Buying Dictionaries in Hong Kong

 Travel  1 Response »
Feb 242009
 

My son is learn­ing Man­dar­in, so when I went to Hong Kong recently, I asked what I should bring back. His teach­er sug­ges­ted a Man­dar­in dic­tion­ary; it soun­ded like a good idea to me. Find­ing one to buy ended up being more of an odys­sey than I expec­ted though.

The hotel had an Eng­lish-lan­guage Yel­low Pages, which seemed like a good place to start. Bad assump­tion — there was a cat­egory for Book­bind­ers, and one for Books — Whole­salers, but no retail books. Even if they had had a list­ing there, it’s doubt­ful it would have done me much good. It turns out that the Hong Kong Yel­low Pages lists addresses in terms of the name of the build­ing the store is in (e.g., Prosper Com­mer­cial Build­ing, or Tai Sang Build­ing), with no hint as to which part of Hong Kong it might be in, let alone which num­ber on which street. I guess they expect people to know which build­ing is where.

One of my tour­ist guides men­tioned that Dymocks (which I always think of as an Aus­trali­an store) is near the Star Ferry ter­min­al, so after the required trip on the ferry (well worth it), I stopped off there. They did­n’t have any Man­dar­in dic­tion­ar­ies, so I bought anoth­er book and asked the cash­ier where to find one. Her answer? “Com­mer­cial Books, on Sug­ar Street, ask when you get there, every­one knows it”. So I went down to Sug­ar Street, walked along it twice, up and down stairs at the Com­mer­cial Build­ing, before find­ing the actu­al book­store is called “Com­mer­cial Press” and it’s on Yee Wo Street, near the inter­sec­tion to Sug­ar Street. Close enough I guess, I did find it eventually.

Of course, I don’t speak any Chinese lan­guage, so I needed help to find what I wanted. I com­pletely bam­boozled the first book­store employ­ee I asked for help, she could­n’t believe she under­stood what I was ask­ing for and asked someone else for help. They showed me lots of books on learn­ing Man­dar­in, and Eng­lish-Man­dar­in dic­tion­ar­ies, before finally believ­ing that maybe I did want a Man­dar­in dic­tion­ary with no Eng­lish and show­ing me those. 

As an aside: if you see a book in Hong Kong with a large num­ber on a stick­er on it, the num­ber is the per­cent­age of the nor­mal price that you pay, not the final price. So if the stick­er says “85”, you don’t pay $HKD 85, you pay 85% of the nor­mal price (which is on the back of the book). This can, ahem, be quite a dif­fer­ent price.

Domain Registrars?

 Technology  16 Responses »
Feb 232009
 

I’m think­ing of regis­ter­ing a couple of domains. GoDaddy annoyed me with their lame Super­bowl ads, and their regis­tra­tion sys­tem is equally annoy­ing (far too many screens, all with options I have com­pletely zero interest in). Does any­one have recom­mend­a­tions for good basic regis­trars? What I want is basic .com|.org|.net, as well as .ca (sep­ar­ate regis­trars for all of these are ok). I don’t expect to host at the same place I register, so I don’t care about their host­ing pack­ages or email setups. A reas­on­able price and a straight­for­ward way to set the DNS serv­ers is what I’m look­ing for. Remind­ers of regis­tra­tions that are about to expire come in handy as well.

BTW, please don’t flame regis­trars you don’t like in the com­ments. Just tell me the ones you do like (adding a sen­tence on why would be help­ful). Intem­per­ate com­ments run the risk of being deleted.

Northern Voice 2009

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Feb 222009
 

I’m slowly recov­er­ing from the whirl­wind that was North­ern Voice this year (I’m one of the organ­isers). All our hard work paid off, we had the usu­al last-minute glitches but every­one seemed to enjoy them­selves, to make new friends and con­tacts, to learn new things, to dis­cuss issues they care about, and to have fun. 

