depthq - ccm|mac

In Malaysia, for me, Chinese New Year (CNY) means meeting up with family and relatives, having lots of good food, getting some "ang pow" (红包, hong2 pao1) and finally getting fried in the super hot weather.

In China, its more of playing with firecrackers and spectating the fireworks, trying to rest amidst all the hustle and bustle, playing mahjong and braving the cold weather.

I initially wanted to write about what is different between Malaysia and China in terms of Chinese customs, but I realised that its quite hard. Its basically the same but tiny differences in the way it is practiced. First difference, most people call it CNY in Malaysia but in Beijing, its Spring Festival, although, its changing to favour Spring Festival a bit more in Malaysia these days.

I feel that the Chinese in Malaysia are a bit more superstitious than the Chinese in the northern part of China, e.g. Beijing. I can't say for the Chinese in the southern China since I didn't live there much.

During CNY, its considered bad luck to do things like: sweeping the floor or breaking a bowl. The reasoning for both is somewhat along the lines of removing or destroying the prosperity. It is also bad to sleep during CNY in the afternoon, because its considered lazy. I think there are less of this superstition stuff when I was living in China.

For Malaysia, one only gives "ang pow" when they are married. And if you're not, then you receive "ang pow". Of course, there is supposedly some limit to this, for those who don't get married.

It seems quite a number of the Chinese in China I know don't receive "ang pow" when they are already working. In some families, I hear, if you're working, you're supposed to be giving out "ang pow".

I know that in Beijing, its customary to give things in pairs, e.g. 2 bottles of wine. I thought this was a Cantonese ritual, because of that we get two "ang pows" from each married couple.

One thing I don't get is why do we need so many different ways to say angpow:

• Angpow (hokkien), Hongpao (mandarin), Red envelope (english)
• Lai see (cantonese)
• Yasui qian (mandarin)

We eat "tang yuan" (汤圆 tang1 yuan2) during CNY and its normally quite sweet. The ones I ate in Beijing, I remember, aren't so sweet. The northern Chinese would eat "jiaozi" (饺子 jiao3zi) on the 5th day of CNY.

One special thing that the Malaysians do is to "low sang" during CNY. There isn't a wikipedia article on this, but this blog article covers it well with pictures.

I got Trac 0.11.2.1 up and running with Apache using FastCGI and then decided to try out Bitten. I've read about it before but never seen it in action or configured it before. I downloaded the 0.6 version (r567) of Bitten and realised that it still requires Clearsilver. Trac 0.11 is supposed to be using a new templating system. But its not so bad, its pretty easy to install Clearsilver. Check Ticket #248 for the Clearsilver issue.

Then after that I realised that it requires the WebTracAdmin plugin, I suppose there are some code dependencies. But it doesn't require the plugin to be enabled in the Trac setup. Having WebTracAdmin installed will allow you to see additional Bitten specific Admin options in Trac. Check the install instructions for more info.

Things look like its working well. Clicking around doesn't seem to trigger any issues. I read more about how Bitten works and I realise I need to create a build recipe in the Admin section. So I head off to create one, but Trac continually gives me an error about having issues with missing or invalid form token, which might be caused by cookies.

So I went ahead to troubleshoot this problem and realised that the form token that is rendered in the HTML form is different from the form token that is stored in the cookie. After a bit more digging, it seems everytime I load the Bitten form in Trac, 2 requests are made to the server.

So what is the 2nd requests? And why does it matter? A bit more digging reveals that Trac will generate a different form token for each requests and the offending request is for an invalid Javascript file (wikitoolbar.js).

Because Bitten is written based on pre-Trac-0.11 code base, I guess there are some missing stuff, which lead to the template generating the wrong path for static files, which lead to making erroneous requests and finally creating this buggy behaviour with the form token. There is a ticket already about something similar and I reported my findings as well.

A bit of templating hacking here and voila Bitten seems to be working for real now, at least that is what I thought until I get to running Bitten slaves. Only after doing all this work did I realise that there is a Bitten for Trac 0.11, an experimental branch. I wonder if everything is working as it should. I am currently happy with the hacked up setup and won't want to modify it for the time being.

A Bitten slave will do all the grunt work of running the builds. You need to write some XML files as instructions for the slave. I wanted to write the whole build script in the Bitten recipe XML DSL but it seems that is not the right way to go. The way the Bitten slave runs the shell commands make it hard to do so. So you'll actually have to write a shell script first to do all that work (it makes sense anyway) and use the Bitten recipe to invoke it.

The Bitten slave will capture all the output and result of the commands that you execute and send it back to Trac. From my testing it seems that the Bitten slave is quite sensitive, I had a script that output new lines and that seemed to have broken the build. I actually had to make my scripts output less crap to make it a bit more Bitten friendly.

All in all, it wasn't that hard to setup and I am pretty happy with the setup at the moment. I am so happy that it is open sourced and I can hack on it. I am still trying to figure out how to use virtualenv in this whole setup so that I can also test the setup of python related dependencies. That will be another experiment for another day and maybe another blog post, I suppose...

I mailed a box of stuff (mainly clothes) back to Malaysia and I was amazed at the condition of the box when it arrived. And also the speed, it got back to Malaysia before I did.

I wonder if anything fell out of it. As far as I can remember most (if not all) of the things are intact, 16kg worth of stuff.

The only thing that got broken was my Exoweb mug. I'll get it glued back together I guess. Oh well!

I have another box coming shortly, I wonder how it will end up...

Just about 2 weeks ago, I was still out on a 8-day trip to Changbaishan, Mohe and Harbin. It is winter in China and what better place to be than the northern most place in China, Mohe. Other highlights include: the frozen lake in Changbaishan, alfresco bathing (yes outdoor!) in hot springs in Changbaishan (sorry no pictures ), beautiful winter scenery and landscapes, dog meat hotpot & other delicious food and fooling around in the cold.

I somewhat enjoy the cold weather more than the hot, even though I have lived most of my life, so far, very near the equator. Actually I much prefer living in a place with proper 4 seasons than some place that has eternal sunshine (and or rain). And people say that you live a longer life if you live in a place with 4 seasons, I wonder how true is that.

Anyway, the trip was a blast and -30 degree celcius (without wind) in Mohe is not as bad as I thought it was. When we initially arrived, we didn't feel it was that cold, not until we stayed outside for about 15-20 minutes, did the cold really get to us. I definitely wore enough, although some people might argue against that and the hardest part of my body to warm up would be my toes.

We spent quite a lot of time in the train and bus. Let me recount: train from Beijing to Changchun (5-6 hours), overnight train from Changchun to Yanji (7-8 hours), bus from Yangji to Erbaidaohe (3-4 hours), van from Erbaidaohe to Changbaishan (1 hour), bus from Erbaidaohe to Antu (a few hours, can't remember), train from Antu to Harbin (10 hours), train from Harbin to Mohe (20 hours), van from Mohe to the northern most village and back (2-3 hours), train from Mohe to Harbin (20 hours) and finally train from Harbin to Beijing (5-6 hours). That's about a total of 80 hours in 8 days. An average of 10 hours in the bus/train each day.

That seems like a lot of travel time but a lot of it is sleeping time, for overnight trains and for those waking hours, it was really fun, listening, chatting, joking and just being silly. Overall, a very good trip!

And now, I am back in Malaysia, where I'll have to battle high 30 degree celsius temperature with t-shirts & shorts, a running nose, a sore throat and a fever.