Stuff What I Posted

DarkBasic and Notepad++

2012-01-24T14:27:00.002+13:00

Syntax highlighting is my #1 requirement from an editor. If anyone else wants to view DarkBasic source code in Notepad++, you can use the following UDL to get most of the way there.

Save the XML below to "something.xml". If you mouse over the top right hand corner of the highlighted source area, you can find buttons that let you view the source and copy/paste it.
Open "User-Defined Dialogue" in the view menu.
Dock it.
Click on the "Import" button and select the saved XML file.
Close any open DarkBasic files and reopen them to ensure they get the hightlighting (needed? dunno).



    
        
            
            
            
        
        
            000000
            
            
            ' - ! " # $ % & ( ) * , . / : ; ? @ [ \ ] ^ { | } ~ + < = >
             1 2 0`
            dim as dword for to rng rnd sync on rate skipsyncmode set display mode desktop width height autocam hide next position inc prepare matrix texture trim make object box sphere update add delete rotate limb offset do loop if endif else text end curvevalue camera point constant function create bitmap endfunction ink get image save and or write memblock from atanfull sin cos circle wrapvalue mouse color backdrop aspect tile show mesh

Oh Darkbasic..

2012-01-24T13:11:00.000+13:00

If you're looking for a Basic and are tired of having your time wasted by all other kinds of broken and disfunctional software, do not try DarkBasic.

They do offer DarkBasic Professional for free download, but good luck locating it on their website between the myriad of different products and add-ons for sale, and the huge amounts of advertisement.

Still, it's free. Let's give it a shot. Write some code.

And it compiles. But enjoy it, chances are that is an accidental successful compilation. Make a change, and suddenly you get a "Compilation Failed (Syntax Errors)". What does this mean? Where are the syntax errors? Beats me.

I've compiled newly entered source code successfully, made a trivial and undoubtedly correct change, and then gotten a failed compile. Then reverted the changes, and the compilation continues to fail! Searching the DarkBasic forums yields helpful suggestions like reinstalling DarkBasic.

One potential source of problems is that DarkBasic creates new projects under "Program Files" on Windows 7. Then it has no write access and seems to still manage to compile and run (falling back to the temp directory), although leaving a broken project if any at all. But this is actually good, because it is the only way to be able to edit a DarkBasic project without getting the mystical compilation failures after the first change to the code..

I hear FreeBasic is pretty good.

Roguelike MUD progress

2012-01-23T17:08:00.000+13:00

Starting up my MUD framework today for the first time in a long time, I forgot where I was at. My telnet client of choice, Windows Telnet, no longer works reliably.. at least on a Chinese language Windows 7 computer.

Is there still a reason to support Windows Telnet?

Wider accessibility is one reason, so that people with older computers who already use it for other MUDs can continue to use it. At one point in the past, Kavir analysed the connections to his MUD and came up with a quick rundown of how many users were using which client. The rundown is somewhat lacking and I am not convinced it is correct enough to be representative, there's no Windows Telnet, and the large number of "Unknown" needs to be dealt with.

I think I'll leave it for now. A better investment would be a web-based client.

Mud progress

2012-01-22T21:49:00.002+13:00

It has been a long time since I've worked on my MUD code-base. Most recently, which is to say not that recently at all, I've been concentrating on the roguelike game code. Today however, I managed to get myself to spend a little time on the standard text-based game code.

Weight

I was playing around with my container code, and for some reason, that got me motivated to add a 'weight' property to objects. This is of course pretty straightforward. For now, a player can gauge the weight of an object by using the 'consider' command on it. And a player can see how much weight he is carrying, and capable of carrying, but looking at himself. Not sure if there is a standard way to expose these two pieces of information, but if there was I'd prefer to go with it. For now, this will do, as will my use of kilograms as the unit of measurement.

Message formatting

My message interpolation pretty much works for the purposes I put it to, but I started to wonder why this wasn't something better documented out on the web. Ideally there would be a MUD wiki somewhere which would define the standard approaches which everyone took. The agreed upon rules for pluralisation, verb conjugation or whatever. Yeah, standard libraries are available for this these days, but they come at a cost. Most that I located are overly complicated and surprisingly arcane.

In any case, looking at the text I generate when someone 'looks' at another object, I found myself expanding the message formatting.

vo = ViewedObject(viewer=actor, object=self, verb=self.containerVerb)
"{0.Pn} {0.v}: {1}".format(vo, "...")
viewing self: "You carry: ..."
viewing other male: "He carries: ..."
viewing object: "It contains: ..."

I already handled 's' (short description) and 'v' (verb). Now after adding a 'gender' property to objects, I also support 'pn' (pronoun). Something resembling verb conjugation is also supported, where the viewer gets a pluralised verb if he is not viewing himself. Good enough, and quick and straightforward is the goal.

Procrastination led to some web browsing:

mudconnect.com: Message Expansion.
This thread has several parties discussing the approaches at use in their MUDs. Some are prohibitively complicated, but there are some good points made.
gamedev.stackoverflow.com: Generating grammatically correct MUD-style attack descriptions.
The question is from someone completely new to the topic, and the answer gives a great breakdown of the various aspects which need to be addressed.

Nothing I am interested in looking into. A good approach for me is to look back at these when issues arise, and to stay straightforward.

Next steps

Finish implementing encumbrance concept.
No idea! Trying to balance resisting feature creep, and not having a MUD code-base that isn't complete enough to use.

Planet MUD-Dev additions & removals

2012-01-17T08:27:00.003+13:00

Added:

Natilena - Lua scripting related.

Removed:

Basternae MUD - Seems to have become a launching page for commercial projects.

Xi'an - Terracotta Warriors

2011-12-24T23:08:00.000+13:00

I took the public transport bus #307 from in front of the train station, out to the terracotta warriors. The ride cost 7 RMB which was paid to the conductor slightly after departure, and took around 45 minutes to get there going past a number of other anonymous (to me) tourist attractions which various Chinese people hopped off to see. Arriving, it stopped in a car park in front of some shops outside of the larger official car park where all the tourist buses stop. I followed signs past the carpark and over to the ticket office.

Once I bought a ticket and fended off around six Chinese people offering me audio tours or guiding or something, I set off on the long arduous trek to the actual site area.

From that plaza, to this plaza.

Then to these statues, which you have to walk around.

No climbing..

Onto this bit, where you go past some stalls in the middle selling random junk foods or cooking various street foods.

Then past a forest, and through another plaza to the actual site entrance. Over to the right, people arrive in motorised carts which they paid 4 RMB to skip past all this walking, from the ticket office. But all along this walk, there were numerous stalls selling souvenirs. Maybe the cart-takers have to walk past all this on the way back.

Once inside the entrance, there's a museum over to the right. Within the museum are various different kinds of terracotta warriors, with plaques describing their purpose. Maybe this guy used to be holding something, I don't remember.

A .. crane?

The wrestler? I don't recall.

A terracotta chest?

The museum hall.

Excavation hall 3. I went through the three halls backwards.

Lots of solid looking mud, with stuff in it. No really, this hall was the least impressive.

This photo may have come out bleary due to the no camera flash policy, but to me it just looked like lots of broken bits and pieces which were left laying around and allowed to become dusty.

A man with a horse.

A statue of a high ranking officer.

A statue of a middle ranking officer. Looks like he used to be doing something with his hands to me.

Kneeling archer statue. Same deal with the hands, couldn't they make a terracotta bow?

More rubble. Not much more interesting when seen unblurry.

Entrance, or rather as I was going backwards, exit to hall 2.

Hall 2 pit room right-hand side.

Hall 3 pit room left-hand side.

And finally hall 2 pit. This is a bit more like it. Looks a lot less like caked dusty piles of dirt and junk.

Hall 1.

All the tourists who probably can't read English, given some of whom who are using their flash.

As one of the teeming masses of tourists, looking out from the balcony.

Heading back to the car park, I stopped off at the shops and stalls along the way. I bought a box of terracotta statuettes as a souvenir, bargaining down from 50 RMB to 5 RMB.

Then walking all the way out back to the street-side car park, I took public transportation bus #914 back to the train station in town. This cost 6 RMB, and stopped off several times along the way to just sit there waiting for something. Or for the conductor lady to pop off and put her card in some machine to get it ticked off.

Most of the stalls along the road-side were selling what I assumed were onions. But these, after seeing a few vendors with some cut open, are actually pomegranates. The bus sat here for around 10 minutes.

During this time, some bloke drove in and dropped off some water bottles to the restaurant in the top of the photograph.

And the pomegranate sellers to the other direction sold a few more.

This... statue? was along the way back (we'd passed it on the way in too).

And that was it. Onwards back to town.

Overall, given this and the Great Wall are two of the things which I had been brought up hearing about, I felt like I should have been awed but wasn't. I think hiring a good guide who tied it all together with history and facts would have made all the difference, and not being likely to ever see it again I could probably gain a better appreciation if I watched a documentary on the subject to tie it all together. In fact, that's a good idea and I'll try and remember to find one!

Earthquakes

2011-12-24T07:28:00.001+13:00

Had two earthquakes here yesterday that I felt. Luckily I am an hour away from Christchurch, so don't get the worst of it.

Python garbage collection crash

2011-12-23T08:38:00.002+13:00

I run the unit tests for the Windows debug build of Stackless Python 2.7.2, the tests pass, but on exiting the interpreter crashes. The problem is that the garbage collector finds a 1 element list, where that element has either been already garbage collected or never initialised. Logically, the following occurs.

How do you track down the cause of this crash?

Xi'an - Motel 168

2011-12-21T22:19:00.000+13:00

Looking for a hotel close to the Xi'an metro that wasn't too expensive, I somehow ended with Motel 168 through internet searches. It seemed like a better idea just to turn up, than to book on-line, but a couple of hotels later I think that's a bad assumption.

The scrolling marquee advertised a room for 108 RMB / night, but that room had no windows. The next step up was 138 RMB / night, which was what I went for. This is actually approximately what I would have paid per night, had I booked on-line.

The room itself was a bit dingy, with the wall to the right being dirty and having a hole in it.

Outside the window was a rooftop of a lower building within an alley. On the roof were an array of garbage and assorted unwanted or lost objects, including one fancy looking sneaker. Below the desk, under the kettle the wall was a panel that gave access to the "shower forest". The room came with free internet access, but I needed to request a cable from the front desk.

The internet access was slow. 1990's dial-up access slow. I gave up on it, until after using my VPN to access a site behind the Great Firewall, I noticed that access through the VPN was very usable. After that, no worries!

