Canghuixu

Facebook privacy for subscriptions... FAIL

2011-10-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was dabbling with Facebook subscriptions.

As far as I can tell, even if a user configures his or her settings so that subscriptions are supposed to be visible to 'Only me', and the list of people they subscribe to is no longer displayed on their own profile, their name and a link to their profile will still display publicly at the profile of whoever they subscribed to, in the list of subscribers.

Moreover, lists of subscribers are always public. In my own experiments, once I changed the setting to allow people to subscribe to my page, I couldn't find any way to prevent my list of subscribers from being displayed publicly.

To me, this seems like a flaw. If I have checked 'Only me' for who can see who I can subscribe to, not only should my subscriptions not be displayed on my own profile, but my name shouldn't show up as a subscriber on the profile of whoever I have subscribed to. My name showing up on the list of subscribers on another profile sort of defeats the purpose of 'Only me'.

At the very least, Facebook should warn users that even if they choose 'Only me' for who can see who they subscribe to, it only prevents the list from being displayed on their own profile, and doesn't prevent their name from being include in the list of subscribers at the profile they are subscribed to.

This seems to work differently than the privacy settings for my list of Friends. As far as I can tell, if I have set my list of friends to 'Only me', not only is my list of friends not displayed on my own profile, but I am not visible in my friends' lists of friends.

Meanwhile, I still can't figure how privacy settings for Likes, Subscriptions, and so forth apply to the information that is displayed in other users' Tickers. Oh well.

Overhaul of my Smugmug site

2011-09-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

I just overhauled my Smugmug site. I began by making all of my galleries smugmug stretchy so that the display would take advantage of all the available space in the browser window. As a result, photos and thumbnails now display much larger, and the overall appearance has much more visual impact. I already noticed in the day or so that the change has been in place that people are hanging around the site longer.I decided that I could take best advantage of the use of the full screen by further reducing the amount of space devoted to my banner. I redid the banner to make it text only, confined to two lines along the top of the screen, with only the most important links. I moved the search box and the Facebook 'like' box down to the footer. Take a look and let me know what you think: http://www.canghuixu.com

An appearance by one of my photos on a tour company site

2011-09-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

A Chinese tour company site has embedded one of my photos from the Travelator in Hong Kong Central in a web page introducing the Travelator is the system of escalators that move people from Mid-Levels to Central and back. The traffic from the link turned up when I was inspecting Smugmug referrer stats. It is definitely worth checking out if you visit HK, if only because the area it passes through has become a popular place for bars and restaurants.

Here is the website:http://d.lotour.com/zhongxiqu/yule-32613.html

As you can see, the photo that they have embedded includes my watermark.

Here is the gallery that includes the original photo: http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Hong-Kong/Central-to-Mid-levels

Here is a direct link to the photo:http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Hong-Kong/Central-to-Mid-levels/10512194_qvUxs/1/729868404_mqbN7#729868852_Dv8hX

And here's the photo:

Updated maps for Hong Kong and Shanghai photo galleries

2011-09-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

I updated my Google Maps to include markers for the rest of my galleries from Hong Kong and Shanghai. Click on any of the markers in the maps to be taken to one of the galleries.

Here is Hong Kong...

View Canghuixu Photos in a larger map

And here is Shanghai...

View Canghuixu Photos in a larger map
And while I'm at it, a map view of all my China galleries...

View Canghuixu Photos in a larger map

Night scenes of Minpu No. 2 bridge in Shanghai Minhang, and nearby areas 上海闵行闵浦二桥的夜景

2011-08-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

I spent the summer in Shanghai. I ended up spending a lot of time in Minhang, near Jiangchuan and Dongchuan Roads. One evening I had some extra time and I walked down to the Pudong river and took the ferry across the river and back, and had some great views of the No. 2 Minpu bridge. The full gallery is here: http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Shanghai/No-2-Minpu-Bridge-Minhang.

Here are some highlights...

On the way down to the bridge...

Updated map of California photo galleries

2011-08-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

I just went back and added place markers and links to most of my California galleries. Browse the Google map below to find galleries...

View Canghuixu Photos in a larger map

Wujiaochang, Shanghai at night (五角场的夜景)

2011-07-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

I processed and uploaded some pictures from some walks around Wujiaochang in Shanghai. Wujiaokou is an intersection of five streets, and it seems to be emerging as a major center in that part of Shanghai. There is a large, submerged pedestrian plaza in the center of the traffic circle, with spoke-like walkways that emanate to the various plazas and department stores that are being built around it. It is quite nice.

I took the pictures during a walk from the Crowne Plaza Fudan to Wujiaochang and back, so there are some pictures mixed in of stores on Handan Road and Guoquan Road.

The full gallery is here:

http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Shanghai/Fudan-and-Wujiaochang-area

Some favorite pictures from the gallery...

Some street vendors on Guoquan Road...

The submerged pedestrian plaza at the center of the Wujiaochang traffic circle...

One of the tunnels emanating outward from the submerged plaza...

Another shot of street vendors on Guoquan Road...

Data services on China Mobile in Shanghai... Android Wifi tethering, VPN service etc.

2011-07-12T23:04:00.000-07:00

I'm in Shanghai for the summer. I've been using China Mobile for my cell. I switched out my T-Mobile SIM card and put in an China Mobile M-Zone SIM card that I bought a couple years ago in Beijing. I talked to someone at the 10086 help line and they confirmed that even though I bought my card in Beijing, the data plan worked the same wherever I was in China. In other words, the 500mb I signed up for was 500mb, wherever I was in China.

One general observation I have re data services on China Mobile is that they are much, much better in downtown Shanghai than in the suburbs. When I am downtown, which is probably where most people reading this will spend most of their time, the data speeds are comparable with what I get when I am in LA, even though I think here I am limited to 2G, whereas in LA I have T-Mobile's '4G' service. When I am out here in the distant suburbs, however, things are much spottier. My phone signal is strong, as it is everywhere in China, but the data speeds are much, much lower than downtown, and data is much more prone to interruption.

At least for the time being, my China Mobile data service supports the VPN I have configured my Android phone for. Downtown, the VPN connections tend to be rock solid. Out here in the suburbs, however, the VPN connection tends to be much less robust. The connection often drops after only a few minutes. Sometimes I can't connect at all. Given that VPN works pretty reliably downtown, I suspect this has more to do with the poor quality of the local data services than anything else.

I am pleased to report that I am able to use WiFi tethering with my Android phone with China Mobile data services, at least for short periods of time. I wasn't sure how well that would work since I thought not all carriers were too happy about tethering. Again, this generally seems to work much better when I am downtown than when I am out here in the suburbs. Out here in the suburbs, the connection via WiFi tethering is pretty slow, and unstable. Sometimes the connection drops and the phone loses data services completely. So I really can't really use the WiFi tethering as anything more than an emergency backup when my residential DSL is flaking out. At one point this morning I actually had a VPN connection running on the machine that was tethered to the phone, but that didn't last very long.

A few notes re data plans on China Mobile, at least with M-Zone. One is that you manage them via SMS messages to the China Mobile service number, 10086. I have never found a comprehensive list of the commands that you can issue via SMS, but here are some important ones. At least if you have service through Beijing China Mobile, you can initiate a data plan by texting a message of the form KTSJLLxx where xx is a number to 10086. I think KTSJLL stands for 开通数据流两. To get a 500 Mb/month service costing 50 rmb/month, for example, you would text KTSJLL50. I think, though I haven't confirmed it, that KTSJLL100 gets you 2gb/month for 100 RMB, and KTSJLL200 gets you 5gb/month for 200RMB. According to this page, there are different commands if you are signed up through Shanghai China Mobile, or somewhere else. At least if you have Beijing China Mobile service, to check your data usage for the month, text CXQTC to 10086. You're only allowed to check your data usage three times a day. It may be a different command if you have service through Shanghai China Mobile.

One thing to note is that any data plan you sign up for on China Mobile starts at the beginning of the following month, so if you send the command to initiate in the middle of the month, you will still be paying by the byte until the end of the month, which may drain your account pretty quickly if you have background data turned on. My Android phone is a data pig if I have background data turned on, so I used up a lot of money on data charges at the end of June before the plan I signed up for kicked in on July 1. Unfortunately I only signed up for 500Mb/month, and since I realized I was burning through that pretty quickly when I was out and about the town, I have learned to turn off background data when I am out unless I really need it. I wish I had spent the money and signed up for the 2gb or better yet 5gb plan.

Another handy SMS for 10086 is YE. That returns the balance remaining on your prepaid account.

To cancel the plan, text QXSJLLxx to 10086, where xx is the amount of the plan you originally signed up for. So for me to cancel my barely adequate 500mb/month plan that costs 50rmb/month, I would text QXSJLL50.

One thing I would like to add is that I am pretty impressed with China Mobile customer service via the 10086 number. Every time something comes up and I need to talk to someone, I get through to a Chinese- or English-speaking representative pretty quickly. And the people I talk to generally know what they're talking about. This is a real change from the US, where talking to a human being requires being on hold for half an hour, only to find out that whoever you talk to is working from a script and can't function if there is any departure from the script and you have to wait half an hour while they bump you up to someone who knows what they are talking about.

One other observation I have is that whatever the rules are re showing ID to get a SIM card, they don't seem to be enforced very well. I bought my M-Zone card a few years ago in Beijing at a shop and never showed any ID of any form to anyone. I also bought a SIM card here in Shanghai without showing any ID. However on that SIM card, when I turned on the data services, I did receive a text message saying that I should go to the local Service Center with my ID. So maybe they only enforce an ID requirement for data services.

The historic canal town Luzhi, Jiangsu (江苏水乡古镇甪直), June 2011

2011-07-09T02:10:00.000-07:00

In June, I spent a few days in the lovely and historical canal town of Luzhi, which is in Jiangsu, between Suzhou and Kunshan. I was lucky enough to stay in a house in the reasonably well preserved part of the old town, close to the canals and old buildings. I had a few opportunities to get out and walk around with my camera. I put a selection of my favorite pictures from Luzhi into a gallery. These favorites are drawn from three galleries, one from my boat ride, one from some nighttime walks, and one from daytime walks. I have included a few of them below, along with links to individual galleries.

I was shooting with my new Canon S95. I was generally very impressed, especially with its low-light capability. I find that as I get used to it, I am pretty much leaving my SLR at home. Obviously the SLR takes much better pictures, but it is also heavier, and attracts more attention. While carrying an SLR around a famous and well-photographed area like the Bund in Shanghai doesn't attract any attention, using it in a quiet neighborhood where there are few tourists with it sometimes attracts more attention than I would like.

My favorite pictures were from a walk through Luzhi in the evening:

I also took some pictures during a boat ride:

And finally some pictures from just walking around...

Back from Wordpress...

2011-07-09T01:28:00.000-07:00

I came back from Wordpress. It didn't seem to be as accessible from China as I was hoping, so I decided to return. Wordpress is impressive in many ways, but I am used to the Blogger interface, as so without the incentive of being accessible in China to lure me, I returned to what was familiar to me.

Moving to Wordpress...

2011-06-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

I'm going to let this blog go dormant, and start blogging at a Wordpress site: http://journal.canghuixu.com. Please update your bookmarks.

The main reason I am moving is that I have heard, though not confirmed, that Wordpress blogs are available in China. I guess I will find out soon enough. I don't have any complains about Blogger/Blogspot, but since China isn't playing nice with various Google services, I thought the switch to Wordpress was worth a try given my plan to spend the summer in China.

Thoughts on why people are losing interest in Facebook, and how Facebook could tweak its user interface to keep users

2011-06-14T13:33:00.000-07:00

Recently there have been some stories claiming that Facebook is losing users, for example, this story on CNN

I would also be interested in seeing what is happening with activity per user, not just estimates of the total numbers of accounts. My own sense, admittedly largely impressionistic based on what I see among my friends, is that many account have 'gone dark' in that users are no longer logging in, or log in occasionally to check out what their friends are doing but almost never post anything themselves. Right now out of well over two hundred people on my list of friends, I would guess that not more than a dozen or two are active users, and there may be a few more dozen who post something every once in a while, and that the rest are dormant, either because they no longer log in, or because they log in but no longer post.

My own thought is that along with Facebook's well-known and really annoying penchant for adding new features that abruptly release personal information and require tinkering with privacy controls to reign back in, another key problem is that the user experience is largely unmanageable. Facebook's interface seems designed to pressure use to share everything with everyone, and connect with everybody.

I am sure that people would like and use more frequently a service that made it easy to compartmentalize their online presence, sharing some things with colleagues at work, other things with family, other things with classmates, and so forth. Basically, Facebook makes it too difficult to direct status updates or shares to particular groups of friends, and segregate these different groups from each other. While it offers the ability to create lists of friends, those lists are not very useful. At some point in the past I took advantage of the ability to create lists of friends defined by how I knew them, for example, high school classmates, college classmates, and so forth, but right now from a practical standpoint those lists are almost useless. At the web page interface, directing an update to friends on a particular list requires several clicks: first the little padlock, then Custom, then I have to enter the name of the list, then click on specific people, then type the first few characters of the list. And the mobile app doesn't allow any selection of friend lists at all.

I wonder how many people find themselves in the same situation as I am, where there are things they would like to share with particular groups of friends, as they have defined them on lists, but the process for doing so is so cumbersome that they simply don't bother, and restrict themselves to posting only the most innocuous of updates about the weather, a sandwich they just ate, or the price of gas. I often see news articles or videos or other websites I would like to share with specific sets of friends, but I shudder at how cumbersome the process is, and don't even bother.

I would like to be able to designate a small number of my lists as favorites for sharing, for example, "Work", "Family", "College Classmates" so that they would show up immediately when I click on the padlock, along with existing choices like "Everyone" "Friends" "Friends of Friends" etc. This would give me finer control over who I share what with, and make me more likely to update my status. Along these lines, it no longer seems possible, or at least easy, to specify which friends apps share information with.

Along these lines, once I have defined subsets of friends, I would like to be able to click on the name of the list and see a feed based on the updates from people on that list, with a default that if I post any updates while in that view, they will be visible only to the friends in that list. I could have sworn there used to be a feature like this, whereby I could look at updates only for friends on a particular list, but that seems to have disappeared.

Facebook seems to offer a partial remedy with its groups feature, but the drawback of that is that it requires people to join a group. I really don't want to run around organizing groups. I would just like to be able to broadcast to selected subsets of friends, without worrying whether they are in a group or not.

Another admittedly petty annoyance that I have with Facebook is that its People You Might Know feature doesn't have a "No" button that I can click, and will prevent that person from ever being suggested again without actually blocking them. I gave up using the People You Might Know quite a while ago because every time I saw it, I had to wade through a long list of people I didn't recognize, or who I really had no interest in, before I came across someone that I actually wanted to friend. I found that I can prevent people from being suggested by blocking them, but that is a cumbersome procedure. I can't for the life of me figure out why they don't offer a feature like this, since presumably it would increase the efficiency of help them train their algorithms. LinkedIn has a feature like this and it makes the People You May Know feature there much more useful. I can plow through the list of people every once in a while and cull out the people I don't know, so at any given time the new people it is suggesting are more likely to be people I actually know. This is related to my general complaint about the Facebook user interface being unmanageable, and aimed at getting everyone to connect with everyone. Why keep suggesting the same people to me if I have passed them over dozens of times already?

Oh well. I guess I'll stick with Facebook until something better comes along, but in the meantime, update less often. I really think they would be well-served by imposing a moratorium on adding new features, and back up and spend some time cleaning up the user interface to make it easier to compartmentalize our presence.

Google Music Beta

2011-05-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

I received a Google Music Beta invite earlier in the week. Of course I accepted it, and installed the helper on the machine where I keep my collection.

I was interested in seeing how well it would perform, given the size of my collection. I have a large collection of music, about 18,000 tracks or so forth, all of it acquired legitimately. I had a large CD collection already, which I went through methodically and ripped disc by disc, and then I have been buying mp3 albums at eMusic and Amazon since I stopped buying CDs. The current limit for Google Music Beta is supposed to be 20,000 tracks.

The helper that I downloaded and installed began scouring my Music directory and uploading tracks about four days ago, and it just finished a few minutes ago. I think it was about 150Gb or so of music. I was uploading from a machine at work that has a very high speed connection. I suspect that at home, the upload would have taken much longer, since at home we have awful ATT DSL.

The upload seemed to go smoothly, and as far as I can tell, everything is there. The web interface for Google Music Beta is nice, and the Android app also seems to be basic but functional.

A couple of things came to my attention as limitations.

First, Google Music Beta doesn't seem to make use of anything but the basic tags for artist, genre, album, track title and track number. I have a large collection of classical music with additional details like composer, which is handy in Mediamonkey and other managers that recognize those tags. I have also assigned star ratings to all my tracks, so that I can make up auto-playlists for favorite music by genre or artist. I'd like to see some way of accessing all the other tagging information on the tracks.

Second, Google Music Beta doesn't seem to import any of the M3U playlists in the folders it scours. This morning when I went running and wanted to try out Google Music Beta, I had to quickly throw together an Exercise playlist in the web interface since it didn't import my existing m3u playlist, which was exported from an auto-playlist in Mediamonkey. I have several other playlists based on my favorite music that I would like to import to Google Music Beta but right now I don't see how to do that. Oh well. Fortunately, creating and managing playlists in Google Music Beta is very straightforward, basically drag and drop. I thought Google Music Beta had the easiest playlist management of any of the web interfaces for music I have tried, including Audiogalaxy and Subsonic that stream from the computer, and Rhapsody and MOG which are cloud based.

As I said, I went running this morning with a hastily assembled Exercise playlist, and I was pleased with the results. I have an HTC G2 on T-Mobile. The stream was very robust, as robust as when I am streaming from Subsonic. I had mixed experiences with many of the other streaming services.

There seem to be some odd glitches with the players. In the web interface, it was easy to set a song, album, or playlist, or whatever to play, but I couldn't find a pause or stop control, so to stop the music I had to close the browser tab. Maybe I'm missing something. On the Android app, going through the playlist on shuffle, sometimes it repeated tracks until I hit the 'fast forward' to skip to the next track.

Overall this looks pretty solid and robust and well thought-out. I may still continue with Subsonic since I invested so much time in figuring it out, and now that I have it figured out it works quite well, but of the cloud based services I have tried so far, Google Music Beta seems to be the most robust in terms of the stream, and has the cleanest interfaces. As mentioned above it could use some additional features, but I assume they'll be adding things.

(9/11/2011 update)

I haven't been using Google Music Beta very much recently. The main problem I was having was that on my HTC G2, the app became increasingly flaky. For one thing, it didn't seem to play well with the original Music app that came with the phone, which I think was the default Android app. Somehow it often became confused between the two of them. In some cases it crashed the phone and brought down other apps, such as Cardiotrainer. Also, the inability to import M3u playlists, or make use of any of the other Id3/id4 tags such as ratings that I had added to the music in my library was a downer. I spent a lot of time rating my music to identify a subset of a few thousand tracks that I really, really liked, and there was no way to make use of that in Google Music Beta, at least no easy way via an m3u playlist. There might have been some way of doing something in two steps, first by important the playlist into iTunes, but when I tried it, the results weren't pretty.

I assume Google will keep working with Music Beta and it will eventually have a winner, but right now I'm not seeing very much progress. I would have thought that with something in Beta there would be frequent updates and so forth, but I don't remember the app being updated at all the whole time I used it.

Some more appearances by my pictures...

2011-04-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I check the Smugmug referrers stats to see whether any of my photos are being embedded anywhere. Today I found a couple more...

The Beijing Hash House Harriers used one of my Nanluoguxiang photos in a post announcing an upcoming late night run. Here is the photo from its original gallery:

And a blog entry in China included one of my pictures from Valley of Fire State Park in a set of pictures featuring scenes of environmental degradation. Of course Valley of Fire State Park was always the way it is, and wasn't the result of man-made environmental degradation, but I guess the scene looked striking enough that the author of the post imagined it as what the future might hold... Here is the photo from its original gallery...

Blog and microblog at Sina.com

2011-03-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

I recently set up a Chinese language blog and microblog at Sina.com.

I did this was mainly because I noticed that my photo site was getting an enormous amount of traffic directed from various Chinese search engines, most notably Sohu and Baidu, and I wanted visitors from China who found my site that way to be able to stay up to date. As you probably know, Twitter and Facebook are largely inaccessible in China, as are blogs like this one hosted at blogger.com. Right now I am using my Sina blog and microblog mainly to post updates about my galleries. Perhaps at some point I may translate some of my software reviews, or other random posts.

Setting up my account was pretty straightforward. I suppose the main issue that will confront anyone curious about setting up a blog or microblog at Sina.com is that the user interface is in Chinese. If you can't read Chinese, you're going to be out of luck. Though you might be able to muddle through with Google Translate.

As far as I could tell, setting up an account from outside China didn't require a Chinese mobile phone number, or entry of a personal identification number. At least I was never asked for either. When I dabbled with setting up an account last time I was in China, it did ask for a mobile phone number, and a personal identification number. I guess they have different criteria according to whether you are inside or outside of China.

The user interface for the Sina.com blog and microblog is pretty slick. I like it. The blog is especially good for sharing photos because you can upload lots of them at a time. When you click on the link to upload a picture, a dialog box comes up that gives an opportunity to upload or link to as many as 20 or so photos at a time. When I want to write a post introducing a new gallery, and feature a 4-5 of my favorite photos from the new gallery, it is very easy to use. The user interface is generally quite slick and easy to use. I find it as easy to use as the blogger.com user interface, even though it is in Chinese, and I am not a native speaker of Chinese.

Sina.com's blog interface also displays the number of visitors to the blog. If people are logged into Sina.com when they visit, it also displays thumbnails of their profile portraits, with most recent visitors listed first. The count of total visitors doesn't seem entirely reliable since I noticed that even when I am logged in, it seems to count my own page loads.

Sina.com's microblog (新浪微博) is also pretty slick. They really have it configured nicely for sharing individual photos. Also I seem to have configured my Sina blog to automatically post to the microblog whenever there are new entries. Sina.com also provides a very nice Android app for accessing a microblog that allows for sharing of pictures and so forth directly from the phone's gallery. The app shows up alongside Facebook and other apps where you can post a photo directly.

Overall, if you can read Chinese, and for whatever reason want to have a blog and/or microblog that is easily accessible in China, the Sina services do seem to work pretty well.

I don't have too many followers yet, but we'll see.

Suggestions for Washington, DC at end of March?

2011-03-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

I'll be in Washington, DC at the end of the month. I like Washington. It's fun, historic, and exciting. I have always enjoyed my trips there. Unfortunately, my visits are usually very short, and fairly busy, with lots of meetings, and little time to explore. I don't really feel like I know the city well. I'd be grateful for suggestions for neighborhoods or locations that are interesting to photograph at night, and I suppose are safe. Right now I don't have too much in the way of photographs for DC. Indeed, I think all I have posted are pictures from the Metro, from a trip last year:http://blog.canghuixu.com/2010/03/washington-metro-march-2010.html

Also, it looks like I may be free on the evening of 4/1, or at least part of that evening, so I would be grateful for suggestions for things to do then... performances, gallery openings, happenings, shindigs, hoe-downs, soirees, whatever...