On Fri­day I spent most of my time on the regis­tra­tion desk, apart from intro­du­cing the con­fer­ence and listen­ing to Stew­art But­ter­field’s key­note. Sat­urday was a little dif­fer­ent; I made it to lots of ses­sions (both key­notes, Aid­rie’s pan­el, my own pan­el, bits and pieces of oth­er talks/panels). What I took away from all was a sense of com­munity, a sense that the people attend­ing are truly inter­ested in shar­ing their know­ledge and exper­i­ences, in being genu­ine. Even though some blog from a purely per­son­al stand­point, and oth­ers from a pro­fes­sion­al, there was dis­cus­sion about how to be genu­ine, how to show who you are with­in whatever lim­its you find reas­on­able (some people blog about their chil­dren, oth­ers don’t, for example). I’m look­ing for­ward to watch­ing the videos of the ses­sions I did­n’t man­age to make it to; we only had three ses­sions con­cur­rently but lots of good top­ics. The energy in the whole space was amazing. 

Sat­urday night after we got home, we found Van­couver was in the top ten for two trend­ing Twit­ter top­ics: North­ern Voice and the Canucks. As someone tweeted (sorry, can­’t find it now), that really shows that Van­couver people under­stand how to use these tools for com­mu­nic­a­tion. I feel proud, as one of the organ­isers of North­ern Voice, to do my little bit to help, by giv­ing people who care about these things an oppor­tun­ity to get togeth­er and dis­cuss them. And it’s fun — at a Ser­i­ous Con­fer­ence we could nev­er get away with put­ting out a bas­ket of yarn and telling people to make their own lan­yards (yes, we had some of those white elast­ic things for those uncom­fort­able with the notion). Lots of people grav­it­ated to the bright fluffy stuff, or used mul­tiple strands, cre­at­ing their own bit of wear­able art. And then there was the Moose col­lec­tion — Rahel Bail­lie donated her col­lec­tion of moose as a fund-raiser for the con­fer­ence, so we had these moose statues and ties and kitsch spread over one corner of the regis­tra­tion desk. Again, not some­thing you can do at a Ser­i­ous Con­fer­ence. Which does­n’t mean to say we did­n’t talk about ser­i­ous top­ics, there were lots of those, and lots of dis­cus­sion about them. 

I’m already look­ing for­ward to next year’s North­ern Voice.

Hong Kong Impressions

 Travel  2 Responses »
Feb 172009
 

Tim had a busi­ness trip to Hong Kong, and since I’m cur­rently under­em­ployed, I thought I’d tag along. It was only for a couple of days, which is a shame giv­en how much there is to and see in Hong Kong. It was also my first trip.

First impres­sions are that Hong Kong is clean and very organ­ised. You arrive at the spark­ling new air­port, right out­side the arrival doors there’s a booth to sell tick­ets to the train (if you’re doing this, get the trav­el­ler pass that cov­ers the MTR and the train trip, it’s very con­veni­ent), the train is on the same level as the arrivals hall and whisks you into Hong Kong, to be met by a shuttle bus that takes you to your hotel. All very use­ful for the jet­lagged trav­el­ler (and in my case, one with a bad cold to boot). The only oddity was being told to take off my hat in the air­port for what looked like a cam­era and was likely a thermal imager (after­math of the SARS out­break, one suspects).

The shuttle to the air­port drove along some of the main roads in Cent­ral, and my first impres­sion was how much like Singa­pore it looked. Lots of traffic, tall shiny build­ings with lots of glass, con­crete over­passes over the roads, inter­spersed with palm trees and oth­er vegetation.

Walk­ing around Wan Chai the morn­ing was a little dif­fer­ent — there were no palm trees there, although there’s still the same crazy traffic. I walked along Gloucester Road to the beat of an alarm that every­one ignored, walk­ing by gleam­ing bath­room fix­ture com­pan­ies and jumbled hard­ware com­pan­ies, over to Vic­tor­ia Park with people walk­ing around slowly, stretch­ing as they go, and then back along Hen­nessy Road, one of the main shop­ping streets on Hong Kong Island. The oddest thing to me was that I was taller than many people on the streets, both men and women. 

This part of Hong Kong is remin­is­cent not only of Singa­pore, but of New York, Lon­don, and almost every Chin­atown I’ve been to. Chinese herb­al­ist shops jostle with glob­al names (in par­tic­u­lar Star­bucks and McDon­alds, but also well-known cloth­ing and phone com­pan­ies), the people mostly speak at least one Chinese lan­guage as well as Eng­lish, the Eng­lish is accen­ted with UK pro­nun­ci­ation. They drive on the left, and mostly walk on the right like the Eng­lish do. 

