually went over to Personal Media's headquarters and made sure that each of the modules worked. The person who explained things to me, Mr. Oshima, showed me how easy it is to view the contents of existing modules for comparison, so if anyone is interested in creating new language features for BTRON, they now have most of the information that they need. The only problem is that languages written right-to-left still cannot be handled, although I lobbied for that, too.
For May's update, I have included three opinion pieces, plus some hot news. A T-Engine board based on Motorola's DragonBall processor is now available for purchase, an experimental terrestrial digital television terminal based on T-Engine has been developed, and Toyota Motor Corporation is getting into the TRON Intelligent House business. Moreover, according to an opinion piece by Prof. Sakamura, membership in the T-Engine Forum has hit 150 companies, and it is still climbing rapidly. He's predicting that 300 or more companies will be signed up within the current fiscal year. The TRON Project is definitely back, and back in style.
I hope you enjoy this update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
June 7, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
April's update is a little late and will be delivered in pieces, since I'm having a little trouble getting graphics together. I also have to confirm the contents of a technical translation I recently completed. For those of you unfamiliar with Japan, at the end of April and the beginning of May we have what is known here as "Golden Week." This is approximately a week of official holidays that form one of the most important vacation periods for the Japanese, and, yes, your Web master spent long hours of leisure during it. Anyway, I will deliver my update in pieces as soon a they become available. That means some this week, and some next week.
The main items at this time are a couple of opinion pieces, plus a couple of news items. My opinion piece is on a development that had a lot of people overseas talking, i.e., the announcement that real-time Linux will be ported to the T-Engine development platform. Some people are calling this the merger or fusion of the two operating systems, but this is not the case. The underlying computing models of the two operating systems are very different. Moreover, the TRON movement is aiming at "total architecture" for computerizing human society, which is different from the goals of the GNU/Linux movement. Let's keep things in perspective.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy today's update. More is to follow.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 15, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
There was a lot of interesting news in March. Personal Media put on sale two pieces of middleware for T-Engine, and the T-Engine Forum is establishing T-Linux and T-Wireless working groups. Yes, GNU/Linux is going to make its appearance on T-Engine, and T-Engine is going to become the platform of choice for developing third-generation cell-phones. And then there is that TEA Terminal developed by PIN CHANGE Co., Ltd., which is going to be tested in primary and middle schools in the Tokyo area. In a way, I feel like I'm back in the age of 8-bit personal computers, when all sorts of exciting things were going on in the world of computing.
You wouldn't know that by looking at the western technical press. Although at last count there were 104 domestic and foreign corporate members in the T-Engine Forum, there is almost no reporting being done on the project, in spite of the fact that it is setting standards that are going to become the foundation for the age of ubiquitous computing. What one sees in the western technical press these days are stories about neat little tools for manipulating telephone numbers and doing other sorts of mundane office automatic tasks, such as products to block spam. Just for the heck of it, I input T-Engine into the TechWeb search engine, but all I drew was a blank.
Such is the world we live in.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 2, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
I owe you an apology for a glaring error in December's update. In my long news article about TRON SHOW 2003, I wrote that the Ubiquitous ID would be using the 10.4 GHz frequency, which is what Prof. Sakamura said at the TRON show press conference and I later confirmed. However, afterward I discovered the Ubiquitous ID in fact uses a dual frequency--2.45 GHz for RFID chips and 13.56 MHz for eTRON smart cards. Apparently, Prof. Sakamura misspoke himself, and none of the Japanese staff remembered to correct him. In the future, needless to say, I shall use different routes to confirm facts.
February was another low news content month for the TRON Project. Thus I decided to get some more opinion pieces out for you. Prof. Sakamura, as you can tell by his opinion piece, is elated at the fact that so many companies have joined the T-Engine Forum. But there are problems on the horizon in the form of competing ID schemes for RFID chips and other forms of identification for ubiquitous environments. That's a problem I took up in a opinion piece, where I compared the Auto-ID with the Ubiquitous ID. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Europe and others come out with one of these schemes on their own.
I hope you enjoy February's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 10, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
There wasn't much news in January. Personal Media Corporation and The T-Engine Forum announced some training sessions for developers interested in learning how to use T-Engine, and there was a new product release. Since the training sessions were in Japanese, I didn't bother reporting them. However, please keep in mind that Personal Media is currently preparing English-language documentation for T-Engine, so overseas developers will not be left out. Although there has been no official announcement, I believe this documentation will become available some time in the spring of this year.
In that regard, I would encourage my overseas readers to contact Personal Media and/or the T-Engine Forum and request that they hold seminars overseas to introduce this new and important technology. Middleware developers in particular have a lot to gain from porting their middleware to the T-Engine platform, especially those who are interested in penetrating the Japanese market. But integrated system developers should also take an interest in T-Engine, since this is going to become the backbone of the infrastructure that will be used to remake Japan into a computerized society.
As we have entered the slow news season, I am planning to get some more opinion pieces up for you, plus I am doing a translation of another article about BTRON multilingual processing.
That's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 12, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
I'm sorry I couldn't update TRON Web sooner, but I ended up with so much information from TRON SHOW 2003 and TEPS 2003 that it took about a month to plow through it all, write a long article, check the facts, add corrections, rewrite things, gather image data, and do the layout. During the press conference and three-day show, believe it or not, I took 84 pages of notes, plus I also collected a lot of brochures to read.
TRON SHOW 2003 was a great success. Attendance was up 50 percent over last year, which was probably a result of increased news coverage. Increased news coverage was probably also why approximately 100 reporters went out of their way to come to the show. A TRON show is, of course, much smaller than the computer shows in the U.S., since there is almost no advertising budget. However, a lot more money went into TRON SHOW 2003 than previous shows. There was simultaneous interpretation for the full three days at all the events, and high quality champagne was served at the reception!
