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 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...

Almost 2 weeks ago I was in Vilnius to attend EuroPython 2008. It was my first time in Vilnius and first time to attend a conference about Python, which is the main programming language that I've been using for the past 2 years of work at Exoweb.

It was interesting to meet so many people that are also using Python everyday in their work and projects. In the conference, I met up with Greg and Tomasz, who's Greg's partner in crime in the software business. They are part of Enpoka that is doing outsource software development. I also met up with Tobias, who drove all the way from Tromsø to Vilnius so that he can fix his car in Riga, its more than 2000+ kilometres, pretty crazy!

I attended some talks on Jython and PyPy. I have to say I am pretty impressed with how far Jython has come (and only recently realised the state of development of the JVM in the dynamic languages world) and the grandiose plans for PyPy.

The day ended with Guido's keynote but it was done through video conferencing and I guess it wasn't to the best effect. It was regarding Python 3000 which I've heard at least twice so far.

The next day started with a talk on a tool to visualise relationships between Python objects and duplicate code finder a.k.a CloneDigger. I listened to a talk on LEAN software development by Steve Alexander of Canonical but it was a bit too vague to me, although I thought his approach of using photographed stickies as slides was cool. There were some good talks of Python's more advanced topics (descriptors) and the internals of some of the standard data structures we use everyday like lists, dicts and sets.

I attended the Cython talk but I was getting distracted hacking away with Greg on using greenlets with twisted. Both of us were not so happy with the deferred style of coding asynchronous servers in twisted and wanted to find a more manageable approach. We have a pretty simple prototype and I would want to apply the same idea to a larger code base .

The day ended with a keynote by Hans Rosling, who I admire quite a bit due to his great TED talk he gave. He is more impressive live and I truly enjoyed his talk although it wasn't much about Python. There were some lightning talks before the keynote and the one that I can remember very clearly is gSym, which is a python editor that visualises your code in different ways such as mathematical formulas and lisp style.

For the last day, one of the highlights was a talk about hacking your dna with the amazon cloud. I talked a bit with Mike the DNA hacker and learned quite a bit about his travels in South East Asia which were pretty cool. After the hacking on greenlets and twisted, Greg decided to hold an unconference session on it to discuss about it. Tommi, who knows quite a bit about twisted gave some good insights on the greenlet+twisted approach which is that although it works its dangerous.

There is a lot of material that I would like to catch up on but I haven't found the time to really dig into it. I really enjoyed the conference and thought it was a good chance to learn a few things and meet similar minded people.

I managed to meet briefly with some Django contributors and Jim Baker who's working hard pushing out Jython 2.5. He says he'll be in China in September, maybe he'll come over and give a talk on Python and Jython. I am kinda interested in Jython myself and have been submitting some bug reports, hopefully its useful for them . I was not really ready for the Django sprint and spent a bit of time looking into Django new forms admin. At least I learnt a bit about the new branch that will go into 1.0 soon.

I have bookmarked some of the more interesting stuff I learned from the conference in del.icio.us and also took some pictures while sightseeing.

I have more to say, ok maybe not. Over!

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Last Friday, 23 of us from the NB team set off to Shen Cun Dao for a short weekend excursion.

I would have to say that it was more fun that I expected. We walked on metal ropes and wires while avoiding the dangers of falling into somewhat dirt water. We raced against time, climbed over walls, dangle and get off-balance on swings.

I didn't snap many photos. I was obviously just too distracted. But anyway, we also had some less physically demanding activities such as creating some art stuff.

Many thanks to our friendly PM for doing a lot of the PM work for this trip.

I think I really liked the team oriented games/competition. There is an amazing amount of good memories, laughter and friendship that is developed through these activities. I am utterly amazed. Other than that I liked the rock climbing (pan1 yan2). Yes I managed to hit the bell right at the top! I thought the barbecued food was pretty good! I also like just snacking on random junk.

This whole trip reminds me of my school days. Its a good feeling.

UPDATE: Some links to some videos:

1. Some sort of charades-like game that we played, extremely funny
2. Dancing around the fire with the rabbit dance
3. One of our friendly PM rock climbing
4. Another one of our friendly PM rock climbing
5. And finally myself, rock climbing and hitting the bell!

This is a pretty late entry. I want to post it earlier but somehow it has slipped past me.

I have been here for about 2 months and I really miss the blue skies and white clouds at home. I really like to look at white fluffy clouds. Beijing's sky is mostly dusty (probably due to the massive construction work going and being near a desert) and misty (after a thunderstorm). I think about 2-3 weeks ago (and actually yesterday as well), the sky really turned blue and some clouds could be seen. I was so excited I actually took a photo.

I wish for more of these days.