Tue, 20 Nov 2007

Deezer

A free and legal site for listening to music - sounds interesting.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 16:27 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Changed sidebar font size

OK, so against my better judgement, I increased the font size for the sidebars on the Amity website - even though just a bit. I hope this will stop some dear colleagues from pestering me with "too small!" notes. At least I can reply now: "But I already made the letters larger!" Incidentally, by making this change I messed up K2 even more. Heaven knows how I'll ever get out again. Maybe I've already passed the point where re-creating the whole design from scratch is actually the easier and faster solution.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 14:00 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Not updating K2

Regarding the Amity website, I think I'll leave K2 as it is instead of updating to the latest version. Updating can wait until a real problem turns up. It will be quite a hassle because I made quite a few changes to several of the K2 files, including the core.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 11:36 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Bad Behavior, continued

In less than 5 days, Bad Behavior has blocked more than 120 attempts by spam bots to access my "entries" blog. No more than 2 spam comments got through, and these were caught by Akismet. Which is why I'm now installing Bad Behavior on the Amity website, too.

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 11:07 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Keats for every-day use

My head aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense ...

Posted on 20 Nov 2007 at 10:45 in /life. -- Permalink

Mon, 19 Nov 2007

Picked up my guitar

I picked up my guitar again today and spent some time practising, after a break of 10 days or so. I like the sound of my Aparicio guitar very much. My fingertips don't hurt as much as they used to. The problem is (always) my left wrist, which just doesn't seem strong enough to take the strain of pressing and stretching. Anyhow - progress is slow but there is some.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 20:18 in /life/music. -- Permalink

Alex King's tumblelog

Maybe worth an occasional look? Another "blog by the wayside", and a very elegantly styled one.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 18:50 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Twitter Tools WP plugin "broken"

I've just found out that Alex King's "Twitter Tools" plugin for WordPress doesn't work properly in WP 2.3. A fix seems to be on the way. (I wonder if anything is seriously wrong, apart from a problem with assigning the proper category to Twitter digest posts.)

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 18:35 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Installed WordPress using Subversion

Subversion works fine, so I can run it (using ssh) and do something useful with it! I installed WordPress on my server using Subversion, which was very fast. I then copied all the files I had added or changed from my former blog into the directory (almost forgetting the "Twitter tools" plugin ...) - and everything works! So now I should be able to update WordPress in a very easy and fast way whenever a new version is available. I still have a few doubts - e.g., will I be able to run "svn update" so everything ends up in the correct place? But that's something to figure out later.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 17:24 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Finished watching The West Wing

We watched the last episode of the last season last night. What now?

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 16:46 in /life. -- Permalink

Trying again to install Subversion on my server

This time, I'm trying to install an earlier version (1.3.2): from the forums of my hosting company I learned that nobody has managed to install its latest version yet. When I tried first, I didn't get anywhere before installing the dependencies as well - I wonder what will happen this time. It's probably not an issue with the older version.

Even if I succeed, I may not be able to actually run Subversion on the server and do anything useful with it. But I guess it's worth a try.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 14:47 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Blosxom blog headlines in WP blog sidebar

Using the RSS module provided by the K2 theme, I added headlines of entries in this blog to my "entries" blog. I'm still not 100% sure if it's actually a good idea to make my "Traces" so easily accessible ...

In the same way, I added the RSS feed from my Twitter page.

Since I'm not so fond of posting photos, videos, chats ..., I decided that Gelato CMS and Tumblelog (which integrates into WordPress) are not for me.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 14:20 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Die Grünen und die Kirche

Ein Artikel in der "Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung": Durchs Klösterle in die Politik.

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 14:18 in /media. -- Permalink

Impressed by Amazon (2)

A minute ago, I received the complete 2-volume set of the "Intermediate Reader of Modern Chinese" (Princeton University Press 1992). Amazon had sent me only volume 1 by mistake; they corrected this without any fuss or delay.

I've already worked through several lessons in the 1st volume: good stuff! The only problem is, how do I transfer all the material in the 2 volumes to my brain?

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 12:36 in /life. -- Permalink

Keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader

I've started using keyboard shortcuts - Binny VA has drawn my attention to their existence. Nice!

These are the ones I use most often:

• j/k - item down/up
• m - mark as read/unread
• A - mark all as read
• ? - help

Posted on 19 Nov 2007 at 11:05 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Sun, 18 Nov 2007

How safe is Hushmail's e-mail encryption?

The company Hushmail provides different e-mail encryption services: one where e-mails are encrypted by a Java applet before they leave the user's computer, another one where e-mails are sent over https to Hushmail and then encrypted on the server side. Neither service precludes the company decrypting users' e-mails and handing them to courts - so Hushmail does not protect data of people engaging in illegal activities. (A story on Wired.com)

Posted on 18 Nov 2007 at 22:52 in /technology/e-mail. -- Permalink

Advent music rehearsal

We attended the German Protestant church service this morning. B., U. and a school principal whose acquaintance we made took care of the music. We had an interesting talk with that principal and her husband. After the service, we had a drawn-out rehearsal for our concert-cum-sing-along, which will take place on 9 December. We realised we're still rather far from being ready to perform our stuff in front of an audience - this came as quite a nasty surprise. But we'll sort it out ...