Professor Sakamura is extremely happy about the rapid progress that has taken place in the T-Engine project. As of December 10, 2002, 71 domestic and foreign companies had joined the T-Engine Forum, and T-Engine-based products are rapidly being developed. Prof. Sakamura keeps talking about how T-Engine is not just about developing technology, but also about the creation of a new business model. Looking at what PIN CHANGE Co., Ltd., has done in a short period of time, he just might be right.
So weren't there any disappointments for the veteran TRON observer? One disappointment is to see all sorts of great software running on ITRON that cannot run on BTRON. For example, at the Hitachi booth there were demonstrations of an MPEG4 player and voice synthesis running on ITRON. If there really is a new business model, how about porting these middleware to BTRON? One solution would be to develop a T-Engine-based multimedia card for BTRON, which runs on standard PCs.
Well, that's all for now. I hope you like the update for December.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
January 22, 2003
Dear Friends and Readers,
It's that time of the year again, the busy season when I have to do TRON Web updates while doing some side work for TRON Web's sister site, www.tron.org. As a result of translating some TRON SHOW 2003 information for them, I can tell you that this year's show is going to be very interesting. For example, PIN CHANGE, a new company in the Matsushita group, is going to demonstrate a very low cost prototype educational computer, a tablet device, that looks just like Alan Kay's original Dynabook. If they can create an easy-to-use programming language for it, the age of the "true Dynabook" may be here.
Of course, since the T-Engine project is still new, a lot of the products at the show will be aimed at developers, not end users or consumers. However, there is a lot of interest in this project, since it will greatly reduce development costs and hence lead to cheaper, easier to use computer devices. The educational computer prototype mentioned above was developed in well under a year, so it is going to cost considerably less than today's personal computers. People in the Japanese electronics are expecting products like this to revive the Japanese economy. It wouldn't surprise me if they did.
Well, that's all for now. I've got to run.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 6, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
We are now about one month away from TRON SHOW 2003. This year's show and symposium is going to be significant, and as if to underline that, the Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun put pictures of new T-Engine-based products on the first page of its October 23 edition. Yep, no doubt about it, the "TRON Spirit," which has been lacking for so long among the Japanese media, seems to be returning. I hope they have finally realized that Japan is very lucky to have such a forward looking technology project taking place inside its borders. It just might create the technologies that get the ailing Japanese economy rolling again.
For October's news, Personal Media Corporation has announced yet another CD-ROM dictionary for its Cho Kanji operating system. A lot of people, particularly reporters in the western technical press, don't realize it, but the unabridged kanji character set inside the BTRON3-specification computer is an important piece of digital age infrastructure that is going to serve as the basis for putting a lot of Japan's societal information in digital form. The three dictionaries that Personal Media has put out to date are but a harbinger of what is to come in Japan using BTRON technologies.
In October, I received an e-mail request from Mr. Shin Moriyama to update TRON Web's "Links to TRON-related Web sites" page, which were out of date. He also asked me to put a link to Mr. Masayoshi Yamazaki's Web site. Both of them speak English, and, in addition, Mr. Yamazaki speaks Korean. For that reason, I updated that section of TRON Web.
Well, that's all I have for now. I hope you enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 11, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
Your Web master has just moved from one dimension of "temperature and space" and entered another. The cool winds of autumn have begun to blow into Tokyo, and what a pleasure it is! I can now take long walks again, which, believe it or not, stimulate my ability to write. In particular, it takes a feeling of being detached to write an opinion piece about some issue. And there is nothing like a long walk through cool air to give one that feeling of being detached from the worries and cares of the world. It's almost like a glimpse of nirvana. I only wish it could continue forever.
The TRON Project is also in the process of emerging from one state and entering into another. According to the rumor mill, the T-Engine Forum member companies are working overtime to get their T-Engine-related products ready for TRON SHOW 2003. I suspect that Prof. Sakamura is also beginning to feel as if he is detached. There is no longer any reason to worry about the future, because the future will definitely include the TRON Architecture. With more than 50 companies supporting the T-Engine initiative, the TRON Architecture is definitely here to stay.
September's update is rather brief, just a couple of opinion pieces and some news items. But things will probably start picking up in the next couple of months. In December, of course, there will be the annual TRON show, and this year's show promises to be one of the best. If any of you live in the Tokyo area, please go out of your way to come to the show and see what the T-Engine project has to offer. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
October 11, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
I'm sorry my TRON Web update for August is a little late. The hot weather got to me--in fact, I was ill--and I wasn't very productive. There wasn't much important news in August, though. A couple of minor stories from Personal Media Corporation was the extent of it. Personal Media made available some i-mode picture character font data, and they also established a Web site to support T-Engine, which is drawing a considerable amount of interest as a development platform.
In keeping with my promise to you last month, I have put some more information about BTRON on line. Specifically, I translated the "Quick Reference Guide" that appeared in the Cho Kanji 3 manual. Some of the information there is of the type you'd like to have immediate access to, so just create a link to it and call it up when necessary. Personally, I often forget how to switch from one input mode to the next, so this on-line guide is also for my own selfish purposes.
I'm still getting the occasional e-mail from programmers interested in BTRON and the TRON character encoding system. People want English-language information about the system. I have been recommending this for some time, so your requests strengthen my position with the TRON Project Leader. Please send more and more requests. I will forward them to the Prof. Sakamura to shown him that people overseas really are interested in BTRON.
Well, that's all for now. I hope you enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 19, 2002
Dear Friend and Readers,
July was another interesting month for the TRON Project. The big news is that the T-Engine project is picking up steam at an incredible rate. Prof. Sakamura announced at a press conference in Tokyo that he expects 100 companies, both domestic and foreign, to join the T-Engine Forum, which is something like a brand new TRON Association. Unlike the old TRON Association, Prof. Sakamura is going to be in the command position, i.e., that of chairman, so he will at last have the authority to make decisions without interference, particularly from people who know nothing about computers.
