Lu Guang's award winning "Pollution in China" contains beautiful and disturbing pictures. The exhibition site is all in Chinese but the pictures speak for themselves. Well worth a look. English coverage is on China Hush.
Ommwriter is a new full screen editor for the Mac. What makes this one different is that it includes ambient sounds (think new age relaxation and aromatherapy), very subtle keyboard sounds and interesting backgrounds. In my brief test, this post was written in ommwriter, it works well but I did find the ambient music to be too loud relative to the keyboard fx. It would be nice to have a control on the relative levels. But this is about minimalism (the fewer controls the better) and it's only a beta release. It's a very interesting project and it's good to…
If you do any flying inside of China you get used to flight delays. So you sit on uncomfortable chairs in drafty waiting halls hoping your laptop battery will last and await the coming announcement with news of your flight. With a classic piece of circular logic the announcement usually goes something like: "The flight is delayed due to an aircraft delay." In general the question is not if the flight is delayed, it is by how much. There's a startup called FlightCaster which, in the US at least, claims to accurately predict flight delays early. I'm planning a similar…
A video appeared on YouTube recently (embedded below) of diners in a restaurant discussing the dish in front of them. The diners are speaking Cantonese so I assume they are in Guangdong or somewhere down south. I don't speak Cantonese but I can imagine what they're saying. Now, there's nothing unusual about diners discussing what they're eating except that in this case what they're eating is alive. Or at least appears to be alive. There has been the predictable wave of outrage on the net about this video. I am not going to judge. I've been in China too long…
Like many starting out in websites and databases my first experience was with MySQL. I had no choice since the hosting service I used only offered MySQL. This is still the case for a lot of hosting - you get the standard LAMP stack and nothing more. I had read on the web that everyone is using MySQL, so how bad could it be? I was forgetting the maxim that quality and popularity are inversely proportional. BTW: it's not really popularity in this case - it's the most users - think Windoze.
Anyhoo, I struggled through the nightmare that is…
Autumn comes to Shanghai. Decides it's too cold. Leaves again.
There's a lot of trees in Shanghai. We tend not to notice but they're there, especially down town in the former French Concession. And trees mean leaves. Lots of leaves. All falling at the same time. A couple of weeks ago it was hot and bright sunshine in Shanghai, today temperatures approach zero. We seem to skip over Autumn here. It's hot then suddenly it's bitterly cold and we're digging out our big winter coats and wishing the builders in Shanghai would discover insulation and draft proofing. Over a period…