The bathroom was more modern looking, and excepting the shower was in good repair.

The shower was interesting. That metal doodad hanging from the ceiling gave water at a good pressure, but the drain couldn't keep up. The wall tiles were a bit wonky and in need of repair.

I'd recommend Motel 168, it is pretty standard for a Chinese hotel. Although in retrospect, while it doesn't seem natural to live in a room like it, the cheaper room with no windows couldn't be much more dingy.

As for conveniences.. The metro is a half block and a street crossing to the north, and there's a supermarket right beside the metro entrance. The train station is about 15 minutes walk down to the south corner and off to the east outside the city walls, this is also the place where you can catch a bus to the terracotta warriors. I found it pretty handy, and the staff while they didn't speak English, got by with my limited Mandarin.

Xi'an - Xiyangshi - Sticky rice

2011-12-18T13:05:00.000+13:00

My favourite street food of my stay in Xi'an was this one.

There was a corner stall with a giant tub of sticky rice, with what seemed to be a bean and date flavouring. The tub was structured in layers of rice and flavouring paste.

You'd order a given serving size, I ordered the 5 RMB one. Then the lady serving would hock out a chunk of the current rice layer, plunk it in one of these containers and then hand you it and a pair of disposable chopsticks.

I don't eat rice normally, mainly for boring reasons related to it providing no nutrition and just being used to accompany whatever has the flavour. And I am not partial to the Chinese bean flavouring in any way, shape or form. But this was delicious, and I'd treat myself with it if I could find it back in New Zealand.

I had some more photos related to this, of the stall, the lady carving out chunks and more.. but my ipod seems to have swallowed a random selection :-(

MUD development blogs wanted

2011-12-18T11:45:00.000+13:00

MUD development blogs are not that common. Besides the initial set we started with on Planet MUD-Dev, it is rare that new blogs are found to be added. If you know of any that meet the criteria, please comment on this post and let me know the URL.

Blog suitability criteria

Should contain posts about development of a text-based MUD.
This can be played a browser, played in a custom client or of course a standard telnet client.
Multiplayer roguelikes are considered suitable, as long as their game is represented with text.
Tags or categories should be used to separate suitable posts from off-topic ones. If not, and off-topic posts are too common, I do not add the blogs.

As it is hard to find blogs, I do not complain to blogs that do not meet the last criteria. The first three primarily represent my interests, as otherwise I wouldn't be interested in running this aggregator.

Unfortunately, I noticed three blogs died. While they didn't have recent posts, having them on the aggregator was useful both to collect any unlikely and unexpected new posts, but also mainly to point to them for anyone interested in doing some MUD-related readings.

Removed blogs

DGDhub. Site is present, but content removed.
Iron Realms. Default unconfigred web server install now appears at this location.
Ryan Hampshire. Blog deleted.

Traffic

Here are tables of analytics data for anyone else who is procrastinating.

Keywords through which this blog was found.

The most common sources of traffic.

And that's it, I should really do some MUD coding. Or at least something more productive.

2003 MUD-Dev Conference & lost MUD resources

2011-12-18T11:16:00.001+13:00

Back in the day, there was a parallel conference to GDC which was MUD-specific, and organised by posters from the MUD-Dev mailing list. This was the MUD-Dev conference.

The 2003 conference had a CD produced, for which the contents was described on a now Internet Archived page. Unfortunately, my past efforts to locate someone with a copy of this CD have failed. One of the presenters, Nathan Yospe, replied saying he never saw a copy.

It is a pity that so much is lost. At least community efforts have recovered a full MUD-Dev mailing list archive, and also a full copy of Imaginary Realities.

Has anyone saved any rare MUD resources they think might be of interest? Maybe even some of the publically available files on the conference CD-ROM page?

Gyp and libuv

2011-12-16T22:26:00.001+13:00

One open source project that I've heard a bit about recently is libuv. A cross-platform asynchronous IO library, it is something that I can plug into Kristjan Valur's stacklesslib module. And all the work writing the Python bindings has already been done by Saúl Ibarra Corretgé in his pyuv project.

Anyway, I spent some time today getting it compiling for Windows and thought I would post a note about gyp, so that I could remember to avoid the same problems in future. Gyp is a pretty handy build system. Just define the gist of what needs to be compiled in a mildly arcane mark-up, and it will churn out Makefiles, Visual Studio projects and solutions and a range of other things. However, as with most programming related things, it is the little details that trip you up and cause you to waste your time.

Missing include files

If you are compiling with Visual Studio 2008, and it includes inttypes.h or stdint.h, errors will occur as these files will not be present.

...
libuv\include\uv.h(54): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'stdint.h': No such file or directory
...

Apparently the solution to this, after a lot of googling on what constitutes a wi-fi connection over here in New Zealand, is to download something like the custom msinttypes versions of these files. And then bung them somewhere Visual Studio will find it.. wherever that is.

Overriding gyp settings

If you are compiling a static library with Visual Studio using gyp, it will start with a range of default settings. You will not be able to override these settings no matter where you put your own custom versions in your gyp configuration file. The specific problem I had was that Python extensions are compiled with a RuntimeLibrary setting of MultiThreadedDLL and libuv is compiled with a different setting of MultiThreaded. These are of course incompatible, and a variety of compilation errors are caused by it.

...
LIBCMT.lib(crt0dat.obj) : error LNK2005: __amsg_exit already defined in MSVCRT.lib(MSVCR90.dll)
...
LINK : warning LNK4098: defaultlib 'MSVCRT' conflicts with use of other libs; use /NODEFAULTLIB:library
LINK : warning LNK4098: defaultlib 'LIBCMT' conflicts with use of other libs; use /NODEFAULTLIB:library
LIBCMT.lib(crt0.obj) : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _main
build\lib.win32-2.7\pyuv.pyd : fatal error LNK1120: 1 unresolved externals

In order to force this gyp setting to change from the default, it needs to be defined within a conditional expression. The default setting is also a conditional expression, and .. well.. work it out. Maybe it's in the documentation somewhere, but not in a clearly stated way that I could find.

Xi'an - Beiyuanmen - Quesadillas

2011-12-15T12:40:00.000+13:00

This stall on Beiyuanmen (北院门) always had a queue no matter what time I went past. First thing in the morning, the afternoon or even late at night.

You basically choose a filling, or combination. Beef and lamb are both options, as well as a variety of generic looking rabbit foods. Meat is more expensive, of course. I think it was maybe 7 RMB for the one without meat, and 10 RMB for one with. Lady one takes the money, constructs the uncooked "quesadillas" and also on receiving the cooked ones slices and hands out the finished product to the customer.

Lady two fries them and bungs them over to lady one.

Then you get a bag with four quarters which look something like this.

Extra extra spice was added on request to mine, but I think you'd be better off adding some rabbit food to get more flavour. This was nicely, and not overly spicy.

Xi'an - City Wall

2011-12-12T21:08:00.000+13:00

The tourist attraction in Xi'an that appealed to me the most, was the city wall. A wide walkable area presumably with a good view, which you could circle around the center of town. It sounded ideal for a morning run, but unfortunately turned out to be unsuitable for that. On one hand, it opened too late and cost 40 RMB per entrance, and on the other, the stones were often slippery and that was on a good day with blue skies. Oh well, it was still an enjoyable presumably 7 km long walk.

You can rent bicycles, but I chose not to. In order to rent one, you need to either leave your passport as a deposit, or 500 RMB. As I planned to go halfway around and depart out the other side where my hotel was, it wasn't really convenient for me to come back to my starting point on the opposite side from my destination, in order to return the bike.

The first few days I was in Xi'an, the weather was cold and grey and thankfully I didn't get time to go to the wall. Luckily the day I did decide to go, was the first blue sky and relatively not cold day there during my stay.

Cross the carpeted bridges over the moat, pass the guards, and in you go.

The young bird in the smock is there to check the tickets. Or rather tell people who didn't realise that the building off to the side tens of meters back (or maybe a kilometer back if you made this mistake at the terracotta warriors) sells tickets that you need to go back and buy one there.

The costume looked kind of fake and costumish to me, but maybe it was genuine.

Back at the ticket office, the ticket lady had toddled off somewhere completely unbeknownst to this older man who kept telling me to buy one from her (in Mandarin). Several people and myself loitered around waiting for five minutes for her to return, some of whom in the meantime had made it up to the young bird at the gate to find out they needed to come back here to buy the actual ticket.

Nice moat.

Looking through the southern gateway. This is actually the nicest entrance, and the fanciest. In order to get here, you need to cross a wide and very busy street though. It's just as well that Chinese drivers are in my experience extremely happy to let pedestrians cross and have no problem slowing or stopping. If you tried to cross this way in the states, you'd probably get hit and run, then some cop would come along and give you a jaywalking ticket. Here, no-one is ever going to make it to this entrance or for that matter the less fancy but similarly inaccessible northern one, unless this type of street crossing is sanctioned.

If I ever revisit this, maybe I'll read this sign. To be honest, no point in reading something you are not going to remember.

The staircase to the gatehouse, whose walkable area at the top is not connected to the actual city wall, was steep but not the steepest I've come across in China.

Looking out over the gatehouse wall at the entrance area.

More signs what I didn't read.

This is looking down from the gatehouse into the southern entrance courtyard.

And from the gatehouse out into the southern direction over the city. Bit of a smog going on there, but blue skies.

The gatehouse bell. Used for something probably written on one of those signs.

Looking out along the westward side of the southern length of the wall.

Looking into the city inside the southern gate entrance.

You can rent bicycles, or you can rent these cart things. I think they were a little more expensive, but don't remember how much.

There are a decent number of smaller staircases down into the city, with closed and locked gates blocking access to prevent people from gaining unpaid access.

This sign describes that this particular gate was added when there was a threat of the Japanese attacking.

One of the rentable bicycles, seems to work..

Piles of random garbage being cleaned up on the street down below.

The outside of the city wall almost the entire way around the half I walked, seemed to be covered with park and public Chinese-style exercise machines. In this case, someone was flying a kite.

A less kite-centric view of it.

A more interesting looking section of moat. If only the water was clean and had fish so that there was a point to getting down there. But if people were fishing out of there, it wouldn't be the dirtiest water I'd seen people fish from in China. Hopefully they're doing it for the sport, not the eating.

More cyclists. There were groups of up to 15 people cycling around together.

Some kid with a motorcycle, which he seemed to be enjoying.

The southwest corner.

A sign going into detail about all the interesting things that make a southwest corner interesting.