In addition to lots of companies joining the T-Engine Forum, the first T-Engine development kit, based on Hitachi's SH microprocessor family, was announced at the press conference, and new T-Engine implementations were exhibited to the press. By the end of the year it is expected that T-Engine implementations based on the M32, ARM, and MIPS architectures will also be on the market. But the real thing we await is the full list of middleware being readied to run on T-Engine. The more middleware that becomes available, the more innovation will see in T-Engine applications. In particular, we await the arrival of full-featured, handheld BTRON-based PDAs that can become desktop CPUs at home.
Speaking of BTRON, now that we have an English-language kit available for downloading, I'm planning to put some more information about using BTRON on line. I wish I had someone to work with me, because there is a lot of BTRON information that has to be translated into English.
Anyway, I'll try to do my best for you.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
August 12, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
There was a lot of TRON-related news in June--and what news! Finally, an English-language interface kit for BTRON has been completed and made available for downloading free of charge via the Internet. Just download it and install it into the Japanese system, and any English-language user will be able to use the BTRON human-machine interface plus the bundled applications. It will be interesting to see who will use this first. Personally, I think hackers will be the first to try out this unique operating system, but East Asian specialists may surprise me and put Cho Kanji 4 to use in their work.
BTRON is still not a major operating system in the Japanese market, but Personal Media continues to develop niche markets based on it. This month Personal Media began marketing a version of Cho Kanji 4 that can handle high-definition LCD screens. The initial targets of this expensive product seem to be museums, in particular the University of Tokyo museum, and publishing firms, but it could also be used in other fields. Frankly, it would make a great DTP platform. The only thing it needs is for some to port the software to BTRON.
Perhaps most importantly, in June, a lot of companies got together to create the T-Engine Forum. This is a major step toward the standardization of TRON-based hardware and software, something originally envisioned when the project began back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, Japanese industry and government officials fell for the old, worn out line about Japan becoming "isolated" if it developed unique computers technologies, and it took quite some time for the project to get back on track.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the update for June.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
July 10, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
For May's update, I have decided to place a little more educational material on the Web site, since there hasn't been much news about TRON lately. Accordingly, I have translated an article of the basic operations of the real object/virtual object file system of the BTRON. If you master these operations, you won't have much trouble using a BTRON-based computer when the English-language version of the BTRON3-specification operating system hits the market.
There were also a couple of interesting news items in the May. NTT DoCoMo announced i-mode cell-phones with increased download speed for its TRON-based i-mode cell-phone service. The download speed is nowhere near as fast as DoCoMo's 3G FOMA service, but compared to the old i-mode, the speed boost is substantial. Another news item was that hackers have successfully ported the Mozilla browser to Cho Kanji 3, although Personal Media introduced it on Cho Kanji 4. Thank God for hackers. They do a lot of work that really benefits whatever computing community they are a part of.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy May's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
June 10, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
In April I received an interesting e-mail from a college student in Minnesota who is interested in Squeak. Apparently, he found the news item I wrote about Squeak being ported to BTRON, and now he wants to program a BTRON-based PDA using Squeak. I hope the folks at Personal Media read this e-mail, because it shows that there are people overseas willing to help the TRON Project. All they need is an English-based BTRON system plus an appropriate programming environment, in particular one that is "well documented in English."
I have also translated an interesting opinion piece from Prof. Sakamura this month. He notes that roughly 200,000 people have tried BTRON in Japan, which is a lot of people for an alternative operating system in this country. Most other alternative operating systems in Japan have not garnered much more market share, so BTRON is holding its own in this field. In order to make BTRON a mainstream operating system, the most important thing is to take advantage of its unique features, i.e., real-time responsiveness, a unique filing system, true multilingual capability, and a very small memory footprint.
My guess is that BTRON will come into its own when cell-phones require an operating system with more functionality than current JTRON-based systems can provide. Accordingly, our young friend in Minnesota may have discovered BTRON at just the right time.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 15, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
Again in March there was not much news about the TRON Project--just some minor releases from Personal Media--and thus I have used the lull to catch up on some opinion pieces by myself and Prof. Sakamura. Although Prof. Sakamura's opinion pieces do not necessarily translate into good English, there are important insights in them. Read between the lines and you will understand where the TRON Project is headed.
The next big announcement, as I stated previously, will be the appearance of T-Engine. This is a truly important development that, if successful, will change the face of the Japanese electronics industry. When one considers that there is really no alternative to making something like T-Engine succeed--Prof. Sakamura alluded to this in one of his opinion pieces--then it is highly likely that a lot of effort will go into making it succeed.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 15, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
There wasn't much news about the TRON Project during February, and it looks like the next big announcement will be the commercialization of T-Engine, probably by the end of June. Thus I am attempting to catch up on things, such as the translation of opinion pieces by Prof. Sakamura, which were put aside as a result of the major yearend events. Please keep in mind that in addition to writing up these events for its readers, TRON Web is also tasked with numerous event-related translation requests, which is not to mention translation requests that sometimes have nothing to do with the TRON Project.
Since I have received a couple of correspondences from folks about broken links and so forth in my article on the history of character codes, "A Brief History of Character Codes in North America, Europe, and East Asia," I have added some revisions to that article and linked it via a new footnote to my follow-up article on Unicode, "Unicode Revisited," which discusses the Unicode mechanism designed to allow Unicode to handle more than 1 million characters. The former article is listed at the "dmoz open directory project" site (click here to view), so it gets a lot of hits from people throughout the world.
If you spot any other broken links in TRON Web, please let me know. I'll try to repair them.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
March 13, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
I finally got my long TRON SHOW 2002 article finished along with January's news. The show was mainly about T-Engine, a new development platform for creating PDAs and other small network devices. Somehow Prof. Sakamura got two A level members of the TRON Association, most of whom lost their enthusiasm for the TRON Architecture after the project was attacked by the USTR in the 1980s, to create two standard development boards plus a standard software development environment. Standardized hardware and software is exactly what the TRON movement was about in the beginning, and if the A level members of the TRON Association had ignored the political forces they would have been able to create innovations that probably would have kept the high-tech sector profitable even today.
