cdrum

About 20 minutes after I posted my blog post on Google’s new Google Maps Mobile client, I noticed I got a pingback, or whatever it’s called. This pingback goes to a website http://0d1.info/gps/, which looks like a Google Adsense farm rss aggregator. This means, they’re taking other people’s blog posts and putting Google Adsense adds on them.
Here, have a look (click on the image to see the full size screenshot). Look at all the ads! They didn’t even keep my photos! I wonder if they’re spidring the net for any post with “gps” as a tag?

I don’t think so…

Time for a cease and desist?     (See here for the infringing URL)

Google’s new mobile client for Google Maps, Google Maps Mobile, is pretty sweet. It’s now native on the S60v3 devices (whcih my N95 has).  It also has a pretty neat feature called “My Location”.  Now, with the N95′s internal GPS turned on, it will show you pretty darnd acurately where you are on the map (or satellite image).

If you don’t have GPS (or turn it off), then it will, using the cell towers, give you a chabuduo (translate: close-enough) location.  While at work, I did a quick test:

The image on the left is a zoom-out, the image on the right is a zoom-in.  The dot in the center is where it thinks I am; but in reality, I’m at the 6-o’clock position at the bottom of the blue-tinted circle.  So, that’s probably somewhere around a half kilometer off.

Oh well.  Close enough, eh?

I’ve decided to stop using Netvibes in favor of Google Reader for my feed reading purposes. Google Reader has improved quite a bit since it was first released (at that point I deemed it as unusable). I liked Netvibes’ customizability, in teams of colors, etc. But the “openness” of it is of no use to me (using 3rd party apps, etc.) I essentially just used it for reading my feeds.

I much prefer the way Google Reader formats my feeds (I used to use NetNewsWire back in the day when I used my mac, and liked it) – Google Reader sort of follows the method of NetNewsWire. Sort of…

The two features I have been waiting for Netvibes to introduce, and ultimately what made me finally choose to switch, are star and share. I often forget where I read something, and most of the time, can’t find it when I try looking for it. The star feature shouldhelp me in that area. Share is a nice-to-have – in case anyone out there is at least somewhat interested with what I would like to share. We’ll see.

So, sorry Netvibes. You guys were quite good at innovating in the “start page” arena and 3rd-party interoperability, but I’m looking for more Feed-friendly features. Google Reader satisfies my needs now.

Now, if only Google would let me change the color schemes of their apps – I prefer dark backgrounds, light text.

I randomly checked my “Links for you” page on my del.icio.us account, and low and behold, I was given a beta account to the new preview.delicious.com.  Neato!

It sports a cleaner layout, a bit more web 2.0 friendly I think.  They also mentioned they got the delicious.com domain – I wonder how much of Yahoo!’s money they spent on that bad boy…

Click on the screenshot for a larger version.

Last night, I installed Ubuntu 7.10. I had 7.4 installed previously, but I decided to do a complete reinstall. This included repartitioning the drive into, what I think, is a better configuration.

I (again) pasted what I wrote in the forums of the Beijing Linux Users Group:

A few observations:

1. Wow – Compiz rocks! Those who are allured by Mac’s “beautiful visuals”, they need to check Compiz out. I have no idea why the package compizconfig-settings-manager isn’t installed by default – took me a while to figure that out – I wanted the cube!!

2. The nvidia drivers were already installed. It just worked!!! This is a big improvement over 7.4. Yes, it complained it was a restricted driver, but that was easy to turn off by enabling it.

3. Getting the codecs to work, while straight forward, the connection to medibuntu sucks. So damn slow.

4. This is slightly related to 3. I like amarok to manage my music, so installing it was a piece of cake. But it didn’t recognize the xine engine untul I installed xine-ui. I didn’t see this in documentation anywhere (maybe it should be a prereq for amarok, or anything that uses xine)

5. I decided to go for the 4 partition approach: /boot, swap, /, and /home, where /home is by far the largest. I decided to screw the GParted route to try to resize, etc. I just backed up the data on my USB HD and copied things over once Ubuntu was installed.

Check my previous 7.4 installation post for a comparison report at http://www.beijinglug.org/en/index.php?option=com_joomlaboard&Itemid=25&func=view&id=811&catid=2

I still need to check the webcam support in the other clients to see if that has been improved.

Other than that, I really like how Ubuntu / Linux is coming along. I really don’t see a reason to spend the money to get Winblows or Mac. This is really a full fledged OS!

I documented my installation and configuration efforts at http://docs.cdrum.com/index.php?title=Ubuntu_7.10

In response to my previous post on questioning the use of services like feedburner (especially when feedburner doesn’t really work in China)..

I think those China blogs who aggregate (link) with Chinalyst, you may want to change your feed URL in the Chinalyst configuration for your site if you have previously provided a feedburner link (I’m talking to you, Danwei).

The problem still remains when I see your post in a Chinalyst feed and I want to click on it to be sent to your site to read more, feedburner gets in the way.  You know the rest…

O.k, before you get smart with me and say something stupid like “Hey, Chris – just don’t use the web” or “Hey, Chris – why don’t you leave China – then you won’t have this problem…”, I have this to say to you: “Um, lameass, why don’t you just shoot yourself.”

I wrote a post about 3 weeks ago about the blocking of (access adjustments made to) Feedburner URLs in China. Rick from Feedburner was nice enough to submit a comment to my post. Rick basically said they know of the problem and are trying to work with the ISPs in China to find a workaround. (ok, those were my words from what I remember he wrote, I actually haven’t read his comment for ~3 weeks).

Well, so far, it’s still blocked. Best of luck to Feedburner/Google in hope these guys will start thinking rationally… Ain’t gonna work.