Looking down the northward stretch of the west wall.

And back eastward.

Besides the spitting, hygiene-wise one of the worst things about China is the trough toilets. I decided to take a few photos of this one, just to capture the experience as there was no-one around. The outside entrance in this case, was freshly cleaned and had a curtain of flies.

This trough is not unflushed and is clean and unsoiled. Not very common.

Heading to the northwest corner, there's a monastery. I particularly liked that they had cell phone tower with fake tree branches and leaves.

Some inner levels to the wall, to what end, I do not know.

And the eastward view from the northwest corner.

At the northern gate, in the center of the northern wall, there's another bell.

Looking in to the northern part of the city inside the wall.

And back westward down the moat.

And finally to the northern part of the city outside the wall.

Uncrowded and a reasonably nice day, this was one of the better attractions I experienced in Xi'an.

OpenCycloGraph

2011-12-09T23:23:00.001+13:00

A recent post to MudBytes on using real world natural resource and mineral data to make a game, made me think of OpenCyc. I've played around with it in the past, but it is somewhat complicated. Starting it up also starts up a web interface through which the ontology can be either clicked through, or searched for specific terms. Even so, it is still hard to get a grip on what is in there and what it means.

Even people who know it well enough to be ready to extend the ontologies are warned that it can be difficult to know whether whatever you wish to add is in there or not. Just clicking through the data, or searching on relevant searching terms that come to mind, I sort of wished for a graph to click through. And this reminded me of opencyclograph. OpenCycloGraph can be pointed at a running instance of OpenCyc, and from there it can fetch and display the hierarchy of concepts.

In the screenshot above, it can be seen showing the results of a search for "Mineral".

Unfortunately, OpenCycloGraph is not quite ready for use. There are no binaries provided at the Google Code project. This means that anyone wanting to use it, needs to do a little bit of legwork. I'll note below what I did, although I've never really worked in Java or used this IDE before, so maybe I'm doing it a little harder than I need to.

Download and install NetBeans.
Run NetBeans and import the code as a project.
Find the "GLPanel.java" file under CycloGraph/src/com.touchgraph.graphlayout in NetBeans.
Right click on it, and select "Run File".

At this point, you will see a window looking something like the above. However, it won't be able to find a running instance of OpenCyc so it won't really be useful.

Download and extract OpenCyc 2.0.
Try and run its "scripts/run-cyc.bat". If it fails due to lack of memory, edit the BAT script and modify it to run the 64-bit version (this is a two line change).
Once it has started running on "localhost" up go back into NetBeans.
Search for "CycServer" which is used in OpenCycloGraph as the default address where it should look for a running instance of OpenCyc. It should be in "GLPanel.java", line 1282. Replace it with "localhost".

Now when you right-click on "GLPanel.java" and select "Run File", it should "work correctly" for selected values of "work correctly".

You start by entering a search term and hitting enter.

This will populate the graph, and from there you can click on related entries of interest.

Note that you can see what the relation is, for example above you can see that "NonMetal" is 'disjointWith' "Metal" which seems not very useful to the end user and more likely was added to help out OpenCyc inferencing.

If you find a node and want to know more, you can right click and select "Inspect Node" to update/synchronise the browser display in the left-hand pane.

And that's about it. There's a video of me generically browsing game world relevant information for about a minute and a half below. One application would be adding a "light" verb and linking it to objects which are CombustibleFuelSources, for instance.

An aspect of OpenCyc that escapes me is that either some data is missing and was not released as part of the cut-down OpenCyc public ontology, or I just don't know how to query it yet. Case in point is Mass, massOfObject and MassOfObjectFn. I am unable to locate any entries which map values for these to other ontology objects.

Xi'an - Looks like savoury potatoes

2011-12-09T00:04:00.000+13:00

I don't remember what this dish was called, but it was common to see out in front of restaurants in a large pan like this. To me, it looked like a potato dish. So when it was recommended to me in restaurant, and was 5 RMB, I gave it a shot.

Very little flavour and a gritty texture.

Translating the menu, I seem to remember it being called something related to sand and grass. Having seen a pan of it being prepared from scratch later on, the chunks looked like a clear and opaque solid. Perhaps some kind of gelatine based mixture.

There's a reason this one isn't recommended on the tourism related websites..

Xi'an - Xiyangshi - Niu rou pao mo

2011-12-06T23:52:00.000+13:00

One of the dishes that internet sites recommend you try when you visit Xi'an, is yang rou pao mo (羊肉泡馍) which is a mutton "soup". Most every restaurant I went to instead offered niu rou pao mo (牛肉泡馍) which is a beef "soup", so that's what this post is about. I put soup in quotes because eating this dish constitutes mostly fishing soggy bits of bread out of your bowl.

The restaurant with the black sign was the one I mostly frequented, as it was always packed out unlike many others.

For 15 RMB, you get given a bowl, two unleavened pieces of bread and a tag. Then you go to a table and start breaking your bread into very small pieces. I was on the large side here, and my table companion told me to go smaller.

Once you've broken your bread up, you take your bowl and "proof you paid" plastic tag up to this counter and they give you a numbered tag in exchange for them. At this point, I recommend grabbing a small bowl of pickled garlic and minced chilli. The chilli I added to my soup later on, and the garlic.. well.. it tasted a little kerosinesque to me so I skipped it unless the "passing time" to "this doesn't taste right" ratio went in the wrong direction.

When they've added soup and a few pieces of beef to the bowl, they call out your number in Mandarin. And some young guy brings it to you, as you indicate that it is yours.

Going back several times, I enjoyed it a lot. There's not much flavour to the dish, but it doesn't taste watery, it doesn't have the texture of soggy bread and it is on the cheap side. I had the mutton version elsewhere for slightly more, and it wasn't better. Really, I couldn't tell the difference.

I'd definitely re-recommend this common internet recommendation as a filling and satisfying meal. There are many things that are recommended on the internet which really aren't worth trying, but this isn't one of them.

Soft sleeper train travel

2011-12-03T00:11:00.000+13:00

In order to get from Shanghai to Xi'an, I booked a "soft sleeper" bed in an overnight train. This costs around 550 RMB (~115 NZD), and I bought the ticket at the local Jing'an ticketing office. The lady at the counter spoke English, but to spot the store you probably need to know the characters for train. I followed instructions from an online forum, and still spent a bit of time hunting for it. If you look at the blue strip at the top and squint a bit to make up for the ipod camera photo quality, you can see 火车票 (AKA train ticket) are the leftmost characters.

The soft sleeper cabin is pretty comfortable looking. You get a pillow and a duvet.

There's a television, in theory.

And the controls on the wall beside the bed, within easy reach. Of course, no train I have been on shows anything on TV other than a blue screen.

There's a convenient power socket if you feel like using your laptop, or run out of power on some device. Not sure the air conditioning dial made much difference.

And overhead luggage space.

My travelling companion was an engineer who worked making axles for rotors for boats and generally most any machine, or something similar. He travels around China quite a bit for meetings related to this, taught himself reasonable English from a CD, and lived in the states for two years.

On my Xi'an to Beijing leg, I bought the ticket at the Xi'an train station. This cost around 440 RMB. One thing to note, is that apparently some train stations have special lounges where those who paid out for the soft option can wait away from the teeming masses. Here's the one at the Xi'an train station.

The soft sleeper lounge also has a special entrance, where you don't need to get into the queue where everyone pushes forward to get their ticket checked and access to the train.

Seeing a foreigner sit down, the girl above came over and asked to look at my ticket. She obviously planned to let me know when my train was departing. When a group of other foreigners came in, she sat them down beside her and told them she'd let them know when they were to go. I was expecting the private entrance to give earlier access to the train than the teeming masses got, but going through immediately when my train was announced, the masses were already present and teeming their way to the train.

For this leg to Beijing, the cabin had four men including myself, and one child who shared a bunk with his history teacher father. The history teacher was the only one who could speak English, and had also taught himself from CDs. At some stage, the ticket collectors came through and charged him for his trip which he didn't seem to have paid for yet. He paid ~178 RMB, which I should have asked him about, it being less than half what I paid.

On the way back to Shanghai, the ticket was around 475 RMB for the cheaper train (16:58 PM departure, 06:30 arrival). There were no televisions, and a lady came around and accounted for each passenger by swapping their ticket for a plastic card. When it was your stop, she would come around sometime before, wake you, trading your ticket back for the card. It's quite a good system from the perspective of a foreigner, as it ensures you won't miss your stop. Especially if you are disembarking somewhere along the way.

I read some foreigners complaining about not realising they'd be on a train for a day and a half and not having any food, but that's not a real problem, at least not on any train I took. A food card came around every half hour, both in the morning and evening. There was also a food carriage where you could get freshly cooked meals, beers, cokes, and sprites.

This is so much better than flying, or taking a high-speed train during the day. You get the bulk of the day before and after to yourself, and a good nights sleep.

Shanghai - Pan-fried dumplings

2011-11-30T00:39:00.000+13:00

I've bought dumplings once from here on the way past, and wanted to buy them again before I left Shanghai.

Large round, filled with mystery meat and soupish liquid. They're also pan-fried which gives them additional flavour. Bying two lots of four at 5 RMB each, the price had gone up from 4 RMB, but I always wonder if maybe I just get "random foreigner price which is higher than what locals pay". You never know.. although sometimes you do and can't be bothered bargaining.

I went to Jing'an park to look for a place to sit down and eat, and found this performance. This lady was loudly singing Chinese songs, and had people up on stage singing with her. Grandchildren and grandmothers, maybe some sort of school holiday activity or some such. But more importantly, they had spare seats.

The dumplings, still too hot to eat.

The innards. The leaked liquid can be seen surrounding this last dumpling. Really four would have been enough for me, and eight was overdoing it.

I prefer the smaller more standard shaped dumplings, as there's less liquid and a higher ratio of burnt surface to the rest of them. But these were fine for a change.

Open source web-based consoles

2011-11-29T17:44:00.001+13:00

I'm looking to bring both my MUD and networked roguelike code-base into the 90's, erm.. that should be 00's these days. A web-based console with connectivity to the backend server through the web server is the way to go.

I've been collecting candidate "already written wheels" and wanted to collect them in one place.

Forum thread: HTML+JS Tech Demo (demo).

A GPL licensed code-base which uses an array of character cells to emulate a curses-like display.

Advantages:
Cleanly written code.
Disadvantages:
Restrictively licensed.
Code bound to existing game implementation.