Better late than never, as the saying goes.
TRON Electronic Prosthetics Symposium 2002 was also fascinating. It's absolutely amazing to see the disabled using standard TRON-based technologies, such as NTT DoCoMo's FOMA cell-phones, to enable themselves to do things that were previously impossible. This is one of the major goals of the TRON Project--to do things never before possible by creating a computerized society based on an open, real-time, total computer architecture. A TRON dream has been realized at last, and one of the top people from NTT DoCoMo was on hand again to listen to and look at what the disabled doing with his company's technology. Fantastic! I can only hope that the TRON Project will have more and more successes of this type.
Well, that's all I have time for now. I hope that you enjoy this update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 12, 2002
Dear Friends and Readers,
December was a big month for the TRON Project, and an extremely busy month for TRON Web. Thus I am going to do two updates for December 2001. The first one will be uploaded to TRON Web with this message. It is about the "Takeda Award 2001 Forum," which took place on December 3 as a part of a two-day program of events related to Takeda Award 2001. There were three fascinating presentations at the forum by Ken Sakamura, Richard Stallman, and Linus Torvalds, so I decided to describe them all in detail and add some footnotes so that readers can follow the issues that were raised.
The second update for December will be about TRONSHOW 2002 and TEPS 2002, both of which went very well. I have 46 pages of notes plus brochures to plow through, so I won't be finished writing it up until the middle of January.
TRONSHOW 2002 was an outstanding success. There was excellent attendance and lots of announcements of new products. The biggest announcements were T-Engine and µT-Engine, which are new standardized development boards for creating compact systems based on ITRON and BTRON. In a way, these boards are going to bring computing--for hackers and hobbyists, anyway--back to the old days when people developed unique systems using their personal computers. Both boards are completely open and will have lots of middleware available for them.
There was also a big BTRON announcement and demonstration. The Mozilla Web browser has been successfully ported to Cho Kanji 4, so now BTRON users can view Web sites with frames, use cookies, and make use of JavaScript and Secure Socket Layers. A lot of people seemed to be buying Cho Kanji 4 the Personal Media booth where they could purchase it at a discount, so it looks like we may pick up some more new users as a result of the appearance of Mozilla on BTRON.
By the way, there is TRON technology going in the opposite direction. Elmic Systems Inc. has merged ITRON with Linux to speed up the popular OS. This is possible as a result of ITRON's fast task switching time, a couple of µseconds compared to several tens of milliseconds for Linux.
Perhaps the most interesting event was TEPS 2002, where the use of 3G cell-phones to help the disabled was once again the topic. As was the case last year, Mr. Hirotaka Nakano of NTT DoCoMo Inc. attended the show to let people know what was going on in the world of i-mode, and to gain valuable feedback from the disabled about their experiences using cell-phones. Cell-phones have proved themselves to be of enormous value to both the visually and hearing impaired.
Well, that's all I have time for now. I have to return to my research and writing. I hope you enjoy my description of the Takeda Award Ceremony, and best wishes for the New Year.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 31, 2001
Dear Friends and Readers,
The TRON season is upon us here in Tokyo, and there are more events scheduled than usual. Could it be that the Japanese have come to their senses and now realize that one of the greatest computer architectures ever has been developed in their own country? I hope so. Since we seem to be headed for a worldwide depression, the old Japanese economic model, i.e., an export-oriented economic model based on superbly manufactured goods, is going to collapse. Domestic demand has to be stimulated for Japan to survive, and what better way to do it than on the basis of Japanese developed software?
TRON seems to have captured the interest of a famous Japanese author, Mr. Hiroshi Aramata, who gave his feelings about East Asian culture and what Chinese characters mean in that context in an interview with Prof. Ken Sakamura. Although it is an old interview--it appeared in TRONWARE a year ago--it makes fascinating reading, and it should be of particular interest to people in the West who believe that East Asian countries should simply abandon Chinese characters or reduce the number that they use. Mr. Aramata loves Chinese characters, and in fact he wants to create more of them! This is something the Unicode folks could never understand, just as they couldn't understand why Japanese people would want to Tompa characters in daily life.
There is also some interesting news this month for MS Windows users. Personal Media Corp. is working a software package that will allow Cho Kanji 3 to operate on MS Windows in emulation. Take a look the TRON news items for October.
I hope you find this month's update interesting.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 13, 2001
Dear Friends and Readers,
We had a long, hot summer here in Tokyo, and it was also very dry, which led to drought conditions. Then a couple of typhoons came rolling through the Tokyo area, which gave us floods. All this bad weather, plus more personal computer systems problems, slowed me down, but at last August's news and information is ready for your perusal.
In July and August, there were more new product announcements from Personal Media Corporation. The company will put two CD-ROM versions of the Kang Hsi Dictionary on the market in September, and they have started free Tompa hieroglyphic character Web sites for personal computer and i-mode users. This is exactly what the BTRON subproject needs--constant product announcements to get the attention of users. Another good sign is that BTRON is attracting more and more attention in the Japanese press, as can be seen at Personal Media's Web site.
TRON Web got the attention of some Unicode proponents. I exchanged a few e-mails with one Unicode advocate about the Unicode "surrogate pairs" mechanism. That got me so upset I sat down and wrote a 10-page rebuttal to his arguments. Basically, the surrogate pairs mechanism provides four-byte encodings for characters not on the Basic Multilingual Plane, which has about 63,000 characters assigned to it. Needless to say, no one in Japan is thrilled about using four bytes to encode characters that only require two bytes. It remains to be seen whether large Japanese institutional users will actually employ Unicode in their databases.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 14, 2001
Dear Friends and Readers,
It has been a long time since I wrote a Web master's message. Some of you may have thought I passed from the scene and turned the reins of TRON Web over to someone else, but actually I have been here chugging along since December.