Posted on 18 Nov 2007 at 20:25 in /life. -- Permalink

An afternoon of playing games with friends

Yesterday afternoon, we had 3 pastors and a child over for an afternoon of playing games, eating cake and chatting. We had a great time together. Also, this occasion gave us the opportunity - or rather forced us - to clean up our flat, which was in quite a mess. B. did almost all the cleaning while I did the shopping.

Posted on 18 Nov 2007 at 20:25 in /life. -- Permalink

What Tor can be used for

It's interesting what you can do with Tor - set up an exit node and monitor other people's traffic for example. Apparently, this is what a guy named Egerstad did; he found lots of usernames and passwords associated with e-mail accounts used by embassies - and later posted these username/password combinations on his blog. Now he's in trouble with the police. But has he done anything wrong?

It's interesting, too, that quite a lot of Tor users still don't seem to understand that Tor does not provide strong anonymity - even though the Tor website clearly states this. A lot of people don't seem to understand the difference between Tor and end-to-end e-mail encryption. Well, too bad for them ...

Posted on 18 Nov 2007 at 20:16 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Sat, 17 Nov 2007

Arbeitslager in China

Ein deutschsprachiger Artikel über die chinesischen Lager, in denen Kriminelle, Dissidenten, FLG-Anhänger usw. usf. zwecks "Umerziehung durch Arbeit" eingesperrt sind und Zwangsarbeit verrichten müssen. Die Einweisung erfolgt ohne jegliche gerichtliche Überprüfung. Aus der Zeitschrift "Das Parlament".

Posted on 17 Nov 2007 at 22:41 in /china. -- Permalink

Second Hong Kong Studienstiftung Round Table

On 16 November 2007, the 2nd Hong Kong Studienstiftung Round Table meeting was held on the rooftop terrace of the Fringe Club in the (actually not so) beautiful city of Hong Kong. Mr. Z., top manager of a big chemicals corporation, Professor A., who teaches law at one of Hong Kong's illustrious universities, Professor T., an architect, and Dr. E., a stray historian, were present at the meeting. All of them are alumni of Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes - except myself, who never made it into that club of bright minds. P., a photographer specialising in architecture, attended the Round Table as a guest. He presented his impressions of using a view camera in Hong Kong's fair city, where everybody takes pictures with tiny digital cameras or mobile phones, to the members.

In other words, we had another very enjoyable and interesting evening with these pleasant guys. B. started this Stammtisch ("Round Table") not long ago and it's been a resounding success. By the way, it's not formal in the least. I just needed a way of getting over the pathetic formality of the articles I'm translating day in, day out. Parodying their style seems a good way.

Posted on 17 Nov 2007 at 11:22 in /life. -- Permalink

Fri, 16 Nov 2007

K2 and Rubin combined

In spite of what I wrote yesterday, obviously I couldn't keep myself from playing around with the stylesheet. I managed to integrate the colours of my "Rubin" theme into K2. I kind of like the result I've got now - and hope my dear readers will agree. And not turn away in disgust ...

The static pages on the "entries" blog - "About" and "My other sites" - are a lot less difficult to find in this new design. The navigation in the header is a real strong point of K2, I think.

Posted on 16 Nov 2007 at 13:55 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Reading The Economist

Reading The Economist at leisure, which I haven't done in quite some time. In the Oct 27 issue, I read that Microsoft bought a (hugely overpriced) part of Facebook. I'm glad I disabled my account!

Posted on 16 Nov 2007 at 10:46 in /life. -- Permalink

Thu, 15 Nov 2007

Better go for the latest K2 version

It's dawning on me that that database problem isn't caused by any supposed incompatibility between K2 and WordPress 2.3.1 - I guess I should just use the latest K2 release candidate for the Amity website. The problem is, I adapted quite a few things in the core of K2! Of course I should never have done that ... Especially since it's so easy to add custom stylesheets etc. That was really stupid!

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 19:49 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Finished adapting my K2

K2 now looks like it should. After some experimenting, I decided to go with the default colours - good-bye, my dear Rubin theme! I went for 3 instead of 2 columns, added a few things to the sidebars, moved the title and tagline to the right and made the header a bit narrower; otherwise, it's a K2 out of the box. Bulleted lists are fine, blockquotes display nicely, even the groups of pictures look good. This is very satisfying!

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 19:24 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

The K2 sidebar manager ...

... is extremely slow, but if you give it the time it needs, it delivers the results you want.

Now it's time to push the blog title and tagline to the right - and maybe change some colours, after all.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 18:14 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Bad Behavior blocked its first intruder

I installed Bad Behavior an hour ago - and already it blocked an intruder! Akismet, in the meantime, is lazing in the sunshine ...