Beijing and Shanghai, February 2011

2011-03-01T19:53:00.000-08:00

I was just in Beijing and Shanghai again. I was struck by how much better the food in Shanghai was. Indeed, I was struck by how in general, Shanghai was so much nicer than Beijing. The service at the shops and restaurants was better. It was generally tidier and more orderly. The traffic was better. And yet, for all of that, I guess I retain an affection for Beijing.

In Beijing, I spent one evening in a hotel in Nanluoguxiang, Courtyard 7, which I have already discussed. I walked around a bit in the evening, and then again the next morning, and took pictures. I already uploaded a gallery containing my evening pictures of Nanluoguxiang, and another gallery with my before dawn pictures of Gulou East Street, including the Bell and Drum Towers. If you want, you can cut to the chase, and go directly to a small selection of favorites from both galleries. I was actually in Beijing for several days, but the other days I was in Zhongguancun, and was too busy to get out and take pictures.

Here are a few of my favorites from those two galleries...

A bicycle parked on Gulou East Street...

A snack stand in Nanluoguxiang....

Another shot of Gulou East Street, before dawn..

Nanluoguxiang...

I also spent one evening in Shanghai. I stayed at the Jinjiang Hotel, on Maoming Road. I didn't have time in the evening to get out and take pictures, but I did wake up before dawn and walk around a bit and take pictures. Here are a couple favorites...

Taxis in Beijing

2011-02-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

A recent experience with taxis in Beijing reminded me that I wanted to share some advice re taxis there: avoid taxis that have been sitting and waiting for fares in lines at the major hotels, or at other sites, like the entrances of stations. Drivers sitting in hotel and other lines have typically spent a lot of time sitting there waiting, and they generally want to make their wait worthwhile. Some of the ones who hang out in hotel lines seem to specialize in trying to rip off travelers. To the extent I have had bad experiences with taxis in Beijing, it has always been with drivers from hotel lines. If they can get away with it, they may avoid turning on the meter, and then just make up an outrageous fare at the destination. If they quote you a fare, it is almost definitely a rip-off. About the only time when taking a taxi that has been waiting in a hotel or other line is not a mistake is if you need to go somewhere far away, like the airport. In those situations, the driver will typically conclude that the fare will be worth the wait, and may run the meter and not try to rip you off. Quite often drivers who have been waiting in line will simply refuse you if you want to go anywhere that doesn't represent a substantial fare for them.

Accordingly, it is almost always worthwhile to avoid headaches with drivers by walking a bit from the hotel and flagging down a taxi. In twenty years of regular travel to Beijing, I've never, ever had a problem with a taxi that I hailed on the street. They have always run their meter without being prompted, and not played any other tricks. Since I speak Chinese, they generally enjoy talking as well. About the only experiences I've had with regular taxis in Beijing that came anywhere close to being problematic was that sometimes I have hailed down a driver from one of the suburban counties like Fengtai who had just dropped someone off, and generally didn't know the city very well. In those cases I was able to give them directions to the destination, so I am have been in the unusual situation of being a foreigner and explaining to a taxi driver how to get to Peking University, or Yuan Ming Yuan, or Sanlitun, or Houhai. In these cases the drivers were conscientious enough to confirm with me that I could direct them to the destination before they accepted the trip. If you have your destination written out in Chinese, but you don't speak Chinese and can't provide a phone number for the destination, and the driver of a taxi you have hailed refuses to take you, there is a strong chance that he is from one of the outlying counties and doesn't know how to get you where you want to go.

The reason for this rant is that I was recently in Beijing, and for the first time in quite a while stayed at a hotel downtown, with the 2nd Ring Road. I decided to try the light rail from the airport, and took it to Dongzhimen. The light rail worked find, but once I arrived at Dongzhimen, I found there was no official taxi line, just a bunch of drivers parked nearby quoting me absolutely ridiculous fares, like 100 yuan to Nanluoguxiang. When I told them I could have come from the airport for that fare, they tried to negotiate by offering to make the trip for only 50. I ended up walking about 30m down the street and hailing a taxi. Accordingly, unless you speak Chinese and are willing to walk a bit with your luggage to hail a taxi, I would strongly advise against taking the light rail downtown.

Courtyard 7 in Nanluoguxiang, Beijing (北京南锣鼓巷里七号院)

2011-02-26T13:49:00.000-08:00

I was just in Beijing for a short trip. I'll write about that in a bit, and provide links to the associated galleries. The highlight of my trip was a night at the Courtyard 7 hotel in Nanluoguxiang. I wouldn't normally write about a hotel, but this stay was such a rewarding and unusual experience that I decided to write a post about it.

The Courtyard 7 is an old courtyard home (siheyuan or 四合院) in the Nanluoguxiang hutong neighborhood that has been converted to a small hotel. What is remarkable about it is that they have done an excellent job of preserving the original architecture and general feel, but have also managed to include all the amenities you would want from a hotel, most notably a nice bathroom in the room, and a decent restaurant. I had read about the hotel on the web and was skeptical before I showed up that they really could have preserved the look and atmosphere of a siheyuan and still made it habitable. But whoever did this, really pulled it off and did a nice job.

The hotel is fairly easy to find if you study the map on their web page beforehand. It was pretty easy for me to get out of the taxi at the north entrance to Nanluoguxiang (南锣鼓巷北口) and walk south on Nanluoguxiang for 100m or so and then turn right at the first alley, Qiangulouyuan (前鼓楼苑). One easy way of identifying the intersection at which to turn is that there is a Korean restaurant in a relatively modern building, Saveurs de Koree, at one corner. It was about 40m down the alley on the right.

Here is a picture of the entrance:

Another shot of the entrance, that provides a better view of the buildings on the other side of the alley...

One of the interior courtyards. The restaurant where they offer breakfast is on the left, and the entrance to the courtyards around which the guestrooms are arranged is on the right...

I stayed in one of the smaller rooms at the back. Way back in the day, these were the rooms occupied by the unmarried daughters of the family. I didn't take pictures of the room, but it was done nicely. The room had a really lovely antique bed. The mattress was firm, but that was fine with me. I guess if they had really wanted to be authentic they would have provided ceramic or stone headrests in lieu of pillows, but they did provide pillows. The bathroom was very nice. They had a very good free WiFi signal in the room.

Overall, the room was a little cramped, without a really good desk or other surface to work on, so it might not be the best choice for a long stay for a business trip, but if you need a base where you can stay while you can explore downtown Beijing, I don't think you could beat this place.

The staff was really nice. I spoke Chinese with them so can't assess their English. The staff were all young people who seemed pretty enthusiastic. Some other guests had small children with them and the young ladies working at the restaurant really seemed to like them and give them a lot of attention.

The room rate was very reasonable. I booked the room on Travelocity. It was much cheaper than any of the business hotels in the CBD. For the price, the experience was really remarkable.

Another nice feature of the hotel is the location. Nanluoguxiang is an interesting little hutong neighborhood that has become home to a lot of interesting little restaurants, shops, and bars. Sure it is a little touristy and not really 'authentic', but I really don't know what is authentic. It is certainly much nicer, smaller-scale, and generally low-key than Houhai. And from the hotel you can walk fairly easily to Houhai, and other major sites are a short walk or taxi ride away.

If you need to get here from the airport, I would strongly advise you take a taxi from the official line at the airport, rather than taking the light rail to Dongzhimen and hailing a taxi there. I tried the light rail to Dnogzhimen, and that worked fine, but I was disappointed that at Dongzhimen, there was no official taxi line, just a bunch of scamming drivers hanging around the entrance who quoted absolutely ridiculous prices to take me to Nanluoguxiang. Most of them initially said they would do the trip for 100 yuan, which is about what it would have cost to come all the way from the airport. I had to walk about 30 yards with my luggage to get away from these scammers and hail a regular taxi. The metered fare was something like 12 or 13 yuan.

Experience using the HTC G2 with China Mobile M-Zone

2011-02-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

I brought my new HTC G2 to China with me. As usual, T-Mobile was very easy about unlocking it before I left. All I had to do was call their service number and ask to unlock the phone and they emailed me the code. I actually unlocked the phone before I left by swapping my wife's SIM card in and turning on the phone, which triggered the process to request the unlock code.

When I arrived in China, I popped in my M-Zone SIM from a trip one year ago and I immediately had service.

China Mobile numbers seem to take a really long time to expire. I think way back in the day they used to expire after 6 months of non-use or something, but now they seem to last forever, as long as you have a balance on your account. Basically if you come only occasionally, just make sure to have a generous balance on your phone whenever you leave China for home, and turn off any recurring charges like a data plan, and you should be good next time you come back to China. That has certainly worked for me.

I didn't have data service right away automatically. I called the China Number 10086 help number, which has service in Chinese and English, and talked to someone who explained the different data packages, and I said I wanted the 50 yuan/month plan. The person at the service line sent me a text message with a code, and I forwarded that text message back to 10086, and I was signed up. The key was that the text message included the code KTSJLL50, which signed me up for the 500 megabyte/month plan for 50 RMB/month. I still didn't have service. I called back and talked to someone and they said I had to set CMNET as the APN. Once I did that, I had service. There seem to be several data packages with varying capacities that you selected from by sending a text message: KTSJLL5 is 30mb/month for 5 RMB/month, KTSJLL20 is 150 mb/month for 20 RMB/month, KTSJLL50 is 500 mb/month for 50 RMB/month, KTSJLL100 is 2000 mb/month for 100 RMB/month, and KTSJLL200 is 5000 mb/month for 200 RMB/month. If you sign up for something, and then you will be away from China for a while, make sure to turn off the monthly plan by texting QXZSJC to 10086 before you leave.

At least by default, I didn't have international calling and text messaging either. I called 10086 and they said to turn on international calling, I just had to text KTMYCGC to 10086. On China Mobile, you turn most services on and off by sending text messages to 10086. I did that, and sure enough, I quickly had international calling and text messaging. I dug around on the China Mobile Website and found that to turn off international service, I just need to text GBMYCGC to 10086. And I can check whether I have international service by texting CXMYCGC.

There are also packages for text messages but I haven't looked into them too carefully.

Basically the best way of finding anything out re China Mobile service is to call 10086 and talk to one of the people at the help line, in English or Chinese. The website seems pretty hopeless in terms of being able to find the various codes to send to 10086 to turn services on and off, or instructions for configuring your phone.

One thing I noticed: for whatever reason, my battery drains much more quickly here than it does in the states. I'm not sure why. With only mild use, my battery seems to be nearly dead by late afternoon. I have been taking steps to conserve battery by turning off WiFi except when I am at a hotspot. I turned off syncing on my email accounts, so I just check email manually by refreshing. I don't know if this was the issue, but I did notice the phone had the little syncing symbol up top a lot of the time. I am wondering if the phone was having trouble connecting to Gmail servers from here, and draining the battery while trying to do so.

Android apps that stream music from the cloud: MOG, Rhapsody, Pandora, Spotify

2011-01-21T13:48:00.000-08:00

Pandora

This is easily the most robust and stable of ANY of the Android apps that I have used to stream music from the cloud. For that reason alone, I like it a lot. I can listen as long as I like without the music cutting out, skipping, or the app locking up. Pandora even does pretty well when I am doing other things on my phone (a Samsung vibrant) like viewing web pages or sending text messages. And Pandora seems to be very good at what it sets out to do: streaming music from personal radio stations that the user creates by seeding with the names of songs and artists. For each station you create, you can provide additional training by liking or disliking the songs that it comes up with.

It does a great job. If I just want background music with a particular mood for an indefinite amount of time, and I'm not too worried about the specific contents of the playlist, Pandora does the job. I usually use Pandora for music when we have guests, or when I am working, because it takes the thought out of coming up with a playlist. I can just fire it up and leave it going to provide background music for my work, or guests.

In case you are interested in checking out some of the stations I have created, here is my profile at Pandora. Of course, you don't get to pick specific tracks or create playlists on Pandora, the whole point is that you get a personal radio station where you don't know what the next track will be.

Rhapsody

Rhapsody has been around for a while, offering a product that streamed music from the cloud to a PC. I had a subscription a few years back and liked it for listening to music on my PC, but once I figured out how to listen to my music collection across different PCs, I abandoned it. I just tried it again but gave up before I finished the trial period. Rhapsody has a huge collection of music and a pretty good web interface, so it is still easy to find music, build playlists, and save favorites. I gave up however because at least when I tried it, the Android app simply didn't seem very stable. Songs cut out or skipped. The app became sluggish and unresponsive or even locked up when I was trying to navigate. I was surprised that even on the PC client, streaming didn't work as well as I remember it doing in the past. It cut out more often than I remember. So I gave up on Rhapsody for the time being. I might try again in a few months if I hear that the app has been updated.

MOG

Right now I am using Mog to stream music from the cloud. It does everything Rhapsody did, with a cleaner and snappier web interface, and perhaps more importantly, a more stable and robust app. I can listen to music for extended periods of time without Mog skipping or cutting out. My impression is that the audio stream is also much higher quality, at least over a WiFi or 4G connection. I like it so much that now in the office, I plug my Grado headphones into my cell phone and listen to Mog there instead of on my PC.

The app interface also is designed nicely and seems very stable and responsive. It doesn't lock up or become sluggish the way that the Rhapsody interface did. I have used it to listen to music from an exercise playlist while running, with well over an hour at 3G, and it performed flawlessly. I certainly haven't come across anything that seems like a deal-killer yet. There are a few things on the browser interface that I would also like to be able to do on the Android app, like add songs to playlists and so forth, but overall it seems pretty snappy and robust.

I do have some minor quibbles. Like Rhapsody, and I would guess most of these services, it doesn't really handle classical music very well. For whatever reason, it is impossible to search by composer. Artist searches generally turn up the performers, so if you are looking for a composer, you have to hope the composer's name was part of the album title. Then when you favorite the CD, it typically shows up in the artist list under the performer's name, not the composer's name. Also, like Rhapsody, there doesn't seem to be a way to force a search for an exact match, so if for example I want to search for covers of Brazil, I end up with hundreds of tracks that have the word Brazil in the title, but no way of limiting to tracks named Brazil.

(9/11/2011)

I eventually gave up on Mog. For one thing, the app on Android was periodically erratic, for no apparent reason. Also, I guess I finally decided that I didn't like the web interface very much. Somehow, searching for music and adding it to playlists was more complicated than I wanted it to be. Another reason I gave up on Mog was that at the time, there didn't seem to be a Squeezebox app for it, so I couldn't listen to Mog on our home stereo.

Spotify (added 9/11/2011)

Right now Spotify is my flavor of the month. I received an invite a month or two and have been using it. I like that it will import iTunes playlists and try to find matches for the songs online. It isn't perfect, but it did a pretty good job with my Exercise playlist.

Spotify's catalog doesn't seem as complete as Mog or Rhapsody. There were a bunch of things that I remember being able to find on Mog like Electronic's cover of Blind Faith's "Can't Find my Way Home" that don't seem to be available on Spotify. These tend to be tracks that aren't available at most sites so maybe Mog was unusually effective at licensing. Coverage of classical seems especially spotty. But then again, most of the major services don't seem to do classical very well.

What I like most about Spotify is the user interface, both on the Windows app and the Android app. The Windows app makes searching for music and creating playlists very smooth and intuitive. As I mentioned above, somehow I found that managing playlists in Mog required too much clicking and moving through screens. And if I want to bookmark an album instead of a track, as I typically do with classical, I just make the album into a new playlist and bang, I am done.

The app on Android seems to be the most robust of any of the apps I have tried. I have been using Spotify during exercise for several weeks now and it has been rock solid. It hasn't crashed, behaved erratically, or interfered with other apps, which became a serious problem with the Google Music Beta app.

Spotify is now available on the Logitech Squeezbox, which is very nice. The Squeezebox app seems to work very nicely and we have been using it to listen to music in our living room.

Testing blogaway on my HTC G2

2011-01-21T08:09:00.001-08:00

This is posted from blogaway, which I also just installed. At first glance it looks more full featured than blogger-droid. For whatever it's worth, I see the text formatting options right on the main screen, so I can italicize and boldface and underline. The menu brings up options for adding links, photos and so forth. The linking works by inserting new text and link directly after you enter it, you don't select the text and then insert a url. Here's a link to my photo site.

Testing blogger-droid on my htc g2

2011-01-21T07:57:00.001-08:00

I just installed blogger-droid on my HTC G2 and am taking it out for a spin. Seems pretty bare bones. In particular, right now I'm not seeing any way to format text. Maybe there is a way of doing it, but I forgot. Also trying out the G2 keyboard for the first time.

Samples from the HTC G2 camera: Ventura Boulevard just before dawn...

2011-01-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

I run in the morning. I have been taking my G2 with me so I can track my route with Cardiotrainer, and listen to my exercise music with Mog. For the last few days, sunrise has been just at the right time to allow a very nice view to the east just before dawn on a section of my route between Woodman and Coldwater Canyon. The sky is largely dark, but the horizon is lit with beautiful reds and pinks, and at least on certain stretches, the hills are silhouetted against this color. I decided to give the HTC G2 camera a try. In general I'm not as happy with camera on the HTC G2 as I was with the one on the vibrant, but in a pinch it seems to do OK.

I guess I should be pleasantly surprised that I could take any decent pictures at all with a camera phone in these lighting conditions. I was actually pretty impressed with the colors. The pictures are blurrier than I would have liked, but I have been spoiled by shooting with image stabilized lenses, and I guess effects of camera shake are inevitable given the conditions. There were a few shots that did come out very sharp, I guess where I was able to keep my hands still. These pictures haven't been processed except for a little cropping...

The gallery is here, with a lot more samples, if you want to inspect higher resolution shots... http://www.canghuixu.com/California/Los-Angeles/Ventura-Blvd-Sherman-Oaks-and/15521723_HAjh4

This was probably the sharpest of the shots, I guess because I kept my hands still...

I thought this one also was pretty sharp, given the circumstances and the camera...

Why does anyone add any information at all to their Facebook profile? And has Facebook peaked?

2011-01-18T10:43:00.000-08:00

Another Facebook privacy FAIL, or almost FAIL...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/facebook-is-temporarily-holding-off-on-sharing-its-users-addresses-and-phone-numbers-with-developers-and-websites-after-a-bit.html

What I can't figure out is why anyone would add their address, phone number or any other information to their Facebook profile in the first place. That information should only be useful to strangers who don't already know me, like Facebook employees, developers, and hackers.

Everyone in my Facebook network is someone who knows me in real life. They already knows everything that I could possibly add to my profile, or could get that information by asking. I don't add strangers or people I know only casually. Thus adding contact information or any other personal details to my profile is at best redundant, and at worst dangerous. Only Facebook, app developers and hackers would not already have access to any of the information I could provide on my profile. Accordingly, I have left my profile pretty much blank, not entering any contact information whatsoever.

So my question for people who have filled out their profiles with their date of birth, names of relatives, political orientation, alternate email addresses, city of residence and so forth is: why? What do you gain by posting that information? Your friends should know it already, so you're just providing information that Facebook or developers can use. I suggest you wipe your profile clean. You'll find that it makes absolutely no difference to your Facebook experience, and reduces your exposure to the risk of a privacy breach if Facebook changes its policies again, or one of your friend's accounts is hacked, or whatever.

Moreover, as an added layer, I am signed up for Facebook with an email address I don't use for anything else. This way I don't get random people showing up in my friends list, or trying to friend me, just because I exchanged an email with them about buying their couch, or whatever else.

More generally, I wonder if Facebook has already peaked. I know that people are still adding accounts, and the page gets of views, supposedly more than Google, but somehow I can't shake the feeling that they have maxed out in terms of user engagement. I have nearly two hundred people in my friend list, and their activity seems to follow a power law, with many people not active at all, most people only logging in every once in a while, a fair number of people who log in regularly to see what friends are up to but never post anything of their own, and then progressively smaller numbers of people who are more active. Out of 200 people or so, I would say that maybe just 10 or so are active on a regular basis, in the sense of posting something every day, or every other day. Moreover, I have noticed that a lot of people who were active, are now less active. New users especially seem to go dormant quickly after an initial burst of activity.

Facebook has its place and I like it, but I suspect it is coming close to maturing. They may continue adding user accounts, but somehow I think that it will settle into something where there is a small core of very active users, a larger cloud of occasionally active users, and then lots and lots of dormant accounts.

Also, I think Facebook's reach is inherently limited by the fact that it is a tool for interacting with people we know in everyday life. That is a pretty small subset of the people I interact with regularly, and I have no intention of using Facebook to interact with any of those people because I don't want them trying to add me as a friend.

Maybe I'm wrong and Facebook will continue its breakneck growth, but for the long run, my money is on Google...

Ventura Boulevard, just before dawn...

2011-01-18T08:59:00.000-08:00

A couple more pictures I took this morning while running on Ventura Bouldvard, with my G2 cell phone... I'm pretty sure that whatever the other merits of the G2, the camera isn't as good as on the Vibrant. I have yet to take a picture that didn't seem a little blurry. Of course, these are unusual lighting circumstances, but still... I took pictures with the Vibrant under similar circumstances and they generally came out sharper.

I'm accumulating the pictures from my early morning runs in a gallery at my photo site dedicated to before-dawn pictures of Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, by all means check that out if you ended up here while looking for pictures of Sherman Oaks.

Red Rock National Conservation Area, Las Vegas, Nevada, December 2010

2011-01-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

I finally finished processing pictures from Red Rock National Conservation Area (NCA) from our Vegas trip in December. We spent about a day and half there, mainly at Calico and Sandstone Quarry. Red Rock NCA is really lovely and well worth the trip out from the strip. It has a loop drive with a number of stops, each of which is probably worth a half day. I hope we have the chance to return someday, but we'll see. Anyway, here are a few favorite shots...

If you have a particular interest in Red Rock NCA, check out the original galleries...

Red Rock NCA Sandstone Quarry...
http://www.canghuixu.com/Southwest/Nevada/Red-Rock-National-Conservation/15474029_z36Q5

Red Rock NCA Calico Hills...
http://www.canghuixu.com/Southwest/Nevada/Calico-Hills-Red-Rock-National/15391946_oBaRb

Enjoy!

Comparison of the Samsung Vibrant and HTC G2 on T-Mobile

2011-01-16T17:38:00.000-08:00

I recently turned my Samsung Vibrant over to my wife and bought a HTC G2. I'm on T-Mobile. I've had the G2 long enough to begin making some comparisons between the two. I already have a long review of the Samsung Vibrant based on six months of experience with it, so here I will focus on how the Vibrant and G2 differ. I will add to this as thoughts occur to me.

Look and feel, build quality

The Samsung Vibrant is a much better looking phone than the G2. It is slim, light, and has a beautiful display. If I wanted something that would impress sophisticated design-conscious friends who wear black turtlenecks, have eyeglasses with unusual rims, spend their days in coffee shops sipping espressos and flipping through design magazines, and their evenings in darkened cocktail lounges that play trance, ambient techno, and dub, I would go with the Vibrant. Seriously, it is a lovely phone. I barely noticed it in my pocket.

By contrast, the G2 is a chunky brick. A very functional brick that I really like using, but let's face it, it isn't beautiful. If you are out on a date and desperately trying to prove to your companion that you are not a geek, do not under any circumstances whip out a G2.