Normally, at the end of each year, I only have two events to deal with: the annual TRON show and TRON Electronics Prosthetics Symposium. However, last year I also attended a presentation by Prof. Sakamura on next generation microprocessors, and thus I had another long year-end article to write. Writing about an event like the TRON show, for example, is not easy. I usually have forty or fifth pages of notes plus a huge pile of handouts to sift through, so I am busy for a long time afterward. Then at the beginning of the new year, I had to go through visa renewal, housing contract renewal, plus submit both my Japanese and U.S. tax forms, so events conspired against me and left me too depressed to write to you.
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed the updates. The annual TRON show in December was very impressive, and I have been making suggestions to improve it. For example, I would love to see the participants put their materials on-line prior to the show, and then use--at the very least--voice streaming to send each presentation around the Internet in real time. Also, if there was some way that allowed people in foreign countries to interview Prof. Sakamura and the TRON engineers at the show, the TRON Architecture might become better known. As a foreigner who has been involved with the TRON Project since 1988, I am amazed at the steady progress this advanced computer architecture has made. It's too bad it is not more widely known outside Japan.
For this month's update, I have added a section on the TRON Intelligent House, since I receive two requests this year for information about it. In addition, I have added some more opinions, and I have done some house cleaning in the links sections. Those links are now all updated. The news this month is interesting. The free BTRON development environment has been ported to the Windows environment, so folks who do not want to use GNU/Linux can do BTRON programming in a familiar setting. There's even new software from Personal Media--can you believe that Tompa hieroglyphic characters are a fad in Japan?
By the way, my personal computer system went down at the end of May due to a virus, which is why May's update was a little late. Thanks to the resulting disaster, I now grasp why using an alternative operating system in a Web terminal is highly advantageous.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 31, 2001
Dear Friends and Readers,
November's update was a long time in the making. The reason was that I was deluged with information. A new freeware ITRON kernel, the µITRON4.0-specification TOPPERS/JSP, was put on line for downloading; Prof. Sakamura gave an important presentation on embedded systems at MST2000 that was fully booked (I couldn't attend, so I had to write from his presentation materials); and the TRON Association held a seminar on microelectronics in the 21st century. It took a lot of time to get all the information together, digest it, and start writing. But the news is outstanding.
First, the new µITRON implementation is performing well on hardware that is two generations old, so it looks like the ITRON subproject will attain its goal of a task switching time of 1 µsecond in the near future. Second, the TRON concepts of total design and dynamic updating of software that were conceived back in the 1980s are finally going to be realized in the 21st century. Third, the hardware building blocks for this incredible world of the future have already been implemented, i.e., microprocessors for handheld devices that process 1 billion instructions per second, the Bluetooth wireless interconnection technology, and Memory Stick high-capacity IC storage technology.
I must apologize to the technical wizards among my readers for not being technical enough in this month's news. For example, I didn't mention any details about the various methods used to execute instructions on the new microprocessors I described, but that is a little beyond the scope of a general news section. Nevertheless, I did put references and links into the news for you so that you can go off on your own and gather extra information. I hope that you will check out the latest chips from Japanese semiconductor makers, which are nothing less than "supercomputers on a chip." Absolutely amazing progress has been made in the development of low-power, high performance microprocessors.
Even more information about the TRON Project was released in December. Let's hope that I can do December's update by the middle of January.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 27, 2000
Dear Friends and Readers,
Two things were very hot in East Asia in the month of August--the weather and the TRON Project. The torturous heat of the former was offset by the latter, which scored a couple of big successes. The first of these was a well attended project seminar held in Seoul on August 22. Although Prof. Sakamura has previously given seminars in Seoul, this seminar was very special in that it was managed by the "Korea TRON Association" (provisional name). That's right, Korea is going to become home to the second overseas TRON Association. I hope that other countries in the region will follow the lead of China and Korea and climb aboard the TRON Project.
The other big success was the announcement that National Semiconductor Corporation is developing a version of an Internet appliance based on the B-right/V R2.5 operating system. As anyone who has read TRON Web knows, BTRON-based operating systems are ideal for hardware systems with limited resources, such as PDAs, handheld computers, and cell-phones. This is because they are simple yet powerful. How an American company came to this realization, and where they got the courage to move ahead on a consumer appliance based on a Japanese-developed operating system is an interesting tale that I would love to hear. I hope someone at National Semiconductor will write in and let us know about it.
For the information of computer historians out there, National Semiconductor was the first company to put a true 32-bit microprocessor on the market. It was a very compact processor, only 90,000 transistors in comparison to 275,000 transistors for Intel Corporation's 80386 microprocessor. Interestingly, their new Internet appliance is going to be powered by a clone of the Intel architecture called of "Geode GX1," so maybe this is their way of getting back at Intel for capturing the microprocessor market for personal computing applications.
As always, please feel free to write in and let me know your thoughts.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 7, 2000
Dear Friends and Readers,
For July, there is a lot of good news. The latest upgrade of the BTRON3-specification operating system, B-right/V R2.5, has been put on the market and sales are good--in fact, much better than the previous version. This may have something to do with the fact that Personal Media Corporation has included a training video in the package. It may also be related to the fact that the Japanese press has "rediscovered" the TRON Project. Instead of giving unjustified coverage to Microsoft Corporation's buggy software products, which TRON Project Leader Ken Sakamura pointed out in his opinion last month, they are now beginning to realize that the TRON Project is a godsend for Japan, which is hoping for an economic revival based on an IT revolution. Where were they when the USTR was trying to destroy the world's only "total computer architecture" 11 years ago? In those days, they seem to have swallowed the "disinformation" that the TRON Project would lead to bad relations between Japan and the U.S., and thus it would be best to scrap the project.