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 16:34 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Indenting text with CSS

I created nice indented bulleted lists for the entries on my "entries" blog. <ul> lists are used in the sidebars, too, but there I don't want to see any bullets or indentations. In the entries, yes. CSS has nice things like these:

• list-style-type:disc; (puts bullets before each list item)
• list-style-position:inside; (puts the bullets inside the left text margin)
• text-indent:-1em; (indents the 1st line of each list item to the left)
• margin-left:1em; (indents the 2nd, 3rd etc. line to the right of the 1st)

What would I do without selfhtml?

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 16:26 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Installed Bad Behavior

How could one not install something with such a nice name? Bad Behavior is a blog comment spam killer. I saw that, even when I had turned all comments off on the "entries" blog, I still got tons of spam comments. How can you prevent the bots which send out such stuff from reaching your blog in the first place? Bad Behavior just might be the solution. I'll give it a try.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 15:26 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Executive education in China

China has a dramatic shortage of qualified managers - you know, the sort of business leaders who are able to understand financial reports, know something about marketing, have some organisational skills and recognise the need for motivating their employees. This is why the market for executive MBA programs has exploded. What exactly are Chinese top executives doing there - when they're actually attending class instead of delegating learning to their secretaries? - "Back to School", a funny and interesting article at China International Business.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 14:35 in /china/education. -- Permalink

The publisher who rules Japan

The Economist has a story about Tsuneo Watanabe, the chairman of Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's biggest newspaper. Apparently, he's the guy who pulls the strings in Japanese politics. A fascinating, if depressing, story of price-fixing, corruption and political farce.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 14:18 in /media. -- Permalink

That time, part 2

Coming back to my text after a decent interval, I find I'm even less inspired, and things make even less sense, than when I left. Well ... Time for lunch!

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 13:20 in /life. -- Permalink

Struggling with my newsfeeds

I'm already struggling with my newsreader again - if I don't go through my subscriptions every day, things get out of control. Do I have too many subscriptions? Well, I just added another one ...

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 12:11 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink

Twittering on my phone

When I first tried to get twitter to work with my mobile phone several months ago, I got nowhere. That was disappointing as well as surprising because I may have a Hong Kong number, but my provider is British-based just like twitter. Yesterday, I went through the set-up steps again - and now it works! It's still so new to me, every time I get a message on my phone, I catch myself thinking: "Oh, a message! Who could be the sender?"

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 11:49 in /life. -- Permalink

It's that time of the year again

With the advent of Advent just around the corner, it's time for us poor Amity Hong Kong guys to help with "Minutes that Matter" once again, a series of devotional radio broadcasts which is produced by the Hong Kong Christian Council and broadcast on Radio 4, one of the channels of RTHK.

I've got some ideas for my thing - have had them for quite a while, in fact, so they were allowed to mature inside of me before I sat down this morning and started to write them down. I spent the whole morning writing (after having breakfast and, admittedly, solving a few - just a few! - jigsaw puzzles on the web ...) but now I'm stuck! What I've written so far doesn't seem to have any point! What am I actually trying to say?

I have to choose a piece of music for my "Minutes", too. Here I find it difficult to make a choice between two songs, one by Johnny Cash, the other by Kris Kristofferson. The song should somehow relate to the text I'm writing. Right now, this doesn't help at all.

Better to surf the web a bit - just a bit! - before I press on, I guess ...

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 11:34 in /life. -- Permalink

The same old questions

Ich saz ûf eime steine
und dahte bein mit beine.
dar ûf satzt ich den ellenbogen.
ich hete in mîne hant gesmogen
daz kinne und ein mîn wange.
dô dahte ich mir vil ange,
wie man zer welte solte leben.
deheinen rât kond ich gegeben,
wie man driu dinc erwurbe,
der keinez niht verdurbe.
diu zwei sint êre und varnde guot,
daz dicke ein ander schaden tuot:
daz dritte ist gotes hulde,
der zweier übergulde.
diu wolte ich gerne in einen schrîn:
jâ leider desn mac niht gesîn,
daz guot und weltlich êre
und gotes hulde mêre
zesamene in ein herze komen.
stîg unde wege sint in benomen:
untriuwe ist in der sâze,
gewalt vert ûf der strâze,
fride unde reht sint sêre wunt.
diu driu enhabent geleites niht,
diu zwei enwerden ê gesunt.

A poem by Walther von der Vogelweide, written around the year 1200.

I sat on a stone and put one leg on the other, rested my elbow on it, with my chin and one of my cheeks in my hand. Sitting like this, I thought a lot about how to live in this world. I couldn't figure out how to get three things without destroying any of them. Two of them are reputation and wealth, which often negatively affect each other; the third one is God's grace, way more valuable than the other two. I wanted to put all of them in one place, but unfortunately it is impossible that wealth and reputation and also God's grace are in one heart at the same time. There are no paths or tracks where they could travel: betrayal lies in ambush, rude force rules the streets, peace and justice are badly injured. Those three things have no protection unless these two get healthy first.

Posted on 15 Nov 2007 at 03:00 in /life. -- Permalink

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