At lunch­time I headed back to the hotel and dis­covered the ped­es­tri­an over­pass sys­tem. A bit quick­er than the streets, and a lot safer than try­ing to cross the roads. It was also notice­able that the people using the over­passes (which lead through shop­ping centres and hotel lob­bies) were, on aver­age, taller, bet­ter-fed, and much more expens­ively dressed than those walk­ing on the streets below. The typ­ic­al busi­ness appar­el seems to be dark suits, for both men and women. Pin­stripes seem to be con­sidered flashy.

Hong Kong is intense. I walked through much of Wan Chai, Cent­ral, Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok, just look­ing at things and absorb­ing the atmo­sphere. I saw lots of obvi­ously poor people, but few home­less people and the only beg­gars I saw were in the tour­ist areas of Tsim Sha Tsui. I marveled at the mid-levels escal­at­or sys­tem, and at how thin all those build­ings look from the top of Vic­tor­ia Peak. You can tell that Hong Kong does not have a sig­ni­fic­ant risk of a large earth­quake by how close the apart­ment build­ings are build to each oth­er, and how tall they’re built, even on the reclaimed land. The build­ings on the mid-levels look like they’d bang into each oth­er when sway­ing in a big quake.

I want to go back and see more.

OpenSolaris Hostname on DHCP

 Technology  No Responses »
Feb 172009
 

By default, OpenSol­ar­is does­n’t broad­cast the host­name on the loc­al net­work, just the IP address. To rec­ti­fy this, find out what net­work inter­face you have (often nge0) by run­ning ifconfig -a. It’ll be the one with the IP address giv­en by the router (i.e., not 127.0.0.1).

Then, as root, edit the file /etc/default/dhcpagent. Find the line # CLIENT_ID=, delete the # to uncom­ment the line, and append your host­name. Find the line # REQUEST_HOSTNAME=no and change to REQUEST_HOSTNAME=yes. As doc­u­mented in that file, you also need to edit your /etc/hostname.<if> file, where <if> is your net­work inter­face (often nge0), adding the line inet hostname.

You can then either reboot the machine, or renew the DHCP lease on a con­sole on the machine (since it will dis­con­nect you from any SSH ses­sions). As root, first execute ifconfig <if> dhcp release to dis­card the cur­rent lease, then ifconfig <if> dhcp start to start DHCP on the inter­face again. Com­plete doc­u­ment­a­tion can be found through the man ifconfig and man dhcpagent pages.

Res­ult: I can see the host­name through the DHCP serv­er now, which I could­n’t before, but I still can­’t see it from the Win­dows box. So that’s anoth­er piece of the puzzle to track down.

Mind you, I need to give the Sol­ar­is box a stat­ic IP address for serving web­sites, so the DHCP nam­ing thing is moot. It would be nice to be able to ssh <hostname> from oth­er machines on the net­work rather than using the IP address though.

Victorian Bushfires

 General  2 Responses »
Feb 102009
 

Aus­trali­ans learned so much from the Ash Wed­nes­day bush­fires (I was liv­ing in Mel­bourne at the time and still vis­it as often as I can); there was a sense that although every­one knew bush­fires are capri­cious and dan­ger­ous, that there were things to do to mit­ig­ate them. That all changed this week.

The com­bin­a­tion of years of inad­equate rain­fall, record high tem­per­at­ures, and arson meant there was no escape, no hope for those caught in the bush­fire’s path. There are thou­sands of people out there fight­ing for people and anim­als, hop­ing and pray­ing for the rain that is the only solu­tion. The Aus­trali­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­por­a­tion Mel­bourne news site tells the story. 

I can­’t find the right words to express my sor­row and sym­path­ies for those who lost fam­ily and friends in this hor­rif­ic way. All I can do is point people who want to help to some of the appro­pri­ate ven­ues. There’s the Aus­trali­an Red Cross, the Aus­trali­an Sal­va­tion Army, and some organ­isa­tions to help with anim­als and wild­life.

 Older Entries
/* ]]> */