depthq - ccm|mac

Happy Valentine's Day!

I wish I could spend some time with my girl but its alright because I managed to talk to her a bit over Skype. I finally went for my first proper cycling session, though short, since arriving back in KL for about a month. Today wasn't that hot so it wasn't that bad in terms of the heat. My body overheat and sweat too easily.

I took the Sprint highway from where I stayed and headed for Sri Hartamas and then Bukit Kiara to stop by at a friend's place. I did about 10km in 30 minutes when I was heading there. Not too bad for my first time. It was just a bit hilly and I am not so good yet for those hill climbs. But I realised that I had a bit more power in my legs during those nice straight paths. It could be due to the jogging sessions I have been doing for the past weeks. Coming back was much better, only 26 minutes. It could be due to the route having more downhill.

Cycling in Beijing is much more relaxed because its flat like a pan. KL goes up and down and up and down, though its mostly gradual. Another downside of cycling in KL is that it rains fairly often and although its only a drizzle, the road will spit water at you as you cycle past those patches of water. Not fun but nothing a good shower will not fix. Oh yes, I should add on mud guards, but my bike will look fugly.

Beijing has nice bike lanes and its more bike friendly. It can be dangerous cycling in KL, especially next to the highway, which is why you need a bit more planning and try to cycle on those roads with less cars and no blind corners.

Due to the lack of bicycle lanes, I have to cycle at the side of the road which is not so flat, at times and you can easily bump on to small rocks. Because of that my wrist aches a bit. So I still have a bit of getting used to, but its fun nevertheless.

I need to get proper cycling shorts and cycling shoes & pedals, when I get some extra cash on hand .

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.

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.

I waited for more than 2 years for this trip and there is certainly some excitement around it. I missed the one back in 2006 because I wasn't feeling too well. So last weekend, about 40 of us headed to Hongjiushanzhuang for a weekend of games and fun.

The setting for the trip is just right: great company, bright blue skies, cooling weather and the websites we're maintaining aren't in a busy period .

I realised a very interesting thing: in good weather with good sunlight, almost all the pictures I take are beautiful, its like almost effortless. I need more of this in Beijing so that I can seem as though I am an accomplished photographer .

We were broken up into 10-person teams and each team is assigned a villa, 别墅, to stay for the weekend. First thing I noticed is there are lots of insects around this area. Spiders, bees and butterflies were among us. I have to say this is a rare treat in the concrete forest of Beijing. We were 1 hour and 30 minutes away from the city but still technically Beijing I guess, or I can be wrong. There is also another insect but I am not sure of its name, its black and pretty smelly.

There were lots of fat cats in the area as well. I guess a tourist area fits them as they are lazy and because they look cute, people will go and feed them. What a win-win situation!

After we arrived we had some rest and we played some games (golf, basketball, tennis, badminton) during the day and in the night we played Texas Hold'em.

The next day, we climbed the Great wall at Simatai. There is a story between me and this part of the Great wall. I was here about 2 years ago and I failed to go past the 12th tower because it was closed, due to it being very dangerous. We almost managed to get the guard to let us through the last time but failed in the end.

And here I am 2 years later, and there is another chance. In about 40-50 minutes we managed to reached the 12th tower and it was still closed again. We tried to talk to the guard and he didn't budge at all. He advised us that if we really wanted, we could stay over at the resort at the Great wall and then wake up very early the next morning and there wouldn't be anyone.

2 Years, 2 Simatai Trips, 2 Disappointments!!!

We were back at the resort at lunch time, had lunch, went for a horse ride, shower, massage, sauna, rest, video games and by then its time for dinner. There was a bonfire, barbecued food, beer, red wine, fire water, silly singing and lots of drunk people .

Overall it was a good trip. Many thanks to the admin team for making it happen! And also many thanks to those that came along to make it a real blast! I leave you with a video of the final competition between the Red and Yellow team to win the final prize (Jingkelong cash card!).

UPDATE: I initially embedded a video on this blog post but it seems RSS readers don't pick up on it.

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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