Bjørn Stabell 白熊

On occasion of the second world-wide Django sprint we got together 12 people to sprint at Exoweb’s office yesterday.

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If you’re in Beijing, know Python, have played around with Django, and want to roll up your sleeves and contribute some code to open source, then feel free to join as at the Exoweb office Saturday Dec 1st from 11:30 until 24:00 for the Django sprint.

If you want to come, please post a comment to this blog and put your name on the Django sprint wiki page under the Beijing section, so that we can gauge how many are coming and keep informed if there are any updates.

(See also Exoweb planet for more information on Exoweb and our office.)

I’ve been having so much fun listening to songs and watching music videos by Jonathan Coluton, an ex-software developer gone Internet music artist, or “Internet star”. He originally made headlines with his “Thing a Week” project in which he would make and publish a song every week. Merlin Mann has a good interview with Jonathan where he discusses what the process was like.

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Richard noticed that Feedburner has been blocked in China. This is terrible news as a lot of blogs and podcasts are using feedburner! No wonder half my podcasts suddenly stopped working. Let me know if you find a work-around (besides using Tor for everything).

Warning: This is a rant.

With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.

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This post shows how name components, which one is sorted on, and which one is normally used, vary around the world. The Chinese section is a bit weak as it doesn’t mention common titles such as 老毛 and 小毛, and the common use of nicknames, often by doubling given name characters like 东东, but the author gets his point across. Maybe it’s time to just use a full name field, and perhaps a field for an alias or preferred shorter name?

I September blir det 10 år siden jeg satte beina i Beijing, Kina. Det har skjedd så mye her sammenlignet med hjemme i Norge at det føles nesten som 50 år har gått forbi. Interessen for å komme hit har også vokst mye, og jeg får en del forespørsler fra andre som vil komme hit, så jeg tenkte å lage en liten side angående emnet.

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“Let’s head out for a coffee”, my girlfriend Ivana said, thereby setting in motion an incredibly journey on this, the first day of 2007.

As usual, we caught a cab outside of our apartment building, Heqiao, heading first to Pacific Coffee at Fortune Plaza. They were, as many other places on January 1st, not working today. We continued in the same taxi to our second most favorite coffee shop, Sculpting in Time out by Lidu.

Finally inside SiT, Ivana made a face of terror, “where’s my phone?!”. That would be her Sony Ericsson 810c which her company had finally, after 3 months of waiting, awarded her for coming up with the winning names for their conference rooms. She’d just gotten the phone two weeks ago and was deeply in love with it.

We had neither a fapiao, the driver’s number, nor the license plate number. About the only thing we remembered was that the cab was from a taxi company called 海-something, which means sea-something, and that it was white and green… or… wait, maybe it was green and yellow?

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As a software/data guy I always dream of abolishing physical boundaries so everything can be in software, virtualized. Besides a computer and a place to sit, what do you need to work?

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For a while now I’ve been aware of this situation, but thinking it would pass I didn’t do anything. Well, it hasn’t, so I thought I’d start sharing what I see.

Beijing Telecom has broken the Internet

At various places, one or more of the DNS servers you get from, e.g., wifi hotspots, will be configured to always resolve any domain name lookup. That means typos like www.doesnotexist11.com will resolve.

What do they resolve to? They resolve to IP addresses for websites of advertisers. It’s most likely a pay-per-referrer business model.

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