Last week, I was in Beijing to chair the Input Method Sub-Working Group meeting for the 13th time over the past three years. The IMSWG is part of the larger Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum (NEAOSS), formed by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments for pushing open source software.

Over the past few years, every detail of how input methods should work were discussed and debated among participants from the three countries. All had strong opinions on the architecture of the system, and at times it seemed impossible for them to agree on the specification.

We solved that by getting them to write software code instead — being programmers, we found they understood each other better in computer languages than in English.

Now, not only do we have an agreed specification, but we are also developing a reference implementation, IMBus, thanks to the hard work of all involved, which includes James Su of SCIM fame, and Hideki Hiura, the designer of XIM and IIIMF. James gave a nice talk about IMBus at last year’s LF Desktop Architects Meeting.

I said “nearly” because the overhead of being a semi-government entity means the specification won’t be published until later this year. But all technical issues have been dealt with. With hope, this specification will work its way up to ISO and published as an ISO standard in future. ISO being ISO, this won’t happen anytime soon — I’ll talk more about that later.

Update: this post now also up on the Outblaze blog.

From top left: a stack of GNU manuals (dead tree version!), the one on the top is Using and Porting GNU CC version 2.95; Ximian Desktop Professional Edition, including Ximian Evolution Preview Release; some souvenir from LinuxCare; a Sharp Zaurus SL-5000D; and mainland China’s Yangfan (”Set Sail”) Linux 1.0.

This must be part of the HKSAR 10th Anniversary celebrations…

Perhaps the fact that today was the Queen’s birthday has some significance.

Or maybe Buddha have had enough and just want some peace.

# apt-get install hibernate
# hibernate-ram

Done.

I thought a lot of people knew this already…

PS. You might need to set IbmAcpi yes in /etc/hibernate/common.conf.

Edit: thanks to Evgeni Golov for the even shorter command.

Nevertheless, I felt that doing something is better than being a sitting duck for the money-grabbing “creative industry” cartels that the Government so desperately wants to please.

So here it is: my submission to the paper (PDF). I should’ve allowed more time for this; right now it still feels very rough.

However, while it seems more and more people are concerned this time around, knowing the HK Government I’m not getting my hopes up high.

PS. I’ve submitted via email a few hours ago but I have yet to receive an acknowledgement from them…

If you happen to be in Hong Kong, there will be a Debian etch release party this Sunday afternoon. Please do come along, it’ll be fun.

I’ve also translated the etch release announcement into Chinese, but it seems a bit more work needs to be done before it will appear on the Debian website. In the meantime following is a copy of the Chinese translation:

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Happy Chinese New Year!

It is simply stupid. Why only express love on this day? My love to my girl is the same every single day. So why do people have to ‘demonstrate’ or ’show’ how much they love the other half only on this day? Does that mean we get to torture them for the other 364 days of the year?

If not, then what’s the point? A free pass for ladies to make outrageous demands?

So don’t force me to do “something special” on this day. Don’t even try.

Then came Czar Li and Burnt Rice, who jointly usurped the number one position in the town’s most talked about quote chart, with “I’ll Remember This. You’ll Pay!” and “Watch Your Mouth, Mister!”

Now that’s what they mean by “administrative-led governance.”

Who would’ve thought? At just the right time, too. I wonder who’ll pay.

Lemote is the name of the company.
Loongson is the name of the CPU used to be called Godson.
Fulong is the name of the PC using the Loongson processor.
Both Loongson and Fulong are developed by Lemote.

For example, this just arrived in my Inbox:

Mcmug and Mcdull Sold Octopus Premium Sets

Huh?

I couldn’t figure out what it was on about until I checked the Chinese version.

Sweden plans embassy in Second Life Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life, officials said. “We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden,” Swedish Institute (SI) director Olle Waestberg has told AFP.

If I am a Swede I’m not sure if I want my country to be associated with what appears to be the online haven for money laundering and pyramid schemes.

I’ve wondered the same thing myself. Even though I’m a HK-born native Cantonese speaker—heck I read the Apple Daily every morning—I simply find reading and writing in English more natural for me. Despite what Sharon thinks of my Chinese writing ability, I still find it uncomfortable reading and writing long Chinese passages; not so much as giving me a headache, perhaps, but still less easy than in English. (Except for technology-related stuff, a topic I simply find unbearable reading in Chinese.) Yet I converse in Cantonese and even Mandarin perfectly fine (at least before people start referring to Chinese history, classics and proverbs, where I simply fail miserably.) I even think in Cantonese most of the time.

