Wed, 14 Nov 2007

K2 and WordPress

I thought about using K2 for the "entries" blog. On the K2 downloads page, it says that you should make sure you run WordPress 2.2+. So 2.3(.1) isn't a good choice for K2? Well, that settles it. I'm not going back to version 2.2.

Actually I'm using K2 with WordPress 2.3.1 on the Amity website - maybe this is why there are some small problems with the MySQL database. Apart from these problems, which don't really seem to matter, this combination works just fine. But it's probably better to stay with my "Rubin" theme for the time being.

Or does 2.2+ mean "2.2 or later"? But if it does, what causes those database problems?

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 19:40 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

A German visitor at the office

Unexpectedly, a visitor turned up at the office today: a German, who has made a handsome donation to our organisation to mark his wedding - several thousand yuan for Chinese schoolchildren.

Well, when Germans meet far from home, what do they talk about? History! Recent German history, to be precise - the partition of their country and its reunification after the end of the Communist dictatorship in the "German Democratic Republic". Our discussion was especially interesting because our visitor grew up in the Communist eastern part of our country, whereas we are from the western part.

Together, we found a few striking similarities between the "German Democratic Republic" and today's China:

• censorship and thought control (though apparently this works in a more indirect and less systematic way in China - Germans are known to be strict and bureaucratic for a reason ...)
• the ever-present fear and mistrust among people instilled by the Communist Party
• the prevalence of unskilled, manual labour in the economy
• the comparatively low living standards (while people in other countries profit from the work done by the Eastern Germans/the Chinese)
• people's low self-esteem
• people's acceptance of authoritarian treatment by those in power

Maybe these similarities are all the more striking because in many ways, Eastern Germany was very different from today's China. Obviously, with a population of 16 million, it was tiny in comparison. Also, it was heavily industrialised; even agriculture was largely mechanised. It was the richest, most "developed" of all Communist countries. Still, when the Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern German economy was in tatters.

The end of Communism, by the way, came as a complete surprise to everybody - politicians, military and secret service people and all sorts of experts included. A year before the dictatorship fell, it looked like it would last forever.

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 18:49 in /china. -- Permalink

Cursive vs. keyboard

A lovely article in the Christian Science Monitor about the relative merits of handwriting and typing in the education of schoolchildren. While some say that those who write well by hand get better school results, others point out that how people write is really not the point: students should be encouraged to write, and typing is both faster and easier for children (and, of course, for adults too).

Printing, traditional cursive, italic cursive, the Palmer Method and a magic bunny ... Who would have thought that there's so much to be said about this issue! With the decline of penmanship, it seems a whole world is disappearing.

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 14:10 in /life. -- Permalink

Positive coverage banned at the office

We're about to announce the new website in the printed "Newsletter". I wrote a draft announcement yesterday. However, it was then made clear to us by XXX that we were not to describe it as "using state-of-the-art web technology". Fact is, the new website does use such technology. Only, to the aforesaid person (who knows nothing about the internet) it's a self-evident truth that her underlings can't possibly ever come up with anything of high quality and cutting-edge. Grumble ...

Well, who cares!

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 11:10 in /work. -- Permalink

Habari blogging platform

Habari, as it says on the project's homepage, "is a next-generation free software blogging platform". Well, it's definitely not this-generation: the project has reached version 0.3 and is still beset with lots of bugs; work on Habari doesn't seem to be going on particularly smoothly. Still, the "free software blogging platform" part sounds interesting; and if we are to believe what it says in the FAQ, Habari just might be the answer to bad things like comment spam.

Posted on 14 Nov 2007 at 02:00 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink