Wednesday April 16
16:51
A Proud Moment
As I’ve been moving my websites to Cirtex, I’ve discovered little pages and mini-sites that I’d forgotten about.
Two of them are Alan’s Macau Guide and Alan’s Hong Kong Guide. There are tiny little one pagers that I wrote back in 2001/2 and just forgot about, but I’ve discovered they are actually still getting hits daily. Today I even found that Alan’s Macau Guide is listed on this travel site, and has sporned a discussion on Gambling and Casinos in Macau. Amazing.
Searching around, I found that Alan’s Macau Guide is listed on this Investment site. They’ve stolen my images, which I’m not chuffed about, but they did link back.
It’s on CMOZ as well.
I almost deleted them. Now I’ve discovered they have a life of their own.
I love that about making internet sites - I love the way that a simple creation, a little bit of effort from me, can lead to so much more. It can even lead to things you wouldn’t imagine. Look at The Korean Blog List, it’s has become one of the major ways for foreigners living in Korea to find each other.
Those two guides are just little page - in some ways they are laughable - but I can’t help feeling a little proud that people are still finding them useful 7 years after I wrote them and forgot about them.
Of course now I know they are popular, I’ve adsensed them upto the hilt. Maybe one day I’ll get to cover my Korean Blog List hosting costs!
Tuesday April 15
18:43
Vista and Popcorn Hour
On my recommendation, one of my friends bought a Popcorn Hour media server. Being a non-technical girl, I was given the task of setting it up for her. Sometimes I think the girls in my life use me only for my technical knowledge.
The Popcorn Hour can supposedly run without a hard drive, so to keep things simple, I hadn’t told her to buy a HDD. It had been hard enough working out how I could make buying a WIFI router easy for her - since she needed one of those also to set up a LAN.
I know the Popcorn Hour can’t run the built in Bitorrent client and file server if there’s no hard drive installed, but I thought it would still be able to see network shares. It turns out, however, that it can’t see samba shares either without the hard drive installed - well either that or the Popcorn Hour doesn’t play well with Vista shares. I wouldn’t put it past Vista to be the problem; I used it for the first time last night and it was, as expected, pants.
In the end, I had to run the media streaming server which Popcorn Hour make available for free. It kind of works, but sometimes the Popcorn Hour wont see that the server is running, and the only way to get it to recognise the server is to - unintuitively - toggle the “Support iTunes” option on and off. Weird.
I felt a bit uneasy leaving her with this slightly flakey setup. I hope I don’t start getting calls at 1am asking me to “make things work” because she can’t watch the latest episode of “Grand Designs”.
Aside: My friend’s Popcorn Hour remote is slightly different from mine - it’s a different colour, has slightly different shaped buttons, and has a strange “rb” logo with a hand. Strange.
Sunday April 13
20:02
It’s Strange The Things That You Miss When You Live Abroad
Of all th thingz u cld ask me 2 bring u over u want me to bring sum collar stiffenerz- weirdo
My family think I’m crazy - but it’s strange the things you miss/need from home when you’re abroad.
My brother is coming over last week. He asked me what I wanted him to bring to Tokyo. My list:
Metal collar stiffeners from Tie-Rack
Non-iron shirts from M&S
A can of Ambrosia tinned rice pudding
The can of rice pudding is for the Japanese who consistently look at me in disbelief when I tell them we have pudding made of rice in the UK. Japanese eat rice every day. They never think about making it into a pudding.
In fairness, the things I really want my brother to bring me, he can’t bring. They are:
Black pudding
British bangers
British bacon
Scottish bread
Scottish rolls
Irish soda bread from M&S
Potato scones
A big juicy yellow mellow
Low-fat hummus from the supermarket
Mr Kipling’s Mince Pies
Not being able to get hummus is one thing that has consistently driven my crazy living in Asia - in Hong Kong, in Korea, and in Japan. In Japan there are a couple of restaurants with hummus, so at least I could get it occasionally. Finally - this month - I found a supermarket that sells it, but it’s not the same.
Mince Pies also are something that I missed. In HK I could get them. In Korea, fat chance. In Japan, I can buy Robertson’s mincemeat and make my own. Except for one thing, Japan is miles better than Korea when it comes to international food - I can even get the English breakfast muffins I so longed for in Korea. What’s the one thing? Sour cream. It’s just thick gloob in Japan. Sour cream in Korea was gorgeous - in big tubs from Hyundae department store in Shinchon.
There is actually a Scottish Pub in Tokyo - or, at least, it claims to be. It’s called Scottish Glamour, which isn’t a good start. In fact, after going and seeing the bar menu, I immediately left. No Scottish beer (which, probably, is a good thing), and a cover charge to enter the bar. Any bar that tried to levy a cover charge in Scotland would be burnt to the ground.
I can’t find the URL for Scottish Glamour - but then since I would never recommend you go there, I didn’t try very hard.
Friday April 11
10:01
Korean Space Priorities
Jon has a piece about the blast off of The First Korean In Space, Yi So-yeong. He comments:
Arirang mentions her plans to introduce her country’s traditional food and beverages such as kimchi specially developed and packaged for space to the crew aboard the ISS.
I once worked as a consultant for a Korean film producer wanting to film in Scotland.
Of all the things he could have been worried about - weather, permission for filming, getting the crew and equipment there, grants - the thing that most concerned him was: How can I get Kimchi for my crew? Koreans need their Kimchi for work.
It made me laugh that the same dialema also faced the organisers of this space mission. I imagine the list of priorities was:
- Kimchi
- Allowing smoking in the toilets
- Soju
- DMB TV reception in the shuttle
- Enabling MSN messenger so that So-yeong can chat when she is supposed to be working
;)
Thursday April 10
18:55
Arrrgh! Databases Screwed Up
Lately I’ve been moving my websites over to my new webhost, Cirtex. I’m doing the process myself rather than getting Cirtex to do it because, basically, I only trust myself to do it. I want to make sure every last thing is tested and working. I have a lot of history tied up in my websites..
Today, when testing one of my sites, I discovered that some of my databases got screwed up on the move over. The cause? Character set and collation options. My previous webhost uses a version of MySQL which is pre-”character set and collation options”, Cirtex uses a later version.
I knew that, and I thought I’d caught every possible snag related to collation options in this post but I hadn’t. Despite using phpMyAdmin for both the export and the import, today I found some text fields had been chopped. It seems that the export from the old MySQL server contained characters such as the accented ‘e’ in cafe and other control characters. When imported into the new server, phpMyAdmin didn’t like those characters and chopped the text without warning. The solution seems to be to open the exported file in Editpad Lite, convert to UTF8, and then upload that file.
It is very annoying - and scary, because I only found it by accident. I was testing something else at the time when I noticed a truncated value. I was already very wary that after I finish the move and cancel the old webhosting package, I’d suddenly find something wrong - not I’m VERY VERY wary that will happen. I’ll need to go through extensive testing.
Luckily there has been no damage to The Korean Blog List, but some of my other sites will need their entire databases redoing - and retesting, of course. Thankfully, in the end there will me more benefits than just having moved webhosts - I’ll have tidied up my sites, have verified copies that I know I can restore, and I’ll be on servers that handle character sets correctly - so I shouldn’t have this problem again. If I stayed with my current webhost, I might suddenly find a new server thrust upon me and not have the leisure to get things right.