But that still doesn’t explain why I don’t read blogs in Chinese. After all, most blogs’ entries are nowhere near the limit of my Chinese language tolerance. YP thinks I’m simply being 崇洋 or worship everything foreign. But I think it’s simply the consequence of spending all my teenage years flippin’ burgers in Melbourne. In fact come to think of it, I’m surprised my Chinese is still as good as it is now. But as good as my Chinese is, it is still English for me. For now.

Does anybody else see this? Why? It’s not as if people are running off or something…

The banner reads, “Register as a voter by law, exercise your voting rights”. Shot at a residential development in Beijing.

See, even they are more democratic than us in Hong Kong, at least superficially…

A model of the Long March rocket, part of the Ice Sculptures exhibition at Cityplaza. Beautiful.

Bibimbap!

I didn’t expect that actually. It was very tasty, the rice was actually well done and soft and fluffy, quite difficult to achieve in the air. The vegetables were crunchy, the beef not overdone… the only thing wrong was that the seaweed soup was a bit too salty, but that’s just nitpicking. In fact I would gladly pay to have this while on the ground, which is saying a lot for airline food.

The Chinese is very questionable too… and they’re pretty honest about it.

Jeju Airlines

… and you thought we just sit around in meeting rooms all day…

This is the KAL Seogwipo Hotel on Jeju Island, where the NEAOSS Promotion Forum WG1 and WG2 meetings are taking place. They sure do know how to choose meeting venues, as opposed to the WG3…

A talk by Kai-fu Lee in Beijing. Quite boring actually.

Huge jackpot tonight.

Sadly no Debian birthday party tonight in Hong Kong, since everyone is so busy… actually which DD is still in HK nowadays?

Authentic?

Me: I’d like a tall latte, please.
Starbucks: Hot or iced?
Me: Hot.
Starbucks: Wouldn’t it be too hot in this kind of weather?
Me: No, I prefer my coffee hot, thanks.
Starbucks: You sure you don’t want to try our iced coffee?
Me: No.
Starbucks: Please be careful, you might get heat exhaustion.
Me: JUST GIVE ME A HOT LATTE!
Starbucks: Do you want syrup with that?
Me: (WTF? Only iced coffee come with syrup) NO!
……

spacehunt@ramen:~$ vlc -v --color pvr:/dev/video0:size=720x576:bitrate=3000000 --cr-average 1000 --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=vorbis,vb=180,ab=48,width=320,height=240,venc=ffmpeg{keyint=80,hurry-up,vt=500000},deinterlace}:standard{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=:56881}'

This says, take a 720×576 3Mbps MPEG2 stream from /dev/video0, deinterlace, transcode it using the XViD and Vorbis codecs, at 180kbps and 48kbps respectively, scale the resolution down to 320×240, and offer the result via HTTP port 56881 as an Ogg stream.

At first I tried Flumotion… but after trying for the whole morning, I gave up and remembered that VideoLAN was created exactly for this purpose. And it works flawlessly!

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Well, not quite immediate… often some bits can be passed through, for example:

# telnet mail.sw-linux.com 143
Trying 202.153.106.243...
Connected to mail.sw-linux.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT IDLE ACL ACL2=UNION STARTTLS XMAGICTRASH] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2004 Double Precision, Inc.  See COPYING for distribution information.
Connection closed by foreign host.

# telnet mail.sw-linux.com 25
Trying 202.153.106.243...
Connected to 202.153.106.243.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.sw-linux.com ESMTP Exim 3.35 #1 Fri, 09 Jun 2006 13:14:12 +0800
HELO nanjing
250 mail.sw-linux.com Hello nanjing [218.104.86.222]
MAIL FROM: xxxx@sw-linux.com
250 <xxxx @sw-linux.com> is syntactically correct
RCPT TO: xxxx@sw-linux.com
250 <xxxx @sw-linux.com> is syntactically correct
Connection closed by foreign host.