Of course as you probably know, the G2 does have a very nice flip out keyboard, whereas the Vibrant relies on screen input. I actually don't use the keyboard on the G2 very often. When I do, it is quite nice.

+1 to the Vibrant for look and feel, and build quality.

GPS

Hands down, GPS on the HTC G2 beats the Samsung Vibrant. At least the Vibrant that I had. As I discuss at length in my review of the Vibrant, its GPS was flaky, even after an OTA update that came out last fall that improved things slightly. Even after the update, the GPS took an inordinate amount of time to lock, and sometimes crashed the app or the whole phone while trying to lock. Even after a lock, the positioning was flaky, so route maps recorded by apps like Cardiotrainer showed me teleporting and passing through buildings.

By contrast, the GPS on the G2 seems to work well. Most importantly, it locks quickly. Once it has a lock, it seems to keep it. Routes recorded by Cardiotrainer and other apps all look like they should.

+1 to G2 for its GPS.

User interface

The G2 user interface is much truer to the basic Android experience. The Vibrant had a number of 'enhancements' which in most cases detracted from the usability of the phone.

The most annoying of the deviations on the Vibrant is that there did not seem to be any way to specify which sets of Gmail contacts to display in the contact manager. It simply displayed everyone in "My Contacts" which included everyone that Gmail added willy-nilly to my contact list based on the fact that we had one email exchange. I had to go in regularly and clean out "My Contacts" in Gmail to keep my contact list manageable.

By contrast, the G2 allows me to specify which groups of contacts to display, just like on the G1. I specify a group I have created called Contacts that only includes people I have added manually.

Similarly, and importantly, the Calendar on the G2 seems to be the basic Google Calendar, not the badly tweaked Calendar app on the Vibrant. The annoying thing about the Calendar app on the Vibrant was that by default, it added events to something called "My Calendar" which had nothing to do with my Google calendar. Events I added on the phone didn't show up on my Google calendar. It was only when I figured out that I had to manually specify with the creation of each event that it should go to my Google calendar that events added on my phone showed up on my Google Calendar.

The one tweak in the Vibrant interface that I liked was that it had a set of easily accessible tabs on the main page, maybe a widget, that allowed direct access to Wifi and Bluetooth settings. That made it easy to turn Wifi and Bluetooth on and off. The G2 doesn't have that. Initially it required me to go into Settings, but I ended up finding and installing some simple apps that are nothing more than shortcuts to the relevant settings pages.

Overall, +1 to G2 for User Interface

Battery life

I haven't noticed an appreciable difference in battery yet, comparing the Vibrant where I manually killed off apps, and the G2 which runs Froyo and doesn't seem to require an app killer. I found the Vibrant battery could drain quickly unless I manually killed certain apps immediately after I was done using them. Facebook seemed to be the worst offender. With the G2, battery life seems OK without my having to kill any apps.

Camera

My impression is that the Vibrant actually has a slightly better camera than the G2. The best of my shots with the Vibrant were comparable with what I might get with a low-end point and shoot in terms of sharpness, color, and clarity. So far I don't think any of the shots I have taken with the G2 have turned out as well as I would have liked, at least on close inspection. At least not the ones I have taken indoors, or in low light. They looked fine on the phone, but when I looked at them after uploading to the web, none of them were too inspiring. Also the G2 has a flash which really doesn't seem to do very much good. I will need to take more pictures to make up my mind for sure. I did take some outdoor pictures today with the G2, in bright sunlight, and they looked OK, so maybe I am being too harsh.

The Samsung Vibrant camera application seemed a bit more feature rich than the one on the G2. I still haven't figured out how to zoom with the G2. On the Vibrant, I used the rocker switch for the volume to zoom.

Update (2/26/2011): The more I use the G2 camera, the more convinced I am that it is just as good as the one on the Vibrant. I have been using it to take pictures on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks before or at dawn during my morning runs, and while walking around LA in the evening, and I have been pleased at how well it has done in very low light. The colors generally seem nice and rich.

VOIP via Wifi

The G2 allows for connecting to the T-Mobile network via Wifi, presumably via built-in VOIP. This is a huge plus. Parts of my house, including the living room, are a T-Mobile dead zone, and I couldn't make or receive calls in those parts of the house. I dabbled with VOIP via Sipdroid, a SIP number from Gizmo, and Google Voice forwarding to the SIP number, but the results were not very pretty. When I brought the G2 back home, I was pleased to see that I had the option of accessing the T-Mobile network via Wifi. I activated that and now I can make and receive calls in my living room and all the other dead zones in the house.

+1 to the G2 for access to the T-Mobile network via Wifi

Network Connectivity

For the last few weeks, my Vibrant had been acting bizarrely in the sense that when I was leaving a Wifi area, it was no longer connecting back to the T-Mobile 3G network. In other words, if I had the phone connected to WiFi, more and more often, when I left the WiFi area, I lost the WiFi as expected, but the phone was no longer reconnecting to the T-Mobile data network. On those occasions, I had to turn the phone off and back on to rejoin the T-Mobile data network. This problem only emerged in the last month or so. There was a related problem with the Vibrant in that in the last month or so, it was less and less successful at reconnecting to WiFi networks automatically when it came within range. Increasingly, when I came home in the evening, I had to turn the WiFi off and then back on before the Vibrant would reconnect to the home network.

A related problem is that the Samsung Vibrant had real problems connecting to certain WiFi networks, including the one at work, and quite often at other locations at well. At work they finally had to program my phone's MAC address into the system to guarantee access. The G2 has had no such problems.

Of course, another nice thing about the G2 is that it can make use of the T-Mobile HSPA network, which here in LA seems pretty complete. This is a huge improvement over 3G in terms of speed.

+1 to the G2 for connectivity in general.

Streaming audio over Bluetooth

One area where the Vibrant wins out is that it was much more robust about streaming audio over Bluetooth, I think via A2DP. I have stereo audio Bluetooth receivers hooked up to the receivers in my living room and bedroom, and never had any problem with the Vibrant streaming music from Orb, Pandora, and Mog to these receivers.

For whatever reason, the G2 has a lot more problems streaming audio via Bluetooth. It especially has problems with the Belkin stereo Bluetooth receiver hooked up to the receiver in my living room. Somehow after a few seconds of music, it actually interferes with the Wifi connection, and the phone loses its Wifi connection completely and the streaming stops. It sometimes resumes, but not always. Basically in the living room, where I need to rely on Wifi, the G2 is useless for streaming music to the stereo. Oddly, the G2 streams fine to my Rocketfish Bluetooth headset that I like to wear when running, at least when it isn't 320 kbps music. It gets choppy streaming high quality audio. It also streams fine to a Motorola DC800 Bluetooth receiver hooked up to the stereo in the bedroom. So maybe it is some kind of interaction between the Belkin and the G2.

+1 to the Vibrant for streaming audio via Bluetooth

Android

The Vibrant is still running 2.1. While there seem to be noises about updating to Froyo, 2.2, I'll believe it when I see it. The G2 runs 2.2 out of the box. I guess the main obvious difference is that on G2, I can watch Flash videos and animations that didn't show up on the Vibrant, which was running 2.1.

+1 to the G2 for running Froyo

Stability and robustness

I think the G2 wins here. Leaving aside the problems with the GPS on the Vibrant, the G2 seems more stable in general. Several apps that seem to work fine on the G2 never worked properly for me on the Vibrant, for example, Google Reader. The web browser on the Vibrant also seemed to lock up frequently, requiring me to pop the battery and restart the phone. Go figure.

+1 to the G2 for stability and robustness

Boot time

One of the frustrations of the Samsung Vibrant was that it took forever to boot. After I turned it on, it was often one or two minutes before it was usable. It seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time scanning the SD card and internal memory, during which time the phone was essentially unusable. Even when it was done with that, it still seemed to be sluggish and unresponsive for some time. The whole experience left me feeling like I was booting an old virus-ridden Windows XP machine.

By contrast, the HTC G2 is usable within a few seconds of being turned on. It seems to not need the media scan. Go figure.

+1 to the G2 for booting quickly.

This is it for the time being. I will come back and edit as I notice other differences.

Las Vegas Strip, December 2010

2011-01-03T19:33:00.000-08:00

We spent one evening walking up and down on the Las Vegas Strip. For part of the trip, I had the Tokina 11-16 f2.8 on my T2i. For the remainder of the trip, I had the 17-55 f2.8 IS EF-S. I thought the most interesting place to photograph was probably the new City Center development, but I didn't really have time to hang around there since I was with my family. If I have a chance I would like to get back there. The City Center development really is pretty over-the-top, and makes for some great pictures, at least the kinds I like to take.

The full gallery is here: http://www.canghuixu.com/Southwest/Nevada/Las-Vegas-Strip-at-night/15318353_FJpgs

Here are some of my favorites, which you can also access directly via http://www.canghuixu.com/keyword/favorite-las%20vegas-strip

Favorites from the Valley of Fire State Park, December 2010

2011-01-01T08:12:00.000-08:00

While we were in Las Vegas, we spent one day up at Valley of Fire State Park. It is about an hour northeast of town and well worth the trip. It has lovely rock formations. At several locations there are well-preserved petroglyphs. There are a variety of trails with spectacular views. You can't go wrong.

The slideshow above is based on a gallery of a selection of my favorites from the day. These favorites are drawn from several galleries devoted to specific locations in the park. I included these more specialized galleries along with the selection of favorites in case anyone was planning a trip, and wanted a more detailed look at these locations to help with their selection of destinations: the Beehives, Atlatl and Arch Rock Loop, Rainbow Vista, and White Domes.

Kelso Dunes, December 2010

2010-12-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

We just spent a few days in Las Vegas. On the way there, we stopped at the Kelso Dunes. By our calculation, it only adds about forty miles to the route. Of course, you had better make sure you have a full tank of gas, because the stretch from the dunes back to the 15 is pretty desolate. We really like the Kelso Dunes. I have never had much photographing it, but I tried again anyway, and did come up with some results. The full gallery of Kelso dunes photographs is here, and here are a selection of favorites.

A few picks:

My China photos: An introduction

2010-12-29T13:54:00.000-08:00

This entry is a companion to my selection of favorite photographs from China. You are also welcome to browse all of my China photos in their original galleries.

I travel to China frequently. I first visited in 1987, then had longer stays in 1989/1990 and 1992/1993, and then started traveling there frequently again starting in 1999. Most of my early extended stays were either in Beijing or Taiwan. Obviously, China has changed a great deal since the late eighties. Unfortunately, I didn't take many pictures on those early visits. I've been trying to make up for lost time by taking lots of pictures recently and sharing them here. More recently, I have been visiting Hong Kong and Taiwan more often. I may start spending more time in Shanghai.

I am usually busy with work during the day when I am in China, but at night I often have the opportunity to get out and walk around and take pictures. I prefer to take pictures at night, anyway. I guess I'm inspired by Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. I particularly like to take photos of well-lit shops or restaurants on otherwise deserted and dark streets. More generally, I really enjoy walking around urban neighborhoods and talking to people and taking pictures. Fortunately, I speak Mandarin Chinese. Everywhere I go, people are very friendly, interested, and helpful.

I have created collections of my selected favorite photos from Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan. These collections are probably the best place to start if you want to browse my best photos. As alluded to earlier, I really enjoy taking pictures at night, thus I have created a collection of selected favorite night photos from China.

You are also welcome to browse the galleries from which the photos in these collections are drawn. My collection of galleries of Beijing photos is especially extensive: Beijing hutongs, Beijing museums, parks and temples, Beijing Wudaokou, Beijing Zhongguancun, the Great Wall, Peking University, and miscellaneous other Beijing. I also have galleries of photos from Guilin, Hong Kong, Xian, Taiwan and the Three Gorges.

Also be sure to check out all my blog entries related to China.

My California photos: an introduction

2010-12-29T12:41:00.000-08:00

I live in California, so of course I have lots of pictures of the state. Since I live in Los Angeles, many of my pictures are from that city, and the area nearby. I also have some shots that I am proud of from the deserts, the mountains, and the redwood forests on the north coast.

California is an amazing place. I fell in love with the state when I was still in high school and had an opportunity to visit the summer after my junior year. My father and I started out from Las Vegas, drove down to Los Angeles and spent a few days there, came up the coast on the 1 and 101, and spent a few days in the Bay Area, and then drove eastward, crossing the Sierras through Yosemite, and then crossing the White Mountains into Nevada and then back to Nevada. Based on that experience, I decided to come here for college, and was lucky enough to be admitted to a good school. I went elsewhere for graduate school, but have been here ever since.

I still like to think California is one of the greatest places in the world. The state faces many challenges but I am confident it will muddle its way through. It certainly can't be beat for variety: cities, deserts, mountains, agricultural fields, forests...

Start by checking out my selections of favorite California pictures and favorite Los Angeles pictures. You can also check out my favorites from Death Valley, Joshua Tree, the redwoods, and the deserts.

You are also welcome to browse all of the California galleries from which these selections of favorites were drawn. I have collections of galleries for Death Valley, the Huntington Library, Joshua Tree, Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach and South Bay, UCLA and Westwood, Yosemite, other, mainly coastal landscapes, historical sites, and the redwood forests.

Experiences with Android apps that stream music from a PC: Orb, Subsonic, Audiogalaxy

2010-12-19T14:37:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to use my Android phone (originally a HTC G1, then a Samsung Vibrant, and now a HTC G2) as my primary music devices for some time. I have already bought stereo Bluetooth receivers that I have hooked up to the RCA inputs on the receivers on my home stereos. Streaming music straight to the stereo from my phone is SO much easier than streaming from a PC, or practically any other device, just because the phone is right there in my hand and is easy to control. I have experimented with a variety of apps that stream music, and will probably continue experimenting. In my experience, none of them is quite perfect, in the sense of meeting all of my needs. That said, I thought I would create a post to record notes about my experiences with the apps that I try. I'll update it from time to time.

In this post I talk about my somewhat limited experiences with apps to stream music from a PC. There are three apps in this space that I hear about most frequently, and have tried out: Orb, Subsonic, and Audiogalaxy. I have another post about services like Rhapsody, MOG, and so forth that stream from the cloud.

Orb

Orb streams music and other media from a PC that is set up as server. The web interface that allows you to access your collection is very feature rich, allowing searches for tracks based on any of the meta data, including tags. Creation of playlists based on search results is very easy, via drag-and-drop. So for example I can search for all my classical tracks that I have rated four stars and above, yielding two thousand tracks or so, and then drag and drop the resulting list to create a new playlist. It can even stream video, so when it is working properly, in principle you can stream home video from your server at home to your handset. Setup of the server is very straightforward and it seems to have no problem at all working on a machine behind a corporate firewall, or behind a home router, and doesn't require mucking around with port forwarding or opening up ports. Overall, it is immensely ambitious in terms of its functionality, and if it worked as intended, it would hands down be one of the best apps out there.

In spite of my enthusiasm, I have reservations. I have been dabbling with Orb for years now, even before an Android app was available, and it has never been glitch-free. When I tried Orb over the summer, the main problem was simply that the app was not robust or stable. It was almost impossible to listen to more than a few songs at a time without the music skipping or cutting out completely. Video streaming worked only occasionally. Sometimes the app locked up the phone.

I used again for a few weeks and it was working better than it did over the summer. I have even gone running with it, streaming my exercise playlist over 3G for well over an hour, and it worked fine. I don't think there has been a new version of the Android app, so perhaps there have been improvements with the server software. The app generally seems to work well, though sometimes there is more of a lag after making a selection than I would normally like. The Android app hasn't been updated since mid-2010, however, so I don't know what the future holds for the app. Orb seems to be putting most of its effort into its Orb device. (Updated 12/31/2010)

There are some other minor annoyances. I could never get the Orb server to import m3u playlists created by Mediamonkey playlists. Songs were randomly dropped from the playlist, and no playlist that was imported seemed to end up with more than a few hundred songs. That is less of an issue now that I have figured out how to combine search in Orb with drag and drop playlist creation to quickly produce very large playlists. Another oddity is that Orb reads in ratings with one more star for each track than I assigned in Mediamonkey. Go figure.

Subsonic

The comments about this app looked pretty good, so I decided to give it a try. In fact, I tried it twice. I installed once on my office machine and once on my home machine. The installation and configuration process is not intuitive at all. After I went through all that, in neither case could I access the server from anywhere else. I tried paying for the custom URL functionality but that didn't work either. There seemed to be a lot of stuff about port forwarding or changing ports or opening up ports, but I can't muck around with that at all on my office machine, and I don't feel like messing with that on my home machine. I want anything I install to be up and running in moments, not hours.

The comments at the Market are extremely positive, so I guess for some people who have the right configuration to begin with, or spend the time to open up or change ports or customize the port forwarding and so forth, it probably works really well. That said, I don't think I would recommend this for anyone who isn't technically sophisticated, and who doesn't have complete control over their firewall and router settings.

Update (3/18/2011): I tried again with Subsonic, setting up my home machine as a server, and it works pretty well. I did have to manually set up port forwarding on my router, which wasn't that difficult. I am pretty impressed with the performance. It is definitely much less glitchy than Orb. It is extremely robust. Sometimes after very extended listening the app simply crashes, but it is easy to restart. Unlike Audiogalaxy (below) it imports .m3u playlists. Although I think it seems to choke on very large playlists, i.e. ones with thousands of songs. Searching my music library works like a charm, and has a nice variety of views. And it streams video pretty robustly! So I'm sold on Subsonic now. I wish I could run it from my office machine, but that isn't Subsonic's fault. I suppose I could ask tech support at the office to open up one of the ports for my machine on the company firewall, but that isn't worth the effort.

Subsonic's business model is a bit odd. The app is free, but you have to pay for the server on your PC after the trial period is over. I guess I would like it to be the other way around, since buying an app is so easy, whereas paying for software on a PC requires me to whip out a credit card and type. Also, as far as I could tell, you need to make a donation for each PC on which you install the server. I uninstalled from my office machine and installed on my home machine and it looked like if I wanted to continue with the added functionality after the trial period was up, I would need to make another donation.

Audiogalaxy

I tried this out. Installation was easy, even on an office machine behind a firewall, and it seemed to work as promised. The app was definitely very robust. I didn't pursue it, however, since the functionality seemed pretty limited. For one thing, there was no easy way to import .m3u playlists. Apparently it is possible to import iTunes playlists, but I don't run iTunes. More of a problem was that it only allowed browsing by artist and album. I didn't see any way to browse or search on ratings or other meta information. Orb has very powerful search on metadata and allows for quick creation of playlists based on the results. I didn't see anything comparable in Audiogalaxy. I think Audiogalaxy is the most robust of the three streaming options I have talked about here, but has the least functionality in terms of user interface.

My Beijing photographs: an introduction

2010-12-19T12:12:00.000-08:00

This is the first in what I intend to be a set of entries introducing collections of my favorite photographs from specific places, or on specific subjects. I have been putting this sort of text in the gallery descriptions at my Smugmug site, but I find that isn't really the best place for displaying long blocks of text.

This entry is a companion to the collection of favorite photographs from Beijing at my Smugmug site.

Until about 2008, Beijing was the city in China that I visited most. I first visited Beijing in 1987, when I was an undergraduate and spent the summer at Peking University. I then spent several more months there in the first half of 1990. After a long hiatus, I began visiting regularly again in 1999. The city has been transformed completely in the time since I first visited, yet I still find it the most interesting and enjoyable place in China.

One of my regrets is that during my initial visits to Beijing, I didn't really take many photographs. The city that existed then is now gone, and I don't have anything except memories. Now when I am there, I make a point of spending my free evenings taking pictures in various neighborhoods to preserve some feeling of the city as it is right now, on the assumption that it will change again soon.

I really like the people of Beijing. They are garrulous, even loquacious, but rarely mendacious. Complete strangers are happy to share their opinions on international relations, Michael Jackson, the Lakers, American politics, history, or practically any other subject as soon as they realize I can understand Chinese. I don't get this anywhere else in China.

I have many galleries of Beijing photos, organized by location. These include Peking University (北京大学）, Wudaokou (五道口), Zhongguancun, some of the hutong (胡同)　neighborhoods, especially Houhai (后海)　and Nanluoguxiang　(南锣鼓巷). I also have a collection of galleries for Factory 798, the Military Museum, and some other miscellaneous but interesting places. For good measure I have a collection of galleries of photos from various sites on the Great Wall.

You can also view selections of my favorites from the hutong neighborhoods Houhai and Nanluoguxiang, Wudaokou, Zhongguancun, the Great Wall, and Peking University.

Be sure to check out all my other blog entries tagged Beijing

Downtown Palo Alto, in December 2010

2010-12-18T08:53:00.000-08:00

I was up in Palo Alto for a few days earlier this week. I didn't have much time for photography, except that one evening while walking to a restaurant to join a dinner, I brought my camera and took a few random pictures. The full gallery is here: http://www.canghuixu.com/California/Downtown-Palo-Alto/15118175_PGeGD.

Here are a few that I liked...

Facebook Fan Page

2010-12-12T17:03:00.000-08:00

I created a Facebook Fan Page as a companion to my photo site and blog: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canghuixu-Photography/183163141698781

If I have this set up properly, my blog, Twitter feed, and photo galleries should now all be accessible there, so you can keep up to date without ever having to leave Facebook. So go visit the page and 'Like' me. We'll see how that goes. I used the SmugmugTab app to create a tab to provide access to my Smugmug galleries, and so far it seems to work reasonable well. I also added the GraffitiRSS to import my Twitter and blog RSS feeds into the Fan page, we'll see.

Another photo used in a blog post, found with Smugmug referrer stats

2010-11-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

One of the great things about Smugmug's new stats is that they list referrers that link to specific photos, as opposed to pages. I have been running Statcounter for some time and it does a nice job of tracking page loads, including referrer information, but of course it can't tell me anything about direct views of photos via a URL that goes straight to the image. Fortunately, Smugmug's stats were upgraded earlier in the year and they have detailed referrer information. Accordingly, they provide information about views of photos via direct URLs, including photos embedded elsewhere.

I have no longer have any hope of monetizing my hobby and so don't worry too much if people use my photos in their personal blogs, forum postings, or other non-commercial sites. However, I do like to find out when my photos are used elsewhere, mainly because I am flattered that anyone found them nice enough to re-use. I just wish people that embedded my photos would also provide a link to my site, especially the specific gallery where they found the photo, to help boost my page rankings.

Today I was looking at the referrer stats and was pleased to find that one of my Nanluoguxiang photos had been embedded in a blog entry at Sinologistical Violincellist that started out talking about Yao Ming, but digressed into a mention of a restaurant in Nanluoguxiang...

http://adamcathcart.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/yao-ming-shanghai-feel-relief/

It actually looks like a pretty interesting blog. The author appears to be a cellist living and working in China, and many of the posts relate to the classical music scene there.

As I mentioned in a previous post, another of my Nanluoguxiang photos was used in a post at another blog, Haonowshaokao. The author there was nice enough to also provide a link directly to my gallery:

http://haonowshaokao.livejournal.com/3734.html

Thanks to Smugmug's watermarking, you can see the name of my site in the lower left corner of the embedded people.

Looking at the referral states, There also seem to be a fair number of referrals from blogs and forums that require a login, so unfortunately I can't see any of them.

