yaean design shanghai: blog > articles from June, 2009

We don't see much graffiti in Shanghai. This is a protest about the knocking down of old buildings. It's on Fuxing Lu near Baoqing Lu. It has been painted over three times. Keeps coming back.

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Stereo acoustic guitars from Paul Kinny - site well worth a visit lots of lovely instruments. More at Gizmag.

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Classic review from The Times Archive of The Beatles.

…one gets the impression they think simultaneously of harmony and melody…

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Interesting piece on CNN about the army of volunteers in China translating content in near realtime:

More experienced translators are given so-called "zero day" shows -- highly popular programs, like "Prison Break," that are recorded and uploaded by someone living abroad to a special FTP site immediately after the program. Meanwhile, back in China, a team is on standby, ready to download and subtitle the show as fast as they can for Chinese fans to watch online -- and to see if they can beat rival translation gangs.

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The Guardian set up a Django site to crowdsource analysis of the released (and redacted) MPs expenses claims. The Nieman Journalism Lab has a good piece on the lessons learned.

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TopGear do an excellent extreme road test of a Ford Fiesta (embedded below from YouTube). But take a look at the above still from the in studio intro. It's back to the 80s New Romantics. Anyone remember The Tube?

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Google asked people in Times Square: "What is a browser?" Oh dear.

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This won't mean much if you weren't in to computers in the UK in the 80s and 90s. If you were, however, you'll probably be sad to note that PCW - the magazine we all used to read - has ceased publication. Guy Kewney has written an obit for TheReg and here's another from former editor Gordon Liang. Finally, here's a picture of the first issue. Read 'em and weep.

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When I first set up this site back in 2005 I looked around for a blogging platform and chose ExpressionEngine. After years of bad experience with PHP (it's such a mess) I was relucant to use a platform based on PHP but EE is a good and well thought out system. (BTW EE is about to release version 2.) So there we were.

Always in the back of my mind was: "You know how to do this. Why don't you write your own system?" Well life and business got in the way and I never got around to it.…

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