simonb.com: blog > articles from 2009

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Ah, those five minute tasks that end up taking the whole day... So, the kids got the above wind-up, light-up, musical toy for Christmas. Perfect for a little Christmas Day video I thought. And while I'm at it, lets make it with HTML5 video tags. That should be quick and easy... Here's what I discovered.

Dive Into HTML5 is a good resource

Firefox does not support MP4 files because of licensing issues. Safari/Chrome does not support OGG because…

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The Americans blow in like a whirlwind. Loud. Taking up space. One of them can speak Chinese. We know because he feels the need to give his order in the loud baritone of Americans abroad. In an intense loud, fast exchange we learn of their latest business venture, the gossip, who’s a PITA and a comparison of Starbucks to McDonalds. Then, whoosh! They’re gone. Silence. The insipid jazz and disconnected prose drip from the walls and creep into the remaining vacuum. Equilibrium is restored. Peace.

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Pingdom have put together a nice gallery of pictures of early computers starting from 1944 (Colossus and Z4) to 1964 (Univac 1108). Lovely.

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In case anyone else is wondering why their utf-8 email is not coming out as it should when using Django...

Non-ascii character sets are a major pain when writing code to send email. They're not impossible by a long way but they do take some digging to figure out why your nicely formated utf-8 Chinese is coming out in garbled characters, tracing code, examing email headers... Oh the joy. So it does not help when your framework of choice (Django) decides it knows that you really want a certain type of text encoding, even if you are writing your own…

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I read on t'Interwebs that there is a Christmas tree made of beer bottles down on Nanjing Lu. So I set off down Huaihai Lu and up Nanjing Lu snapping the Christmas decorations outside of the malls. You can see the results over on the yaean web site. Above is a traditional golden rose from Plaza 66.

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SVT (the Swedish public service broadcaster) have a nice little iPhone app which they're waiting (of course) for Apple to approve. To help the processs along they've made a site called dearstevejobs.com. Good luck to 'em.

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Sixty Cafe Shanghai

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Snapped in Parkson's basement on the corner of Shanxi and Huaihai.

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Tools are not everyones cup of tea. You either like taking things apart and building things or you don't. I've spent hours looking at tool catalogues. "Oh there's a tool for that," you think to yourself. Usually too late after struggling with the Haynes Book Of Lies and giving up. Countless hours spent with the Capri manual, endless cups of tea in a freezing garage. Ah, those were the days before t'Internet. Now we can browse tools we can't afford online. There's even tool blogs. There are a few DIY stores in Shanghai, though not much of a DIY…

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In 1983 Steve Jobs in a characteristically brilliant speech introduced the Mac as the solution to IBM's dominance in the PC industry. "IBM wants it all." He says a few times. A clip of the speech is available on YouTube (embedded below):

This speech was also the unveiling of the legendary 1984 Mac ad. Shot by Ridely Scott for the agency Chiat/Day. It won numerous awards despite only being officially shown on TV once during the superbowl. Here it is (YouTube):

Fast forward a quarter of a century and replace the PC industry with the music industry and IBM…

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