Developers Revolt

Nengun Performance has launched a new Yahoo Japan Auctions website, enabling searching and direct bidding on any car related part all in English.

The Yahoo Japan Auctions feature the largest range of aftermarket Japanese car parts anywhere in the world. However, the sellers on the auctions do not ship internationaly and the navigation and descriptions are all in Japanese.

Nengun Performance has done the hard work, you can now find parts by searching categories, brand names or by vehicle, all in English. You can then bid on any auction and have it shipped via airfreight to your door.

My friend Ilia has been working hard on a new website called Fiction This and he is almost ready to launch. If you are interested in getting involved, even as an initial tester send them an email!

Fiction This is a unique social site that allows you to share ideas and have unbiased input into creating a published work of quality fiction. Any creative writing has three core elements: the plot, the characters and the setting. Together with other users of fictionthis from around the world, you have total control in forming the story.

Read about Celebrity Sexy Teeth and discover the full story!

I have been speaking to our old friend Joe Matthew, who I used to work with. He has been very busy working in the online marketing, search industries. He has been focussing on online conversions, that is converting a visitor to a buyer - much like the focus in a retail store. I wish him well in a challenging and ever changing industry. 

Joe has also recently just also launched an affiliate system of which I am quite interested in. An affiliate program is designed to use the word of mouth concept in a way that can be beneficial for both the advertiser and the person making the recommendation. So if you are looking at affiliate programs or just curious, check out Joes affiliate program on his website - and if you have any further questions ping him an email or instant messenger - I'm sure he'll be happy to help.

I never knew the world of Golf was so technologically driven until speaking to my Codswallop friend Christian. It seems that the world of advanced materials has had major influence in golf club design and development.

Take the Titanium Hybrid Golf Club, this has been designed to provide the length for irons that was previously only realised with a driver. Alpha Golf has released the club and it recently achieved a top 10 finish in the Champions Tour.

My next golf club purchase might have to be a titanium model to match my titanium hybrid exhaust system from Greddy - can you get a blue flare with a golf club?

Just imagine being in a meeting with yet another consultant, marketing drone or salesman, one of those meetings you secretly want to run out screaming due to the pure horror flowing from their mouths. Now there is an alternative fantasy - Mr T. to the rescue - eating the consultants brain.

Bring clarity not chaos to the data center, intelligence is in the controller and not in the network, suckah!

If you are looking for wheels there is a huge selection, the best of all coming from genuine Japanese manufacturers, checkout a small selection of JDM rims below. Just imagine the improved look of your high performance import vehicle with these quality wheels.

The Weds SA70 BLC are my current favourite wheels and though only available in cast may be the next purchase for my Skyline. These wheels feature an awesome finish that is not chrome, but shiny and dark.

The blue border highlights the colour and would go very well with a silver car and in a large size with large brake calipers behind them, they would nicely show off your aftermarket brakes.

Looking for wheels for your Suzuki? Such as a Suzuki Swift, Vitara and others. These may be the wheels you have been looking for. Lightweight, manufactured by Speedline and featuring the Suzuki Sport brand they are sure to match your modified Suzuki.

And everybody loves a modified, lowered white car with white wheels to match. Its one of the few colours you can combine for the instantly recognisable modified look.

Looking for a lightweight high performance rim, with a unique appearance that matches your vehicle in 18, 19 and large sizes? The Volk Racing CE28N may be the answer. As featured on a number of JDM vehicles I have recently seen, the rim really goes well with a modified GTR - in 19" size the wheels really fill the guards and helps to stand out in the crowd - I mean they almost look like pro racing JDM rims.

Available with the titanium lip finish. The Rays Engineering Gram Lights 57S Pro JDM rims are sure to be a favourite with newly modified vehicles. As featured on a number of drift and show vehicles, the titanium lip option at relatively small additional cost proves a unique appearance for showing off.

As I saw at the recent Auto Salon 2007 Semi Final in Melbourne, the additional of the titanium rim to your GTR helps to stand out, to men and women alike, amongst a crowd of other modified vehicles

The very popular Nismo LM GT4 rims have been featured on countless high performance Nismo vehicles. Such as Nissan Skyline R34 GTR's, the 350Z and a number of other factory vehicles. With its ultimate light weight, manufactured by Rays Engineering, the LM GT4 are the wheels for your GTR.

So if you are looking for wheels for your JDM import vehicle or even your domestic vehicle, the range of JDM rims available are broad and numerous, so take your time look for the best option and make sure you purchase a high quality wheel that will last.

The new Nissan R35 GTR deserves an entire blog, but I thought I would put up at least a few photos and you can search the web for more details. The first Nismo GTR entry in 4 years will make its public debut at the 2007 Nismo Festival, wish I could be there!!

November is the month for insurance renewal for my highly modified Nissan Skyline. Car insurance for modified high performance import vehicles is quite different to the everyday car, you cannot simply ring up the major players such as AAMI, Allianz, GIO, etc and get a quote - they simply won't insure you.

