Lunesu

Accessing foreign sites from Beijing is pretty slow lately. In fact, today most sites load faster through VPN than without VPN, which is odd. I'm starting to believe the explanation given here (The Peking Duck) might be true.

(The Pula mentioned in the movie is a city in Croatia, but also a vulgar term in Romanian)

UPDATE: which reminds me...

Long time no post. My page is still being blocked (I might just as well resurrect that post about Tbet) and having to use VPN to write a post is just too much effort.

So why this post? I just had to share my latest brainchild with the rest of the world:

0xCEFAC1BA

Hover the mouse over the text to see its meaning. It's a hexadecimal value that when considered as words is Romanian for "WTF are you doing!". This turns out to be applicable because similar 'magic numbers' are often used to catch software bugs: when the the special value appears, the programmer knows something is wrong.

People who liked this also liked this.

partial class StaticAssert
{
byte a = RenderQuality.Low < RenderQuality.Medium ? 0 : -1;
byte b = RenderQuality.Medium < RenderQuality.High ? 0 : -1;
}

Apparently ?: is being folded at compile time, resulting in the following error if the constant expression before it evaluates to false:

Constant value '-1' cannot be converted to a 'byte'

I use partial class to prevent collisions with multiple static asserts in the same namespace, although you will still have to come up with unique variable names.

Also, I've hidden my post about [tee'bet] to see if that will lift the blockade of my site in China.

Or actually, this year it's Happy 牛 Year! 牛 is the character for ox/cow and is pronounced niu, yes, like new. And let me completely ruin the joke by underlining that it's the year of the ox. Get it? Funny, huh?

Anyway, enjoy the fireworks. We had the same kind of view from our apartment last night:



Oh, and my site got blocked! I have to use VPN to access it. Perhaps it's because of my previous post about Tibet, but I'm linking to their freakin' site for God's sake!

EDIT: click the thumbnail with the radicals to see the high resolution version.

To be considered legally literate, one has to know at least 1500 characters. Being able to read the newspaper requires one to recognize about 3000 characters. Common first thought: how can you ever remember 3000 unique characters?!

Recognizing a Chinese character is easier than it seems. A Chinese character is composed of one or more radicals. There are 214 radicals. Although the purists will probably not agree, I like to think of the radicals as the letters that make up a word. 214 might seem like a lot, but consider that the English alphabet has 52 different characters, lowercase + uppercase, and the Cyrillic alphabet has 66 characters.

Identifying the radicals in a Chinese character has several purposes:

• The characters in a dictionary are sorted by radical (and stroke count)
• The radicals might give an indication of the meaning
• The radicals might give an indication of the pronunciation

And here's where it gets tricky. Characters which are composed of more than 1 radical still only appear under 1 radical in the dictionary. When you know under which radical to look, you need to know how many additional strokes are needed to write the character. For example, some characters are composed of only one radical and nothing else. At the radical's section in the dictionary, these characters appear first since they have 0 additional strokes.

Another tricky part is the might: a radical might given an indication of the meaning or the pronunciation. Sometimes you can guess how a character is pronounced (more or less) and other times you can guess what a character means. For example, the character 口 (pronounced [kou] and looks like a square) means mouth or opening. Many characters that are related to eating or drinking start with the radical 口: 吃 [chi] to eat, 喝 [he] to drink, 咖啡 [kafei] coffee.

...OK...

This post is long overdue. By now, I must have explained how to write Chinese characters to several of my friends. Story of my life: postpone writing a document/post until after realizing that the time spent explaining the same thing over and over roughly equals 10x the time it would take to write the document.

I'd like to make this post the first in a series about the oddities of living in China. That is, about the oddities that I still notice after having lived here for 10 months.

Part 1: How to write Chinese

If you're like me you've often wondered how the Chinese are able to use a keyboard with 5000+ keys. Allow me to clear it up: they don't. Chinese characters (and characters of other strange scripts) are written using a piece of software called an Input Method Editor or IME. The IME converts keystrokes (from a normal* keyboard) into the actual character.

To type Chinese, the user just enters the Latin characters corresponding to each character's pinyin representation. Pinyin is a way of writing Chinese syllables using the Latin alphabet and is more or less based on the character's pronunciation. Because there are many different characters with the same pronunciation, the IME will show a list of all possible characters, from which the right character must be selected pressing a key from 1 to 9. Smart IMEs can even convert a whole string of Latin characters into a sensible sentence using a dictionary of common word combinations (similar to T9). You know who has a big dictionary of word combinations in any language? Right: Google. That's why they created their own IME.



In this picture I typed "nihao". Google's IME shows the list of possible characters, with the most probable one first. Indeed, the characters meaning "you good" (the common greeting) are shown as the first option. The second option also represents "nihao" but has a different character for "ni" (I have no idea what that "ni" means). All other options only show characters for "ni", and after selection the user would be presented with a new list with all options for "hao". Also note the arrows pointing up/down: apparently there are more than 9 options for "nihao" so using Page Up and Page Down the user can cycle through all different characters.

This all sounds very complicated and tedious, but is very easy in practice. Just as with T9, it's important that the IME has a good representative dictionary so its first guess is the right one. Many times it's possible to type a complete Chinese sentence in pinyin without having to manually select any option from the list of characters. It gets tricky when the sentence contains non-Chinese words (for which you need to turn the IME off and back on) or proper names (for which the IME cannot guess the characters, although it will remember them for later.)

* yes, even though I'm Dutch and Dutch has its own keyboard layout, I don't know anyone who uses it so for me the US keyboard layout is normal

Today I received my copy of I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert from amazon.cn. At 160 RMB, it's more or less the same price as at amazon.com, which I find remarkable. Most imported goods get a hefty price bump somewhere along the way.

EDIT: For a moment I thought I had bought a bootleg but apparently all versions have this warning on the back:

...that the the official Beijing 2008 game is not available in mainland China.

I've been trying to find out where I can buy an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3, but it seems that ones that are being sold in China are 'imported' from Hong Kong. Imagine how silly I feel for not having brought one from Hong Kong two weeks ago.

And what's even more odd: the Xbox 360 is actually being produced in China.

Ine had some laptop problems and I've spent the last evening of my holiday trying to fix them. Things I've learned, in chronological order:

• Ubuntu live CD rulez: I was able to find corrupted files using diff * --ignore-file-name-case --to-file=dllcache/


• Copying ntoskrnl.exe from dllcache to system32 fixed the BSOD by causing the laptop to lock up instead


• Recovery Console sucks: it kept prompting for an administrator password that I didn't know


• Recovery Console really sucks: its chkdsk reports errors, but does not fix them


• During the graphical part of Windows XP Setup, you can open a console window by pressing Shift-F10


• Reset the administrator password using net user administrator *


• System Restore rulez: using plain old copy I was able to restore the registry from the recovery console. Simply cd into C:\System Volume Information\ and copy _REGISTRY_MACHINE_X to \windows\system32\config\X


• System Restore UI (\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exe) sucks: it restored all personal settings to the original defaults!


• Windows XP Repair sucks: repair would fail because "the signature for windows xp home edition upgrade is invalid"


• sfc /scannow is nice and all, but kept prompting for the Windows XP Professional CD when run on Home Edition (Same problem as previous one?)


• Using the Windows XP Repair function will break Windows Defender's auto-update