Forum thread: js-like beta (first version!) released (demo).

A BSD licensed code-base which implements three different display mechanisms, canvas, array of character cells and image based.

Advantages:
Liberally licensed.
More library like, than game specific.
Disadvantages:
Code is somewhat hard to follow.

Forum thread: DecafMUD (demo)

A unknown licensed code-base which provides a complete out of the box web-based MUD client. Supports different code pages, and able to interpret the complete telnet stream from negotiation to escape codes. Tries to use web sockets for connectivity, but can fall back on flash if they are not usable.

Advantages:
Complete solution
Straight-forward code.
Disadvantages:
Windows-incompatible repository contents, errors when cloned.
Official web-site down.
Telnet protocol support is superfluous, a modern MUD server should be have a direct connection and not be encumbered by these complications.

While the GPL license is indeed restrictive, and reason enough to avoid using a project. In this case, given a client is kept separated from the server, it shouldn't encumber the server-side in any way that matters.

Dwarf fortress forum notes #1

2011-11-27T23:27:00.001+13:00

On the overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai the other night, while the man on the bunk below me munched away on sunflower seeds, I really wanted to browse the Bay 12 forums. The reason for this is that I've been thinking about procedural world generation lately, and not the graphical kind. Having an ontology which defines a wide range of relevant scientific, cultural and historic facts would allow generation to produce something with a direct, if not subconscious, recognisable believability.

Browsing the Bay 12 forums some time back I came across posts by people who were researching geological, geographical, historical and other areas in order to suggest more correct and realistic directions for Dwarf Fortress brought to mind. This is pretty much the same thing, except rather than gathering them in the hope (one acknowledged to be unlikely) that someone would incorporate them into their game, I'd be looking to generate my own from them.

Some initial interesting threads:

Geologic structures and the 3D ore veins.

The first post touches on a lot of subjects related to underground geological generation. Second post builds on this, and recommends a free book "Petrology of Sedimentary Rocks". Pictures of giant crystals in real life caves. Fault lines and similar things, with ascii diagrams. Suggested potential use of perlin noise to model ore deposits. Pointer to this "scientifically plausible" world building open source project.
Add real solid density values for stones.

From a world ontology point of view, this is gold. It not only has discussion about density and colour, but also temperatures like their melting points. This was kind of what I was looking for when I was looking in the latest release of OpenCyc lately.. but failed to find within it. There's even a link to data on various woods. People are even having samples shipped to them and measuring them themselves, in order to get their facts straight.
Alchemists.

Starts off talking with respect to the way the game works, rather than related aspects featured in history. Turns to how it was featured in history, rather than in fictional sources like AD&D. Veers to astronomy and the person responsible for modern perspective of alchemy. Then to dwarf and magic related talk unrelated to history.
Evil plants in real life.

Using actual plants that exist as a baseline for the believability of game plants, seems to be pretty relevant. Initial post links to a cracked.com article about 10 creepy plants, then another post links to a cracked.com article about 6 things that shouldn't explode but did (specifically the sandbox tree).
Complete Weapons Database.

A variety of Dwarf Fortress weapon definitions, the given weapon properties may or may not be generically useful or realistic. No references given. Pointer to a D&D pole-arm quiz, of unknown correctness. Veered to mention of asian weapons, which is outside the scope of my 13th century England focus.
Absent pre-1400 technologies.

Started with a list of pre-1400 technologies that are not currently found in Dwarf Fortress, with the note that its developer has stated that these are the only ones to be in the game. Moved onto bows and blowguns, to actual guns and then to mysterious unreproducible inventions (damascus steel / archimedes mirror). Then more about different kinds of bows and their uses and users. And finally, back on topic with pre-1400 technology wishlist.
A few thoughts for the new city maps.

Starts off with general wishes, but then moves on to relating how real cities came about, with links over to similar past posts in the "Future of the Fortress" topic. Roman city planning. Pictures and links to existing cities.
Alien Creature Behaviours and Myths.

References to monster archetypes within original historical myths. A desire for Gaelic and other cultural faeries, with detail of specific stories. Link to Russian house spirits wikipedia page. Link to flying asian vampire head and introduction of Monstropedia, which might be a good source for further examples. The Dullahan is brought up, said to be "a cross between the headless horseman and the grim reaper". Something about Kitsune that I didn't read because Japanese culture is out of scope. Then the topic gets further Kitsune detail, before heading off into wishful thinking territory.
Cooking and Brewing Diversity: The Food and Drink Megathread.

Starts off with a breakdown of how cooking should ideally work, which is a good starting point for the elements that would be the breakdown for this part of the ontology. Someone posts a list of recent cooking threads which look to cover a wide range of interesting parts of the big picture. Reference to a wikipedia page on the history of alcohol. Use of honey for preservation, and vinegar for cleaning. Pies and their history are brought up. The mining and storage of ice are next. An uber-post with lots of history food-related pointers.

To be done:

Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (342 pages).

This thread seems to be where the developer gets feedback from forum-goers, which includes comments and references about how topical things were done in history. Lots of gold to be mined here.
SanDiego's realistic tissue rebalance (6 pages).

Bleeding, snapping of tendons, brain plasticity.
Underground Diversity (46 pages).

Interesting things to flesh out adventuring below ground.
Aboveground Diversity (23 pages).

Interesting things to flesh out adventuring above ground.

Sources:

DF Suggestions board.

Some of the topic titles infer presence of useful information, but there are a lot there. A better idea is to start with known threads of interest and work my way through the posts made by people who post the most useful history/science-related posts.
Poster: Jeoshua (processed up to: May 06, 2011, 02:54:50 pm).
Poster: NW_Kohaku (processed from: April 11, 2011, 12:21:22 pm up to: May 19, 2011, 04:12:47 pm).

Anyway, that's a good start.

Next post: Dwarf fortress forum notes #2.

Miscellaneous food pictures

2011-11-27T22:05:00.000+13:00

Back in mooncake season, I really wanted to eat a meat mooncake with decent flavour. So.. I bought this cheap beef one from the local supermarket, otherwise known as Century Mart.

Bland with an unpleasing lard texture to the pastry unfortunately. But for 2.5 RMB per, what can I expect..

Another attempt at buying cheap mooncakes of one sort or other. In this case, cheap pineapple mooncake from one of the corner store chains, Family Mart.

A look inside the packet.

Tastes a lot like flour, water and gelatine. Not sure there's anything that tasted like pineapple, but there was a hint of "pineapple flavour" :-)

One Chinese dish I fall back to if nothing else appeals on the menu, is this one. In this case, I went to the restaurant across the road from my apartment complex and ordered it from the picture on the wall. It was very well made, spicy and tasty. At ~11 RMB, it wasn't a bad deal.

In the corner store beside work, they had a new drink. I'm all for healthy food, and drinking vinegar is supposed to be good for what ails you. It.. well, I have no idea why. But this tasted like mild apple cider vinegar, too sugary for my taste.

The back:

It is hard to find what I consider to be healthy food in China. If it doesn't have sugar, bread, rice or isn't deep fried then it won't be easy to buy. One of the things that is easy to find here, is yogurt. In this case, I wasn't clear what exactly the difference between fermented milk and yogurt was. I am still not clear, but what I do know is that this was not very thick and was sweetened. Not recommended.

The back:

The style of packaging is more used for fabric softener back home.

Scheduler deadlock

2011-11-05T20:32:00.000+13:00

One common approach to creating tasklets, is to wrap the callable that will run within the newly created tasklet in a function that captures exceptions.

Something like the following:

import traceback

def create_tasklet(f, *args, **kwargs):
    try:
        return f(*args, **kwargs)
    except BaseException, e:
        # Let TaskletExit, SystemExit and KeyboardInterrupt raise up.
        if isinstance(e, SystemExit, KeyboardInterrupt):
            raise e
        traceback.print_exc()

Another exception that is worth handling especially, is RuntimeError. In the case where the last tasklet tries to block, the scheduler will instead raise a RuntimeError on it in order to prevent deadlock. Catching this exception and showing what the main tasklet is doing, and why it is blocked, is helpful. That is assuming you are running the scheduler in the main tasklet.

Something like the following:

import traceback

def create_tasklet(f, *args, **kwargs):
    try:
        return f(*args, **kwargs)
    except BaseException, e:
        if isinstance(e, RuntimeError) and e[0].startswith("Deadlock:"):
            print "Deadlocked tasklet, the main tasklet is doing the following:"
            traceback.print_stack(stackless.main.frame)
        # Let TaskletExit, SystemExit and KeyboardInterrupt raise up.
        elif isinstance(e, SystemExit, KeyboardInterrupt):
            raise e
        traceback.print_exc()

For future reference, the situation where I needed this was where I was polling for completed asynchronous file IO events. In theory this was programmed to do so in a way where it would schedule any tasklets blocked waiting for their IO to complete, so they would run when the scheduler was pumped next. However, due to a race condition the main tasklet sent the results of the IO operation to the channel before the tasklet doing the operation itself blocked to wait for those results. Then when the other tasklet itself blocked, the deadlock situation occurred.

Minimal Sqlite library size

2011-09-11T16:37:00.000+12:00

The Sqlite website states that the library size should be around 300KB, and that by omitting optional features it was possible to get the file size down to 180KB.

SQLite is a compact library. With all features enabled, the library size can be less than 300KiB, depending on compiler optimization settings. (Some compiler optimizations such as aggressive function inlining and loop unrolling can cause the object code to be much larger.) If optional features are omitted, the size of the SQLite library can be reduced below 180KiB.

There are also disclaimers that omitting optional features is unsupported and not guaranteed to work.

Important Note: The SQLITE_OMIT_* compile-time options are unsupported.

And there are three out of the many which do not work. When they are specified, compilation errors due to other external code depending on parts of them.

