According to Gartner, at the end of 2009, Palm WebOS still has only 0.7% of the global smartphone market. In the same 1 year period, iPhone went from 8.2% to 14.4%, Google Android from 0.5% to 3.9% and RIM went from 16.6% to 19.9%. Only Nokia Symbian went down from 52.4% to 46.9%.

So now that Verizon is carrying the Palm Pre and Pixi, it was only a matter of time before Palm started pushing things a little more. They switched from the creepy lady TV ads to the 80′s mom ads, then removed the 80′s mom and now they just show the Pre.

In print ads, they’ve started pushing even on the side of a bus, as shown here. It just shows some apps running on the screen.

Will this increase WebOS market share in 2010? Well, it can’t really go down from 0.7%, so I guess things can only go up.

While commuting, I came across yet another Tesla in the wild on the 405 freeway transitioning to the 10 freeway west. These things are starting to pop-up now. Pretty soon, it will be like a Prius.

Once again, I got an opportunity to return to Maru in Valencia. You can read my original review here.

This time around, I decided to try the regular sushi combination instead of ordering piece by piece.

Crisp Duck Risotto - $16

My friend and I were both tricked by the name of the appetizer we picked. The name of it was “Crisp Duck Risotto,” and I somehow thought the duck was crisp. Instead it turns out that the risotto was crisp, which isn’t exactly the way I like my risotto. If anything, I like my risotto mushy, and not crunchy. Nonetheless, the small pieces of duck was good and everything was right in the world again.

16 Sushi Combo - $33

The sushi combination was fresh and well prepared but not as spectacular as on the last trip when we ordered each piece separately.  This seems to be the same at almost all sushi places, where you get better stuff when you order them one shot. There was nothing to complain about here except for the price. You can get the same or better for less money at places like Izayoi.

Moreover, unlike the last trip, the service was not up to snuff for an upscale sushi restaurant. The waitress seemed very rushed and out of sorts and when our sushi combination arrived, there was no soy sauce dish.

In my opinion, at a sushi restaurant, this is worse than the waitress at a steak house not bringing the steak knife. We did eventually flag down a waitress but at any good restaurant, the waitress should return soon after the dish arrives at the table to make sure everything is fine.

However, I will still give this place good marks for their upscale ambiance. But ambiance alone cannot sustain a restaurant. Ask any of the thousands of great looking restaurants that have closed over the decades.

Oh, and one last thing. The hot tea $1.50. Nuff said.

Maru
24250 Town Center Dr. #180
Valencia, CA 91355
(661) 290-2595
maruvalencia.com

After declaring that you should try rolls here in my last review of this place, I never did come back to review a roll. On this outing, we tried the Dragon Roll.

I

Dragon Roll - $13

The Dragon Roll is made from fresh water eel (unagi) over shrimp tempura and kaiware sprout roll with plenty of unagi sauce. It wasn’t the best unagi I’ve ever had but it was much better than the worst I’ve had and the price is reasonable. Overall, I’d rate this roll above average and tasty enough for even a picky sushi eater like me.

This place offers a bunch of other rolls to try. Good place for drinks and rolls.

Joy Mart Restaurant
Sake bar and sushi
137 Japanese Village Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 680-9868
Map

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed a reduction of posts here. The reason for this has been that I’ve been working on Palm WebOS games and a corresponding website mobigamedepot.com.

This new website will be the portal for the games that I will be developing and I will post some behind the scenes details about the development work here on Cochinoman for your reading pleasure.

For starters, why did I choose the Palm WebOS platform? When the iPhone first came out, I wanted to do development work for it but since I’m not a Mac user, there was that learning curve and the SDK was not available at first. Then before I realized, everybody and his brother was on the iPhone platform and it was too late to get in the game.

Fast forward 2 years and when the Palm WebOS was announced at CES last year, my interest was again peaked. I followed the SDK development closely and managed to get on the software developer program as an early developer.

The WebOS SDK has a lot of limitations, especially for real-time games, but it also makes it less likely that the big boys will be getting on this path. As it turns out, there is a new PDK that was announced at this year’s CES that allows for low level C/C++ coding and the big boys (e.g. EA) has come out with their 3D games for the WebOS.

