Archives November 2007

My Key Phrases (Should have just gone ahead and learned chinese years ago...)


My ESL friends back in University wanted to teach me Cantonese and I always wound up stopping after a few days of learning incredibly abstract and largely "useless" stuff (though fun, we started off reading Confucius, so all I got were extremely long decompositions of a few symbols in written form, which shaded pretty heavily ...

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Camera's on the Wrong Setting (Everything's blue...)


About 50% of my shots from yesterday are garbage due to blurring (in low light you're hands need to be very stable to get good pictures out of this model). Another 45% or so are ruined by a lighting-mode-compensation setting that was set for incandescent instead of exterior lighting (the 50% also share the issue, ...

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What to see... (Touring the city)


Suggestions from Ellis:

* Lin Family Mansion, (NW of Taipei in Pan Chiao City)
* Master Ching-shui Temple (81, Kangding Rd., Wanhua Chiu)
* A traditional vernacular house
* Lung Shan Temple
* Museum of archaeology
* Dalongdong Baoan Temple

The Open Source group of Taiwan in meeting tomorrow, so tomorrow I should do ...

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Presentation seems to go well (Few questions, though...)


Presentation went reasonably well today. The Asus and the XO were sitting next to each other on the podium, they really are very similar systems. I tried to make it clear that we'd like to get the software and content shared across the various systems, so that we avoid teaching "computers", and teach children how ...

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Joomla, Wims, Mozilla (Webby...)


First three sessions at the conference over. Wims appears to be a framework for writing web quizzes. It apparently has an embedding mechanism for adding those quizzes to courses using the open source course mgmt software (blanking on name right now).

Joomla 1.5 seems like it's primarily a refactor and clean up. Useful sounding for ...

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Pleasant walk around a night market (Very generous hosts...)


Our hosts took us for a walk around one of the night markets this evening (after treating us to a very well done dim sum dinner). The night market is a very large, intense and close version of the shops down in Chinatown (or Kensington Market), but without the need to close everything in, so ...

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Quick walk while the process runs (At least I got out of the air conditioning...)


Feel so stupid sitting here coding software at home. Two bugs found, one a straightforward "duh", the other a scaling issue that didn't show up in the tests, with a straightforward fix. Still, that's 4 hours of my time here gone.

Went for a walk as the final run was working. Just around the block. ...

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Little things to remember (What not to do when travelling...)


Just got into the room about 40 minutes ago. Total door-to-door travel time of 33.5 hours. Things to remember in the future:

When figuring out how much time you have left on your passport, remember to calculate based on the day you arrive in the country, not the day you leave your own country. My ...

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Forgot how fun PyGame is (Been way too long...)


Been hacking on a spike test for Productive for the last few hours. PyGame is really very fun once you get (back) into it, gets right out of the way most of the time. First task was to re-learn sprite-based rendering and create a simple grid of squares that responds to mouse-overs with a highlight. ...

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