SQLITE_OMIT_COMPLETE
SQLITE_OMIT_DISKIO
SQLITE_OMIT_GET_TABLE

Which leaves the following options that do work:

nmake "OPTS=-DSQLITE_OMIT_ALTERTABLE -DSQLITE_OMIT_ANALYZE -DSQLITE_OMIT_ATTACH -DSQLITE_OMIT_AUTHORIZATION -DSQLITE_OMIT_AUTOINCREMENT -DSQLITE_OMIT_AUTOINIT -DSQLITE_OMIT_AUTOMATIC_INDEX -DSQLITE_OMIT_AUTORESET -DSQLITE_OMIT_AUTOVACUUM -DSQLITE_OMIT_CAST -DSQLITE_OMIT_BETWEEN_OPTIMIZATION -DSQLITE_OMIT_BLOB_LITERAL -DSQLITE_OMIT_BUILTIN_TEST -DSQLITE_OMIT_BTREE_COUNT -DSQLITE_OMIT_CHECK -DSQLITE_OMIT_COMPILEOPTION_DIAGS -DSQLITE_OMIT_COMPOUND_SELECT -DSQLITE_OMIT_DATETIME_FUNCS -DSQLITE_OMIT_DECLTYPE -DSQLITE_OMIT_EXPLAIN -DSQLITE_OMIT_FLAG_PRAGMAS -DSQLITE_OMIT_FLOATING_POINT -DSQLITE_OMIT_FOREIGN_KEY -DSQLITE_OMIT_INCRBLOB -DSQLITE_OMIT_INTEGRITY_CHECK -DSQLITE_OMIT_LIKE_OPTIMIZATION -DSQLITE_OMIT_LOAD_EXTENSION -DSQLITE_OMIT_LOCALTIME -DSQLITE_OMIT_LOOKASIDE -DSQLITE_OMIT_MEMORYDB -DSQLITE_OMIT_OR_OPTIMIZATION -DSQLITE_OMIT_PAGER_PRAGMAS -DSQLITE_OMIT_PRAGMA -DSQLITE_OMIT_PROGRESS_CALLBACK -DSQLITE_OMIT_QUICKBALANCE -DSQLITE_OMIT_REINDEX -DSQLITE_OMIT_SCHEMA_PRAGMAS -DSQLITE_OMIT_SCHEMA_VERSION_PRAGMAS -DSQLITE_OMIT_SHARED_CACHE -DSQLITE_OMIT_SUBQUERY -DSQLITE_OMIT_TCL_VARIABLE -DSQLITE_OMIT_TEMPDB -DSQLITE_OMIT_TRACE -DSQLITE_OMIT_TRIGGER -DSQLITE_OMIT_TRUNCATE_OPTIMIZATION -DSQLITE_OMIT_VACUUM -DSQLITE_OMIT_UTF16 -DSQLITE_OMIT_VIEW -DSQLITE_OMIT_VIRTUALTABLE -DSQLITE_OMIT_WAL -DSQLITE_OMIT_XFER_OPT" -f makefile.msc all dll

Additionally there are some other features that can be disabled by modifying the makefile before compilation.

MAKEFILE_NAME = "Makefile.msc"
s = open(MAKEFILE_NAME, "r").read()
s = s.replace("OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS = $(OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS) -DSQLITE_ENABLE_FTS3=1",
    "# OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS = $(OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS) -DSQLITE_ENABLE_FTS3=1")
s = s.replace("OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS = $(OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS) -DSQLITE_ENABLE_RTREE=1",
    "# OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS = $(OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS) -DSQLITE_ENABLE_RTREE=1")
s = s.replace("OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS = $(OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS) -DSQLITE_ENABLE_COLUMN_METADATA=1",
    "# OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS = $(OPT_FEATURE_FLAGS) -DSQLITE_ENABLE_COLUMN_METADATA=1")
s = s.replace("-O2", "-Os")
open(MAKEFILE_NAME, "w").write(s)

And gives the minimal file sizes of:

381,162 libsqlite3.lib
373,588 sqlite3.lo
382,464 sqlite3.exe
327,680 sqlite3.dll

This is not quite as simple (or perhaps achievable) as advertised. My current assumption is that the Sqlite website is four or five years out of date in describing what is possible.

Amiga game playthrough videos

2011-09-09T00:27:00.003+12:00

There weren't many Amiga games available in my New Zealand home town. The few that made it there, were too expensive or unappealing. There were many games in the computer magazines (which were readily available) which I wanted to play but was unable to. These days people play through (AKA longplay) the old computer games, record it in their entirety and then upload it to YouTube. This gives me a chance to see what the games had to offer, without having to invest the time myself.

Link: Recorded Amiga Games.
Link: Longplays YouTube channel.

Cadaver:

Castle Master:

Kult:

There's actually a lot of playthroughs for games for other platforms, even recent games. Gives me a chance to experience the best parts of a game without wasting time and money to find out if it was worth it. Not that I would have played them anyway.

Gucun Park

2011-09-06T00:41:00.003+12:00

Getting off the metro at the Gucun Park stop I needed a drink badly, having eaten the Starbucks' mooncake earlier and it being a hot and muggy day. Unfortunately, the only thing nearby that wasn't a building under construction was Gucun Park. Since I was there, I decided to check it out. In the worst case scenario I would be able to buy something cool to drink.

The subway entrances were surrounded by typical buildings under construction. You can see finished buildings further down the road away from the park.

The sign was the only reason I knew the park was there. All the other buildings except for the ticket office were empty and had not been touched since construction.

The ladies in the ticket office didn't speak English, but told me that a ticket was 20 RMB.

You hand your ticket to another lady at the gates. It looks like they're set up for reasonable sized crowds, but maybe that's forward looking given the circumstances.

This sign made it clear that apart from snack shops, there wasn't anything worth seeing here for me. So I headed right to the nearest snack shop. Actually, the park is still under construction and the right-hand side of it is the least constructed part of it. I would have found the biggest snack shop almost immediately if I had headed left instead.

The park is mostly full of grass, trees, lakes, gardens and water features.

Bridges lead between the different "islands" the park is separated into.

Walking around the dead and unpopulated part of the park it felt wrong. It took me a while to realise why. It is because every single tree in the park has these supporting struts, if not more. They stand out and overly obscure the view.

There was no snack shop at the first location so I headed on to the second. I completely passed that by without being able to find it and then found this sign which told me I had passed it too.

Backtracking 100 meters, this was it. One of many empty buildings.

You can hire bicycle carts which set up to four people. I think this means that if you're driving one of those you shouldn't loiter on the bridge.

An indication of how much construction there is in the area.

There are plenty of these seats around the park. I went up to one and knocked on it and got a solid metal clunk back. I think they're cast out of steel.

I eventually after walking right around the park found this snack place. The foliage prevents me from getting a direct shot. You can rent boats there and.. boat your way around the greenish waters. If I recall my own childhood, we could also swim in lakes at parks like this. But I don't think you could do that here.

After that was a carnival area and lots of different kinds of gardens. There was a large barbeque area in front of the large snack shop near the exit which was mostly empty, instead all the families were cluttered under the large shop veranda out of the grey sky "sun". The pictures actually make the sky look blue, but that's misleading.

I bailed and cut across the park using one of the many paths. Like most experiences in China I got the "Hello! Hello!" and so for forth yelled at me after I passed, as some Chinese people tried out the only English they knew. Eventually I passed this river where several men were fishing.

Seems like a nice enough place to go to if you have a family and want to go somewhere spacious (at least at this time when it is still in development), green and in the city. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone else though.

Amiga cracktro remakes

2011-09-04T00:51:00.000+12:00

In the local city newspaper, there used to be pirated games advertised for sale. Send a disk with a self-addressed, stamped envelope and you'd receive a catalogue back on disk. Or so I heard, there was a guy in town who I knew who had started up his own business like this and gotten a call warning him from the piracy police. One of the things on these pirated games disks were these cracktro things.

There's a community now, Retro Remakes, where people recreate these with versions that run on Windows. The forum hosts competitions with demo effect related challenges, and people discuss how to recreate the various effects.

Scoopex:

Classic:

Paranoimia:

French Cafe bottled coffee

2011-09-03T00:08:00.000+12:00

The FamilyMart convenience store across from my apartment complex used to sell Starbucks bottled coffee, but after selling out their first lot of stock never acquired any more. Most Chinese convenience stores sell a variety of mostly identical uncompelling bottled coffees.

These appeared on the shelf where the Starbucks bottles used to be and looked interesting enough to give a shot. Like the Starbucks bottles which are around 22 RMB, these are also expensive at around 18 RMB apiece.

Bottles from the front.

Bottles from the back. Made in Korea, maybe that means the product quality is more trustworthy and one doesn't need to worry about things like malamine.

I need to stop drinking these bottled coffees. I could make instant coffee with milk, cool it in the fridge and it would likely taste as good. It would cost a fraction of the price, and would more than likely be nowhere near as fattening.

Starbucks chocolate mooncake

2011-08-31T23:51:00.000+12:00

Bean flavour is big in China. To me, bean is something you eat when you're eating Mexican or it's all that's left in the cupboard. So when a friend suggested that I should try Starbucks' chocolate mooncake, I decided to give it a go. I pass several Starbucks a day, so why not.. However, they don't actually sell mooncake. Instead they sell tickets which you take to a Carrefour supermarket, where you redeem them for a box of mooncakes. And I think a box of mooncakes costs around 250 RMB. Expensive! I walked into a random Starbucks near Nanjing Xi Lu and after having this all explained to me, asked if I could have one to try.

My free mooncake.

Second layer of wrapping, the box.

The presumably pressed into shape mooncake.

The filling of the mooncake.

Until I sat down to take these photos, I didn't realise that the flowers along this part of Nanjing Xi Lu were actually chilis. I was tempted to pick a few and take them home, since I had run out but then I thought about pesticides and similar additives and thought better of it.

Anyway.. at first I could taste the chocolate, but then all I could taste was bean. It appears to be a chocolate tainted bean filling. The texture reminded me of the sensation of what I would imagine toe nail cheese to feel like, should I find myself eating a mooncake-shaped chunk of it.

Do not try again. Definitely do not go through the hoop jumping required to buy a box.

85° pork mooncake

2011-08-27T23:15:00.001+12:00

Was talking with a friend about mooncakes (yuèbĭng / 月饼), since mid-autumn festival is next month and they are on sale. We both preferred savoury flavours and they suggested that their coworkers had bought some pork-flavoured ones from a place called 85 degrees. With a bit of searching using Google Maps, I managed to locate the closest shop on Beijing Xi Lu.

Turned off Chang De Lu, down Beijing Xi Lu. This guy is on the wrong side of the road and must have swerved over into my shot, didn't notice him when taking the photo.

The 85 degrees store was on the corner a couple of blocks down. It has a "blend into the background" industrial look.

I'm not sure if these are actually called mooncakes. The sign in the shop didn't have the correct characters, that I could see. They were 4 RMB each, quite expensive and probably could be gotten cheaper if you can find a street vendor who makes them.

The texture was nice and although it was tasty, the pork filling was a little on the sweet side.

I wouldn't go out of my way to buy it again.