What also struck me in looking at the Smugmug referrer stats is the vast number of referrals I am getting from Chinese search sites that do image search. In particular, as you can see below, over the last seven days, well over half (885 out of 1532) of the hits on my site, mainly image views, were generated from Baidu image search:

I guess the lesson here is that if you want a lot of hits from China, keyword your photos in Chinese, and they will be picked up by Baidu and Sohu, and you may end up with a lot of views. Whether any of that will translate into anything useful, I have no idea.

Dragon Naturally Speaking and Microsoft speech recognition

2010-11-25T09:23:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been curious about using speech recognition to dictate content. I've heard people talking about using speech recognition to dictate in generally their experiences some pretty positive. I certainly need some way of speeding up my creation of text. When I'm trying to type text I often seem to get stuck ones and a lot of time dawdling. My hope is that by using speech recognition I can speed up the process of content creation because my thoughts flow better when I'm speaking instead of talking. I tend to be very garrulous, even loquacious, so when I'm talking, the words simply flow. When I'm trying to type, somehow I spend a lot of time staring at the screen.

I started out by trying to use the speech recognition facility built into Windows 7 and Vista. I figured that since it is free, it was at least worth a try. Unfortunately though, as far as I can tell from my experiments, it really isn't ready for prime time. Even after extensive training with my voice and after trying several different handsets, it still made many mistakes, usually several per sentence. Moreover, correcting mistakes was a real trial. Even after repeated attempts, it typically failed to get the correct word or phrase. When I gave up on trying to speak the word and tried to spell it instead, it had terrible problems recognizing the letters that I was dictating, failing to differentiate between letters with similar sounds, or between letters and numbers that sounded similar. Another problem I had was that the built-in speech recognition seemed to be incompatible with anything but the Microsoft Office suite. I had really looked forward to using speech recognition to dictate e-mail and blog entries and documents in Google Docs, but basically it was almost impossible to dictate text in any of the browsers I tried, including Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. Sometimes I was able to enter a few words, but then we service simply stop working until I closed the browser and reopened it. The built-in speech recognition might be fine if all you want to do is work with Microsoft office and perhaps spend more time training it were your voice than I did.

One of my friends suggested Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The friend who recommended it was very
enthusiastic, and based on his recommendation I went ahead and bought.I just installed it about half an hour ago on this machine, and so far I am really impressed. I only had to spend a few minutes training it and now I am dictating this blog post. Overall it seems to make fewer mistakes than the Windows built-in speech recognition even with much less training, and the mistakes it makes tend to be a little less incomprehensible and easier to correct. It sometimes seems to drop words toward the end of a long passage and sometimes misinterprets my navigation instructions as text to be entered. Overall though, my initial impressions are pretty positive. I'm curious to see what will happen as I continue using it and it gets better at recognizing my voice. Entering this paragraph already seems to be lot smoother then entering the first paragraph up above. I certainly hope that this will let me post more often to my blog. We'll see how it goes.

UPDATE: I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking intensively now for several days. Clearly, it seems to work best with the Microsoft Office suite. I find that it does work with Google Docs, Gmail, and Blogger, though with a few minor glitches. At least when I am using Chrome, when I want to correct something in Gmail or blogger, the correction menu often doesn't appear, or it does appear, but then disappears again almost instantaneously. For some reason, I don't have that problem in Google Docs. However, in Google Docs, the replacement of words following a correction seems a little glitchy. If I correct a word, sometimes it fails to delete the first or last letter of the word being replaced and overwrites a letter or space adjoining the correction. That is only an occasional problem. I have just dictated this entire paragraph was almost no problem at all and only a few corrections to the transcription.

One other issue that I've noticed with Dragon NaturallySpeaking is that it sometimes seems to have a problem recognizing commands as a command as opposed to text to be entered. Maybe it's just me and seems to have a real problem recognizing me saying "go to end of line" and often mistakes that as text to be entered. Just now, it entered that text as " boat go off-line". I have similar problems with certain other commands but by no means all commands. Conversely, it sometimes misinterprets text to be dictated as a command. Again, it may be me, but somehow something that I am saying often triggers it to begin reading text back to me. I haven't figured out quite what the magic word is that this triggering this. Overall though, these are very minor glitches and not too much of a distraction. Moreover, they seem to be becoming less common as Dragon NaturallySpeaking becomes more and more used to my voice. Probably I just need to do some additional training focused on the specific commands that I am having trouble with.

I do like the experience of dictating text. For some reason, I find it easier to compose sentences and paragraphs in my head when I am dictating as opposed to typing, perhaps because the internal process my brain is closer to coming up with something to say in conversation or a talk. I have always been rather garrulous and have rarely ever been at a loss for words in any situation, so I find it easy to sit here in front of my computer and drone on and on indefinitely.

Photos from an early evening walk along the Chicago River, November 2010

2010-11-22T15:28:00.000-08:00

I went to Chicago last week. I was busy most of the time, but I did have one evening free to take pictures. Actually it was late afternoon, before a dinner at an Italian place called Volare, but the sun was already down, so I will call it evening.

I spent most of my time along the Chicago River, going west from Wabash Avenue to Lake Street and then back. The weather was fairly nice. It was on the cool side, but the sky was generally clear. I have always thought that this is one of the nicest places for nighttime urban landscape photography because of the combination of the river, the bridges, and of course the interesting architecture. The river is narrow enough that you can have nice shots of the buildings on the other side without using a long lens. By contrast, when I took pictures of the Central skyline in HK, Tsim Sha Tsui was really too far away to do much without a very long lens, so I took my favorite shots with a long lens. At some level the river between the Bund and the Pudong is also too wide, at least for someone with my very limited skills.

But the Chicago River is just right. I can stand on one side of the river and take interesting pictures of the other side with my trusty image-stabilized 17-55. In a few cases, of course, I would have probably been better off with my superwide Tokina, with lots of perspective correction in post-processing, but I didn't bring it this time.

Here is the whole gallery:
http://www.canghuixu.com/United-States/Chicago/Chicago-River-at-Night/14759629_BcyCZ

If you're in a hurry, a selection of favorites...
http://www.canghuixu.com/keyword/favorite-ordnov2010

A handful of real favorites...

Looking south from the Randolph Street bridge...

An L train going over the bridge at Wells Street...

A Metra train, as seen from Lake Street...

Looking east from one of the bridges, I can't remember which one...

You can access all of my Chicago favorites, from this and other trips, via this link...

http://www.canghuixu.com/keyword/favorite-chicago

Blogging on the bus

2010-11-12T16:01:00.001-08:00

Now that I can post from my phone, I decided to try posting from on board an LA city bus. Normally I drive back and forth to work, but I decided that today I would try the bus. It is an express bus that has stops right next to my office and home, so in principle it should be fairly convenient. Driving takes half an hour, and according to the schedule, the bus should be fifty minutes. While the bus is slower, at least I can do something else with my time while I'm waiting, like post to my blog. Of course, the one day I decide to try this, traffic on one of the streets that normally moves quickly is completely clogged because of some construction.

This reminds me of what I always thought was the main problem with relying on buses alone as a public transit solution: they can't go any faster than prevailing traffic. Of course, there are options for tweaking signal lights and so forth, but fundamentally, without their own rights of way, they'll never get people to their destination quickly in heavy traffic. They either need their own rights of way, or we need to increase the speed of traffic by imposing road pricing and getting other vehicles off the road. I like both of those ideas but the first is expensive to do properly, and the latter is politically difficult.

Why am I bothering to say this? Because I keep reading about bus advocates here in LA who lobby to take all the money being spent on light rail and subway, and spend it instead on more buses, and I guess drivers. I just don't see how that achieves anything. As long as buses can't go any faster than traffic, more buses are not going to entice people out of their cars. They will be end up being more competition for the roads. Over the long term, it seems to me that continued expansion of light rail is better as a way of creating an alternative to driving. Bus rapid transit on dedicated rights of way also makes sense.

Again, I think the one context where a massive focus on bus would make sense would be in conjunction with road pricing that would get vehicles off the streets and increase speeds. I was impressed with how well buses worked in london last time I was there, and I think they worked because road pricing had slashed the number of cars on the road that the buses had to compete with. Somehow, though, road pricing doesn't seem to be on the agenda anywhere in the united states.

Anyway home now. Speed picked up dramatically once we passed the construction. If it hadn't been for the construction, I am guessing it would have taken about forty minutes, only about ten minutes more than driving. So maybe I will be doing this more often, at least on days where my schedule is flexible and I can afford a delay like this one.

Testing Blogaway for android

2010-11-12T09:50:00.001-08:00

I'm testing another android app, blogaway, that is supposed to work with blogger. Out of the 3 that I've tested so far, this seems to be the first that works well with the speech recognition on android. One of them kept inserting new text at the beginning of the box. The other one did not work at all. Everything was garbled. In fact, I am dictating this entry right now. Overall, it seems to work pretty well although clearly I will need to do some light editing. I have to go back and capitalize the beginnings of sentences and add punctuation. Also I have to correct some mistakes here and there. In general this seems to be the best of the applications I've tested so far for posting to blogger from android.

Testing Blogger-droid for android

2010-11-12T08:00:00.001-08:00

I just bought and installed an android app called blogger-droid, which in theory should let me post to my blog from my phone. Accordingly, I'm composing this on my phone, using swype. So far it seems pretty painless.

I just tried visiting my blog from my mobile phone, and it occurred to me that it would be nice if there was an option to allow posts to be reformatted automatically for mobile devices. Right now it tries to display the page as if it were on a regular display, and there is a lot of blank space where the flash animations would go.

Anyway now that I can blog from my phone, I look forward to posting more often, assuming I can find anything interesting to say.

One limitation with Blogger-droid so far is that at least when I tried it, it didn't work well with speech recognition. It kept inserting text at the beginning of the box, even when the cursor was located properly somewhere else. I would guess that this would be easy to fix so I'll try it again later.

An evening in Mong Kok, Hong Kong, in September 2010

2010-10-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

I spent a week in Hong Kong in late September. It was a pretty busy week, but I did have one evening free for photography. I went down to Mong Kok and spent a few hours there with my camera. Mong Kok is primarily a shopping and dining area that seems very popular with young people. Some parts reminded me of Myeongdong in Seoul and Ikebukuro in Tokyo, in the sense that it was dominated by young people. Most of the pictures here are from the shopping and dining areas on Sai Yeung Choi St. (西洋菜街) and Tong Choi St. (通菜街) which are east of Nathan Road. Tong Choi Street has a night market with a lot of stalls selling knick-knacks for tourists. Portland Street, to the west of Nathan Road, is pretty seedy. I hate to disappoint you, but I spent very little time on Portland Street, and only took a few pictures there. It didn't feel especially dangerous or threatening, but it wasn't exactly charming either.

Here is the gallery of Mong Kok photos:

http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Hong-Kong/Mong-Kok-Hong-Kong-China/14018611_o2vXV

Here is a selection of my favorites from the evening:

http://www.canghuixu.com/keyword/favorite-mong%20kok

Here is a slideshow for your convenience, it may be easier to kick back and watch the slideshow than click through the gallery at the link above...

I had my GPS along, so the photos are geotagged, but the coordinates don't seem very accurate. I think because of the density of the buildings here, my GPS signal was pretty erratic, so a lot of the locations stamped into the photos seem to be off a little bit.

I took these with my Rebel T2i, which I acquired earlier in the summer as an 'upgrade' for my trusty old 20D. I continue to be really impressed with the high ISO performance of the T2i. I know a 5D Mk II or probably a 7D or 60D would be even more spectacular, but oh well...

The first few photos in the set were actually with the EF-S 18-135 IS. I wouldn't normally have thought of it as a night lens, but I did want to give it a try, and it did OK. It certainly had a lower 'hit rate' and I had to discard a lot more pictures than I did with the EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS, which I put back on in the course of the evening. At least on the T2i, and presumably on the other new Canon crop sensor bodies like the 7D and 60D, it does seem like the EF-S 18-135 is OK for low light in a pinch, at ISO 3200, but I wouldn't want to rely on it. For some reason, the lens info isn't being displayed in the EXIF accessible via Smugmug, so I can't figure out how a visitor can easily determine which lens I was using.

The other highlight of the week was a dinner at Loaf On Cuisine (六福) in Sai Kung. That was one of the best meals I have had this year.

Please be sure to check out my selection of favorite Hong Kong photos.

'Data storage low' warning on my Samsung Vibrant

2010-09-27T02:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, while I was coming back from HK, I was in the airport and suddenly my Samsung Vibrant showed a little red icon, gave me a data storage low warning, and then everything began crashing and I had to keep clicking through force closes. I clicked on the data storage low warning and it took me to the app manager, where I deleted some apps. But I kept getting the warning, and apps kept crashing. Finally I began inspecting the apps, and I noticed the 'Web' was using 116Mb, almost all of it in the cache. I cleared the data and cache in the Web app and suddenly everything was fine again. I have no idea what happened, but my phone is working again.

The phone was essentially unusable until I cleared the cache and I guess freed up some internal phone memory. I feel lucky that I stumbled on something that solved the problem, at least temporarily. This seems like a strange problem for the phone to have. It isn't clear to me why the data storage would be filled up since I haven't had the phone for very long, and I haven't installed that many apps. The warning message was cryptic, and while I was getting the warning, the phone was unusable since everything the Dialer and the App Manager crashed and triggered a Force Close screen. If somehow the Web cache was bloated, it seems to me that the Web app should routinely clear the cache, once it reaches a certain size.

Anyway I am putting this up here in case anyone else runs into the same problem. I hope it helps.

Samsung Vibrant in Hong Kong, unlocked and working on People's!!!

2010-09-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

I showed up in Hong Kong with my Samsung Vibrant. After I turned it on and it asked for the PIN to unlock my SIM, I kicked myself because I forgot to get that from T-Mobile before leaving. I used Skype to call the T-Mobile 800 number and they took my request for a unlock code and 24 hours later, I had one. I entered the PIN code, turned on data (*106*01#), subscribed to mobile data plan (*103*01#), manually added an APN via the settings at http://www.peoples.com.hk/images/handsets/handset_setting_en.pdf, and away I go! So far I only seem to have 2G service. But hey, it is working.

I really like T-Mobile for being so nice about providing unlock codes.

Another of my photos, embedded in a blog entry without attribution... sigh...

2010-09-05T13:58:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the Smugmug referrer stats, I can see when one of my photos is embedded in another site. Another one just popped up. It seems to be a personal blog where someone posted scripts that they wrote. I'm flattered that they liked my picture enough to embed it in a post with one of their scripts, and hope that they have a successful career as a writer, but in the meantime, it would be really, really if people who embed my photos on their personal sites or forum posts would include an attribution, and a link to my site... Anyway here is the blog entry:

http://angelswings5.livejournal.com/1012.html

And here is the original in the gallery...

http://www.canghuixu.com/Canada/Toronto-April-2006/1357621_dUfMi#64144712_pr2uR-A-LB

Favorite pictures from a week in Yosemite, August 2010

2010-09-04T15:33:00.001-07:00

We spent a week in Yosemite in August. We were with friends who were kind enough to invite us when it turned out they had extra room reservations because the original invitees had cancelled. We were very fortunate because rooms in Yosemite are typically booked up well in advance, often a year in advance, and we are too disorganized to ever book anything that far ahead of time. It was a wonderful week of hiking, swimming in creeks and rivers, and other activities. I didn't really have time on my own to take pictures, so most of my shooting was done while we were on the move, during hikes. I took hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures, deleted most of them, and posted the surviving shots in galleries organized roughly by location in the park. I also used Smugmug smart galleries to create a gallery comprising a small number of favorites drawn from all the galleries. The slideshow below is based on that gallery of favorites:

For me, Yosemite is really intimidating as a place to photograph. It is one of the most spectacular places in the world, but by the same token, it has already been photographed by the greatest landscape photographers in the world. I can't really imagine coming up with anything new to show. Accordingly, I wasn't too ambitious in my shooting this time. I used the opportunity to practice shooting alpine scenes, with mountains, cliff, lakes, forests, and creeks, and pine trees. Previously most of my limited experience with landscapes has been in the desert, on the coast, or in the redwoods, so this was a new experience for me. If I can get back there and have some free time, I would like to do more shooting around sunset and sunrise. As you can see, most of my shots were in the bright light of midday, when we were hiking.

I should disclose that some of the shots were taken my wife. We had two cameras on this trip. I recently bought a Rebel T2i that I like a lot for its light weight and video capability, and I turned the 20D over to my wife. Most of the time, I had our Tokina superwide f2.8 11-16 on the T2i and my wife was shooting with the venerable 17-55 f2.8 IS on the 20D, though sometimes we switched. The Tokina 11-16 is a really spectacular lens but I feel like I haven't really mastered shooting superwide yet. It did come in very handy with some of the spectacular vistas in the valleys, where it allowed many shots that I couldn't possibly get with the 17-55. Anyway, for the most part, if you look at the EXIF, most of the shots with a 20D were by my wife, and the T2i shots were by me.

More of my photos used in forums, embedded in posts, without attribution... sigh...

2010-08-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the new referrer stats in Smugmug, I can actually see when my photos are being embedded in posts, or web pages, without other attribution. I can't do anything about it, but I guess I can at least mention it, and gripe.

Previously, thanks to the new Smugmug referred stats, I identified some examples of my photos being embedded in posts in forums, without any attribution: http://blog.canghuixu.com/2010/06/big-improvement-in-smugmug-stats.html

Here is another of my pictures, embedded in a post in some forum in the Netherlands, unfortunately without any attribution...

http://forum.fok.nl/topic/883179/12/25#40428418

Here is the original in my gallery...

http://www.canghuixu.com/Europe/Amsterdam-March-2006/1307544_JS6ZF#61596060_8q6KJ

I can't read Dutch so have no idea what the post is about. I'm flattered that anyone liked one of my pictures enough to embed it in a gallery, but I really would be grateful if they would actually mention in their post where they got the photo, if only because that might boost my search engine rankings. I don't really expect to get any money out of this, but some recognition would be nice...

In this post, in a thread that I don't completely understand, the second photo is mine...

http://www.theopenjam.net/showpost.php?p=368325&postcount=11

Here is the original for picture #2, in its gallery...

http://www.canghuixu.com/United-States/Michigan/Detroit-Airport-McNamara/924734_AE3A9#42247531_AfwR9

It wouldn't cost any of these people a penny to credit my photo and add a link to my gallery and say something nice about it, but oh well. I know I can block embedding of my photos, but for the time being, I guess I would rather that someone saw them than no one saw them. Maybe if anyone ever starts ordering prints, or buying licenses, then I'll tighten up... Ah well... If I wasn't so lazy I would probably write to these people and ask them to at least mention my site. Maybe someday...

Why I love LA: I can show up at a good restaurant in a t-shirt and shorts, and get a table

2010-07-26T20:20:00.000-07:00

I love LA. There is a lot to love about LA, especially the weather, but today I was reminded of something else I really like about it here: I can show up at a really good restaurant in a t-shirt, REI shorts, and drivers' shoes, with three days' growth of scruffy beard, and not only get a table, but get really good service, with no indication from anyone that they would prefer that I take my business elsewhere.

Today my dad invited me to lunch for a special occasion, and we decided on Tavern on San Vicente. We had been wanting to try Tavern for quite a while, but we always tried to get a dinner reservation at short notice, and of course they were always booked up. I was working at home so not dressed very nicely, basically a Saguaro National Park t-shirt, some shorts from REI, and drivers' shoes. And I had been taking a vacation from shaving so had several days worth of facial hair growth.

We showed up there with my son and were seated promptly. My dad and I both had the fish special of the day, Scottish salmon. I had the soup of the day, a tomato soup. My son had the grilled cheese sandwich. Which reminds me, another great thing about LA is how indulgent the best restaurants are with kids. Tavern, like many of the best restaurants in LA, actually had a kids' menu. We concluded by sharing the carrot cake. Throughout, the service was impeccable. And the food was all great. I want to go back with my wife for dinner at some point. Or maybe my dad and I can go hit the bar there one evening and have drinks surrounded by the beautiful people of Brentwood.

Initially I felt out of place, since all the other diners were dressed nicely. Not formally, but nicely, the way I usually like to dress when I hit a decent restaurant in LA. But later on I felt better because some other patrons were seated wearing t-shirts and jeans. Of course, they looked a lot better than I did. Their t-shirts probably $200 t-shirts purchased at Fred Segal, and their jeans were probably $400, custom-tailored from fair trade organic denim made from cotton grown on farms where all the workers were paid $30 an hour and had health and retirement benefits. We're talking Brentwood, here. But it was all good.

Anyway, I tried to imagine wearing shorts and a t-shirt walking in to a restaurant as good as Tavern in NYC, DC, Boston, SF or practically any city in North America, or Europe, and I just couldn't imagine it. I mean, I got into trouble years ago in Tokyo for wearing shorts, and those were Brooks Brothers shorts, and I wasn't even in a fancy restaurant. And once in Seoul I was barred entry from a jazz venue and restaurant in Kangnam by a beautiful but emphatic young woman with a headset who was apparently maitre d' whose only English, as far as I could tell, was "No shorts!" I suppose I could get seated at a good restaurant in Beijing if I had on shorts and a t-shirt, but probably not in Tokyo or Seoul. Shanghai might be a problem as well.

All the more reason to like LA.

Samsung Vibrant review (final update: 1/15/2011)

2010-07-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

I picked up a Samsung Vibrant the day it became available at T-Mobile. I have been using it now for about 10 days. So far, so good.

First, some background. The Vibrant replaced my G1, which was still working, but was showing its age. In particular, as apps kept bulking up and becoming more demanding, it was struggling. And because its memory was so limited, as the apps I needed kept getting bigger, I had to delete other apps. So I did a hard reset of my G1, connected it to our son's gmail account, took out the SIM card, and gave it to our son to play with.

The Vibrant is at least an order of magnitude improvement over the G1 in almost all respects: battery life, display, internal memory, and speed. Connection speed also seems hugely improved over the G1, especially over T-Mobile's network here in LA.

Battery life is especially impressive, at least coming from the G1. I typically wake up, disconnect the charger and take it with me for my hour-long morning run, playing music and with Cardiotrainer using the GPS the entire time, and when I get back, the battery is still nearly full. On the G1, running with Cardiotrainer and the GPS took the battery down to about 50% or so. I can generally have the phone with me for the rest of the day with occasional phone calls and app use and there is still a decent charge left when I go to sleep in the evening. What I have noticed is that the phone is especially thrifty about energy use when it is on but not in use. If I forget to connect the phone to the charger when I go to sleep, the next morning the battery level is basically what it was when I went to sleep. Whenever I left the G1 disconnected overnight, by the next morning the battery was down pretty substantially.

Certain apps can be a real battery drain, of course. Sipdroid appeared to be an energy pig. Whenever I left that running, the battery drained pretty rapidly. Accordingly, I leave that turned off. Running Google Navigate drains the battery quickly, but I can't complain since it is leaving the display on, using voice synthesis, data, and GPS all at the same time.

