I attended JP_Stripes Connect 2026 at Information Science College in Yokohama on Saturday, August 1. The theme was “Find out how to monetize in the AI era.” The event had two tracks: main and tech. I’m basically a tech-side guy, but this time I stayed on the main track throughout the event.
I couldn’t arrive at the venue in time for the beginning of the keynote session by Daniel Heffernan, but I was still able to learn how frequently prices are changing these days. One well-known online service changed its pricing ten times within a single year. The session explained that pricing is a product（価格はプロダクトである）and encouraged companies to keep iterating on it based on what they learn.
Recently I learned about PTA: Plain Text Accounting. You can record income and expenses with plain text, gather data programmatically, then calculate and visualize. Ledger, hledger, and Beancount are software tools that provide a way to express double-entry bookkeeping in plain text. They use similar plain-text DSLs, though Beancount is not directly source-compatible with the others.
Here’s a small example of Beancount syntax (Assume these accounts were opened earlier):
2026-08-03 * "Employer" "Salary" Assets:Bank 300000 JPY Income:Salary 2026-08-04 * "Cafe" "Coffee" Expenses:Food 600 JPY Assets:Bank What does it mean PTA provides a shared style of notation for expressing accounting activities in plain text. This is handy common knowledge in case we want to write down transactions quickly in a text file or even on a whiteboard. Similar to the benefit of UML.
Rails provides abstractions for signing and encrypting data. If a Rails app needs to authenticate some data, (let’s say, to generate a magic link sent by email) Rails.application.message_verifier provides a convenient solution. This application-level interface was added in Rails 4.1, so it is already a mature Rails feature.
The examples below wrap an opaque login token that is associated with a user in the payload.
login_token = SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64(32) # => "2LfzCleMQtoNLYij4Ah_y5M80LwXbj3yPqeojsVvRBY" verifier = Rails.application.message_verifier(:magic_link) signed_message = verifier.generate( { token: login_token }, expires_in: 30.minutes, purpose: :login ) # => "eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsiZGF0YSI6eyJ0b2tlbiI6IjJMZnpDbGVNUXRvTkxZaWo0QWhfeTVNODBMd1hiajN5UHFlb2pzVnZSQlkifSwiZXhwIjoiMjAyNi0wNy0yNlQxMjowODozNS42ODBaIiwicHVyIjoibG9naW4ifX0=--3f9948547736a1650e31c35c6c7b38f518785380" payload = verifier.verify(signed_message, purpose: :login) # => {"token" => "2LfzCleMQtoNLYij4Ah_y5M80LwXbj3yPqeojsVvRBY"} Rails.application.message_verifier is a turnkey solution for signing and verifying application data with a MAC-based mechanism. It supports expiration and purpose scoping outside of the data itself. The secret is derived from secret_key_base.
What is an MOC An MOC (Map of Content) is a curated cluster of related information around some area of interest.
At a glance, it may look like just an index of notes. But an MOC is not only for organizing scattered notes, but also provides an opportunity to think, deepen your understanding, discover connections, and distill ideas. Building and maintaining an MOC is therefore part of the value it provides.
I am creating a tiny tool to explore relationships between two words utilizing WordNet: Astrolabe. It is intended to help ESL learners like me to grasp a clearer picture of a particular sense by recognizing the relationships between two words that have something in common.
Motivation I have been trying to extend my vocabulary with Anki for years, little by little. It is an awesome tool to learn new words. I have learned about 6,000 words with it. Thanks to that, now it is much easier to read books and discuss diverse topics in English.