Airport reading

2011-08-24T23:50:00.000+12:00

Travelling back from England I had a few extra hours to waste due to flight delays, so decided to read a few computer magazines to see if they had anything to offer these days in the age of the internet and sites like Reddit.

Linux User was not worth buying. Nothing in it really worth reading, you'd only buy it if you didn't read any web sites or didn't know how to google for information.

One of the things I liked about some of the Amiga magazines I read when I was younger, were the serialised tutorials that told you how to write computer programs one lesson at a time. The Amiga Format magazine didn't have these tutorials, but Linux Format does. As articles in a magazine they have to have a level of detail, and be written in a way that online equivalents seem to lack. Python, C and an Android game programming article. This is the sort of content that I'd consider subscribing to a magazine for.

Both magazines had the same cover topic and some of the same software on the coverdiscs as can be seen in the photos. Linux Format has the obvious and catchy phrase, where the Linux User magazine equivalent just lacks. Given the similarities and the more interesting content in Linux Format, it is almost like Linux User phones it in and copies its competitor.

Shanghai, China - Metro Line 7 - Gucun Park

2011-08-21T23:10:00.000+12:00

I have no idea what is at half the stops on the Shanghai metro system, so riding home I decided to travel further up Line 7. I was going to go all the way to the lake stop at the end, but got lazy and hopped off at Gucun Park as it sounded like something was near the metro exit. Here's a short video of what is around the #1 exit for this subway stop. As you can see, there's mostly buildings under construction. The video ends pointing towards the entrance to Gucun Park which is easily within walking distance. In the other direction in the distance are what look like apartment buildings.

In short, what is Gucun Park? A man-made park with man-made lakes and specially planted trees. There's a basketball court, an outdoor theatre, children's carnival rides, boats you can hire to go on the mirky lakes, various themed gardens (like a British garden) and more. A large barbeque area where you can cook food you brought or buy there, and pedal carts you can hire to drive around the park. As a place to hop off the metro, it is not worth going to unless you have kids.

Travelling with a pacemaker

2011-08-21T21:24:00.000+12:00

I recently got a pacemaker installed in China. I won't go into the Chinese hospital experience which people tend to view as being something to avoid at all costs, but I will detail what happens when you go through customs when you travel and have one in case it helps others. I travelled to England for a vacation, and passing through customs into the departure lounges had to avoid the x-ray machines. As I understand it, the x-ray machines are not harmful but are pointless as they will always go off. The hand detectors cannot be used as they affect the pacemaker, so you need to get a manual pat-down.

Leaving China, at the Pudong airport in Shanghai. Reaching the x-ray machine you step through, I informed the employee standing there that I had a pacemaker and showed him the pacemaker card (which is in Chinese in my case) that you get when you have one installled. He then told the people on the other side, who switched the x-ray machine off and motioned me through. Then a Chinese lady gave me a light pat-down which was very non-intrusive and they let me go on to my flight.

Leaving England, at the Heathrow in London. Reaching the x-ray machine, I told the employee I had a pacemaker. He motioned me to the side of the x-ray machine and then undid the rope and had me step through to the other side. Then he proceeded to give me a thorough pat-down which mostly seemed professional. He also seemed to believe he had to really have a go at my pacemaker to verify it was there in my right shoulder, and this left me in pain. It seemed more like a case of naively attempting to do something vigorously he hadn't actually been trained to do, than the correct procedure.

All in all, it seems like a well organized situation to find yourself in. However, next time I travel I will instruct the employee that I can open my shirt and let him better see the pacemaker bulge and that if he wants to touch it he can tell me what he would like to do first. I'd advise anyone else in the same situation to do the same thing.

Planet MUD-Dev Update

2011-08-19T20:30:00.001+12:00

Added the following links to Planet Mud-Dev.

Appendix G:

Last activity: August 2011.
Summary: Regularly updated, enthusiastic for a sandbox game with player created cities and more. Hodge podge theme including western, fantasy, post appocalyptic and more.

Thanks for the link Kavir!

Planet MUD-Dev Update

2011-08-17T07:25:00.000+12:00

Added the following links to Planet Mud-Dev.

Chrysalis Games:

Last activity: August 2011.
Summary: It had gone silent for a while, but recent posts indicate that interest is still present. The theme seems to be Wheel of Time. The last posts touch on stats and choice of races.

Karintha:

Last activity: December 2007.
Summary: Has been dead for a while, but posts touch on roleplaying, design and the state of MUD forums among other things.

SlothMud:

Last activity: November 2009.
Summary: Has also been dead for a while, but posts touch on dwindling player numbers, and summaries of periodic updates made to the gameplay.

A Personal Tour de Mud:

Last activity: November 2010.
Summary: Dead also, but still twitching compared to the previous two. I hesitated to add this one, as it isn't strictly development related. But I find a lot of value as a MUD developer in reading reviews and comparing to my own ideas and preconceptions of what I would like to do, so I think this contributes from that angle. Reviews also make allusions to code for the MUDs.

Thanks for these links Kavir!

MUD-Dev discussion: August 8th-14th

2011-08-16T07:55:00.003+12:00

Rather than work on one of my many hobby projects, procrastination drives me to summarise MUD discussion during the past week at the various major forums. I think it is quite clear that if you want to productively discuss MUD development, MUDBytes is the place to go.

MUDBytes

Struggling with my object sys...

Nich using the Python code-base Evennia wants to program an object system that empowers players to create content, perhaps by data or perhaps by access to the scripting system. Composition, object orientation, multiple inheritance and entity systems are touched on. Tyche chimes in with a promising but mostly incomprehensible post about Genesis and ColdC. One of a "No-SQL" database or GIT is suggested for use, despite not really having any bearing on the subject at hand. Otherwise devolves into Evennia/Python-specific discussion.

Anachronism, my Telnet library, Brand-new

This topic is a few months old now, but still alive.

"Anachronism allows you to consider Telnet as a set of data channels, rather than a stream of text with embedded data. Telopts are treated almost like ports, and when you attach a channel to one, Anachronism handles negotiation automatically and presents subnegotiation data as just another stream of data. This makes it really easy to keep Telnet away from the part of your code that actually does stuff, and it makes it possible to create a channel implementation once and share it with everyone."

Developed using a Ruby parser generator, and examples are given using Ruby so are inscrutable unless you have learned that scripting language. However, the project itself is c-based. Sounds like a nice idea in theory, but no evidence of uptake yet.

Using Css Server-side For MVC

Suggests that MUD text is marked up server-side using CSS definitions. An interesting idea that hasn't been suggested before. There are some silly suggestions, like custom colouring for different areas in a MUD. But also interesting speculation on how it would work with MXP. Also an working proof of concept Ruby-based implementation is provided. Mark-up approaches are then discussed, with forum-like mark-up being suggested as a replacement for HTML. Discussion devolves into someone's implementation of some extremely stripped down implementation, not using CSS or HTML.

KMPH (FUSC)

Uploaded code from Kavir, was updated by Scandum. Written in C with support for several common code-bases. Intended to be hooked in to process incoming and outgoing text, handling telnet negotiation, unicode, colours, protocols and more. The update does the following: "handle broken packets and resolve a cyclic TTYPE issue with windows telnet."

Top Mud Sites

Community survey: What do MUD players want?

About the only sign of life in these forums, and is probably pointless given that most people doing this never complete their efforts. However, contains useful information like how worthwhile it is to actually use compression. Also touches on other topics like what races to offer.

The Mud Connector

Registration and required e-mail addresses

Discussion about whether it is acceptable to request email addresses from players, and what might be done about them.

AJAX Mud Forums

2011-08-16T05:31:00.000+12:00

Link: forums.ajaxmud.net

Searching for new blogs to add to Planet MUD-Dev, I stumbled across this forum site I hadn't seen before or perhaps looked at in detail if I had. I'll go over and briefly summarise interesting posts.

HTTP Streaming testing results: A good and straightforward overview of AJAX approaches, with notes detailing experimentation by the poster.
Socket.IO NodeJS library: Brings up socket.io which is a library which implements AJAX approaches, the fallback approach using Flash and web socket support.
jsMUD - the NodeJS MUD Engine: Notes on an effort to write a node.js MUD engine, which resulted in a few magazine articles.

That's pretty much it. The forums are pretty bare and only really go into detail on specialised subjects. Again, the best place to discuss these topics is within the major MUD forums.

stackoverflow / gamedev.stackexchange

2011-08-16T05:09:00.000+12:00

Searching for new blogs to add to Planet MUD-Dev, I stumbled across the "mud" tags on both stackoverflow and gamedev.stackexchange. Both of these resources now serve to collect questions from the both the clueless, the lazy and also those who are a combination of both qualities.

I've done a quick survey of the worthwhile questions posted and their answers, and the results follow.

stackoverflow:

Generating grammatically correct MUD-style attack descriptions
The top two answers are very good, one going into detail on the subject and the other pointing to useful libraries that can be employed to solve the problem.

gamedev.stackexchange:

None!

It is not surprising to me that there aren't many worthwhile questions and answers. These sites are good for generic questions, like generalist programming language specific questions, even if they are MUD related. But it is a place unsuitable for questions better targeted at MUD developers, particularly in any of the MUD-specific forums. However, you can't help those who won't help themselves...

Planet MUD-Dev Update

2011-08-16T03:41:00.000+12:00

Did another trawl of the search engines (Bing, Duck Duck Go and Google) for "text mud development blog" and added the resulting links to Planet Mud-Dev.

Ilyrias MUD:

Last activity: September 2006.
Summary: Most likely a dead blog for a failed commercial MUD. Very few posts, one of which is on NPC behaviour and scripting.

Sea of Souls:

Last activity: December 2009.
Summary: Most likely a dead blog, but the MUD behind it is still live. A Wheel of Time themed Smaug. Tens of posts tagged with development.

If you know the URL of a MUD or MUD developer that has interesting development related posts and isn't already present here, let me know. Similarly, if you think a blog on this feed should be removed, also let me know. Post in the comments for either of these, or any other thoughts.

A face you can trust

2011-07-21T01:48:00.000+12:00

The walls of my apartment building elevators are lined with advertisements. This isn't the first time I've seen this guy in them. I feel strangely compelled to buy whatever it is he is selling..

Balcony construction view

2011-07-20T01:44:00.001+12:00

Shanghai is a pretty noisy city, but most of the banging and clanging comes from the construction of new apartment buildings nearby. Here's a shot from my balcony of one of the many buildings I can see in the mid-stage of development.