Performance is a real treat. Media streaming apps like Radiotime, Pandora and Orb that were basically too demanding for the G1 to run comfortably run beautifully. One thing I could never make work on the G1, but works fine on the Vibrant, is running Pandora over Wifi, turning Bluetooth on, and streaming the music to the stereo in our bedroom via a Bluetooth music receiver hooked up to that stereo. On the G1, whenever I tried that, the music was too broken up to be worthwhile. Also, I can run Cardiotrainer and the Music Player at the same time with no problems. On the G1, I couldn't listen to music while running Cardiotrainer, it was too broken up and erratic to be worthwhile.

Swype is pretty nice. I had never used Swype before acquiring the Vibrant, and from the descriptions I had been hearing, I just didn't understand what the deal was. Finally once I had the Vibrant I started using it, and boy is it nice. As I get more and more used to it, my speed for text input is picking up, and right now I think I can enter text faster in Swype than I could on a slideout keyboard. The speed gain associated with Swype is especially apparent for longer words.

For Chinese input, I ended up using the Google Pinyin IME. It seems to be much improved from the version I was using on the G1. I also tried out Sogou Pinyin IME, and it worked fine, but I was really creeped out by the long list of access permissions that Sogou Pinyin IME required, including a lot of stuff that I just couldn't imagine was in any way related to the app, like my contact list.

There are some minor annoyances. The phone doesn't seem to have LED notification lights on the front, so to check for messages, I have to wake up the phone. Looking at the phone, I could swear that I see three small LEDs on the upper left, but they never seem to come on. Maybe I'm just imagining them.

At least from T-Mobile, the phone comes with a bunch of apps installed that I doubt I will ever use. I don't know if they are good or bad, but I'm probably not going to use them. As far as I can tell, they can't be removed. The Vibrant has enough memory that these apps don't seem to pose a problem, but nevertheless, I would like to get rid of them. Oh well.

One other oddity was that when Syncing contacts with gmail, there didn't seem to be any way to specify a particular group of contacts to Sync. The G1 allowed that, so I could define a group in the gmail contact manager and just sync that to the G1. With the Vibrant, it seems to be all or nothing: the only choice appears to be to sync everyone in My Contacts. I went in and cleaned up my contacts in the gmail contact manager so it is manageable now. One other annoyance with the contact list on the Vibrant is that the column of letters along the right side of the screen that allows jumping to a particular letter in the alphabet is very, very small. You really need dainty fingers to select any of the letters on the column. Overall, I think the contact manager could use some work.

There is at least one major annoyance: as has been reported in various forums, there really does seem to be a problem with the GPS. Hopefully it can be resolved with an update. About half the time when I turn on GPS, it takes an inordinate amount of time to get a lock on the satellites. Sometimes I have waited for five minutes with no lock. This happens in a variety of apps: Google Maps, Cardiotrainer, etc. Usually once it has a lock, it is fine. However, the phone has locked up sometimes when the GPS is turned on, like in Google Navigate, or Cardiotrainer, but so far this has only been sporadic. In at least two cases the phone was completely unresponsive and I ended up popping the battery and replacing it to force a reboot. Some fixes have been posted that involve hacks that don't seem too onerous, but I will probably wait for an on the air update.

I'll keep updating this as I notice things, so stay tuned.

7 August 2010

One minor annoyance: the Calendar app by default adds events to a calendar called "My Calendar" that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the google account the phone is linked to, and so isn't synced. So every time I add an event in the Calendar app, I have to manually change the calendar it is being added to. I found this out because I added a bunch of events that weren't synced to my google account, and then finally I realized that by default they were being added to a calendar on the phone "My Calendar" that had nothing to do with my gmail account. I edited each event to change the calendar to my google calendar and it synced fine. I can't find any way of changing the settings on the app to force new events to be added to the synced google calendar by default. Maybe there is a way, but it isn't obvious.

9/6/2010

The camera interface is pretty clumsy. The major annoyance is that the default setting is that after taking a picture, it is left there for review, with options for sharing and so forth, with no obvious way to go on and take another picture. I fumbled around for quite a while before I figured out that the only way I could get it back to be ready to take another picture was to hit the back button. There wasn't any option on the screen for simply saving the picture being reviewed and moving on to take another. Another annoyance is that it isn't at all obvious how to bring up the settings menu. Again, I stumbled on it while getting ready to take a picture, I hit the arrow on the side of the screen and the controls for the settings came up. When I finally did get in to settings, I was able to dig around and turn off Review so that I could simply take pictures without needing to fumble around with each picture.

12/31/2010

Well, I have had the Vibrant for several months now. Overall, my impression after having used it for so long is mixed. The display is beautiful, and when it works, it works very nicely. But the GPS is still flaky, even with the OTA update that came out a few months ago. Apps that use the GPS have a nasty habit of working sluggishly and even locking up, something requiring me to open the case and remove and replace the battery to get things going again. This especially seems to be a problem if I open an app that uses GPS within about five minutes of turning on the phone. Also the GPS lock still takes an inordinate amount of time. It is better than it was before the OTA fix, but hardly acceptable.

This leads me to another issue: the phone takes an inordinate amount of time after powering up to actually become usable. It seems to spend several minutes on power-up scanning the memory, syncing, and who knows what else, during which time the phone is extremely sluggish, and opening an app is difficult. Opening an app at this time that uses the GPS often seems to crash the app or even freeze the phone.

Honestly, given the continuing problems with the GPS, and the hideously slow boot time, I don't know if I could recommend this phone to anyone. I would swear that the phone takes longer to boot up and become usable than a Windows machine, which is pretty bad. And the phone has crashed enough times when I was trying to use Google Maps that I am hesitant to rely on it for anything in the way of navigation. That said, when the phone is working, it works beautifully.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Android 2.2 (Froyo)... What's the deal with that delay?

1/15/2010

I finally gave up on the Samsung Vibrant. I gave mine to my wife and bought a G2. My wife is fine with the Vibrant since she isn't as reliant on her phone as I am for work. In the end, what turned me against the Vibrant was the ongoing flakiness with the GPS. It wasn't just that it took so long to get a lock, but also because while it was trying to get a lock, whatever app was using the GPS and indeed the whole became unstable. I don't know how many times I had to open the case and pop out and replace the battery to reboot the phone after opening up Google Maps, which somehow resulted in the phone locking up when it was seeking a GPS lock. This was especially frustrating a few times when I was driving and wanted to use Google Maps to locate a store. I had to pull over and park several times in the space of ten or fifteen minutes to reboot the phone.

Even when the GPS had a 'lock' on the Samsung Vibrant, it was pretty miserable. I use Cardiotrainer to track my runs. When I looked at maps of my runs, I was shown passing through buildings and teleporting back and forth to locations near my route. By contrast, the G2 shows my path on the same route as a nice, straight line.

More generally, it just seemed like the Samsung Vibrant had a lot of problems with the stability and performance of apps that worked well on my G1 and now work fine on my G2. For example, Google Reader never ran very well at all on the Samsung Vibrant, but works fine on the G2. I also had problems with the browser on the Vibrant freezing while it opened pages, requiring me to kill the browser and restart it.

The continued delays with Froyo didn't help. Perhaps Samsung had its reasons for being slow with Froyo, but their inability to issue the update made me wonder about their commitment to keeping their products up to date.

It is really too bad about the Vibrant. It is a beautiful phone, and a please to hold, and has a beautiful screen. The camera was very nice. But in the end it was simply not up to my needs. I'll be posting a separate comparison of the G2 and Samsung soon.

Good LA Times column on what ails California:

2010-07-18T17:47:00.000-07:00

Skelton wrote a column in the LA Times that I think pretty much sums up what is wrong with California... The problem isn't our governors, it is us...

Don't blame Schwarzenegger - latimes.com

I have been pleased what Schwarzenegger has tried to do as governor. He has taken his responsibilities very seriously. While I am normally pretty skeptical of anyone who campaigns as an outsider, overall I think he has really tried to approach his job in a serious and professional way. He hasn't accomplished much, but I think his heart has been in the right place. He has certainly had some missteps, but he learned from them. He has been making the best of a very bad situation. Every time he has tried to accomplish something significant, however, he has been stymied by hacks on either the left or the right. Given the circumstances, I find it hard to believe anyone else could do much better.

The state is broken in many ways. The accumulation of initiatives over the years have paralyzed state government, especially anything related to budget. The supermajority rule for budget related items is especially pernicious. Proposition 13 is silly. We need to go back to basics for budgeting, including spending and taxation, with a simple majority vote. If the party in control overreaches, voters can exercise their rights and throw the bums out at the next election. Until we fix the budgeting process, nobody is going to be able to govern California.

More generally, the initiative process has to be shut down, or at least tightened up. It has become a tool of anyone with money to spend who wants to bypass the legislature, whether on the left or the right. The most disgusting recent examples of abuse of the initiative process of course are the efforts by electrical utilities, oil and auto insurance companies to buy passage of initiatives that they tailored to suit their own needs.

The other problem is that the primary system now guarantees that in both parties, hacks and extremists are nominated for the general elections. And meanwhile on both sides, we have bored rich people who apparently have nothing better to do trying to buy office like gentry in 19th century England, spending their inheritance to buy seats in rotten boroughs. At least back then, the rich people distributed ale and whiskey to voters. Now all the money goes to consultants. Maybe we should allow vote buying as a means of wealth redistribution: people with too much money and not enough to do could squander their fortunes bidding for our votes. They already do, but because they can't buy votes directly, they throw their money away on political consultants, and we don't get any of that gravy.

Anyway, it is pretty clear that the state is dysfunctional. We could re-animate Abe Lincoln and he would probably try for a few months and then give up and tell us that reuniting the Union was easier. We could re-animate George Washington and he would give it a try and tell us that he would rather deal with the Continental Congress than with the voters of California. We would just have to hope that reanimating Lincoln or Washington wouldn't yield zombies who would run around infecting everyone.

Photos from July 4 in San Francisco, at the Maritime Park

2010-07-11T20:19:00.000-07:00

We spent the weekend of the 4th in San Francisco. It was a last minute decision. We found on Travelocity that we could get reasonably priced roundtrip tickets, and a pretty good deal on a room at the W, so we went.

Before I get to the photos, I'll mention some highlights. We really enjoyed some restaurants that friends recommended, including Zarzuela in Russian Hill, Cafe Troya in Richmond, and R and G Lounge in Chinatown. Zarzuela was a Spanish tapas, Cafe Troya was Turkish, and R and G Lounge was Cantonese. For us the most memorable was Cafe Troya since we haven't found any Turkish restaurants here in LA, it was our first time in years eating Turkish cuisine. We also visited Just Awesome near West Portal to buy board games. That store is really remarkable, I've never seen anything like it. They sell board games, and they have tables set up where you can try before you buy. The staff are also extraordinarily helpful and knowledgeable.

Since it was a family trip, I didn't have much time by myself to take pictures. The main exception was the evening of the 4th, when my wife and I went down to Fisherman's Wharf by bus and then walked over to the Maritime Park, or Aquatic Park, or whatever it is called. Of course, I had the camera along. The whole gallery is here:

http://www.canghuixu.com/California/SF/July-4-Fireworks/12890479_rT3xU

A few of my favorite shots from that outing...

A store on the way from the bus stop to the park...

This gentleman was writing names in a colorful and artistic calligraphy...

There was a musical performance before the fireworks show...

And of course, some fireworks...

Microsoft Office Web Apps versus Google Docs...

2010-07-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been experimenting with Microsoft Web Apps, and comparing it with Google Docs. I like Google Docs, but it is usually inaccessible in China. I need to share documents and spreadsheets with people in China, and also want to access my documents and spreadsheets when I am visiting there. I decided to try Microsoft Office Web Apps since for reasons that I don't understand, or perhaps would rather not understand, Microsoft services never seem to encounter any interference in China. For example, I have been using Windows Live Sync to share files with friends in China with no problem, even though Dropbox doesn't work at all.

The first problem when I tried to get going was that I didn't realize that office.live.com and officelive.com were different products. The later also allows folder sharing, but as far as I can tell, doesn't offer editing of documents in browsers. Maybe it does, but I couldn't figure it out. So before I found office.live.com and set up documents there to share, I wasted time at officelive.com uploading and sharing files. At officelive.com, no one could figure out how to edit documents in a browser, and we were confused, since we thought that this was the Web Apps site. Finally I realized I should be in office.live.com, and things began to work smoothly. This confusion seems to be very typically Microsoft. +1 to Google Docs for being easy to have up and running right away, and not having a related but not identical product from the same company with a nearly identical URL.

My initial impression of Web Apps is that like most Microsoft web products, it seems to require an inordinate number of clicks through different screens to accomplish anything. Google Docs has a much more elegant interface that somehow doesn't require moving from one screen to another as often. Also, a general problem with Windows Live is that it doesn't seem to have a coherent and consistent approach to navigation, so for example, the navigation bar along the top includes different choices depending on whether you are in Hotmail, view your Profile at Live.com, or somewhere else. For example, a link for Office that leads to the Web Apps appears along the top if you are on your home page at Windows Live, but not if you are at Hotmail/Mail.Live.Com. And then once you are in Office Web Apps, doing anything always seems to require clicking through a few screens. So once again, a Microsoft has a web product is a confusing ordeal to get up and running. So +1 to Google Docs for navigability and ease of use.

Once I was finally up and running and had created a folder and put some documents in it, I shared it with some friends in China. It worked. They were able to click on the links they received and open the files in their browsers and edit them. Google Docs access in China remains problematic. So +1 to Microsoft Web Apps for being accessible in China, at least for the time being. I still wonder why Microsoft web services never seem to have any trouble in China, whereas everyone else has all sorts of trouble, but I would rather not go there.

Document and folder management is much clearer in Google Docs than in Microsoft Web Apps. First of all, sometimes the list of files can be confusing as a result of conversion from earlier versions. If you import a .doc file or .xls file, it will show up, then when you edit it and it converts to .xlsx or .docx, that will be listed as well, so you will get the original important and the conversion showing up in the list of file, but you only notice that the extensions are different if you mouseover. This caused a great deal of confusion, everyone was wondering why there seemed to be two copies of the same file in the folder, and some edited the wrong one and then ended up creating multiple versions. The conversion to Office 2007 format (xlsx or docx）should offer the option of removing the original import so their aren't two copies of the document showing up in the folder. In general, the 'detail' view of a folder contents isn't very detailed, at the very least it should include the file extension or the Office version. In general, it would be nice if the folder views were more Explorer like. +1 Google Docs for its folder and document views.

My friends in China reported that even though they could open the folders and documents I shared with them via the link I emailed, the folders and documents did not show up in the Shared with Me list at the office.live.com home page. We struggled this for a while, then I dug around on the web and found a thread in some forum that said for documents and folders to appear in Shared with Me, the people sharing the documents with each other also had to be in each other's networks on Windows Live. We added each other to our networks and sure enough, the documents and folders began appearing in Shared With Me. This was really annoying, and we wasted a lot of time trying to understand what was going on, and there was nothing anywhere to indicate this requirement that only documents and folders shared from people in a network would appear in the Shared With Me list. To put it kindly, this is dumb. Especially in a work environment, I would like to share documents with people who I don't necessarily want to add to my network, and I would like them to be able to see the documents shared with them in Shared With Me. More generally, like everything else that Microsoft does on the web, managing shares seemed to require a lot more clicking through different screens than it should have. So once more, +1 to Google Docs for easy management of shares, especially shares with people not in your network.

While Web Apps is accessible in China, it turns out it isn't accessible in Chinese. If you share a folder with someone who has set the default language for their Windows Live account to Chinese, their view of the Office Live will not offer the ability to edit in browser. There will be buttons for lots of other things, but they won't see the equivalent of Edit in Browser. We wasted an enormous amount of time trying to figure out why our colleagues in China were not seeing the option to Edit in Browser, then one of them switched the default language for their Windows Live account to English, and suddenly they saw Edit in Browser. I understand that since this is a new product, Microsoft may not have translated the UI into Chinese yet, but shouldn't there be a warning at my end or at my intended collaborator's end saying that because the default language for their account is not English, they will not be able to Edit in Browser, and will need to switch their default language to English to have that functionality? This was a real pain. +1 to Google Docs for having a user experience that is consistent across languages.

Now for some functionality issues. My assessment is pretty preliminary since I am just getting into it. As one would expect, Office and Word Web Apps have limited functionality, so it isn't really appropriate to compare them with the full versions. It is however appropriate to compare them with Google Docs. Right now, Google Docs seems to come out ahead. Here is what I have noticed so far...

Word Web App doesn't support commenting. This is a disappointment. One of the things I was really looking forward for in web-based document and spreadsheet management was the potential for review by members of a workgroup, where people who didn't want to edit a text, could still leave comments. Google Docs allows comments, though I am not completely happy with the comment functionality there either. My ideal would be for Web Apps and Google Docs to have a sharing permission somewhere between edit and read-only that would allow invited viewers to make comments and perhaps edits, where the edits would be stored as proposed changes that could be approved by the document owner, much the way that track changes works in Word.
Excel Web App doesn't seem to support title rows and columns. Google Docs does. For looking at very large spreadsheets, it is nice to be able to lock top rows or leftmost columns to use as titles. That is a key feature of Excel, and Google Docs now does it very, very nicely. Without the ability to lock rows and columns, the Excel Web App seems pretty crippled as a tool for reviewing or collaborating on very large spreadsheets.
Word Web App page formatting options are pretty barebones, sort of like Google Docs circa 2008. I didn't see any way of specifying page margins, page breaks and so forth. Google Docs has made a lot of progress on page formatting in recent months, so that at least you can now specify a page width and margins, so it is MUCH closer to WYSIWYG.

Overall, +1 to Google Docs for functionality for editing.

So right now, my score is Google Docs 6, Office Web Apps 1. That said, I may continue to use Web Apps simply because for the time being, it is accessible in China. And I am sure that Microsoft will add some features. Though I suppose they will be constrained by fear that if they make Web Apps too good, it will cannibalize Office sales. Google doesn't face that constraint.

The ONLY reason we are using Web Apps is that is accessible in China, albeit not in Chinese. Overall, the UI is a train wreck. Back when Google Docs was accessible in China, it was straightforward enough that we could share with a complete novice and they would be up and running in minutes. We have been trying to get our colleagues in China on board with Microsoft Web Apps or Office Live or whatever it is for two weeks now, and success is coming in drips and drabs. There is too much we are finding out by accident: that people have to be in your network to see your shared folders in their 'Shared with me' view, and that 'Edit in Browser' is not available when the default language for the account is set to Chinese. And the folder display is confusing for everyone since it lists files repeatedly according to who modified them and when, instead of just listing each of them once.

I will update this post as I dig into this in detail.

Photos from Hong Kong, June 2010

2010-06-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

I finally finished processing my photos from my trip to Hong Kong in June. I only had a few evenings free for photography. I spent them mainly in Central. I was shooting with my new Canon Rebel T2i. I was really pleased with its high ISO performance. It was also quite light and compact, at least compared to my 20D, which I had been shooting with for several years. Highlights of this trip were some time on the Star Line Ferry from Wanchai to Tsim Sha Tsui and then from Tsim Sha Tsui to Central photographing the skyline, some visits to the bar and night life area Lan Kwai Fong, and some aimless wandering around Central, I think in the area roughly between Central and Sheung Wan.

In SoHo, I had a nice dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant named Scirocco which was right next to the Central to Mid-Level Escalators, which I have photographed previously. In Lan Kwai Fong, I came back to a cocktail bar 2121 every evening to refuel. I like the ambience, which was more quiet and lounge-like than some of the other bars I saw there. I had a couple of dinners in Tsim Sha Tsui that were also pretty good, both in the new iSquare complex. One was at Chao Yang, and one was at nan hai no. 1. Those restaurants both have spectacular views of Hong Kong island. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures.

Here is a slideshow of favorites from the visit, from my Smugmug smart gallery of favorites:

Be sure to check out all my Hong Kong galleries, and my selected favorites from all my trips to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong skyline at night, from the Star Ferry

2010-06-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

I was just in Hong Kong for a little more than a week. I was pretty busy, but had a few opportunities to get out in the evening and shoot. I had my new Canon T2i with me. The T2i is my 'upgrade' from the 20D that I have been using for the last few years. So far, I am really impressed with its high ISO performance. As I will show, shots at ISO 1600 and even ISO 3200 are quite usable. On the 2OD, ISO 800 was OK but ISO 1600 was spotty. The camera is also light and generally easy to use. The display on the back is a huge improvement on the 20D as well.

The first batch of photos I processed are from the Hong Kong skyline. I took the Star Ferry from Admiralty to Tsim Sha Tsui, then from Tsim Sha Tsui to Central. It wasn't too crowded so I had no problem getting a seat with a nice view. The ferry is also very cheap. The views of the skyline looking toward the island are spectacular.

The examples below were all shot handheld on a moving boat, with the EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS. I didn't apply noise reduction in post-processing to any of these photos. I did use Lightroom 3 to boost contrast, darken the blacks, sharpen, straight and crop, and do perspective correction. For the full gallery, please visit my site at Smugmug http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Hong-Kong/Hong-Kong-skyline-from-Star

I'll be posting more photos from my trip soon, so be sure to check back in a few days.

Here are a few shot at ISO 3200:

And a few at ISO 1600...

BIG improvement in Smugmug stats: information on referrers! Thanks Smugmug!

2010-06-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

Smugmug recently upgraded its statistics to add a new page with information about referrers.

This is very handy because it finally provides an easy way to locate photos from my site that have been embedded in blog posts, forum posts, or websites via links. I mostly don't have a problem with that sort of use of my photos, as long as whoever did the embedding acknowledges that the photo wasn't theirs. I do prefer that in addition to embedding the photo they also provide a link to the gallery from which it was drawn so that anyone who likes the photo has an opportunity to go to the gallery and see others from the same setting, and perhaps order some downloads or prints. And so far, most people who have embedded photos of mine in blog posts, have also provided a link to the gallery, and thereby helped increase traffic to my site.

Until now I haven't had any way of finding out where my photos were embedded in forum posts, blogs, or other websites because Statcounter and Google Analytics only provide information on visitors to galleries. They rely on Javascript to gather information about page views, and JPGs embedded elsewhere obviously don't trigger the Javascript that would lead to a page view being recorded. In principle I might be able to get this information from Google Webmaster Tools, which is supposed to find links to a site, but right now the user interface for that service is too clumsy for me to figure out what I would have to do to get such information. And I haven't had much luck searching for links to my site on the various search engines.

As soon as I saw Smugmug was now providing information on referrers, I checked it out, and sure enough, it provided some URLs where my photos had been embedded in forum posts, blogs, or other websites. It was certainly gratifying to see that they appeared in the context of being introducing an area where they lived, or were familiar with, and used my photos to introduce the look of the area to viewers.

Basically all you have to do is go to the Referrers tab on the Statistics page and when are interested in finding the referring URL from a particular domain, click on 'Hits'. Then you'll get a list of the pages at the site that link to your photos.

In this forum post, someone fondly recalling what Shanghai used to look like before all the construction of the last few years used some of my photos to introduce forum readers to the Shanghai he remembered...

http://www.ccthere.com/article/2912443

Unfortunately, he didn't link back to the gallery. That would have been nice. I guess I will write him.

In this blog, someone who had just moved to Nanluoguxiang from somewhere in the suburbs used a photo to give his readers some sense of what it looked like:

http://haonowshaokao.livejournal.com/3734.html

I was pleased to see that he also included a link to the gallery that included the photo.

