Featured Writing: Magazine rocks under new name (The Standard, HK)

by lawrence

A story I wrote for The Standard, one of the two English language dailies in Hong Kong (the other one is South China Morning Post), about the fate of the Chinese edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

Go read it here.




A Punk fan from Maldives

by lawrence

What the hell, I think I’m gonna announce anyway: my new Chinese blog 踎低喷饭 is now officially online:

http://www.chinesenewear.com/maldivepunkfan

Still a lot to be done (categories, font, RSS subscription links, other details) but I’m the impatient kind of person, so let’s do it the web2.0 way: release in beta (even alpha) phase, and improve/adjust in open air.

Mind you, the title of the blog is to be read in Cantonese: Mau Dai Pun Faan.




IE 7 solves the alignment problem of GNO

by lawrence

I’m testing IE 7.0 beta 2 (PC only), it’s apparently modeled on Firefox (Extension - Add-ons in IE 7’s case, Ctrl + T opens new tab, RSS subscription, etc.) with a “Macalized” interface. It also has, at least it seems to me, better support for websites that built with newer technology and standard. I’m talking about this very blog you’re reading: on pre-7.0 versions of IE you’ll have problem with border alignment - the left and right borders of the top banner will not align with those of content below. Thank god it’s solved with IE 7. (I haven’t tried Maxthon though.)

Dear IE users, for a better browsing experience of GNO, please go and download IE 7 beta 2 here, it’s only 11.2 MB.




Google Talk’s chat history in Gmail

by lawrence

This is too damn cool to ignore: Google has further integrated Gmail and Google Talk. Just do a little setting and your chat history on GTalk will be auto-saved into the “Chats” box in your Gmail account.

Here’s how to set: click on “Chats” in your Gmail web interface, and then “settings”, set it to “Save chat history in my Gmail account”, which is disabled by default.

You’re right, the function of saving chat history is hardly new, but what’s so cool about it is the smoothness of user experience: you send a message on GTalk, refresh your Chats box, and there you are - the message you just sent is already stored. With this kind of smooth experience, you wouldn’t care about what kind of technology is behind it - you wouldn’t even be aware of its existence.

Btw, you don’t have to use the official client of GTalk in order to benefit from the integration. Any client that supports XMPP protocol will do, for example, I use Adium on Mac.

Definitely my favorite Google service in the past few months.

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The poster of Waterland Kwanyin #34

by lawrence

Got this poster of the 34th installment of Waterland Kwanyin, the regular sound art event in Beijing curated by YAN Jun. The Chinese characters on the poster are Traditional Chinese (TC). (UPDATE: Read comments of this post)
I always have some problem with mainland Chinese designers’ using ONLY TC on posters, leaflets, websites, etc. While a good portion of mainlanders agree that TC is visually more appealing than SC (Simplified Chinese, or SuperCollider), it’s more than just an aesthetic thing for them to actually use TC in public domain. In many cases it’s a deliberate claim of the party’s elitism of being economically and ideologically more “advanced” than the average, of being different, or so-called “international”; in other words, it’s political (in the broader sense of the word).

If possible, I would like to conduct a survey about why mainland designers use TC in their designs. Are they 100% sure that they use it only because it “looks better”?

Mind you, this is essentially different from Chinese (and other non-native speakers) using English in public domain. I, for example, being born and raised in mainland China (Shenzhen and Guangzhou) and have never been abroad for more than 10 days, blog in English in order to reach an international audience on a topic which has scarce exposure in the English-speaking world. But what about mainlanders writing in TC? Although there are a certain amount of people in Taiwan and Hong Kong who would have problem reading SC, it’s unlikely that they’re the audience those mainland publishers can’t live without.

Take a look at the poster above: it’s a local event happens in mainland, it’s curated by a mainlander, most of the participants are mainlanders, I have no information of the designer, but I bet he/she is a mainlander too - the ignorance of English punctuation conventions as manifested in this poster is the unmistakable whistle-blower of the designer’s identity (correct me if I’m wrong, Yan Jun). In such a setting, it is a little bit weird to see ALL (why stroke this out? read comments) Chinese characters in TC. Is it just me? Feedback welcomed.

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Cutting the Bull on New Year’s Day

by Dajuin

The Chinese New Year means little to me except that, for a few days in the entire year, most of the bullshit in life suddenly and miraculously vanish. That, to me, is enough reason to celebrate. It is celebration.

Speaking of BS, I must recommend a book that I just discovered: “On Bullshit,” by Harry G. Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University. And you can watch video snippets of an interview with the author on the PU Press site.