This last move still doesn’t deter me from working on my games because the big budget EA games will have to sell for $7-$10 and I will target the below $2 market for my games. There’s no way that EA could sell their games for 99 cents and still make money because of their overhead in developing these heavy games.

My first released game is “Lunar Attack,” which is basically an upgraded “Missile Command” with more features. In the future, I will post about the decisions that were made regarding this first game.  The second game I am working on is a scrolling sprite based game that takes place in a Pyramid.

If you are thinking about developing games on any mobile platform, you may find the articles interesting.  Even if you are thinking about non-game development on a mobile device, you might find something interesting in there.

Tesla Motors has a showroom in West LA where I drive past sometimes dreaming about how I could obtain one in this lifetime. However, until this week, I’ve never seen one in the wild.

I was driving on the 10 Fwy and I see a sports car coming fast on my left. I tried to figure out what it was and I wasn’t able to recognize it. I got my camera out and managed to get a few blurry shots of the Tesla in the wild.

To add insult to injury, it even had the car pool lane sticker on it.  Damn.

Alth0ugh my first review of Honda Ya was not glowing, the more I go to this place, the better I like it. My current favorite plate there is their “Assorted 5 Kind Yakitori” for $9.95. It’s yummy and tastes even better because of the great price. The chicken leg meat is the best.

Left to right: Meat balls, chicken leg meat, chicken wings, asparagus w/ bacon, chicken white meat

Honda Ya
333 South Alameda #314, Los Angeles, CA 90013
(213) 625-1184
Tuesday-Sunday: 5:30pm to 1am (last call about 12:30am)
Map

Since the last release of my WordPress plugin Splashscreen version 0.20, there’s been many requests for new features. You may also want to read the original post for version 0.10 for completeness.  One of the most requested feature was to allow search engine bots to get the blog content so they can traverse the website properly.

Ask and ye shall receive… version 0.30 of the plugin, that is.

To control the new feature, I’ve added some new options in the settings as shown below:

Click on image for large version

Enable Overlay:
When this option is enabled, the splash screen will be an overlay on top of the content of your blog page. In other words, your blog will still be there, but the splash screen will be on top of your page. This way, the search engine bot can still “see” your blog, even though your visitors cannot while the splash screen covers the contents.

If you turn this option off, you will get the non-overlay version of the splash screen which will NOT have your blog contents “under” the splash screen.  I kept this feature in the plugin for backward compatibility for people who are using it right now.

Overlay Opaque:
The new overlay splash screen is made up of a background and a dialog-type box with links, as shown below.

Click on image for large version

Normally, you would want the background to be opaque (cannot see-through) so this option should be enabled. However, for some bloggers, you may want to have the background transparent so that you can see a little of what is on your blog. Of course, this would not be a good idea for “adult” websites, but for people using this plugin for non-adult websites and wanting to force the users to agree to your “terms of service,” you might want to tease them with a preview of your blog.

Overlay Background Color:
This is the color of the background using normal CSS specifications (e.g. #000000, rgb(0,0,0), black). If you don’t know what CSS colors are, see this article.
The rest of the options are the same as in version 0.20. However, if you are using the new “overlay” feature, you must use a new template. The default overlay template is called “splash-overlay.htm” as shown below:

<script type='text/javascript'>
function setsplash() {
   setCookie("splash", "1", "", "/");
}
</script>

<div style="left: 50%; top: 50%; position: relative; background-color: #F5F5F5; margin-top: -150px; margin-left: -300px;
 width: 600px; height: 300px; padding: 30px;">
 <center>
    <table border="0">
       <tr>
          <td colspan="2" align="center">
             <img src="<?php echo plugins_url('splashscreen/images/wordpress-logo.png'); ?>">
          </td>
       </tr>
   <tr>
      <td colspan="2" align="center">
         <script type="text/javascript">checkcookies();</SCRIPT>
            <h3>
               To enter this website, you must agree to the terms below.
            </h3>
         </td>
      </tr>
   <tr>
      <td colspan="2" width=100%>
         <FORM>
            <P><TEXTAREA style="font-size: 14px;" NAME="comments" COLS="70" ROWS="7" READONLY>By
 using this website, you agree to the Terms of Service below. This Terms of Service is a binding contract
between you and this website. If you do not agree with any of these terms, please exit this website.