Now this is where things get a little odd... In a Spanish language site that I think is devoted to some kind of online role-playing game, someone embedded a photo of some mountains near the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in a post that I think was related to some kind of scenario for the game. I hope it was, anyway:

http://www.comunidadumbria.com/?__Pg=1&PARTIDA=15280&ESCENA=3&MW=2&SW=201&MW=10&SW=0

And this post at SkyscraperCity in a forum thread devoted to pictures of the last stops of transport lines includes a picture from my site of the view from the platform at Waterfront Station in Vancouver, Canada...

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=9844942&postcount=10

Unfortunately, no link to the gallery.

Overall, the addition of the statistics on Referrers is for me the most important and useful addition to Smugmug statistics so far. Almost everything else provided in Smugmug Statistics duplicates functionality offered by Statcounter or Google Analytics, but the Referrer statistics stand out for finally providing information about links to individual photos, as opposed to galleries. Along those lines, I guess the other distinguishing feature of Smugmug Statistics are the counts of photo views, as opposed to page views, available under other tabs.

Way to go, Smugmug. Keep it up!

Unblocked in China, sort of

2010-06-05T10:32:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I heard that in China, some previously blocked websites were now accessible again. While my photo site has always been accessible, my blog was blocked. I don't think it was because of any specific content, but rather because it was hosted at Blogger.com, and everything hosted there seemed to be inaccessible.

I became curious about whether my blog was now accessible again, so I went to the very, very handy Website Pulse website to use their tool (http://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.china-test.html) to test. I entered my URL, http://blog.canghuixu.com and tried it from their servers in Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. The tests from Shanghai and Guangzhou worked, but Beijing was FAIL. I guess two of three ain't bad. I have been using the Website Pulse occasionally over the last few months to check accessibility and this was the first time the blog was accessible from any of the servers in China, so I guess that is a good sign.

Don't believe me? Here are the screenshots, beginning with Beijing FAIL, followed by Shanghai and Guangzhou Woo-hoo...

I guess the real test will be if I actually start to get traffic at my blog from China showing up in my logs. My photo site gets a lot of traffic from China, but my blog hasn't had a hit from China in months. If I start getting page views from China again, that will be interesting.

I poked around a bit more at the site and a variety of other sites that I know were blocked in the past, were accessible again. The Twitter website remained accessible.

We'll see how long this lasts. The optimistic interpretation would be that the Chinese government is stepping back from what seemed to be a growing mania for blocking practically anything, and may move back to blocking a narrower range of sites. This would certainly make sense because I think some of the latest efforts at blocking were so erratic and incomprehensible that sooner or later I think they would start turning off potential investors who didn't care at all about politics but did want to be sure that their corporate sites were accessible.

My cynical interpretation, and this is completely unfounded speculation, is that maybe they were trying to upgrade their blocking software to make it even more effective, and something went wrong and we have a window of a few days while they fix the upgrade to make it work. Again, I'm just making this up, and have absolutely no basis for this, but I can't help but wonder...

Using MediaMonkey with a shared music folder hosted on one machine...

2010-05-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

I was all set to explain how I use MediaMonkey on a variety of different machines on a LogMeIn Hamachi VPN to access a common shared music folder on my home machine, and then I thought I should check first to see if anyone has already posted something to explain it, and sure enough, someone had...

http://tipsfor.us/2009/03/20/share-and-sync-your-music-library-with-mediamonkey/

That post does a nice job of walking through all the steps needed to configure MediaMonkey on a variety of machines that are all on the same network.

Poor man's remote backup via LogMein Hamachi, Robocopy, and Task Scheduler

2010-05-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

Mainly so I can remember what I am doing for remote backup, I wanted to share what I have lashed together from a wonderful free private VPN service, LogMeIn Hamachi, and the Windows Robocopy and Task Scheduler. I guess for what I specify below to work, you don't really need to use LogMeIn Hamachi, you could use over a secure home network or VPN, as long as the two computers are accessible to each other via specification of a UNC.

Don't proceed unless you already know something about accessing resources over a network (i.e. you know what a UNC address looks like), you are familiar with Task Scheduler, and more generally, you know what you are doing. And unless you know something about sharing folders in Windows and setting permissions, don't go any further, you're really endangering yourself. This guide is intended with someone already familiar with the elements I refer to, and is intended more than anything else as a hint about to put them together for a poor man's remote backup. I absolutely can't provide any help to anyone, and you really shouldn't try any of this unless you have a pretty good idea of what the elements are.

Basically I wanted to automatically backup the contents of my Users folder on home machine to an external drive on my office machine, and the contents of my Users folder on my office machine to my home machine. I am not too worried about backing up a drive image because I use only a limited number of apps, and anyway, if something happens to my machine that requires a restoration, I would rather just reinstall the operating system and the apps rather than restore from an image. So all I care about is backing up content.

The solution that I finally settled on was to take advantage of the existing VPN I had created with Hamachi LogMeIn that connected my home and office computers and my laptops, and then set up a Robocopy task to run regularly with Windows Task Scheduler.

What is Robocopy? It is a Windows utility that is like the old XCopy on steroids. It has a rich, maybe overwhelming array of options for mass copying of files, including lots of flags that allow restricting copying to files that are newer on the source than on the destination, and so forth. I had experimented with a bunch of different approaches to automated copying, most notably SyncToy, but in my experience they didn't work. SyncToy is very nice but it seemed to choke on large folders with lots of subdirectories and small files, for example, music collection, and photo collection. Other tools I experimented with always seemed to have some problem, for example, they didn't play well with network locations, and so forth. Robocopy, however, seems to be really robust, and I haven't had any trouble whatsoever with it.

I shared the user directories on my home and office machines with appropriate permissions so the folders would be accessible only to my own password protected user accounts on other machines on the network. If you don't know or understand what permissions are for shared folders, don't read any further, this is not for you and trying this could be really dangerous.

Say that the Hamachi-assigned IP address of my home machine was 5.1.1.1 and the IP address of my office machine was 5.1.1.2..., and I had shared C:\Users\John Smith on my home machine as "John Smith Home"

And on my office machine I had an external HD (F:) with a folder to be used for home backup called "Home Backup"

I specified a task on my office machine to run every day that looked like the following...

Robocopy "\\5.1.1.1\John Smith Home" "F:\Home Backup" /XA:HS /S /XO /XD AppData Searches Desktop Downloads Favorites Links /MIR /R:0 /W:0 /LOG:"C:\Users\John Smith\Documents\Home Backup .log"

All those flags are basically there to the specify the files that are being copied. Key ones are /S, for copying subdirectories, /XD for excluding directories, in this case AppData Searches and so forth, all stuff I didn't want backed up, /XA for excluding files with particular attributes set, in this case /XA:HD excludes hidden files, /MIR specifies mirror so that files that are no longer on the source are deleted from the destination, /XO excludes older files (i.e. only copy files that are newer on the source than on the destination), /R:0 soecifies number of retries on failed copies, in this case I set to zero so it would give up on a failure and move to the next file, /W:0 is wait time between retries, set to 0 here but meaningless since the /R:0 should prevent any retries, finally /LOG specifies a log file.

I set up additional tasks for my photo collection since it was too large to reside on my C: drive, and is on an external drive.

I did the same on my home machine to backup my office.

This has been running smoothly now for several years, and works for me. It seems to work a lot better for backing up really large folder trees with thousands and thousands of files like my music and photo collections than SyncToy and some of the other applications I experimented with. As I mentioned, SyncToy seemed to choke when thousands of files were involved.

One problem I did encounter: using Robocopy to back up directory trees associated with the latest versions of Thunderbird seemed to be impossible. At least the most recent version of Thunderbird I had seemed to create thousands and thousands of folders with strange names and backup always seemed to blow up. Since I had given up on Thunderbird anyway, and only wanted my old email for archival purposes, I just zipped the whole directory so it would copy as one big file.

Windows Live Sync and Dropbox, thoughts and comments after several months of use...

2010-05-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've been running both Windows Live Sync and Dropbox now for several months. My Dropbox account is a 50Gb paid account. I find myself using both of them, for related but slightly different purposes.

The main difference between Live Sync and Dropbox is that with Dropbox, files are also 'in the cloud' so they can be accessed via the web, and if you add a new computer, the files sync from the 'the cloud' rather than other computers. If you add a new machine to your Dropbox account, therefore, it will begin syncing immediately, even if none of the other machines it is linked to are online. With Windows Live Sync, files exist only on the computers that have been paired. If you add a new computer but none of the machines that you want to pair to are online, the files on those machines won't sync over until one of them is online.

Another big difference, of course, is that Dropbox is a paid service if you want to use more than a few Gb, and it isn't cheap. I don't mind paying, however, since it is so convenient and useful. One feature that I fortunately have not had to use, but gives me peace of mind, is Undo, which allows retrieval of older versions of files, up to 30 days. For extra money, there is another feature that removes the 30 day limit for Undo.

Basically, I use Dropbox to Sync the entire contents of My Documents across my office desktop and two laptops. It works seamlessly. I work on a file in the evening at home, and next morning it is there in my office. Because everything is up on the cloud, if I need a file and I'm not on one of my computers, I can just log in to the web page and retrieve the file. I've used this a few times when giving presentations in venues that already had a machine. I just logged in, retrieved my ppt, and did my presentation. This has also been very handy a few times when I needed to print something at the business center of a hotel. For various reasons, I don't like flash drives.

I also make heavy use of shared folders in Dropbox for collaboration, but at present there is one frustrating limitation. I work with people in Asia and the East Coast, and as long as they're not in China (more about that later) we can collaborate fairly seamlessly on documents in shared folders. One limitation that is somewhat frustrating is that folders on a paid account that are shared with people with a free account also count toward their 2gb quota. So basically sharing with people with free accounts works well only for documents and smaller files. If you want to share large data files, or images, or anything that takes up a lot of shortage, you will blow through their free quota pretty quickly. I do find this a bit frustrating, and I hope that Dropbox figures out a way of introducing some kind of functionality that would permit sharing of larger amounts of data paid accounts to free data. I did correspond with Dropbox about this and they had a fairly reasonably explanation for why they are doing things this way, and apparently they are looking at creating some options that would facilitate the kind of sharing I have in mind, so maybe this will be resolved.

Another issue that has emerged with Dropbox is that since the beginning of May 2010, or perhaps late April, it has been blocked in China, for who knows what reason. As I mentioned in a previous post, I understand but don't sympathize with China's decision to block Twitter and Facebook since the experience of Iran and other countries shows that they could be used to organize protests and so forth, but why Dropbox? It is all a mystery. So if you want to have remote access to your files in China, or share files with someone in China, for the time being Dropbox is not a viable option.

So if I like Dropbox so much, why am I also using Live Sync? It is free, and since nothing is being hosted in the cloud, there isn't any space limitation. I think there is some kind of limitation in terms of the total number of folders you can sync and how many computers you can sync across, and each synced folder can only have 20,000 files, but for me that is only an issue for syncing my picture collection. Syncing my music collection was fine since I was able to break it into two folders of less than 20,000 files each, but reorganizing my much larger photo collection to make it compatible with Live Sync would be too cumbersome, so I use another approach for backing up my photos, which I will describe in another post. I wish they would relax the 20,000 file limit so I could sync my photo folders.

Thus I use Live Sync to sync a work directories that contain a lot of data (> 100gb) and are accordingly too large for Dropbox. These are data files that I can only work with on my desktop and laptops and don't need remote access to them, and I have daily off-site backups for them.

Live Sync also allows folder sharing with more options than Dropbox. Like Dropbox, it allows folder sharing where both parties have full rights over all the contents of the shared folder. Unlike Dropbox, it offers other choices, including making the contents of the folder read-only for the party it is being shared with. We have been experimenting with using this to give access to my data directories to collaborators, so they can retrieve any file they need whenever they want, without risking my original files being corrupted.

And here's something else: at least at this moment, Live Sync still works in China. So the people I was working with there have installed Live Sync and we're sharing folders with each other. Who knows how long this will last, but it is OK for the time being. Microsoft web services never seem to encounter trouble in China, and I certainly have some suspicions as to why, so I am hoping Live Sync will be a viable long-term option for collaboration with people in China.

One other limitation with Live Sync: it doesn't play well with external storage. If you sync with a folder on an external hard drive, maybe because like me you want an external HD that is always ready to grab-and-go, it will work fine as long as the drive is attached, but if Live Sync ever runs while the HD is detached, it becomes upset, and forgets the pair, and you have to pair the folder again. I wish it would remember the pair and then sync next time the HD was hooked up.

Both Dropbox and Live Sync both seem very robust and have nice user interfaces.

Dropbox blocked in... that big Asian country that keeps blocking stuff, you know which one

2010-05-14T21:30:00.000-07:00

This evening I was in touch with some people I work with in the capital of that big Asian country where sites that people find useful are routinely blocked... you know the country... and now it turns out that Dropbox is blocked there too! We needed to transfer some work-related files and lo and behold the client was no longer working there. It couldn't connect to the Dropbox servers. I checked in the Dropbox forums and on the web and it seems to be confirmed.

We're looking into workarounds right now, but this is soooo stupid.

I can understand -- though I don't sympathize with or approve of -- why that unnamed government would block Twitter and Facebook and some social networking services. That government knows very well that their system is a skyscraper built of cheap balsa, a house of cards. Given the seething anger and resentment on the part of the population about widespread corruption and widening inequality, sooner or later some initially local incident could trigger an uprising and the whole thing could come apart. Services like Twitter and Facebook could be the medium through which the equivalent of a 'color revolution' like the ones in Eastern Europe and some other former Soviet Republics would most likely be coordinated. So I get why they block Twitter and Facebook. The government is afraid that they could be used to organize an uprising, or a 'color revolution.' I don't like it, in fact I detest it, but at least I see the logic.

The question is, therefore, what in God's name does any of this have to do with a service like Dropbox. I'm a pretty creative and imaginative guy, but I have a hard time figuring out how anyone could use Dropbox to organize a revolution. Gee, I'll put the .pptx file with all the secret plans for the revolution into the folder I have shared with my 10 friends and wait for to sync with them, and then they can copy it over to the folders they have shared with their friends? I just don't get it. The whole point of Twitter and Facebook is that you could spread the news about a plan for a protest march to hundreds of thousands of people in a few minutes and thereby coordinate mass action.

In other words, how do you organize a revolution using Dropbox? Why would anyone be afraid of Dropbox? I guess I'm missing something here, folks. Somebody help me out here. I just don't get how Dropbox is a threat to anyone. Oh well.

Why I deleted my Facebook account

2010-05-14T20:48:00.000-07:00

I finally deleted my Facebook account.

I did so with some regret because Facebook had allowed me to reestablish contact with many high school and college classmates, distant relatives, and old friends I hadn't heard from in years. But recently I came to the conclusion that the risks associated with Facebook outweighed the benefits. While I accept that being on the internet inevitably involves some loss of privacy, what concerned me with Facebook was that I no longer could figure out what was private and what wasn't, and how to control it.

Especially with the recent introduction of Facebook Connect, the imminent expansion of the Open Graph, and some changes like the way that schools, workplaces and so forth were handled, the privacy controls had become so opaque or convoluted that I no longer had any confidence that I had control over anything. The privacy controls, which were already a mess, were now spread across even more pages, with descriptions that were opaque, and seemed to require lots more clicking and reading of additional web pages to understand what was going on. This NY Times article pretty much sums up how much of a cesspool the privacy options on Facebook have become.

What especially concerned me was that whatever I did in terms of setting privacy controls on Facebook didn't seem to propagate to its partners. I went to some lengths to prevent my list of friends from being displayed on my Facebook profile. I had it set so that it was not only concealed from public view, but also from my friends. But I noticed when I went to Pandora and Yelp, my public profiles there had a list of my Facebook friends who were using those services. With Facebook rolling out Facebook Connect and Open Graph to hundreds, perhaps thousands of partners, keeping track of what was going on at those sites looked like an impossible task.

Finally I decided that I was wasting my time. I have a PhD, it shouldn't be this difficult to understand what is going on with the privacy controls. Either Facebook is stupid or deliberately making the privacy controls time-consuming and confusing to force people in the direction of sharing more information than they would like.

Why, for example, are the settings for relationships, workplace etc., all separate, so that changing them requires modifying each one individually? And for the highest level of privacy, why does it require two steps, first clicking on Customize in a dropdown menu, and then on Only Me? Why does restricting my information so that only My Friends can see it require me to navigate through several different pages, and then at multiple locations on each page, choose My Friends for each of the items, or Customize/Only Me for things I thought no one had any business knowing.

Why isn't there a single dropdown menu or radio box that sets EVERYTHING on the profile, and the wall, at once? There could be a SINGLE MENU for all information with a set of choices like "Everyone", "Nobody", "Friends" and then for people who wanted to fine tune, there could be a series of nested menus that would allow someone who really cared to drill down and set each element separately.

The only explanation I could imagine was that Facebook in fact wanted to make the process as convoluted as possible in order to encourage errors in the direction of exposing information that people wanted to keep private.

This called to mind the repeated controversies over the last few years that suggested that Facebook had a nasty habit of exposing information without warning, then tightening briefly in response to outcry, and then a few months later quietly loosening again? For example, I remember at some point last year they made it impossible to hide the friends list. Previously I was Customizing to prevent display of my friends list to anyone. But one day I logged in and my friends list was exposed and it was no longer possible to keep it concealed.

At that point, I threw up my hands and decided to delete the account. I don't mind the lack of privacy associated with being on the internet, but I would at least like to have some idea what is being kept private and what is being exposed. With Twitter, for example, the controls are pretty easy to understand, because they are simple. A feed is either public, or protected. But with Facebook, it was simply no longer possible to understand what was being exposed, and I didn't really understand how to control any of it. And given Facebook's history, I concluded the confusion was deliberate. At that point, I decided it was time to say goodbye.

Automated deletion of Facebook wall posts

2010-05-03T20:54:00.000-07:00

I have been getting more and more concerned about privacy on Facebook recently. One concernin is that Facebook has a nasty habit of abruptly changing its policies without warning, and always seems to move toward making public what I want to keep private, requiring me to tinker repeatedly with the always evolving privacy controls.

One thing that really cheesed me off last year was that they made it impossible to hide the list of friends. It isn't clear to me why each of my friends should be able to see a complete list of all the others. Last year I had a trick worked out that concealed my list of friends from everyone, including my friends, but the 'improvements' last fall broke that trick and made it impossible to conceal my Friend list.

Another concern I have is that my privacy is only as strong as the passwords and account security of everyone on my friend list. Several people on my list of friends have had their accounts hacked over the last year or so. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. The problem is that anyone who hacks their account can in principle go through my entire history of wall posts, and gather a lot of information about my friends and family. This has been making me increasingly uncomfortable.

The ideal solution would be for Facebook to set some kind of default expiration date for posts so that they are deleted automatically after a certain number of days or weeks. That way they wouldn't accumulate over time into a complete history of every interaction I have had, every trip I have made, and so forth, that is available to anyone who hacks the account of a friend, or will suddenly be exposed to the entire web if Facebook changes its policies again.

Facebook, however, seems to go in the opposite direction, making the process of deleting old posts clumsy. Within Facebook, there is no way I could find of doing a mass delete of old posts. Removing posts appeared to require going through them one by one, clicking Delete, and then confirming the Delete.

After some searching, however, I found that someone named Cynthia Perla had developed a script in imacros, a Firefox add-on, that allows for automated deletion of posts. Basically it will loop through your posts and delete them one by one. I ended up tweaking the script a bit and posting a new version. Until Facebook gives us better control over old posts, and allows mass or automatic deletion, this seems to be the best thing around for wiping the slate clean...

Here is the post at the blog that includes the script. If you scroll down you will see mine...

http://www.cynthiaperla.com/facebook/460/how-to-delete-all-groups-and-wall-posts-from-facebook-using-imacros.html

Note that this requires that whoever uses it is comfortable with working with macros in Firefox. If you don't know what a macro or a script is, don't bother with this. I think this is useful mainly for people who are comfortable with installing a Firefox add-on and running scripts and possibly tweaking them a bit.

Added the Meebo Bar to my site at Smugmug and my blog... go ahead and share!

2010-04-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

I added the Meebo Bar to my photo site and blog. In theory, it should make it easier for visitors to chat with me, and share links to my galleries with their friends on the major sites. It should appear at the bottom of the page. If you click on the Canghuixu tab on the lower left, it should bring up a chat widget that will let you chat with me, if I am online. If I am offline, I think it will let you leave a message for me. Give it a try! Clicking on the "Share page" will bring up some options for sharing my page on Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and some other sites. Clicking on the Twitter tab on the lower left will bring up my recent tweets. The buttons on the lower right let visitors log in to some of the various messaging services, presumably so they can chat with their friends about the site.

If you like my site, by all means use the Meebo Bar to share with friends.

Google and an unnamed large country in Asia... yawn

2010-04-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised that anyone thinks that Google is making a bad business decision by leaving that large Asian country that I will not name here. My own take on it is that the censorship and hacking aside, there just isn't much point in them staying there, at least under the current system. It isn't that Google's product isn't competitive. Rather, I seriously doubt that the government there will ever let any foreign company dominate in media or internet. Baidu dominates the market there not because it has a better product, but because over the last few years, every time Google showed any signs of gaining market share, the government threw sand into the gears by claiming they were disseminating porn or doing something else that was reprehensible. If for some odd reason Bing ever takes off there, the same thing will happen to Microsoft, and Steve Balmer or whoever is running things will find out that their willingness to comply with censorship requests has bought them absolutely nothing. Google wasn't making serious money there and more importantly I doubt it would ever be given the chance.

I don't think any other media or internet company has made much money there, indeed media companies aren't really even allowed in. Yahoo has pretty much pulled out because its efforts were largely unsuccessful. Rupert Murdoch's venture was a debacle. So I think Google is doing the smart thing. They realized that they would never be allowed to make much money or dominate the market, and meanwhile to add insult to injury they had to comply with ridiculous censorship requests and suffer from hacking attacks, so what is the point in saying? There seems to be this idea that Google made a terrible decision because if only they played ball and found some way to stay and 'understood the market', sooner or later the floodgates would open and the cash would simply start pouring in. That is silly. They will never be allowed to dominate the market or make a lot of money there, at least not in the absence of some really dramatic changes in government policy. It is possible for foreign companies to make money in that country, and certainly some are very successful, but as far as I know none of them are in the media, entertainment, or internet business.

My own take on this is that the censorship issue is a sideshow. Most people there aren't bothering to search for information on sensitive topics of the sort that are featured in the Western media. Instead, the government is worried about other services that allow unmonitored connections between individuals like Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, because it is afraid of a color revolution or other spontaneous uprising like they had in Iran and some former Soviet Republics. I notice now that even Google Docs and Dropbox seem to be interfered with. To the extent that Google continues to embed social networking features like Buzz into its services that resemble Twitter and Facebook, I am guessing the government will start interfering with Gmail and related services, because it doesn't want to allow anything along those lines that it doesn't have the capability to monitor.

I am glad Google woke up and realized that they were on a fool's errand and being played for suckers. There doesn't seem to be much evidence of a 'first-mover' advantage for companies investing there, they're far better off sitting things out until the situation relaxes.

