China Musings

Alright, i know it has been a long time. But I’m back. I actually got 2 emails from people besides my mother who watched these podcasts, so I have been meaning to continue, but a rather busy few weeks of work and I just haven’t had the time to sit down at the computer. Well, actually all I do is sit at the computer, but anyway… In addition, now that I have my new mac, I really wanted to do something other than paste some clips together.

So here, it is: a new, iMovied, video podcast.

This was taken in the morning before I left for HK on that ill-fated trip. It is footage of a local jook joint (jook is the cantonese pronunciation, mandarin is zhou 粥) that must have been in business for several years. It might look kinda sketchy, but this place is solid, and the food is good. They only make jook, dumplings (jiaozi), and changfen, typical cantonese breakfast/snack foods.

So everyone, practice your cantonese:
“mmm goy, aw you yut go show yo jook”

“I want one lean meat rice porrige, please.”

CM #22 Breakfast at Cheung’s

I have been working with PHP for a long time now, and Java for longer, and Ruby for about a week. Today, I had to implement a very small script in a jsp page without my library of helper functions. This script in php would have been easy in about 10 lines. In Ruby, 5 lines. In java, it was about 35. I just had to post the most obvious example of Java obtuseness:

public int compare(Object left, Object right) {
return ((Long)((HashMap)left)
.get("timestamp")).compareTo((Long)((HashMap)right)
.get("timestamp"));
}

The context is trying to sort an array of hashes according to one of the entries which was a long. Sounds simple right? Not in java.

When I first started writing PHP scripts, I cursed the fact that there was no typing and I always got mixed up in what was what. But now, I really see the benefits of a loosely typed language!

I suffered the rather dubious humility of being stopped at the entry point to China yesterday after a 2 hours train ride from HK.

The guy said, sorry, there’s no visa.

What? But I have plenty of time left…

Nope, just this one, which ran out March 30.

Oh no…

The following was recorded in my detention room, within the border zone at the Guangzhou east station.

CM21 - Caught!

Update:
I may have been a little bit melodramatic. I made it though a day in HK without incident, although I had no change of clothes and I was running out of HK money. Well, this photo is a good summery of the incident, 4 train tickets on the GZ-HK through train. Almost $100US for this trip… an expensive mistake.

I just received a new 1.83Ghz Macbook Pro from my new empoloyer. I am in HK right now, and this is soooo nice. I’m still in the store, writing this about 2 minutes after opening.

After a really long development period, cameraitacina.com is live and public. This was not an easy project, and has given me lots to learn during the development phases. I re-wrote the AJAX part using the Protoype Javascript library, which is awesome by the way, and I had to add a cache because it was totally crashing the server under the load. The Chamber of Commerce gets lots of visitors, this site is my highest traffic project by far.

Aside from creating a huge WP theme for the site, we also implemented 3 searchable databases, streamlined the multi-lingual plugin, added an event registration feature, and integrated the photo gallery. It was a lot of work, but I am pretty happy with the result.