There is also another piece of disinformation that is being aimed at Japan, and I addressed it in my opinion piece this month. This latest piece of disinformation is that Japan lags behind the U.S. in becoming a computerized society. This disinformation is nothing other than hype to get Japan to abandon domestically developed technologies such as TRON for U.S.-created technologies. In fact, Japan leads the U.S. in the race to become a "wireless society," and even in becoming a "wired society," NTT, Japan's telephone company, is planning to install ultra high-speed optical fiber lines in every home in Japan as soon as possible, hopefully by the middle of this decade. And for those of you who missed it, that's why Japan's connection rates are higher than those in the U.S. NTT is constantly upgrading its telecommunications system, and, unlike its foreign competitors in the Japanese market, it is required by law to provide unprofitable service to rural areas. That costs money too, but almost no one in the overseas press has even bothered to report the obvious facts. One-sided reporting and disinformation are the leading sources of friction between between the U.S. and Japan, and TRON Web intends to do something to rectify this problem.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send them in.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
August 7, 2000
Dear Friends and Readers,
The update for May includes a very interesting interview with Mr. Katsumi Asaba, a well known Japanese art director and a specialist on the Tompa characters used by the Naxi people in Yunnan Province, China. While there may not be that many people who can read these hieroglyphic characters, there are many people who appreciate them as art. There is also a huge 100 volume Tompa canon that needs to be electronically archived for future generations. Hopefully, this will be done using the BTRON-specification operating system, a Chinese-language version of which now exists.
In addition to the interview, there are a lot of interesting news stories about new TRON-based technologies for the Internet and electronic commerce. The most surprising news is that the BTRON-based multilingual system is going to be used to create multilingual content for wireless handsets. Wow! And improvements are being made to BTRON. The filing system is being supplemented with a new type of virtual object to seamlessly merge BTRON-based data with Internet-based data. Moreover, streaming software is being tested for inclusion in a future version of the BTRON-specification operating system.
I hope you enjoy May's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
June 7, 2000
Dear Friends and Readers,
For February's update, I decided to post a new gallery dedicated to B-right/V R2. The English- and Chinese-language versions of B-right/V R2 are scheduled to be announced this month by Sennet Inc., the venture business that has been set up to market B-right/V R2 overseas. In fact, I met Sennet's founder, "Super" Yamaguchi, yesterday and gave him my wish list for the operating system, which I believe could become a wonderful interface to the Internet and the World Wide Web.
TRON Project Leader Ken Sakamura also believes this, so for March's update, I have translated and posted a long interview with him that appeared in Vol. 60 of TRONWARE. The topic of that interview is the future of BTRON; and BTRON does have a future, since it embodies new technologies that do not exist on other operating systems. The trick is organizing people to support and ultimately benefit from those technologies. If anyone has any good ideas, let me know.
Well, that's all for now. I hope you enjoy the latest update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 7, 2000
Dear Friends and Readers,
Let me wish you a belated "Happy New Year." I hope you all made it through to January 1 without any Y2K problems.
In this update for the month of January--which is a little late due to the fact that I got burned out doing two updates in December!--I have written an introduction for you to the latest version of the B-right/V operating system, Release 2. The main improvements are to its kanji processing functions, and they are absolutely outstanding. I wish I had access to this software when I started learning Asian languages 30 years ago. However, in addition, there are many other new features, including support for proportional fonts and word wrap, which are important to people who mainly write in European languages.
Incidentally, I would love to hear from anyone who has purchased and is currently using B-right/V R2. Comments from non-TRON sources are also important to enable my readership to accurately grasp what the TRON Project is doing.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 11, 2000
Dear Friends and Readers,
We had a great TRON show this year with lots of wonderful news about the latest implementation of the BTRON-specification operating system. Personal Media Corporation has done an outstanding job of developing a first class operating system with new functionality. Unbelievably to many who had written BTRON off long ago, that new OS, B-right/V R2, will be put on sale next year in English-language form in the U.S. market by Sennet Inc.'s U.S. subsidiary, Global OS Corporation. And a Chinese-language version is also being prepared for the East Asian market.
Since there is so much good news, I am going to try to outdo myself this month and update TRON Web twice. In today's update, I am posting an opinion by Prof. Sakamura, who has made contacts in Korea to introduce BTRON into the field of Korean cultural studies. In addition, I have rewritten a long list of questions and answers about B-right/V R2 that appear on Personal Media's Japanese-language Web site. That will give you a general idea about what it's like. Sure, it's still not perfect, but it's getting better and better with each new release.
I hope you enjoy this update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 15, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
I had a little difficulty getting October's update done. It was a case of a lot of other things creeping up on me and distracting my attention.
Anyway, this update should be interesting to a lot of people, since it includes descriptions of Internet-related software packages that have been developed at the Sakamura Laboratory. They are part of a suite of applications developed to put computers to good use in universities, and they are welcome addition to the growing BTRON software library.
I hope you enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 10, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
There was a lot of TRON-related news that broke in September. Personal Media Corporation finally completed the true multilingual version of its BTRON3-specification operating system, B-right/V, and it also set up a Web site for downloading a GNU-based Japanese-language development environment. There was also another ITRON International Meeting in the U.S., and it was announced that TRONSHOW 2000 would be held at the beginning of December.
As a result, I'm going to have to put aside the MicroScript programming course for a little while. There are just too many new things that have to be written about the BTRON3-specification operating system and applications. If all goes well, I should be able to get the third lesson of the MicroScript introduction on line by December.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
October 4, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
Well, I finished the second lesson for the MicroScript programming section. Since the scripts in this lesson don't do anything other than flash character and virtual object segments on the screen, I decided not to include any graphics to make it easier to download. If you have any questions in your mind as to what should be done, take a look at the first lesson again. The basics of setting up a MicroScript program are all illustrated there.