I am currently with Just Car Insurance and have also been with Famous Classic Car Insurance, from my past experienced Shannons is not interested unless you are over 25 and in previous years not interested if you had an import vehicle. Though with their recent advertising during the V8 Supercars and other motorsport they appear to have repositioned their car insurance to also handle motorcycles and modified import vehicles.

So the question is, do I simply renew my Rating 1, Full Comprehensive insurance for $1200/year or shop around the competitors to get a better deal. Car insurance is a funny business and I would hope that with not a single fine or accident I can push for lower premium.

The following images were taken from the Urban Racer website when covering the NOPI LA. The Mopar Dodge Viper drift car was driven by Chris Cook who was taken away from paramedics but later released with no injuries. 

Every now and again you find an Open Source tool that you can add to your short list of infrastructure management tools. These include tools such as nagios, rrdtool and web based interfaces such as cacti but up until now there was no killer disk based backup tools.

So for the past few years I have been using rdiff-backup and wrote my own rsync, hardlink pool, incremental backup system. Due to time constraints though I had never been able to develop this into everything I wanted it to be. But thanks to open source someone did have the time and developed BackupPC.

Though it has a bit of a daggy name it features:

• Single compress hash pool - one compressed copy of one file for many hosts
• Full and incremental backup capabilities
• Can handle unreliable hosts, goes looking for your laptop and if it finds it and you haven’t been backed up for a while it will run a backup - no interaction required.
• Email you if a host hasn’t been backed up for a while and there is also a nagios plugin
• Great web interface for configuration and host-based user rights to enable web based restores by downloading the file over the web or pushing it back to the host
• Perl based, but the code looks quite good and its separated into a number of tools in the backend. Runs as a daemon waking up every set time period to go looking for things to do.
• Supports rsync over ssh, rsyncd, smb for Windows hosts, tar, etc.
• Completely rock solid operation now on over 15 hosts with a quite staggeringly small amount of disk space required.

In recent times I have rarely added to my toolkit for server management, but this one is a keeper. My only suggestion would be to reposition their target audience, the tool works fantastic for servers as well as for standard PC’s and notebooks.

If you have some linux skills and are not 100% satisfied that your machines are backed up 100% of the time, give yourself some time to get up to speed with BackupPC it will be well worth it.

I was reading Coreys post about the new BMW M3 which features a V8 and fairly bland interior and not much of a revamp on the exterior. To be honest I have to agree it does look to be a bit of a letdown, we have been waiting for the release of this car for some 3 years or so, but I can take a guess it will have an awesome sound and the driving experience will be even better.

However, what has just been announced by BMW seems even more exciting to me. Imagine a 3L sequential twin turbo two door coupe that develops 220kw with 400NM of torque that can push the car to a 0-100 in 5.3 seconds and can offer fuel economy under 10L/100km. Now think of that for only $60k and from Europe. That is the features for the new BMW 135i and for me the first BMW that I would actually start to consider. Available early in 2008, I think this one is going to be very popular - bring on the upgrade parts.

We have setup the Wormly monitoring service for our new virtual server. This enables monitoring from a completely external source, with multiple locations around the world. The advantage being that we are alerted of network downtime as well as simple server downtime. We chose Wormly because they have a nice web 2.0 style interface and keep it simple with a reasonable pricing model for the alerting.

The other monitoring services were ridiculously expensive for what is simply a nice interface to open source tools such as nagios, catci, rrdtool and the like. I think Scott might be seeing ideas for a nice cash cow on an ongoing basis..

In any case, if you are interested in Wormly, use my Wormly referal link to subsidise our usage.. haha

I spend a fair amount of time searching for Japanese automotive aftermarket performance parts and due to the large amount of websites out there selling such parts it can often prove to be very difficult. The problem is that the Japanese based websites often rank quite low for what you are searching for and it can take quite a few pages to actually find the official product information.

Therefore, with the Google Co-Op custom search engine I have created a new website, the JDM Search Network. The aim of this site is to enable easy searching of just the JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) aftermarket suppliers and manufacturers websites to more easily find the actual site and details that you are after. I have some work to do to finalise the Javascript and the look and feel to fully integrate it, but its a start.

I will also be posting product news that I come across in my travel and have added a start featuring some new products from HKS, Greddy and ARC. New products are released fairly often so I will do my best to keep this updated! If you have any suggestions or comments please post a comment to this post, I’d be happy to hear it.

So when you are searching for product information please check out the JDM Search Network and hopefully it’ll make it easier to find what you are looking for!

PS. I need a logo if anyone has some spare time…

The Apexi PowerFC is a complete ECU replacement for a large number of vehicles. It is recommended by a lot of mechanics and tuners for modified Japanese import cars in Australia, due to its ease of use, cost and easy ability to obtain. I have this ECU on my Skyline and in the hands of a great tuner it really works wonders, the difference really has to be experienced. I cannot recommend a good ECU and tune enough, even for a stock vehicle, it would definitely be my number one modification.

You can get more information from these sites:
Apexi PowerFC at Nengun Performance
Apexi PowerFC FAQ