My favorite photos from the Washington Metro

2010-03-31T16:15:00.000-07:00

I picked out some favorites from the photos I took in the Washington Metro, please enjoy...

Here is a larger selection of favorites, and the whole gallery. And here is a slideshow.

Washington Metro, March 2010

2010-03-30T19:54:00.000-07:00

Last week I was in Washington DC. This was mainly a family trip. I didn't really have time to get out on my own and take pictures, so I had to take advantage of opportunities as they arose. For the most part, this meant taking pictures in Metro stations, since we spent a lot of time on the Metro. I really liked taking pictures in the Metro since the color palette reminded me of the night scenes in Totoro that involved the cat bus. The stations are all dimly lit, and then the subway trains are lit up, with interiors that tend towards a warm orange palette, just like the cat bus in Totoro. I have embedded a slideshow below...

If you want to visit the gallery, here it is. And here is a selection of favorites.

First time at a Kogi BBQ truck... yummmmm..

2010-02-25T20:21:00.000-08:00

I saw on Twitter that a Kogi BBQ truck would be in the neighborhood, so I decided to check it out. It really was good. Of course, I brought my camera along, since I always like to take pictures of people buying and eating food, wherever I am... Our son had the Kobi dog, and my wife and I shared a short rib burrito and a spicy pork burrito. Very delicious, we'll be going back for more next time they are around. This is good stuff. Last time I bought food from a truck was when I lived in Philadelphia, and I bought great cheesesteaks from a truck called Sophie's that routinely parked near the Penn campus. I think the Kogi BBQ is probably a little healthier.

This whole truck food thing in LA looks pretty interesting, and I want to start learning more about it...

Nexus One in China, with China Mobile M-Zone

2010-02-20T14:34:00.000-08:00

I am in China for a few days. I brought along a borrowed Nexus One because I wanted to make sure it would work here before I bought one. I am pleased to say that it worked fine. I popped in my China Mobile SIM Card, turned it on, logged in to my Google account, and off I went. Obviously the native Facebook app doesn't work because Facebook is still blocked, and the Twitter app I am using right now, Seismic, didn't work either, since Twitter is blocked as well. GPS and Google Maps worked very nicely, with detailed road maps and well-labeled satellite imagery. I haven't tried out the navigation, however. I did turn out Google Latitude and my family back in the states had no trouble following my movements.

Overall, no problems to report. If you are coming to China and have a Nexus One, by all means bring it. Just make sure that if you do buy a prepaid SIM card for service from China Mobile or another provider, make sure it is one of the plans like M-Zone that includes data services. Some of the more basic, no-frills plans do not include data services, even as an add-on. If you do sign up for M-Zone or another plan, you should probably also sign up for a data plan. M-Zone has data plans where you can sign up for different monthly quotas, like 20Mb/month or 50Mb/month, and they deduct some fairly small charge every month from your balance. If you don't sign up for a data plan, you'll pay according to your traffic, which could drain you balance quickly.

One other nice thing about China mobile: at least in Beijing, they have fabulous English-language customer service via their help line, 10086. Every time I have needed to reach them to go over something, I had someone on the line in seconds, and they were able to resolve my problem quickly.

One other thing: 3G service in Beijing seems spotty. In some ways this may not be a bad thing. Yesterday I was somewhere that had 3G service and the battery drained very quickly. I'm not sure why, but someone else at the meeting who had a Nexus One said their battery also drained very quickly that day. I went into the settings to force 2G service, hopefully this will give me some battery life.

In honor of Valentine's Day, my favorite pictures of roses...

2010-02-14T12:41:00.000-08:00

In honor of Valentine's Day, I made up a slideshow of my favorite pictures of roses. They are from my galleries of photos from the Rose Garden at Huntington Library in 2008 and at the Rose Garden in Hyde Park in in London in 2009. You can also browse my favorite rose photos in a gallery. Of course I bought my wife a bouquet of real roses, I didn't try go cheap and offer this slideshow as the virtual equivalent of a bouquet.

Google and Sogou Pinyin IME comparison on the Nexus One

2010-02-02T13:49:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine lent me a Nexus One that I will try out for a few weeks. I would like to buy one, but before I do, I want to confirm it works in China with my China Mobile M-Zone service. I will be going to Beijing later this month so will have an opportunity to swap in my SIM when I get there and see what happens.

One of the first things I did was install the Google Pinyin IME and Sogou Pinyin IME. I activated both of them in Language and Keyboard but nothing seemed to be happening when I entered text. I kept getting the usual Android keyboard. Finally I saw somewhere on the net that pressing on the text entry field for a few seconds would bring up a selection menu for choosing the input method. I don't think this was the case on the G1, the G1 used whatever keyboard was selected in Locate and Text. Anyway once I found this out, I pressed on the text entry field on the screen for a little bit and sure enough a menu came up, giving me a choice between the Android keyboard, Google Pinyin IME, and Sogou Pinyin IME. Being able to select input methods from the text entry field rather than the Settings is certainly a nice touch. I have not previously tried the Google Pinyin IME so I will see how it compares with the Sogou Pinyin IME and report back in a few weeks.

UPDATE: I have been trying out Google Pinyin IME and Sogou Pinyin IME. I will probably stick with Sogou. The main difference between the versions I have on my Nexus is that while both of them allow for easy switching between Chinese and English input, only Sogou retains auto-completion for English language input. Unless I am missing something, when you have Google Pinyin IME as the input method, there is no auto-complete or auto-correction on the English words you input. I find that really slows things down.

One minor annoyance: by default Sogou when installed seems to have the key click sound turned on, so when you are typing, it is making annoying typewriter sounds. That is easy enough to turn off in the settings.
Oh, one more thing: I just noticed that on the version of the Sogou IME that is now installed on my Nexus One, the menus are in English. In earlier versions, they were all in Chinese. That wasn't a problem for me, but might be for some.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE (23 July 2010): I tried out both Sogou and Google Pinyin IME on my Samsung Vibrant. They both work. The latest version of the Google Pinyin IME seems much improved. And the amount of stuff that Sogou claimed to need access to was pretty creepy... why does it need my contact list? While Sogou seems to work, I just didn't understand why it needed access to so much, so in the end, I uninstalled and kept Google Pinyin IME. I just wish someone would come up with a Swype-based pinyin or other Chinese IME.

Caribou, and the new track "Odessa"

2010-02-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

Today I'll talk about music. Specifically, I'll talk about one of my favorite artists, Caribou. That is the name under which Dan Snaith records. As with many of my recent posts, this has nothing to do with photography, but I feel like writing and I don't have any new photos to talk about. I suppose I could write about how much I would like to buy a new camera, the Canon 5d MkII, but that isn't going to get anywhere. So I'll talk about Dan Snaith aka Caribou and his music.

I bought my first CD by Caribou a few years back in Madison, Wisconsin. I was visiting the university to give a talk and was killing time before a dinner with a visit to a CD store. They had some CDs by Manitoba, which was the name Snaith was recording under at the time. I had never heard of Snaith, or the band Manitoba, but since I went to elementary school in Winnipeg, and have family there, I was surprised and pleased that anyone would name a band after the province. I was even more tickled to see that some of the track titles on one CD, Up in Flames, related to Canada. For example, there was one track titled "Dundas, Ontario" and another titled "Brandon". I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that it referred to Brandon, Manitoba, which I believe is the 2nd largest city in Manitoba. I bought Up in Flames and Start Breaking My Heart.

I returned to my hotel room after dinner and listened to the CDs on my laptop and was blown away. I had bought them mainly as a novelty, and wasn't sure what to expect. I had some hopes since Canada produces a lot of talented musicians, some of whom hail from Winnipeg, or at least spend time there, but was prepared to be disappointed. Well, I wasn't. This was a completely unique, intricately layered sound that I couldn't compare to anything I had ever heard before.

Later, I bought Milk of Human Kindness and was even more pleased. By this time, Snaith was recording as Caribou because of bizarre complications with the name Manitoba that you can read about on the web with a little searching. This was just as creative and novel as Up in Flames and Start Breaking My Heart, but to my ears at least, tighter and more disciplined, the working of a maturing artist. This was also something I could play for my wife. Then came Andorra and I was even more hooked. My favorite tracks on Andorra is probably "After Hours" for its intensive, relentless beat.

Around that time, I saw that Caribou was touring, and would play at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. I talked my wife into going with me. I had played Andorra for her so she was prepared, but this was still pretty new for her, since she is from Taiwan and tends toward honey-voiced romantic balladeers like Fei Yuqing (费玉清) and so forth.

It was spectacular. I had never been to a rock concert in such a small, intimate venue before. I used to attend concerts in high school and college, but usually in stadiums, never in small clubs. We were in the front row of balcony. What made the strongest impression on me was the percussion. It was loud. Our ears rang for two days afterward, but it was incredibly tight. Snaith and another percussionist were going at it and I just couldn't believe that two people could drum that loud and that fast, but remain completely tight. It was amazing to me that such a small number of people could produce such an intricate sound. Somehow I take it for granted listening to a CD, which I always assume reflects lots of studio work, but it was inspiring to see a live show like this where this small group was recreating the incredibly intricate sounds of the CD, live. I loved it, and more importantly, my wife loved it, and added Caribou to her rotation along with her Taiwanese and HK pop ballads.

I was really pleased when I saw on Caribou's twitter feed that he had a new record called Swim coming out, and a track from it called "Odessa" was available. I just listened to it at an entry at the Hero Hill site and once again, it's great. It is a real departure from the sound on Andorra, which was an evolution of the sound on Milk of Human Kindness, which in turn was a real departure from the sound on "Up in Flames" and "Start Breaking My Heart". For the first few seconds I thought about Beck's "Cellphone's Dead" and then afterward it opened up into an incredible and impossible to characterize mixture. There are layers and layers of different sounds, that seem to always be on the verge of collapsing into chaos, but somehow it all works beautifully, and everything makes sense. I'm really looking forward to the album, and hope Caribou comes through LA so we can see him again.

If you want to download and listen to Caribou's new track, check out his website. Overall, it seems like these few months are good for album releases from some of the musicians that I like. Monolake and Four Tet and The Field all came out with albums recently that are pretty good, Caribou has one on the way. And I have this idea, perhaps incorrect, that Brad Mehldau and Thievery Corporation are at work on new albums.

One other neat thing about Caribou: he has a PhD in mathematics from Imperial College. Indeed, he seems to come from a family of mathematicians. If you search on Google Scholar, you can find what I assume is his dissertation. I really admire anyone who starts out as an academic, but ends up doing something even more interesting.

Reminiscing about my first time in Beijing, back in 1987 (追忆我第一次访问北京)

2010-01-31T16:41:00.000-08:00

Now that China is in the news every day, I can't help but think about my first time in China, more than 20 years ago, and how much it has changed since then, mostly for the better. I had just finished by sophomore year in college in 1987 and went to China with one of my professors to help out with some research.

I still remember vividly our arrival in Beijing. We arrived late in the evening. We deplaned the old-fashioned way, down a stairway that had been rolled up to the side of the plane, and we boarded rickety old buses that took us to the terminal. I remember there were soldiers with rifles standing around on the tarmac looking bored. Their uniforms were clean but they still seemed disheveled. The bus, which I am pretty sure was diesel, shuddered to the terminal. This was the old, awful, original terminal. We approached the customs inspection and before we reached it, our host showed up waving a piece of paper that exempted us from inspection. We finally boarded a car that took us to Peking University, which is where we were staying. We dropped off our bags, then went to an apartment of our host. It was already late and I was tired after a long flight but I was excited at being in China for the first time. At the apartment, we had a fabulous home-cooked meal. Unfortunately given my exhaustion I probably wasn't up for it, especially the glutinous rice (zhongzi) and I ended up throwing up everything that I ate, right there in the apartment. I was fine afterward though.

Even though we were staying at Peking University, we were working downtown, so every day we either took a car or more often a series of buses from Peking University to downtown. The buses were really an experience. These were the crowded, old, diesel, yellow, articulated buses that rumbled down the streets. We had to fight to get on, and usually to get off. After each stop the conductors would mutter "卖票儿" in Beijing accent. We usually had lunch at hole in the wall places in the general vicinity of the Imperial Palace, though on a few occasions we went for hamburgers or other Western food at the Jianguo Hotel, at the time the height of luxury. There wasn't much air condition where we were, but it was OK.

At that time in China, foreigners were not supposed to use renminbi, and were supposed to only use FEC (外汇卷) to buy items at specific shops designated for foreigners. In practice, this meant that whenever we needed anything, it required an expedition to the Friendship Store on Jianguomenwai. Last time I looked at the Friendship Store, it was pretty sad, but back in the day, it was a real oasis in the desert for foreigners, with all the necessities, like shaving cream and razors, and shampoo, and instant coffee, and peanut butter, and all sorts of other goodies.

That summer we also spent some time in northeast China, especially Shenyang. My most memorable meal in Shenyang was one where we brought two bottles of Johnnie Walker we had bought at the Friendship Store in Shenyang at a shopping expedition. Our hosts, of course, provided beer and distilled spirits (baijiu or 白酒). We gorged on northeastern dishes and toasted each other. Outside the restaurant, there was some kind of road repair underway, and the workers were taking turns pressing their faces against the windows of the restaurant to get a view of us. At some point during the dinner, my stomach under assault by all the northeastern dishes, the beer, the baijiu, and the whiskey, I began to feel unwell, so I excused myself and went outside to where the road repair was underway. The workers had dug a ditch alongside the road, presumably to lay some drainage pipe, and I bent over and threw up in it while the workers looked on in amusement. Once I was done, I stood up, smiled, gave them all a thumbs-up, and returned to the meal, where with my stomach voided, I was free to continue eating and imbibing.

Another vivid memory I have is a visit to the apartment of a famous doctor who was a family friend of the professor I was working with. He had an IBM PC, which was quite rare in China at the time. But he was one of the most prominent doctors in China, so it wasn't entirely a surprise. He and his family lived in a modest apartment with perhaps two bedrooms. That was luxurious by the standards of Beijing at time, but remarkably small considering his prominence as a doctor. He had been having problems with his PC and the professor I was travelling with had volunteered me to come take a look at it to see if I could figure out what was going on. I played with it a bit and as far as I could tell, the hard drive (I think a whopping 10mb or something) was failing and that was about all I could say.

Another odd memory was that when we took the train from Beijing to Shenyang, after we settled into our compartment in 'soft sleeper' (软卧), another American suddenly materialized and settled in. I can't remember his name, but it was all very odd. At the time it was very hard to get train tickets of any sort, and ours were purchased quite some time in advance. He had some strange story about how something had come up in Shenyang and he had just decided to take the train up at the last minute, which is why he had no luggage. He spent most of the evening asking us about our business in China, but was vague about what exactly he was doing in China, or how he was able to procure train tickets at short notice. After we arrived in Shenyang, we never saw him again. I seem to remember that he was skinny, red-haired, and very intense. All very strange. I wonder who he was, and what he was doing. We had our theories but they all seemed sort of implausible.

Looking back, it really is remarkable how much China has changed, again mostly for the better, since that summer. While some things have deteriorated, like the air pollution, and perhaps social inequalities, all in all it is now a much better and I would say freer place than it was back then. At that time, there was a palpable barrier between foreigners and Chinese as a result of the political atmosphere. Chinese, for example, were not allowed into international hotels. If they had foreigners as visitors, they had to write reports afterward explaining to the neighborhood committee (街道办事处) explaining themselves. There was considerable self-censorship in all interactions. What we would think of as basic necessities were rationed, and difficult to obtain. People who were unhappy with their jobs had difficulty changing them. Everything was politicized.

All that is gone now. When I visit Beijing now, it is completely different. People speak their minds to each other and to foreigners. While there are all sorts of things going on now with regard to the internet and the media that are of concern, people now enjoy remarkable freedom in their daily life. They can speak their mind freely without worrying that their neighbor or coworker will inform on them. So whatever is going on right now in China, I keep thinking that the general trend is a positive one. It will always be 'two steps forward, one step back', but when I compare China now with what I remember from my visit in 1987, the changes are almost unimaginable.

My dad was in Beijing even earlier, in 1983. He visited as part of an academic delegation. They stayed in a guesthouse at one of the universities in Zhongguancun, Beijing Aeronautics University (北航). They didn't have Western-style toilets. Every morning, a cook who knew how to fry eggs came out from one of the international hotels or state guest houses to help prepare breakfast for the delegation.

I just wish I had taken more pictures when I was in China in 1987. But it never occurred to me that everything might change so completely, and that everything I saw then would be gone in a few years. I still see people I met then, and they are all doing well, at least as well as can be expected given aging. It is partly because of my regrets at not having much in the way of pictures from that early that I now take pictures everywhere I go, motivated by fear that whatever I see will be gone in a few years.

Night scenes in Taiwan, December 2009 (台湾的夜景)

2010-01-10T11:02:00.000-08:00

I spent the last two weeks of December in Taiwan. I didn't have as many opportunities to shoot as I might have liked because the main purpose of the trip was to visit relatives. But on three occasions I did get a chance to get out and wander around with a camera. Check out my blog entries about my photos from the former gold mining town of Chiufen (九份), the waterfront town of Danshui (淡水), and the Shilin Night Market (士林夜市). Or go straight to my Chiufen, Danshui or Shilin Night Market galleries. Below is a slideshow combined all my favorite shots from this trip.

As usual, I really enjoyed my time in Taiwan. I have a soft spot for Taiwan, having spent six months there in 1989, a year in 1992 and 1993, and made a number of visits since. The people are about as friendly and reasonable as you can get, and there is a lot to see and do. In some ways, it is even nicer now than when I lived there in 1989, 1992 and 1993. The pollution isn't nearly as bad now as it used to be, the traffic is much better and the mass transit system has made everything more convenient, and there generally seems to be much more civic-mindedness, so drivers obey traffic rules, there isn't much litter anymore, and so forth. I would swear that the food is much better now too, but maybe that is because when I was there before I was a student and couldn't afford anything but noodles and beer, and now I have the money for better restaurants.

While in Taipei, I had something checked out at the Taiwan Adventist Hospital, and was really impressed with how efficient it all was. All of my appointments started right on time, the clinic seemed to manage its records well so that nothing was lost, and best of all, it was incredibly cheap. I ended up having four appointments, and a variety of tests that I think in the United States would have cost several thousand dollars, but in Taiwan the total came to only a few hundred dollars, which I put on my credit card. I kept all the receipts and paperwork, we'll see if my insurer will reimburse me. I wish hospitals and clinics in the United States were as efficient, competent, and easy to deal with. For its residents, Taiwan also has a national health insurance system that seems to work reasonably well. It is nice to be someplace where the health care system isn't a complete train wreck the way it is in the United States. I am sure the system in Taiwan has its shortcomings, but overall, what I saw of it was pretty impressive.

In Taiwan I also visited Hualien which was lovely, but I was too busy to get out and take pictures. Hualien is on the east coast, perched between the mountains and the sea like Santa Barbara, and has a much nicer climate than Taipei. When we were there, it was sunny and mild, just like being back in LA. It is close to the spectacular Taroko Gorge. Oh wait come to think of it I did take some pictures at the Gorge, I will get those uploaded soon.

Shilin Night Market, Taipei, December 2009 (士林夜市)

2010-01-10T10:45:00.000-08:00

One evening in Taipei, I went to the Shilin Night Market. Taipei has several major night markets, and Shilin is probably the biggest. It is spread out over a fairly large area near the Jiantan MRT station, with hundreds of shops, restaurants, and food stalls. The diversity of food on offer at the stalls was staggering. The night I was there, it was absolutely packed. I had a hard time getting shots because in many of the streets, people were packed shoulder to shoulder, and in some cases I was simply swept along. This is definitely worth checking out if you are in Taipei, as long as you aren't bothered by crowded.

Here is the gallery...
http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Taiwan/Shilin-Night-Market-Taipei/10906538_y4GgJ

Night scenes from Danshui waterfront and Old Street, December 2009 (淡水海滩，老街夜景)

2010-01-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

While in Taiwan, I spent one evening up in Danshui where I walked along the waterfront near the MRT station and then doubled back on the Old Street. Danshui is a town near Taipei at the mouth of a river, and easily accessible from Taipei via the MRT line. The waterfront promenade is interesting, with lots of restaurants, shops, and carnival-type arcade games like ring tosses and so forth. The Old Street is also nice. It is well worth a trip out from Taipei. There is a lot more there that I didn't have time to see, maybe next time...

Here is a slideshow of favorites...

And here is the whole gallery...
http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Taiwan/Danshui/10878864_ioy7N#759243791_bD55w

Chiufen and Jinguashi, Taiwan, China, December 2009 (中国台湾九份，金瓜石)

2010-01-06T04:58:00.000-08:00

I finally started processing my photos from my trip to Taiwan over Christmas. Even though I was there for two weeks, I didn't really do much shooting, since it was a family trip. We did have some excursions, one of which was to Chiufen on the northeast coast of Taiwan. Chiufen is an interesting little town on a mountainside that was once the site of a major gold mine, and is now a great place for a day trip out from Taipei. Chiufen was also the setting of the great Hou Hsiao-hsien movie "City of Sadness" (悲情城市). It reminded me of a larger, seaside version of Jerome, Arizona. There are probably lots of ways of getting there, but we took a long-distance bus from the intersection of Zhongxiao East Rd. and Fuxing Road. At least for us, the highlight of Chiufen was the Old Street, which winds from the bus station along the hillside, with stores on each side. Most of the stores are selling snacks and souvenirs, but it is still interesting. Toward the end there are some nice teahouses with beautiful views where you can relax for a bit.

We also went to nearby Jinguashi, where the old mining complex has been turned into a really interesting "Gold Ecological Park" with educational displays about local and Taiwanese history, and of course gold mining. They have a nice little museum about gold there, and even more interestingly, they have opened up some of the shafts to let visitors walk through. There are also some old buildings from the time the Japanese ran the mines.

Here is a slideshow of favorites:

Here is the gallery:

http://www.canghuixu.com/China/Taiwan/Chiufen-Taiwan-December-2009/10870071_4fQ9Z

A pleasant experience with Windows Live Sync, and Office Live

2009-12-16T17:35:00.000-08:00

I'm getting ready for a long trip where I may have only intermittent internet access, so I wanted to find a way of working offline with my laptop while on the road that would let me sync everything again with my office when I did have access. I wanted to be able to keep a fairly large working directory in sync, about 80gb or so. One possibility would have been DropBox, but that amount of space would cost money, so I kept looking at other possibilities for automatic synchronization between laptop and office.

In the past I never had much luck with synchronizing across computers. I had experimented with SyncToy for shared folders on computers connected by Hamachi LogMeIn VPN, but had given up on SyncToy because while in many ways it was a neat and handy program, it did have glitches. I had tried some other freeware or shareware sync programs, and it seemed like every one of them had some kind of limitation or another, like they had problems with syncing across time zones, or couldn't handle Unicode characters in filenames, or were just slow or erratic.