So what do we do? Let’s do a trace of the actual TCP/IP packets, courtesy of ethereal. Here’s what our Hong Kong server sees:

Capturing on eth0
  0.000000 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [SYN] Seq=0 Ack=0 Win=5840 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=92231345 TSER=0 WS=6
  0.000811 202.153.106.243 -> 218.104.86.222 TCP smtp > 39758 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=5792 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=15684968 TSER=92231345 WS=7
  0.102624 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=5888 Len=0 TSV=92231453 TSER=15684968
  0.103506 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1302803663 Win=0 Len=0
  0.190447 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=0 Len=0
  0.231670 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=0 Len=0

And from our Nanjing client:

Capturing on eth0
  0.000000 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [SYN] Seq=0 Ack=0 Win=5840 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=92231345 TSER=0 WS=6
  0.107777 202.153.106.243 -> 218.104.86.222 TCP smtp > 39758 [SYN, ACK] Seq=0 Ack=1 Win=5792 Len=0 MSS=1460 TSV=15684968 TSER=92231345 WS=7
  0.107813 218.104.86.222 -> 202.153.106.243 TCP 39758 > smtp [ACK] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=5888 Len=0 TSV=92231453 TSER=15684968
  0.234913 202.153.106.243 -> 218.104.86.222 TCP smtp > 39758 [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=0 Len=0
  0.269906 202.153.106.243 -> 218.104.86.222 TCP smtp > 39758 [RST] Seq=1 Ack=1 Win=0 Len=0

Now I’m no networking expert, but look at all these packets with the RST flag set… no wonder the connection drops. Even more strangely, look at the line I bolded; that Ack number seems to have came out of nowhere.

Man-in-the-middle, perhaps?

So this morning at around 11am, we opened another set of ports with non-standard port numbers for our mainland colleagues to use. It worked… while it lasts; even these ports were blocked by around 12:20pm ten minutes later.

What can we do?

Update Duh, this is very likely due to the enforcement of the new anti-spam legislation.

Update 07 May In response, someone rised a counter-petition.

I can’t believe “bloody hell” is still considered an expletive in this day and age. It hasn’t been for at least a decade, as evidenced by its widespread use in advertising:

People are not offended anyway.

But the China Business Times, a business newspaper with a sometimes nationalist slant, blasted Google for even telling people that links are censored. “Does a business operating in China need to constantly tell customers that it’s abiding by the laws of the land?” it said, adding that Google had “incited” a debate about censorship. The paper likened Google to “an uninvited guest” telling a dinner host “the dishes don’t suit his taste, but he’s willing to eat them as a show of respect to the host.”

Yes it’s all about face-giving. Go ahead and close it down I say. People still uses the uncensored Google.com instead anyway.

Update 19/02/2006 Added Ethernet MAC address

But as I watched HK Disneyland director Bill Ernest cry…

… the first word that popped up in my mind was: insincere. (more…)

MacBook.

No way. PowerBook sounds way better. Give me back the PowerBook!

“Stop on yellow light.” That’s just braindead. Devoid of common sense. Given that drivers here tailgate at every opportunity, if they do what the government wants them to do…

I received my Common Recruitment Exam results last Saturday. I passed all three papers, including Chinese. Which is great, but I haven’t studied any Chinese since Primary 4.

What does this say about the declining language proficiency level in Hong Kong?

Should be enough for a year…

What’s the point? Well as you know, asphalt is a rather heat-absorbing material, which means it is not a very good thing to have all around you during summer. So the Japanese have figured out a way of trapping rainwater inside the top 10cm or so of the asphalt surface on roads, without making the road too slippery. When that trapped rainwater evaporates, evaporative cooling naturally cools down the road surface.

Very neat.

All three CJK countries within two weeks.

Yes, that means I miss out on the march. Again.

Speaking of the march, Apple Daily is once again trying to get as many people to go on the streets as possible during the past week, culminating with today’s headline, “For Our Next Generation’s Tomorrow, Go On Street Today”, together with a “I Want To See Universal Suffrage” banner.

Very effectively, he reminded everybody to go march on Sunday.

Hence the following patch against Nautilus 2.12. It adds a GConf key /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow, which when set to False prevents the shadows from being drawn. A nice side benefit is that Nautilus then checks the background colour, and draws captions in black if the background is light. Nice.

Screenshots later; gotta run now. (more…)

Crazy idea! The high-rise mobile

MILLIONAIRE mobile phone salesman “Crazy” John Ilhan has unveiled his radical design for a $40 million tower in the shape of a phone.

The distinctive 120m highrise in City Rd, Southbank, would house his multi-million-dollar communications empire and 166 luxury apartments.

Mr Ilhan, who put forward his “phone tower” plan earlier this year, hopes his distinctive building will become a Melbourne landmark.

“Every country has a building of some sort. Sydney has got the Opera House — why not this for Melbourne?” he told the Herald Sun.