But why bring this up here? Because I think there is much to think about, in light of Professor Frankfurt’s “from the ground up” analysis, regarding the amount of BS in new music and sound art today. How do we deal with this topic in an analytical fashion?

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Google.CN: A Preliminary Test

by Dajuin

The biggest news today is of course the launch of the custom-made, localized version of Google for Mainland China: Google.CN. (VOA, LA Times, NY Times.)

A search for 脱汉 (De-Han, or De-Sinification) resulted in 3,880 finds on Google.CN, and 3,980 finds on Google.com. (BTW, our own discussions on this topic - which happens to be highly critical of the movement - on the ForeTaste Cafe forum is ranked number 4 on Google.com and number 7 on Google.CN.) The Chinese local version’s first obvious omission is a link to www.tibetalk.com. No big deal here. It seems that the authorities have yet to sense the power of this oddball coinage.

A search for /ffaaa//*/lllunn/@//ggo@nnng//*/ (I’m adding random letters and symbols here for obvious reasons) using Chinese characters resulted in 864,000 finds on Google.CN and 2,820,000 finds on Google.com. What is interesting and amazing is that ALL of these 864,000 finds on Google.CN are linked to official propaganda articles denouncing the movement.

Now, I have neither the time nor interest in doing further test searches, as we all pretty much get the picture. One thing I cannot figure out, though, is: did they have a super intelligent and elaborate software algorithm to decide on the contents of these 2.8 million articles - whether a text is “for” or “against” the theme, or, did they hire an army to do the filtering by brute force?

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Off Topic: Windows/Unix/OS X users

by lawrence

I know the frequency of my going off topic is a little bit too high lately, but man, it’s the eve before Macworld Expo 2006, let’s stay away from the boring artsy stuff and dive into geek’s world for a moment. ^_^

What I’d like to share with you is this article on MacSlash, titled “A Linux Geek Gets His First Taste of RDF” (I have no idea about what RDF is, but according to the article, it’s “Reality Distortion Field emanating from Steve Jobs”.), in which the author has some interesting observation on the difference between Unix/Windows/OS X users. Here’s a line from him:

These (OS X people) were people who cared about understanding how this stuff works, but not so much that they would let it interfere with them from getting their first kiss before they graduated from High School.

If you need something to justify the fact that most of the so-called “creative type” of person are using Mac, here is it for you.

UPDATE (1:10 am, Jan. 11, Beijing time): MacRumors and Engadget are doing on-spot live update of the Expo:

MacRumors (don’t need to refresh manually, but text only)
Engadget (text and pics, need to hit command/ctrl + R yourself, they’ve just live reported CES 2006, so probably more experienced.)




“No MSN Spaces!”? Tell me about it.

by lawrence

With or without the Michael Anti case, you should avoid MSN Spaces.

If you have no idea what “Michael Anti case” is, check out ESWN, RConversation and this NY Times article.

Anti’s blog can still be viewed at anti.blog-city.com if you’re out of the Great FireWall, those who are being “walled” can use this RSS feed or send email to him (antisblog at gmail.com) to subscribe.




Off topic: Robert Fripp recorded for Windows Vista

by lawrence

From Scobleizer (a Microsoft employee blogger):

Robert Fripp, famous guitarist, was on Microsoft’s campus a few weeks ago recording the sounds for Windows Vista.

Go here to see a video of the recording session.

Some interesting comments:

I think it was Steve Ball’s idea. He is the guy working on the Audio Stack of Vista with Larry Osterman. He also very strong relation to Mr. Fripp:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Niners/SteveBall

— on, on Scobleizer

“I think Brian Eno wrote that wee jingle that plays every time you start windows”

He did indeed record the start-up sound. Ironically enough, Eno is also a lifetime Mac user.

—Tetra, on Scobleizer

Reminds me of some stuff Robert was doing MANY years ago (late 70’s early 80’s) when I was doing radio at WAIF. He did a short tour of record stores, just him and two tape recorders. He threaded a reel from one machine across it’s heads onto the SECOND machine, across its heads and then on its take up reel. The first machine was in record mode and the second in playback. The distance between the machines controlled the delay time. He played while a full reel of tape was recorded on one channel. He then rewound the reel, and played back the recorded track while recording on the second channel (both on machine one) and the second machine was in playback mode as well still providing a delayed output, this time of BOTH tracks. The effect was mesmerizing to say the least. If I remember correctly, as a third pass instead of rewinding the tape, he took the reel off machine two and flipped it over and put it on machine one and repeated the process.

—Gary Shell, on Channel 9 forum




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