I came across some positive assessments of WindowsLive Sync, so I decided to give it a try. I was hesitant because my experience with free Microsoft applications was that they always seemed about 95% of the way there, and never quit did everything I needed, or weren't documented very well. SyncToy, for example, was really neat but I had to give up because of frustration with some glitches. But the reviews of WindowsLive Sync were pretty positive so I installed it on my office and on my laptop. Setting up a folder pair on the two machines was pretty straightforward, and one nice feature was that as long as Sync was installed on both machines, it was easy to choose the folder on the other machine remotely, via a web based interface that also allowed creation of new folders. I paired the documents directory on my office with a newly created empty directory on an encrypted external hard drive connected to my laptop, and it began syncing immediately. It processed about 18,000 files very smoothly, filling up the newly created folder. I was pleased to see over the next few days that changes to a file on one machine were immediately reflected in its copy on the other machine, even large datasets of several hundred megabytes, but the sync didn't interfere at all with the data processing that I was doing.

I liked it so much that I decided to sync my music collection between office, home, and encrypted external HD on laptop, and somewhat to my surprise that worked fairly smoothly, even though thousands of files were involved. It worked so smoothly that I have decided to rely on Sync to keep my music collection consistent across different machines. Previously I kept my music collection on a home machine that I used as a server, and accessed from the office or elsewhere via folder sharing over LogMeIn Hamachi, which required some tweaking of the MediaMonkey .ini file to ensure all the machines use the same database file on the home machine. Now I will give up on a having the music and database on a single machine and instead have synced copies of the music on all three machines, with a separate database on each. Changed files, including with updated ratings, tags, etc., propagate instantly to the other machines. I just have to set MediaMonkey to monitor the synced folders and I should be golden.

One limitation to WindowsLive Sync is that each folder pair can only have 20,000 files. I had more files in the folder trees I wanted to sync. There was a pretty easy workaround: I just split my my music collection into two root folders and set up each of them separately to sync.

While I am at it, I will mention another positive experience I have been having with another Microsoft product, Office Live. I have been experimenting with it and so far it seems to work. The advantage over Google Docs, it seems to me, is that you get full formatting. The biggest weakness of Google Docs, it seems to me, is the lack of control over formatting. Office Live seems to offer the hope of combing complete formatting with shared access. I especially the Office plugin that allows for editing of shared documents directly from Office.

A new introduction to my Beijing (北京) photos

2009-12-13T13:33:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a little more work on my photo site. I am reorganizing the front page to provide better guidance to my featured photos. I am setting up pages talking a little bit about my specialties, for example, China, Beijing, and so forth, that include a slideshow of favorites and links to collections of galleries and favorites. Right now my most developed page is for Beijing. I talk a little bit about my experience visiting the city and my impressions, and then have some links to galleries organized by neighborhood. I'll probably expand a little bit on it, but in the meantime, please check it out if you have the time. At least you may enjoy the slideshow...

http://www.canghuixu.com/Slideshows/Beijing/10559553_zYdRX

My new domain

2009-12-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

I finally set up a domain name for my photo site and my blog. My photo site at Smugmug is now http://www.canghuixu.com although http://canghuixu.smugmug.com will still work. My blog is now accessible at a subdomain, http://blog.canghuixu.com. I used GoDaddy Custom Domains for Smugmug to register my domain and it worked pretty smoothly, just by following the instructions at the Smugmug site.

Assigning a subdomain to my blog at Blogger was also fairly straightforward. In the control panel at GoDaddy, I added a CNAME entry for alias blog and pointed it to ghs.google.com Then I went into settings for Blogger and told it I was my blog had a custom domain, blog.canghuixu.com, and everything went smoothly.

The GoDaddy account came with some kind of free email account. It took longer for the email account to become active than the domain name. Once it was active, it was pretty easy to configure my gmail account to access it.

I'm curious as to whether my blog being under a separate domain, rather than being at blogger.com, will make it accessible in places that block blogger.com. We'll see. If you are someplace where blogger.com is not normally accessible, and you can read this, please email me or leave a comment.

Hong Kong night scenes, with slideshow (香港夜景幻灯片）

2009-12-05T12:23:00.000-08:00

Now that I have been back for a few days, recovered from jet lag, and finished processing and uploading my Hong Kong pictures, it is time for a summary post. First of all, here is a slideshow of my favorites...

I was pleased to see that Smugmug now supports feeds for multiple keywords, which can in turn be supplied to embedded slideshows. In the past, keyword feeds on Smugmug were limited to one keyword. The slideshow above takes advantage of the new functionality, selecting photos that have the keywords favorite and hong kong.

My favorites from this trip can also be accessed via the following link:

http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/keyword/favorite-hongkong-nov09

I ended up with four primary galleries, one each for Tsim Sha Tsui, Temple Street, the Central/Mid-Levels escalators, and Sai Kung. I also created separate galleries of pictures from the public pier in Sai Kung, and the elevated walkways in Central.

You will probably notice that all of my shots are at night. I was pretty busy most days with my real job, and only had time to get out in the evening. Fortunately public transportation in Hong Kong is great, so it was easy to zip out for dinner, spent a few hours shooting and perhaps stop somewhere for a drink, and still get back in time to go to sleep at a reasonable hour.

All of the places I visited were interesting in their own way. Personally, I thought the escalators were the coolest just because the whole thing was so unique, and had a futuristic feel. And I really like escalators and moving sidewalks, to boot.

Tsim Sha Tsui at night, November 2009 (香港尖沙咀夜景)

2009-12-03T18:24:00.000-08:00

I also spent one evening and part of another wandering around Tsim Sha Tsui in Kowloon with my camera. The first evening, I started out at the Avenue of Stars and then worked my way north, staying close to Nathan Road, and ending up at the Knutsford Terrace where I had a martini and then a glass of white wine at the interestingly named "All Night Long" bar. The second evening, I spent most of my time near Tsim Sha Tsui MTR. Tsim Sha Tsui is a really interesting area, and fun to walk around. I walked past the Chungking Mansions but couldn't really get any shots that I liked.

Here is the gallery...
http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/China/Hong-Kong/Tsim-Sha-Tsui-at-night-Hong/10522423_ZZzF3

And a few of my favorites...

On the Avenue of the Stars...

And then in Tsim Sha Tsui...

An evening on the escalators from Central to Mid-Levels in Hong Kong, November 2009 (香港中環至半山自動扶梯的晚上慢步）

2009-12-03T04:04:00.000-08:00

While I was in Hong Kong, I heard that an elaborate system of escalators had been constructed to whisk people from Mid-Levels to Central in the morning, and back up the hill for the rest of the day. This is apparently the longest connected systems of escalators in the world. I was interested to read that the construction of the escalators had transformed the neighborhoods along the way, and that the areas near the escalators had become increasingly populated with bars and restaurants.

I immediately decided that I needed to spend an evening photographing it, since I love photographing escalators and moving sidewalks. Lately it has been hard for me to indulge this passion because the coolest escalators and moving sidewalks tend to be in airports, subway stations, and train stations, and hanging around photographing them with an enormous SLR has on a number of occasions led to my being approached by security to ask what, exactly, I was doing. I was hoping that I could spend the evening photographing outdoor escalators in Hong Kong without being disturbed, and indeed, it went fine. I also stopped at an organic food restaurant overlooking one segment of the escalator for a glass of an organic wine.

Here is the gallery and a selection of favorites.

And a couple of shots...

Somehow this shot makes me think of the end of an assembly line that is making clones, or pod people, or robots...

I thought this was evocative...

I liked the color palette here, it reminded me of Wong Kar-wai's 2046... That night I sometimes wondered if this escalator system had inspired the look for that movie...

And of course I need at least one picture of people eating outdoors...

Night scenes from Temple Street in Hong Kong (香港庙街的夜景）， November 2009

2009-12-02T03:28:00.001-08:00

I just came back from Hong Kong. I woke up early this morning because of jet lag. I couldn't make myself focus on anything productive, so I decided to process my next set of photos, from an evening I spent walking around Temple Street. I had been told that Temple Street had all sorts of perils, at least in the evening, but at least to me it seemed pretty tame. It wasn't especially crowded, probably because it was a weeknight. It certainly was fun and interesting to walk around and see all of the restaurants, food stands, stalls, and shops. And there were just enough shady looking characters loitering around off the main drag to give it a little exotic appeal, without making it downright scary, like some of the neighborhoods I walked through in Lisbon last year.

Here is the gallery:
http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/China/Hong-Kong/Temple-Street/

As always, you can just restrict yourself to a selection of my own favorites.

And a few of my real favorites for you to look at...

A fruit stand on a nearby street. Looks like a slow evening...

An outdoor seafood restaurant...

Another restaurant, not quite as busy...

A store with a funky looking car parked in front of it...

And I thought this was just sort of cool...

Divine intervention at Choi Hung (彩虹) MRT station in Hong Kong (香港)

2009-11-25T07:53:00.001-08:00

This evening I went downtown to the Temple Street area to take pictures. After I was done, I took the MTR back to Choi Hung station, where I intended to transfer to a bus to my apartment. The station is very large, with many exits. Several of the exits were indicated as having bus stops, but there was nothing to indicate which buses going in which direction stopped where. I went to the exit indicated as having a "Bus Terminus". I got out and indeed there were lots of buses there. I approached one that I thought would go by my apartment, but the driver said he was going in the other direction, and I needed to catch the same bus but in the opposite direction, somewhere else. He couldn't really speak English or Mandarin so couldn't give me much more detail.

I wandered around a bit more and ended up at a minibus station a couple levels above. I looked at the signs for the buses there and none of them were the one I was looking for. I stood there looking confused. The place was complete empty, except for one other person, a young and fashionably dressed young lady who was talking on her cell phone. She ended her conversation and walked over and asked in English if I needed help. I told her that I was looking for a bus back to the place where I was staying. She told me that to get that bus I would have to get across the street. She walked me over to the balcony overlooking the street and pointed across the street and said I would have to get across and then walk a bit. There was a pedestrian bridge across the street but she said it might be closed so she suggested that I take the elevator all the way back down into the MTR station, walk through the station, and come out the entrance across the street. I followed her instructions and when I came up the stairs across the street and looked up and over to where I had been, I saw her waving and pointing down the street. I waved back and walked in the direction she indicated.

I didn't see a bus stop right away, so when I passed by the entrance of a government office where there were a couple of older women in security uniforms, I stopped and asked them in English and Mandarin where the bus for my neighborhood was. They didn't speak much English or Mandarin, and talked to each other in Cantonese, then I remembered the name in Cantonese of another nearby neighborhood, and gave that to them and they were really excited and pointed down the street and said "前面", which I guess sounds the same in Cantonese as in Mandarin. I repeated "前面" back to them and smiled and we all laughed and I headed off. Eventually I found my bus stop and boarded the minibus back to my apartment.

I am always thankful that no matter where I go, whether in North America, Europe, or Asia, there are always people willing to take the time to help.

Sai Kung Public Pier, Hong Kong, November 2009

2009-11-24T23:57:00.000-08:00

While I was wandering around Sai Kung, I also photographed the interesting public pier. It had a number of berths, I assume for boats and ferries going to outlying islands. When I was there I didn't see any boats, but I saw a lot of people fishing. There were also some nice views of the restaurants along the shore. I took enough photographs that I decided to put them in a separate, dedicated gallery. The pier appeared relatively new, and had an interesting, modern design.

Here are some of my favorites:

An evening in Sai Kung, Hong Kong, November 2009

2009-11-24T04:53:00.000-08:00

Last night I had an opportunity to walk around Sai Kung, a town in Hong Kong. It is in Kowloon, but away from the more crowded areas, and quite pleasant. I think there is a big expatriate presence there but I don't know much about Hong Kong so am only speculating based on the skin color of the people I saw nursing drinks in the bars that I walked past. It is right on the water and there are some nice seafood restaurants. I just finished processing some of the photos, here is the gallery:

http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/China/Hong-Kong/Sai-Kung-Hong-Kong-China/10424871_8obFo

And if you just want my favorites...

http://canghuixu.smugmug.com/keyword/favorite-sai kung

Here are a few that I really liked...

Sogou Chinese pinyin input IME for the Android G1 (G1 搜狗拼音输入法)

2009-11-22T13:26:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: I also posted a brief comparison of Sogou Pinyin IME and Google Pinyin IME.

I'm in Hong Kong right now.

For quite a while, I have been wanting a Chinese IME for my G1. I woke up early because of jet lag and having nothing better to do, decided to see if there was anything in the app store to allow Chinese language input. I found the Sogou IME app and downloaded and installed. So far it seems to work very nicely. I just send some test emails. I haven't explored all of the capabilities yet but I like what I see, and may install the Sogou IME on my PC as well.

The reason I am posting is that I wanted to share what I finally figured out about how to activate it after downloading and installing. I spent a while after downloading and installing wondering why nothing happened, and I was still seeing the old Android keyboard. The help section on the website didn't offer any guidance. Finally after poking around I found that I had to go to the Android Settings 'Locale & Text', then under 'Text Settings' turn off Android keyboard, and turn on '搜狗输入法'. Once I did that, everything was hunky dory, and next time I composed an email, the rather neat Sogou virtual keyboard was up there. Once I turned on the Sogou keyboard, I did get a warning that everything I typed, including credit card numbers and so forth, would be visible to the app. That didn't bother me, I guess I am naively optimistic that Sogou wouldn't do something mean like program the app to transmit everything I type to the 国家安全局.

If you are looking for a Chinese IME for your G1, go into the Android Market and search for Sogou Input and you should find it.

The settings menus for the app are all in Chinese, so they may be a bit hard to navigate for someone who is just learning Chinese. So far it seems to work fine without any fiddling with the settings.

Here are my attempts at translations of the menu contents...

搜狗输入法设置　－　Sougou Input Method Settings
键盘设置　- Keyboard settings

按键时振动 - Vibrate when key pressed
按键反馈音 - Feedback tone on key press

竖屏虚拟键盘模式 - Vertical screen virtual keyboard style

数字键盘 - Numeric keypad (like for T9 input)

全键盘 - Full keyboard

横屏虚拟键盘模式 - Horizontal screen virtual keyboard style

数字键盘 - Numeric keypad (like for T9 input)

全键盘 - Full keyboard

输入设置 - Input Settings

中文输入 - Chinese input

模糊音设置 - Settings for unclear sounds

中文联想 - Chinese linking/association

英文输入 - English input

自动添加空格 - Automatically add spaces

自动句首大写 - Automatically capitalize the beginnings of sentences

符号输入 - Punctuation input

自动符号成对 - Automatically pair punctuation

中文状态下自定义符号 - Chinese custom symbols

英文状态下自定义符号 - English custom symbols

数字状态下自定义符号 - Numeric custom symbols

更新升级 - Update/upgrade
词库更新 - Instantly update dictionary

软件升级 - Upgrade the software over the internet

更新设置 - Update settings

开户自动更新 - Turn on automatic updates

更新提示 - Update reminders

每天 - Every day

每3天 - Every three days

etc.

词库管理 - Dictionary management

词库备份 - Dictionary backup

网络备份用户词库 - Back up user's dictionary on the internet

词库恢复 - Dictionary restore

网络恢复用户词库 - Restore user's dictionary from internet

通行证管理 - Pass management

搜狗通行证注册，登录和注销 - Sogou Pass registration, login, logout

帮助 - Help

与好友分享 - Share with friends

搜狗输入法帮助 - Sogou input help

用户反馈 - User feedback

关于搜狗输入法 - About Sogou input

After using it for a few weeks, I am generally pretty pleased. The English auto-completion/correction doesn't seem quite as good as the native Android system, but it is passable. And having Chinese language input is REALLY handy.

Here is the URL for the Sogou input for mobiles page:
http://shouji.sogou.com/

It is all in Chinese, but you may be able to get some sense of what is going on with Google translate. For more information about Sogou for Android, click on the tab at the top navbar that says 帮助说明. That will take you to a help page. If you look at the navbar on the left, you will see "Android 1.5 平台，使用帮助", click on that to get to a help page for the Android Sogou that you might try running through Google Translate or some other translator. The way the site is configured I can't link to the site directly.

Amazon.com app for the G1, plus updated Cardiotrainer and Twidroid apps

2009-09-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

Last week I installed the Amazon.com app for the G1. I have been trying it out, and it is really nice. Among other things, you can use the G1 camera to scan a bar code of a product in a store. The product's entry at Amazon comes up right away. Not only do you get to see the Amazon price, and I suppose order the product right away if it is cheaper than whatever store you were at when you looked at the barcode, but you can browse the product description and more importantly the customer reviews. Note that this is different from the Amazon MP3 store app that comes with the G1.

This has been REALLY handy at places like Best Buy and Fry's where the product displays are largely uninformative, and the staff are either scarce or well-intentioned but perhaps not very knowledgeable. Last Saturday I was at Best Buy looking at BluRay players that had internet connectivity, comparing various models from LG, Samsung, and Sony, and I scanned the bar code and then read the reviews for each one. At the time, the LG BD 390 had by far the best customer reviews, so even though I didn't buy anything that day, that is the one I am leaning toward. More interestingly, I showed the reviews to another guy who was also looking at BluRay players and trying to decide between Samsung, LG, and Sony, and when he saw the difference in the ratings between the LG and the others, he picked up the LG and headed off to the cash register. I was thinking I should have asked Best Buy for a commission.

Anyway I think the Amazon.com app works really nicely. Being able to read the customer reviews was great. You may ask, why didn't I just order straight from Amazon? Basically there are some things I still hesitate to order from Amazon if based on past experience they tend to fail easily. I have had bad experiences with DVD players in the past so prefer to buy them at stores like Best Buy where it is easy for me to return them.

About the only shortcoming I identified with the Amazon.com app was that when I was reading the manufacturer's product descriptions, the links to learn more about specific features were disabled. A "learn more" link that in a regular browser would have taken me to more detail was simple raw text with no linking. This was a problem since I did want to check on some very specific features, and it was unclear from the product packaging and the conversation with the salesperson how they were implement.

Meanwhile, there is a major new release of Cardiotrainer out, and it works really well. The UI is much improved. If you haven't downloaded it yet, but need something for tracking your workouts, do so immediately. I wish they would start charging for it so I could pay them some money for coming up with such a nice app. The app is constantly improving, and the team seems very eager to hear suggestions that they can implement, so it will only get better.

I installed the latest version of Twidroid, looks very nice. I may upgrade to the pro version soon.

Cheonggye Stream (청계천) in Seoul, August 2009

2009-09-01T10:14:00.001-07:00

I just spent a few days in Korea, and it was great. I had some opportunities to get out in the evening and take pictures of the Cheonggye Stream and surroundings in downtown Seoul. It was very close to my hotel, the Best Western Premier Kukdo, maybe five minutes walk or so. The Cheonggye Stream is an interesting and apparently successful example of an effort to recreate a public space in a large metropolis by removing existing infrastructure. As I understand it, there had been a stream originally that was gradually paved over in the fifties and sixties. An elevated highway was built in the seventies. More recently, a mayor of Seoul who went on to become President pushed for the removal of the elevated highway and the restoration of the stream, along with creation of a landscaped public space on either side. According to the Wikipedia article, the project was controversial, and perhaps remains so, but it does seem to have created a popular public space. Both nights I was out, there were hundreds of people out strolling, or just sitting on the banks strolling. It may look deserted from my photos because I was waiting for breaks in the crowds to shoot.

The gallery of Cheonggye Stream photos is here. If you're too busy to look at that, here is a collection of favorites.

A few examples:

An alley in a nearby industrial area:

Cardiotrainer app for the G1

2009-08-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

I have had a G1 for a while now, and one of my favorite apps right now is Cardiotrainer. Like Google's My Tracks and other apps, Cardiotrainer uses the GPS in the G1 to record a route. Much more so than My Tracks, however, Cardiotrainer is geared toward use while exercising.

For me the most important and useful feature is the real-time information on speed/pace, which helps me keep focused by reminding me when my pace is slowing down. You can also see a map view on the display of your phone to get some sense of where you are in your route and so forth.

Another very nice feature is that you can upload your tracks to the Cardiotrainer site to be archived for later review. You can either have tracks upload automatically as soon as you finish, or manually. Once tracks are uploaded, there are some additional options, including downloading them in GPX or KML format, or creating a link to a specific track for sharing. Here is an example of a track I ran in Ann Arbor a few weeks ago, using the URL provided by the Cardiotrainer site.

There is also a Facebook app that when installed on your account, will show a list of your recent tracks in a box on your profile and publish a line about your most recently completed track as soon as you complete it. The items include links to the maps.

Cardiotrainer also has music integration, but I haven't experimented with that. I'm not too happy with the sound quality of music played on the G1, so I just carry an iPod classic in my other hand when I am running. My issues with the music on the G1 may not actually reflect inherent problems with the G1, but rather the fact that to fit music onto my memory card, I convert it to a lower bit rate than I am used to. Also I find using a dongle to plug headphones into the mini-USB port on the G1 annoying, since the dongles I buy always seem to fail within a few weeks of use.

The people at Cardiotrainer are really committed to making their app a winner, so they have been adding features and resolving issues at a really remarkable pace. The app now is very stable, reflecting I think improvements in the G1 firmware for handling GPS as well as steady improvements in Cardiotrainer, so you probably won't have any troubles with it. If you do have trouble, the people are very responsive. They also take suggestions for additional features very seriously.

Lingoes translation tool

2009-08-16T07:02:00.000-07:00

One more discussion of a software package...

A friend of mine in Taiwan recently introduced me to the free Lingoes translation software package. This package installs on Windows and does cursor translation, i.e. it provides a translation of whatever the cursor is pointing at, or selected text, in a pop-up window. So far it seems to work well in almost any application, though occasionally (rarely) it seems to result in Word or Wordpad crashing. Of course I use it for assistance when I am reading documents in Chinese. My reading vocabulary is sufficient that in a typical document I may be able to get 90%-95% of the characters, but of course every few lines there will be a character pair that I don't know, and all I have to do is highlight that character pair and a translation pops up. If I highlight an entire section of text, it sends it to Google Translate, and returns the results in a pop-up. This is turning out to be extremely useful because now I can actually sit down and read Chinese-language documents fairly painlessly. Before, reading for me was very stop-and-go because I had to pause every few lines to look up a pair of characters in a dictionary or by going to a web site. One of the pleasures of using this handy tool is that I actually learn new vocabulary, so for example yesterday I picked up a few things like 体现 (reflect)，构成 (compose/make up), 输送 (transport), and 招收（hire/recruit). In many cases I already knew the spoken words, but not the characters.

One of the neatest features is that you can download and install additional dictionaries for dozens of languages. As I mentioned, there are a wide variety of dictionaries that you can install. So far for Chinese to English, I have been very happy with the CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary that I installed. Along with English translations, it includes the pinyin for the characters you look up, so you can learn the pronunciation in Chinese as well. Many of the other dictionaries I tried didn't include the pinyin for the Chinese. There are actually dozens of dictionaries, including many specialty dictionaries, some entirely in Chinese.

Overall, this seems like a pretty neat package. It claims that it is spyware and virus free. I can't assess that one way or the other, but so far Sophos AV and Windows Defender haven't reported any problems, and I have noticed any unusual performance issues with the computer.

I think the ideal application of this package is situations where you already know a language, but not perfectly, and like me you need an efficient way of looking up the occasional word or phrase while you're going through the document. This isn't really suitable for translating a large document in its entirety, there are probably better packages out there for that. And did I mention that it is free?