Categories
China General Swing WordPress

Swing abates, my online life abounds

Today is July 4, which marks the two-year anniversary of my involvement with Swing Beijing!. And how am I celebrating? By skipping, actually.

For the last two years, Swing has not just been a part of my life, but it has been my life. I found it at a time when I was just emerging from a one-year hermit phase. Thus, it launched me from my social isolation into a world where I was having multiple encounters with people each week. It also broke my one-year isolation from other foreigners here in China. It allowed me to develop the extroverted part of my predominantly introverted nature.

But it seems as though that time has come to a close. No, I’m not closing myself off and re-entering a hermit phase. I’m just moving away from Swing and concentrating my creative energy in other areas. In November last year (2004), I started to discover other bloggers and also the phenomenon of podcasting. I started connecting with people online, and I began contributing to conversations with others through leaving comments and giving feedback through email. And it has been an exciting time for me.

I’m not sure what the ultimate goal of this new direction in my life is, but I can tell that it’s the right direction. And that’s thrilling.

The hosting woes that I experienced a few months ago forced me to find a new hosting solution and ultimately a new blogging tool called WordPress. And the change has been fantastic. It’s a very powerful tool. But I’ve been sitting on the default look of the WordPress 1.5 install since then, so my site looks like too many others out there. I have been looking for a new design for the header at the top of the weblog, and I finally found one last week. So, here is the new look. It’s a star scene that I generated entirely from the mathematical functions found in the GIMP drawing program. I feel it suits my character and the nature of a “Mad Philosopher” quite well. Here is a screenshot of the new look. Here is the old look for comparison.

As always, comments are welcome. Thanks for joining me in the journey thus far.

Categories
Antiwar China Speech

Radio Open Source on the Great Firewall of China

If you are interested in China and the Internet and censorship—all that’s been in the news lately—Radio Open Source has put together a panel of people discussing the issues in amazing depth and clarity. I highly recommend listening to this one. They do a much better job than I could ever do at explaining the intricacies of the Chinese modern culture and present political situation.

Categories
Tech

More GIMP goodness

In my previous post, I was playing with The GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. This time, I followed a different tutorial on layers, and got this cool result:

[Star scape]

By following the tutorial, anyone with no artistic talent (me) can create a similar looking picture. But the point is, I’ve got a better handle on how layers work and how to use them.

Categories
China Tech

Using the GIMP

I was just playing with The GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, following this tutorial on using layers. The result isn’t too bad, is it?

[Horse image]

Notice how there is a texture of stacked rocks slightly over the horse’s face and also over the background. Not bad for free software. My ultimate goal is to figure out how to take the background header for this blog, and substitute an image into the blue “window”. Stay tuned for this eventual development.

The horse, by the way, lives in my ‘neigh’bourhood, at Mu Dan Yuan in North Beijing. He seems happy, despite the long face.

Categories
Antiwar China Rant

Chinese Blogger Slams Microsoft

Wired News is carrying an excellent article about Isaac Mao, the Chinese über-blogger, and his views on how Microsoft’s MSN Spaces is sucking up to the Chinese government. Yes, everyone knows that Microsoft is a criminal organization (remember the anti-trust violations?), but sometimes we need to be reminded just how evil they really are. (Google is evil, too, remember, for sleeping with the Chinese government in the same way.)

If you know any Chinese who are interested in starting a blog, please encourage them to stay away from MSN Spaces.

The unfortunate news of the story, however, is in the last few paragraphs. They detail that the real problem with the Internet in China is not the ISPs’ or Microsoft’s censorship, but the apathy of China’s most wired citizens. For further reading, the following is a good editorial by Sascha Matuszak:

Categories
Rant Tech

For the record: download and upload, podcasting and podcatching

For the record people: download is pull, upload is push. Similarly, podcatching is pull, podcasting is push.

If you are moving a file to your webserver, that’s an upload. If you are putting a file onto your mp3 player from your desktop computer, that’s an upload too. Someday, when our mp3 players control and initiate the transfer, then it will be a download. But not before. Downloading is pulling something towards you. Uploading is pushing something away from you. Perhaps a poem will help:

Download is pull, upload is push;
If you get it wrong again, I’ll knock you on your tush.

Podcasting is the act of producing and offering a podcast to the public. Podcatching is the act of receiving a podcast. When someone is listening to the radio, we do not say they are broadcasting. It is the radio station that is broadcasting. So in the same way, listening to a podcast is not podcasting. The person producing the podcast is podcasting.

Thank you.

Categories
Tech

Coral Content Distribution Network

Tonight, I just heard about the Coral Content Distribution Network. Say you have a large file that you want to distribute on the Internet in a load-balanced way, free from succumbing to the Slashdot effect. Put it on your webserver as normal. Then, if you add these 14 characters to the end of the hostname in your file’s URL:

.nyud.net:8090

the Coral Network will only download your file once and then handle the rest of the distribution for you in a peer-to-peer, distributed way.

Is that not freakin’ cool??!! Check it out.

Categories
Audio Tech

A backup solution for my mp3 collection

Finally, I’ve found an optimal solution to backup my large mp3 collection (15.6 GB, 3775 songs, 10.25 days total playback time).

The problem: I continually update the mp3 tags, add new mp3 files, and move the directories around, etc., in the original collection. I keep a backup of the collection on a removable USB hard drive, and it takes forever to transfer the files over the USB1.1 link. These two copies of the collection, therefore, get out of sync, and it would be faster just to copy over the changed files rather than the entire collection to the backup device.

The solution:

rsync -av --modify-window=1 --delete /media/AAA-music/ /removable-drive/AAA-music/

rsync compares the files in the first directory path with those in the second and determines which files need to be updated. Note that the trailing slash for the first directory path is necessary. The switch --delete removes any files in the second path that are not found in the first. Thus you get an identical copy in the second location. The switch --modify-window=1 gives a 1-second fudge factor in the comparison of the file modification dates, which is necessary because the dates in the VFAT file system in the second path aren’t as precise as in the first. Use the switch -n for a dry-run of the command to test it out. No files will actually be written or deleted with this switch.

Also, note that since I am using rsync to synchronize two directory paths on the same machine (as opposed to on two different machines over the network), it doesn’t use its synchronization algorithm to determine changes within a given file. It operates on whole files instead (comparing timestamps and file sizes). This is what I want here, because it would be very slow to read all the files on the USB drive, something I’m intending to avoid.

Categories
Audio Copyright

One podcaster’s letter to the Canadian Copyright Board (I Love Radio .org)

A nice short essay on the way things should be for an amateur producer of podcasts: One podcaster’s letter to the Canadian Copyright Board (I Love Radio .org)

Categories
General

A new direction

From my editing work, I’ve discovered a new direction that can be added to the four cardinal directions: weastward. Note that it is impossible to tell which is the extraneous letter.