There were a couple of interesting stories in the news in August. First, a Yokohama-based firm developed a micro-ITRON-based environment to speed up Windows CE and make it compatible with ITRON-based devices. Personally, I think this is a stupid idea. If the whole purpose of the exercise is a speed increase and ITRON compatibility, why doesn't Microsoft just change Windows CE into a micro-BTRON-specification operating system? The specifications are open and Microsoft certainly has enough programmers to create its own micro-BTRON operating system. Moreover, DoJ couldn't bother them if they started developing open systems!
Second, the president of a U.S. real-time operating system supplier met four members of the Liberal Democratic Party in Tokyo to discuss promoting micro-ITRON in the U.S. What a strange story! Why have Japanese politicians suddenly taken an interest in the TRON Project? Maybe it's because they've realized that Japan's economic survival in the next century is going to depend on how well the country succeeds in developing software and creating the infrastructure for an advanced information-based society. If that's the case, I hope they take some time out to study about the TRON Architecture, which supplies all the basic building blocks for just such an information society.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
September 7, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
The hot weather is upon us here in Tokyo. Doing the TRON Web update for July was a real task, even with air conditioning! The temperature never seems to go below 28 degrees in my workroom during the day, so I have had a lot of trouble concentrating. But just like the mail, TRON Web updates must get through.
For the July update, I translated the MicroScript error messages. It occurred to me after I wrote my MicroScript introductory piece that somebody might have problems if they started rewriting the script I included there. So I wanted to get the error messages on line as fast as possible. In my August update, I will try to include some more simple programs for you.
I also found some more links to free BTRON software on the Web. It's nice to see BTRON showing all the signs of becoming a viable operating system. There are lots of young Japanese people who really want to see BTRON succeed, and they're putting their programing knowledge where their mouths are. Bravo!
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
August 5, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
I'm very sorry that June's update is several days late. Unfortunately, I had a problem obtaining some screen shots of B-right/V for TRON Web's new education section. Since very few of you are bilingual and/or have in your possession a copy of the B-right/V operating system, the new programming section would have been incomprehensible without them. So I elected to accept the wait.
The good news is that beginning this month I am going to start putting information about BTRON programming on TRON Web. The programming language described is MicroScript, an easy-to-use scripting language that has been developed for BTRON hobby programmers. And believe me, if an old timer such as myself--who graduated from college even before personal computers hit the scene!--can write programs in this language, anyone else can, too.
As always, please feel free to write in with your comments and suggestions. I love to get e-mail and feedback.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
July 5, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
May '99 was an interesting month at TRON Web. I received yet another request for technical information from overseas. This time it was a very large U.S. electronics manufacturer. I also visited the Sakamura Laboratory at the University of Tokyo to talk with TRON Project Leader Ken Sakamura. On the day I visited, just as I was nearing the building, I noticed that he was outside talking to someone very important. Later he told me it was the chairman of a very large Japanese trading company. These incidents made me really happy, since the big boys are finally beginning to take a serious look at the TRON Project.
I also went over to Personal Media Corporation's headquarters, which it turns out is within walking distance of my home, to gather information on the company's easy-to-use programming language called MicroScript. I am going to start putting information about the language on TRON Web to give people an idea of how easy it is to create programs for BTRON. The big problem with MicroScript at present is that it is "interpreted," which means that it would be difficult to develop commercial software based on it. On the other hand, it is a very powerful scripting language that could be put to good use inside companies for all sorts of things.
This month's update is a little brief. I received an e-mail from a friend detailing his criticisms of last month's translation. Accordingly, I rewrote sections of last month's translation to make it easier for English-speaking people to read. Hope you like it.
Well, that's all for now.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
May 31, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
Well, I got April's update done in the month of April, so it looks like I'm beginning to win out against all the new interfaces. This month I translated an explanation on how to get a B-right/V machine connected to the Internet. The method selected by Personal Media requires the user to buy a LAN adapter and "router," the latter of which includes a dial-up function with PPP. These are added expenses, but this scheme allows you to connect multiple machines to a single modem, so it seems to be ideal for small office/home office users. Apparently, Personal Media is aiming BTRON squarely at business users.
TRON Web also got a couple of e-mail requests for technical information in April, which is thrilling. One of those requests is in the e-mail box. The other I did not post, since it contained information on the business planning of a certain firm. If you would like to know more about TRON or are interested in business opportunities using technologies based on the TRON Architecture, please do not hesitate to write. I'll do my best to help you or get you in touch with someone who can help you.
Well, that's all for now. I hope you enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 30, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
A have a lot of changes taken place since last month. I changed both my computer system and my home Internet Service Provider. I went from a Mac single OS machine to Windows 98/B-right/V dual OS machine, and I changed from a dial-up ISP to a cable modem service. All these changes have left me with unfamiliar interfaces, which has disrupted my work schedule. Thus TRON Web's March update has fallen in April. I'm very sorry about that. I like to get information out to you at least once a month.
Anyway, we had our annual TRON show and symposium in the middle of March. As always, we seem to have attracted about 1,000 people to the events. There is still a lot of interest about TRON in Japan, particularly in light of the fact that we seem to be entering an age in which alternative operating systems are gaining credibility in the corporate world. There were no big blockbuster announcements at the show and symposium, but the usual steady progress that has taken place over the last 15 years was much in evidence. The TRON Project is continuing to make progress toward its goal of creating the infrastructure for a networked world.
Well, that's all I have to say for now. I have to get back to my study of my new system and its applications.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
April 5, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
Well, I kept my promise. I updated January's feature article on character sets with a bibliography and some new links. There are now new references to both Web-based and print resources on character sets in that article. I could have added a huge list, but I decided to be very selective and include just the essentials.
The chief expert on East Asian character sets in the English speaking world is Ken Lunde, a linguist and project manager at Adobe Systems Inc. He has actually heard of the TRON Architecture and writes about in his works. He also considers Unicode just another character set, and he likes Linux. That makes him the kind of person who should be able to write about the subject objectively. I hope he takes time out to keep track of what's going on with multilingual processing in the TRON Project.