Carl's Jr again

2011-07-19T01:42:00.001+12:00

I often meet people at People's Square and arrive early to grab a bite at Carl's Jr for dinner before doing so. The burgers are not that great, but the chilli cheese fries are the best I've had. I often bought chilli cheese fries in the USA when I lived there, but was always disappointed at the lack of flavour (Hardies, chrome coated diners, etc).

The dry and bland burger.

The tasty chilli cheese fries.

Interestingly read today that Carl's Jr is coming to New Zealand - good to have some variety in terms of burger joints. New Zealand generic fast food brands like McD's and KFC actually taste better than any other of their local versions I've had elsewhere in the world. Better than in China, USA or Iceland. And KFC's fries with their onion salt are still some of the best I have ever tried. Of course, NZ has other better local options like meat pies, roasts and more.

Wanted: Memory conservative key-value store

2011-06-03T13:07:00.001+12:00

I would really like to find a key value store that is memory conservative. What we currently have is like a souped up version of the dumbdbm standard library module, but it has a cache budget and as it loads in new values flushes older ones to make room. However, as the amount of data managed increases so does the amount of key metadata indicating whereabouts the values lie on disk. So now the next step is to either add some form of caching for key metadata, or find a suitable free open source solution.

Does anyone know of a suitable one that is not constrained by the GPL? It doesn't have to be Python, but Python bindings are a bonus.

Considering Sqlite

When thinking of low memory database solutions, Sqlite is one that comes to mind, and even better it comes as part of the Python distribution these days. And even betterer, there's a custom port for my uncommon platform of choice. And even.. bettererer it has an IO abstraction layer that allows it to work with custom IO solutions with minimal additional work. Additionally, reading the spiel makes it sound appealing memory-wise:

SQLite is a compact library. With all features enabled, the library size can be less than 300KiB, depending on compiler optimization settings. (Some compiler optimizations such as aggressive function inlining and loop unrolling can cause the object code to be much larger.) If optional features are omitted, the size of the SQLite library can be reduced below 180KiB. SQLite can also be made to run in minimal stack space (4KiB) and very little heap (100KiB), making SQLite a popular database engine choice on memory constrained gadgets such as cellphones, PDAs, and MP3 players. There is a tradeoff between memory usage and speed. SQLite generally runs faster the more memory you give it. Nevertheless, performance is usually quite good even in low-memory environments.

But you know what? I am as yet unable to get it down to 180KiB no matter how many features I compile out of it using the handy SQLITE_OMIT... options. And not all options can be omitted if I want to use pysqlite, as it does not suit the maintainer to support them.

Here's a clipped table of the code sizes for various cross-compilations:

	Overall	libsqlite3.a	libpysqlite3.a	Description
1		0	0	Without sqlite
2	487536	425060	49860	Sqlite with optimise for size
3	365212	308730	46740	Sqlite with optimise for size + code omissions
4	536608	472290	50560	Sqlite with full optimise
5	402492	344440	47430	Sqlite with full optimise + code omissions

In the Windows Python 2.7 installation _sqlite3.pyd is 48KB and sqlite3.dll is 417 KB. So the sizes above, are still comparatively above that expecting both to be done with no omissions and full optimisation. But more or less close enough.

Considering home grown

Any third party solution would need to be adapted to deal with the custom IO needs, unless it was written in pure Python. At this point, the simplest solution is just to extend what I already have.

Edit: Just a note, the key desired feature is memory management. It should be possible to put hard constraints on the amount of memory it uses, both for the cached records read from disk, and for the lookup information that maps keys to location of records on disk. Most key value stores I have looked at either claim to keep all keys in memory as a feature, or just keep them all in memory because it is the simple thing to do.

Gu zheng videos

2011-06-01T22:36:00.015+12:00

Most of the gu zheng videos in Youtube are grainy, out of focus and generally feature people speaking Chinese! I recorded the lovely Elizabeth playing, and uploaded them. There's no-one speaking, but it at least should give a better view of gu zheng finger work. I'll probably have to return my borrowed instrument shortly when it's kind and wonderful owner comes back, but it was interesting while it lasted..

I own you

2011-05-31T22:29:00.003+12:00

Another photo from across the road showing some amusing Google translation-esque English. An inspirational poster like this is just what we need to make us pull over and go shopping at a mall.

"I feel I own the whole world here just like I own you."

Gu zheng nails

2011-05-31T01:24:00.003+12:00

Apparently playing a gu zheng is like playing a guitar in that you need pick-like objects to move the strings. One each for the first four fingers on each hand if you're sufficiently skilled.

Here's my hand with three.

And ready to start pickling.

I think traditionally gu zheng nails are made out of tortoise shells, and perhaps these ones are, but to me they just look like rotten and grubby nails.

I love delicious food

2011-05-30T01:19:00.002+12:00

Across the road from my apartment building. There's about four large split posters like this, each one sounding like it was run through the Google translation web page.

"I love delicious food just as actually as I love you."

More jian bing

2011-05-29T01:08:00.002+12:00

Had an hour to do chores before I had to be somewhere, so I grabbed some jian bing for lunch. Started with spicy pancake, this is like the normal pancake I get.. but erm, spicier.

They also had some spring roll like jian bing there.

The texture was like something with grated potato filling, that had been parcooked and left to sit in a glass cabinet for several hours.

I think I will stick with the spicy vegetable turnover and the spicy pancake from now on.

Your doors on back to front!

2011-05-28T16:35:00.001+12:00

Now I do not know much about that building jiggery-pokery, but don't the hinges go on the inside because someone could just knock them out and pull your door off? That's what I've been wondering at least, since my neighbours (who have thankfully lessened their construction efforts) removed their door and put it back like this.

Shanghai Thriving Hotel

2011-05-28T01:23:00.002+12:00

Maybe it is just a KTV outlet that opens at night, and not or no longer a hotel with a hopeful name.

Chinese tea

2011-05-27T16:29:00.001+12:00

I'm not a big green tea fan, the flavour is generally unremarkable so I don't go out of my way to try Chinese teas. And in addition, I've been avoiding caffeine for the past couple of months. Because of this I've been drinking western herbal teas, like peppermint, or the most excellent rosehip. My coworker noticed this and has been offering me samples of his teas.

This was chrysanthemum and goji berries. You can see below, that he buys it in bulk.

Bung some in the cup - but not really that much.

Add water.

And it wasn't too bad. I'm not sure how you are supposed to drink it without all the bits getting in your mouth. But clearly the Chinese have mastered it.. or more likely gotten used to spitting them back into the cup, as they don't bother with all that teabag shenanigans when they do this. I'd seriously consider working out some blends I like and doing this myself.

New jian bing

2011-05-26T16:21:00.001+12:00

Hurrying past one of my favourite jian bing vendors the other day late for something and not having eaten, I noticed they had these savoury turnovers. I bought one in addition to my usual order of pancake and.. definitely worth it. Full of fried vegetables with enough crispness left to ensure me the nutrients haven't been cooked away, with a bit of spice to it.

Need to remember to keep an eye out for this snack and buy it again.

Lunch at some mall food court

2011-05-25T16:04:00.002+12:00

I was walking around some mall and checking out the restaurants. Eventually, I made it down to the food court after not seeing anything that particularly grabbed me. This place was picked at random. When I say this place, I mean the place to the right with the chefs who would otherwise be working there eating in front of it.

Unfortunately, I tend to forget to take pictures when I am with other people, so I don't have any of the food. But I got the second down, second from the left. I think most of their dishes are seafood, and mine featured squid and chicken fried with various vegetables. It was spicy but good. And only cost 20 RMB. If only New Zealand food court food was this flavoursome and this high a quality, and for that matter this good a value.

If I could only remember what mall this was in, I should definitely go there again. Afterwards I headed outside to see what was around, as I arrived by metro and took this picture from a pedestrian overpass. Shanghai's much better than most American cities that I have been to for pedestrian friendliness.

The Bund and Pudong

2011-05-24T15:48:00.002+12:00

There's a river in Shanghai, on one side you have some banks and stuff and a bit you can walk along. And on the other side, you have some other buildings and a bit you can walk along. And there's a sightseeing tunnel you can take to go underneath.

I ran into this statue. It's on one side or the other, I get confused which is which because I always take the metro.

And then this statue. What are they? Well, beats me. But it beats looking at an oil painting, or ancient scrolls or seals or endless pots.

Then the sightseeing tunnel was taken back to the other side.

I know what you're thinking. Sightseeing tunnel! You must get to go underwater and see fish swim past as the clear blue waters pass by. But no. Think some disco lights, and projected images onto the side of the walls. Some of the images are projected clear blue water and fish, but they're clearly not from this river. All you're going to see here if the walls and ceiling were glass, is murk, grime, discarded condoms and other garbage. What a gyp.. how can they call this a sightseeing tunnel? Given all the lasers and flashing lights, it felt more like an epilepsy tunnel. I felt ill getting out of it.

However, there was some cooing and gasping at the "sights" from behind me in the car. I'm glad some people got their moneys worth.

The gu zheng

2011-05-23T15:17:00.004+12:00

Someone who has gone away on holiday kindly leant me their gǔ zhēng (古筝) while they are away. Initially, when I first saw it, I wanted to try playing it but.. before doing so reflected on it and realised that I was more interested in learning a western instrument. That the gǔ zhēng was too Chinese for me, and something I couldn't identify with. Anyway, here it is in my apartment. It's a pretty big instrument, you need the table leg props for it because you wouldn't want it on your knees.

And this is a picture of a book I bought on playing it. The girl in the book store told me that it was supposed to be a book for beginners, but I can't even read a word! :-) For that matter, she wasn't speaking English so who knows what she actually told me..

Health food snacks

2011-05-22T15:08:00.013+12:00

I eat a pretty healthy breakfast I make out of various nutrients, and in order to source them I need to go to a health store for at least some of them. The store I went to in this case was called Helekang I think, although I may be remembering it wrong. While I was there, I bought some of their "healthy"-esque snacks.

There's not really much to say about these, besides documenting that I bought and tried them. Let's face it, fruit is just sugar, water and a bit of vitamin C. And dried fruit eventually tastes pretty generic after you get over the initial flavour detection.

Blueberries are supposed to be healthy, antioxidants and all that. These were okay, but not really substantial enough to be satisfying.

Freeze dried peach. Peach is reasonably popular in China as a flavour, but usually it is accompanied by extra sugar and maybe some sour tangy nastiness coating it. So these were a better peach experience than your average Chinese peach experience.

Freeze dried apple. Not as much flavour as a dehydrated apple, but okay.