So, I ask this question: Why don’t website owners just host their own feeds? Many of these blogs, such as wordpress or moveable type, have the mechanics built-in already!

Could it be these Website owners want to get an accurate number of subscribers? Sorry, last I checked, feed subscriptions are passive. So the number of subscribers Feedburner provides (such as “you have 3823 subscribers”) is bogus. Please. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I don’t see any other reason to use Feedburner, exclusively. (Again, please, someone shed some light on this). Perhaps you want to monetize your feeds by placing ads? There are other ways to do this! (i.e. adding adsence code in your feeds).

If people insist on using Feedburner, or similar, why can’t you also provide a link to your original feed URL as well. Richard wised up and did this! (Thank’s Richard!) Bjorn also wrote about this.

What really erks me is China-focused blogs using Feedburner, only. Do these guys have any clue what’s going on in China??!

• Chinalyst – A nice feed aggregator for China-specific English blogs. Their main feed is using Feedburner. Are these guys even in China?
• Shanghaiist – You are a blog “about Shanghai”
• There’s many more, but I don’t think I need to waste my time listing all of them. Go to Chinalyst and look for yourself.

Let’s all wake up and not alienate your readers in China! (Those of us who are interested in China, who live in China, and who read your China-focused blogs)

And no, using Tor is not always an option, thank you.

Update Oct, 20:  Joel from Danwei left a rather sarcastic comment for this post which kind of put the jokes on me…  I apologize for somehow overlooking the fairly clear “china safe” feed links.  But my original question stands: why not host your own feed?

Check this bad boy out:

See Techcrunch’s story, as well as this Chinese Developer’s twitter page who allegidly first found out about it, or discovered it.

Techcrunch interestingly points out that both China NetCom and Baidu are listed on the NY Stock Exchange.  Interesting… Standards?  If you guys want to play with the big boys, you’ve got to act like them and follow the rules. M’kay?

This post will probably be outdated any minute, but…

Today, October 18, the new Ubuntu Linux should be out.

Here’s a screen shot of the header image of the main page.

So, where is it?! 0 days left, come on guys!

Perhaps they forgot Asia sees the 18th before the rest of the world?

Mobile Phone Issue

First, last evening (Tuesday), out of the blue, my new Nokia N95 (well, I bought it in June) developed an odd problem – when I would press some of buttons, the screen would “shift” and change colors (like to a shade of blue, then red, then yellow, then green) but it would also shift to the right a few pixels. Very strange – seems like a connection is loose? So I dropped it off with the repair guy today – note – not an authorized Nokia repair shop I am afraid as I don’t have warranty.

Motorbike Issue

Second, my bike finally (again) crapped out on me yesterday. I noticed what seemed an electrical problem developing over the last 2 weeks or so. But did I do anything about it? No. Big surprise. So now it’s stuck in my office’s underground parking with no electricity. I suspect it’s the battery. This be the 4th battery I fried in the last 3 years. This, on top of the headlight and all turn signals are out. Man oh man…

Going for a ride – good for seeing rural Beijing!

Finally, this morning, I woke up a tad late this morning (read: later than I would like but still on-time if I had my motorbike), which means, getting a cab would be out of the question. So I had to revert to a hei che – a black car – basically an unofficial car for hire. boy did this guy take me for a ride. Check this:

View Larger Map

O.k., what are you seeing? This is a satellite photo of Beijing.  Duh!

You see at the bottom left is my home – indicated with the little bed icon.  My office is near the top with the yellow flag icon.  The route I usually take is orange/yellow – following the city’s 3rd ring road.  I sometimes take the red route, which follows the city’s 4th ring road, however, this is usually very jammed with cars.  My “hei che” today took me along the blue line.  That’s right.  Here’s the (short) story:

You usually negotiate the price before entering the car – I negotiated the “normal price”.  I have taken these guys in the past and haven’t had any issues.  Today’s guy was new. Never seen him before.  Sometimes these guys like to pick up several people at a time to maximize their profits.  I usually don’t like that but I figured today what the heck.  He knows where I am going, so I imagine and assumed (shame on me!) that the guy he wanted to pick up was going somewhere along the way.  Unfortunately my Chinese sucks big time so I couldn’t pick up the conversation between the driver and this guy.

Well, if you look at the map, he followed the red route at the beginning, but instead of making the turn left to go north on 4th ring, he kept going straight – to the east.  I asked him what was up, he just replied “something something blah blah bleh bingdo dingo si huan you duo che blanke boo boo slip slip sloppy skank”.  Something like that! The key bit I got out of that was “si huan you duo che”, which means 4th ring has too many cars.  It did – as usual.  So I figured he knew a good short cut.  So I let him be.  Mistake.

We kept going and going and going, passing 5th ring road.  I though there would be no end in sight!  (not really, but I am trying to add a bit of drama here…)  Finally he stopped (at the little fish icon in the bottom left of the map above) and let the guy out.  The driver then proceeded to do a U-turn – presumably going back to get back on track.

Well, in the map above, when he starts turning right to go north (from the east), he drives much of the way along the fulu, or side road, to 5th ring.  It eventually ends, and then we do some creative turns here and there, when finally reaching a road I have seen before!

It certainly was an interesting drive, even though I was quite a bit late for work.  East of the 5th ring road in Beijing is pretty much the dark ages…  Crappy roads, no tall buildings, more animal powered vehicles…

My phone was acting up (see above) but I managed to get through the screen issues to get some GPS coordinates (the pushpins on the map above) – as I wanted proof where I was for my boss!!!

What did I learn?

If you need to take an illegal car/taxi – Make sure he doesn’t pick anyone else up – don’t assume anything.