TERMS OF SERVICE:
[enter terms of service here]
With more text here, there will be a scroll bar on the right to allow the user to scrool to read the terms of service.

If he/she does not wish to read the entire contents, they may simply agree without reading. Even if they do
 so, they are agreeing to the terms of service by clicking on "Agree".</TEXTAREA><br />
            </td>
         </tr>
         <tr>
            <td align="left"><h2><a onclick="setsplash();showcontent();return false;" href="#"><font color="green"><b>I Agree</b></font></a></h2></td>
            <td align="right"><h2><a href="http://google.com/"><font color="red"><b>I Do Not Agre</b></font></a></h2></td>
         </tr>
      </table>
   </center>
</div>

Changing the template:
Be very careful about what you change in the template. My recommendation is to copy it to a new filename (e.g. mytemplate.htm) then start editing it. Do NOT change the original template because if you break it, you may not be able to get back to a working version.

• The first item of interest in the template is near the top and is highlighted in green. If your website re-directs www.mywebsite.com to mywebsite.com, you will want to change the line to:

setCookie("splash", "1", "", "/", ".yourdomainname.com");

Notice that you must have the dot (“.”) before your domain name.

• Next, the blue  highlighted item is the WordPress logo that appears in the overlay dialog box.  You can replace it with your own logo and enter the name there. Place your logo file inside the subdirectory “images” inside the splashscreen directory. If you don’t want any image, remove the entire “img” HTML.
• Finally, replace the yellow highlighted area with your own terms of service or whatever you want to display in the dialog box.

That’s it.

If you want to get fancy, you could change the size and look of the dialog box itself. This is left as an exercise for the student. One thing to keep in mind is that you need to center the dialog box properly.

Free Cool Feature:
While working on the new version of this plugin, I realized that if the underlining website is vertically long, the user could scroll down the page and not be able to see the dialog box. This can also happen if the URL is using a bookmark down the page (e.g. pointing to a comment near the bottom of the page).  At first, I tried forcing the page to automatically scroll up to the top. After a lot of work, I got this to work but when the overlay goes away, you are looking at the top of the page instead of what you wanted to see.

The solution was to copy the technique that terrible SPAM boxes use to follow you when you scroll. Basically, when you scroll, the javascript code will automatically move the dialog box so that it’s ALWAYS centered on the screen.  This also works for bookmarks in the URL.  Nice feature if I do say so myself.

You can see the new version of the plugin in action at alexisbreeze.com. This website is “adult” so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Until I get this up on the WordPress plugin page, you can get it here.

Update December 5, 2009:
I took some code out of the template and created version 0.31. This should make modification of the template a little easier.

Update July 12, 2010:
A helpful commenter told me that the templates were missing a closing /FORM, which have been added in version 0.40.

Update August 24, 2010:
Yet another commenter has found that the adult template was not updated for this new version. This has been corrected in version 0.41.

In case you missed it, see my first review of this strange no-sign Mori Sushi restaurant.

This time, we decided to try the 8 course meal as shown below. Click on the thumbnails to see a bigger version of the picture.

As you can see, as last time, there were a lot of yummy plates to try. The Hiyayako appeared to be home made tofu, which would be surprising at any other restaurant but not here. When the waitress brought out the second dish, she said that it was considered a “delicacy” in Japan. Then, she giggled the same way the Joker laughs on Batman. Scary stuff. The desert was the same as the last time so I didn’t take a picture of it.

At the end, we both agreed that 8 courses was too much and decided to stick with 6 courses for next time.

Mori Sushi
11500 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90064
(310) 479-3939
morisushi.org

My friend David sent me this picture of the menu from a Japanese restaurant called Taiko, in Manhattan Beach.

On a hot day, there’s nothing better than some cold Bukkake noodles. Yummmmm.

Although the word “Bukkake” has become known for it’s use in pr0n, it’s a Japanese word that means “strong pouring of liquid,” and apparently, in Japan, there are noodle dishes where such pouring is done.  Nonetheless, I don’t think I’ll be trying this dish anytime soon.