For this month's update, I have translated a paper on a new freeware e-mailer developed at the Sakamura Laboratory. It's a very easy to use e-mailer that was designed in accordance with BTRON programming concepts. This fills in an important gap that existed when Personal Media Corporation released the B-right/V operating system in July 1998. It will be a great day in the history of the TRON Project when we get commercial quality browser and e-mail software for the BTRON architecture. Then BTRON will be well on its way to becoming what it was intended to become--a "communication machine" for use in real-time networks.
For those of you living in Tokyo, please keep in mind that TRONSHOW '99 is scheduled to be held from March 10 to 12 in TEPIA Hall in Kita-Aoyama. There will be lots of products on display, workshops, and even a conference. For further details please look at the news section.
Well, that's all for now. Please feel free to write in comments. I love to get e-mail.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 25, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
I'm sorry that TRON Web's January update is a little late. I decided to write a brief history of coded character sets to prepare the way for the unveiling of the GT Mincho character set that is scheduled to be loaded onto the next version of BTRON. Little did I know that character sets are such a complex and difficult subject to write about! Just learning the names of the various character sets and what they include would be quite an accomplishment, it seems!!
If anyone spots any mistakes in my article please, let me know. I'm a linguist and a writer, not a computer engineer. Also, please keep in mind that I left out a lot of technical terms in the article to ensure that even non-speciailists would be able to read and understand it. My apologies to the techies on that score. I will add a short bibliography to the article at the end of February.
Hope you all enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
February 2, 1999
Dear Friends and Readers,
Well, TRON Web has finally received some fan mail after a little more than a year of being in operation. And what a morale booster it was! It was nice to read that people appreciate the effort that goes into TRON Web, and that they consider TRON Web a valuable source of information. Doing TRON Web requires a lot of effort, so any positive comments are highly appreciated.
Unfortunately, it was also a little disheartening to read that there are still people overseas who haven't heard of the TRON Project, which has been in existence for well over a decade now. Obviously, the TRON movement still hasn't done enough when it comes to communicating itself to the rest of the world. I sincerely hope that TRON Web can play a small role in helping to alleviate that problem.
Another reason the rest of the world hasn't heard more about the TRON Project is that Japanese electronics companies do not brand their TRON-based products, even though branding marks exist for that purpose. This, no doubt, is based on fear--fear that the U.S. government will look at all those TRON-based products coming off the assembly lines and will complain that Japan is being unfair by not incorporating American-made software in them.
But there is a way to completely overcome this fear. If the Japanese electronics companies participating in the TRON Project put effort--true, well thought out, focused effort--into transmitting the fruits of the TRON Project to the U.S., then many U.S. companies will eventually develop products based on the ITRON, BTRON, and CTRON subarchitectures. If those products are subsequently imported into Japan, there will be no need to worry about trade friction. TRON will become a way of reducing trade friction, not increasing it.
Of course, foreign companies need not wait until Japanese electronics companies take the initiative. There is a whole slew of applications that need to be developed for BTRON-specification operating system, and since it's an open architecture that is not propagated on the basis of "hit teams" from a powerful software maker, there is little risk in developing for it. No one is going to shake you down for the rights to your software.
One of the greatest hopes I have is that TRON Web will become a catalyst for Japanese and foreign companies to come together to jointly develop new software and hardware products based on the TRON Architecture, in particular the BTRON subarchitecture. TRON has a lot to offer the world, and the world can do a lot for TRON in return. Let's hope things turn out that way.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
December 29, 1998
Dear Friends and Readers,
Wednesday, November 25, 1998, I went over to the University of Tokyo to meet Prof. Sakamura, who had recently returned from a trip to Paris, France. He said while he was in France he was interviewed by people who had downloaded TRON Web and put it on their laptops. They made various comments about the contents of TRON Web, such as that he's older than he appears in his picture in TRON Web's Who's Who section, and so on. Accordingly, a brief explanation of TRON Web is in order.
TRON Web was conceived and created, and it is maintained and updated entirely by me, your Web master, who is a part-time foreign employee of a small computer services company working at the legally prescribed minimum wage for foreigners in Japan. Since TRON Web is a very low budget undertaking, there are always more things to do than the "management/staff of one" can handle. However, TRON Web is based on certain goals, which I would like to briefly outline below.
The first--and most important--goal of TRON Web is to get English-language information about the outstanding BTRON-specification operating systems on line. Prior to the appearance of TRON Web in the fall of 1997, there was almost no information about BTRON-based operating systems available in English on the World Wide Web. This was very unfortunate, since BTRON is breaking so much new ground in the area of personal computing. To rectify this, TRON Web was made very "BTRON-centric," and it will remain so for a few more updates.
However, the TRON Architecture is not aimed solely at personal computing; it was conceived expressly for the purpose of computerizing human society in the 21st century, an idea that is finally catching on outside Japan--14 years after the TRON Project was launched! Accordingly, after the true multilingual version of the BTRON3-specification operating system hits the market, TRON Web will slowly become more balanced through the addition of news and information about the ITRON and CTRON subprojects.
In addition, other areas of TRON Web will be filled out. The chronology of the TRON Project has to be updated, the Who's Who and TRON-based Products areas have to be filled out, and some educational material has to be added. But eventually TRON Web will attain its ultimate goal, that of providing a thorough source of information on the TRON Project for people in foreign countries.
In closing, I would like to tell the readers of TRON Web to feel free to send in comments and/or suggestions. There is an e-mail address (web_master@tronweb.super-nova.co.jp) for that purpose at the bottom of the home page. Comments and/or suggestions from Japanese readers--yes, I know that there are a lot of you out there--are also welcome, even in Japanese (nihongo-demo doozo ).
That's all for now. I hope you enjoy this month's update.
Steven J. Searle
Web Master, TRON Web
November 26, 1998
