Sunday April 27
 
19:09
 
How Do You Get A Fat Girl Into Bed?

Piece of cake.

Thanks The Scott Mills Podcast for that joke. Unfortunately it seems not to be updating to my iTunes anymore - I hope they’ve not finished doing it, because it’s one of the funniest pieces of British comedy there is. For me, it’s like a daily injection of British Comedy Drug, and I’ll be having withdrawal symptoms if it doesn’t start working again soon. 

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:

1. Kimchi
2. Allowing smoking in the toilets
3. Soju
4. DMB TV reception in the shuttle
5. 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.

Tuesday March 25
 
17:53
 
Moving Domains Between Webhosting Companies

Yesterday I moved The Korean Blog List to a new hosting company. I faced some technical challenges during the transfer, so to remind me of the solutions to them and the tools I used, I’ve written this: Moving Hosting Companies - Solving Technical Issues.

It’s primarily aimed at me - for when I’m moving domains in the future - but hopefully the page will help anyone else faced with similar site-move problems. Some of the solutions were difficult to track down.

Note: It is not a document about choosing a web host company, though obviously I’d recommend the company I’m using for that. I’ve included details on how to get half price hosting with that company at the bottom of the page.