I'm almost out of flaxseed so I'll be going in again soon, I'll have to see what other snacks they have available.

Freshmark snacks

2011-05-21T15:08:00.000+12:00

Conveniently, there's a convenience store called Freshmart just outside my metro stop. So I'll stop in there and see what snacks are left on the shelves on the way home. Here are two of their snacks that I bought a month or so ago.

I've posted before about yóu tiáo (油条). In this case, they've been made into a burrito. I seem to recall this tasting savoury, but nothing special.

And they also have salads which are more or less reasonably priced. This one actually looks quite appetising in the photo, not that it wasn't edible.

I can also pay my bills are Freshmart, so whenever the gas, water, power or whatever company pushes a bill into my mailbox I can just pop across the road and pay it with little effort. Speaking of which, there are two on my shelf at the moment I need to take over there.

A real Imaginary Realities mirror

2011-05-15T00:55:00.000+12:00

Probably over a year or two ago now, Fred Clift replied to a message I sent to the a mailing list and mentioned he had a full mirror of Imaginary Realities. Up to this point, the best mirror was the text only copy hosted at this site. However, the full mirror was not really usable as-is. The index pages were missing and javascript redirected every visitor to the original now defunct URL of the site. So it sat on my hard drive until now.

I've finally had the chance to process the files and put them up for browsing in all their glory. Note that one author does not want their article published any more and requested it be removed from the old mirror, so it has been removed from this one as well. Both the mirror and the downloadable snapshot have had it removed.

Link: http://imaginary-realities.disinterest.org/

Download: imaginary-realities-2011-05-14.zip (13.7 MB)

Unfortunately, it is unlikely the forum threads associated with each article will ever be recovered. Both them and the rest of the forum contents. If someone else mirrored this, and happens to have a copy I'd like to find out otherwise though. But MUD forums come and go all the time, all the time and effort discussing things going to waste. Imaginary Realities, MUDMagic, ... Anyway, enjoy the mirror.

Roguelike MUD progress #6 - Chinese character sets

2011-05-08T19:55:00.000+12:00

Previous post: Roguelike MUD progress #5

Feeling like doing a bit of programming, I decided to run my roguelike MUD code and see if there was anything that I might feel drawn to working on.

This must be the first time I have tested it since I bought a Chinese laptop. I have debug menus in-game which show me all four character sets, and they now show the following.

Windows Telnet looks better than Putty, but if Putty is what I have to use now, then that's the easiest path forward.

It looks like Putty is also not working reliably now. Going back to Windows Telnet, maybe there is some way to get DOS to display CP 437 without having access to the ability to switch operating system languages. And it turns out there is, typing chcp 437 in a DOS console does the trick. But unfortunately, it uses a different font and it also seems to break handling of escape codes.

Unfortunately, this is going to require a lot more research and work. I can't say I am enthused about it, as I would rather be just working on game code. But maybe I can detect Chinese Windows and use unicode characters, as they seem to be available.

Trying Imperian

2011-05-02T19:15:00.001+12:00

Since I've spent a little time in the past two days doing some MUD-related work, I felt like trying one out. I decided to give Imperian a go. If I recall correctly, the first choice was from a long list of races. Some had odd names, and I had no idea what the difference was, but making a choice you have to live with for the life of your gameplay is an unimportant one.. so I effectively randomly picked one.

This dumped me in a isolated and staged environment, mostly comprised of filler rooms separating NPCs, each of whom offers a functional service. The filler rooms are not even described. This environment is portrayed as a past version of the city I would enter the real game within. It is certainly better than past newbie experiences I have seen, like "newbie schools" and shared locations where confusing goings-on and killing fields of menial animals exist.

Many of the commands are coloured and hyperlinked, which makes it almost like a click and read experience. This is quite nice, but would be even better if it were done more consistently. The occasional command is simply not linked, and other cases where commands could be linked are not taken advantage of.

The map is nicely coloured, and is clearly matched the the tasks command, making working out where to go to "complete" the introductory area a breeze. However, the overlaying map window seems to serve no purpose. It just features linked rooms, one of which is highlighted as the current location. It is a shame, because with better integration it wouldn't be useless and could be even more useful than the text map displayed below.

Having completed the introductory area, the player is then confined to a large and confusing list of guilds which they have to select.

The description for each of these guilds, is mostly meaningless to me. Another important commitment to a gameplay defining choice which is made into a confusing and arbitrary experience.

Having randomly selected a guild, I am next confined to selection of a council.

The first thing I see when I attempt to read about a council, is a long and meaningless list of names and positions. This means nothing to me and makes me wonder why I am being forced to jump through this hoop. I choose this council, for lack of any idea what else to do.

At this point, I press backspace and.. the browser goes back a page and I no longer have a readily usable game window anymore. I lost interest somewhere along the way anyway, due to all the choices I had to make, and which sapped away my investment in the character.

The padded artificial feeling of the introductory area made it a hollow experience. No rooms were there, or detail added to them, except to provide a list of checks in boxes in things which the player needed to be lead by the nose through. Is it possible to do better? Yes, of course, but it would be much harder and much more work.

Reading selected information and making choices deemed necessary, where the two are not necessary linked, were the points of this experience. It wasn't to understand anything, or to choose things which were interesting to me. I wonder if I could make a game where the player didn't need to make any choices, in order to get into the real game world from a staged introductory area, with understanding of concepts, environment and ability. More story driven, where choices are implicit from chosen actions.

I like the idea of an introductory area. I definitely find it better to keep the player away from the confusion on the game, and the weird announcements and player abilities. The last game I logged into, I saw announcements about "laser tag" games and in another players teleporting in and out willy nilly with messages relating to "orbing" or something.

The web-based client is okay, but the backspace problem is too much for me. It's not the first time that I've had this happen when using a client like this. Really, the game should give me a link that I can drag onto my bookmarks toolbar and when pressed takes me straight back into the game where I left off.

Added a "mud" label feed

2011-05-01T01:37:00.000+12:00

When I set up my blog to use FeedBurner, apparently that clobbers the ability of the viewer to choose what they want the feed of my blog they would subscribe to, to contain. All they can get is the "FeedBurner" complete feed. In order to work around this, I have added a specific FeedBurner feed for the "mud" labelled posts. This is linked in the right-hand side of my blog, so go and grab it if you don't want to listen to the rest of my witterings on other subjects.

Planet MUD-Dev

2011-05-01T01:08:00.000+12:00

Finding blogs about text-based MUD development is hard. But I've always thought that if there were a well moderated aggregator that collected together quality blogs of relevance, then it should act as a magnet for other programmers to request that their blog also be added. So here it is, an aggregator seeded with a variety of relevant blogs that I searched long and hard for. The aggregated feeds are restricted to tags and categories that are directly relevant to text-based MUD development. If any blogs were too broad in subject, I emailed their author and requested use of MUD-Dev related tags or categories and refrained from their inclusion.

If you want your blog added, you can find contact information on the Planet web page.

Link: http://planet-muddev.disinterest.org/

Setting up the Planet software on Bluehost was actually pretty straightforward. What took most of the time was scouring Google looking for relevant feeds to add to the Planet. Google is rife with garbage links that include keywords of no relevance to themselves, just to get attention. Perhaps it is time to try Bing, or DuckDuckGo..

Python lazyimporting

2011-04-29T17:59:00.000+12:00

At work, we have a modified version of this lazyimport module. Originally, I used it to work out which modules were not actually ever made use of, but the suggestion was made that it should be enabled by default. And it turns out that enabling it does result in worthwhile memory savings, something which is very useful when you have a budget, but it's not all plain sailing..

We've encountered problems along the way, one of which I will mention while it is fresh for anyone who might be using, or planning to use the same code.

static PyObject *
get_warnings_attr(const char *attr)
{
    static PyObject *warnings_str = NULL;
    PyObject *all_modules;
    PyObject *warnings_module;
    int result;

    if (warnings_str == NULL) {
        warnings_str = PyString_InternFromString("warnings");
        if (warnings_str == NULL)
            return NULL;
    }

    all_modules = PyImport_GetModuleDict();
    result = PyDict_Contains(all_modules, warnings_str);
    if (result == -1 || result == 0)
        return NULL;

    warnings_module = PyDict_GetItem(all_modules, warnings_str);
    if (!PyObject_HasAttrString(warnings_module, attr))
            return NULL;
    return PyObject_GetAttrString(warnings_module, attr);
}

The problem is that PyDict_GetItem returns a borrowed reference, then the subsequent call to PyObject_HasAttrString causes the replacement of the lazy loading stub with the real imported module (and the garbage collection of the stub), and finally.. PyObject_GetAttrString chokes on its clobbered reference. Strangely, this only happens for certain people consistently in binaries they themselves built which are linked against the Python static library. The solution is that the warnings module needs to be excluded from lazy importing, or else this code will crash.

If there were a central repository for this module and a maintainer, I'd get our code released so that others could benefit from our changes (or we could get feedback on them).

Anyone else using this incredibly cool piece of code?

Jingan coming to Putuo

2011-04-18T20:42:00.001+12:00

Near the dumpling place, was this under construction store. Two buxom attractive western women advertising bread to the Chinese - hope it's a western bakery, not one of those weird Chinese ones. In them, most of the goods are sugar-laden and the rest are fluffy shaved pork covered.

Working breakfast

2011-04-17T20:38:00.000+12:00

Normally I just grab two hard-boiled eggs and eat them later in the day for extra protein, perhaps with lunch if it lacks in that area. But recently I've just been grabbing one of everything.

Queueing for dumplings

2011-04-16T20:27:00.000+12:00

Normally I go to the place across the road and get my dumplings to go, but I've grown a bit tired of them. They're pretty tasteless, or at least I've come to believe they are. So I decided to go wandering down Langao road to see what I could find. It's a public holiday here at the moment, as it is the Tomb Sweeping holiday. But shops were open..

I came across this place, and got in line. Then I saw they were handing over not money, but tickets. So I asked the last lady in the queue where she got hers and she told me inside at the counter (asked and told being generous descriptions of a series of gestures). So I headed inside and bought two tickets at 3.5 yuan each.

They sold out just as I neared the front of the line. Then they refilled the pan with fresh ones, and covered it with this lid.

Eventually, they were cooked. It took several minutes, if not five to ten of them. I lost track of time because spit while he talks dude in the line in front of me decided to speak lots of Mandarin at me. Apparently he works at some sort of processing plant and he liked my cellphone, which was an ipod touch.

The serving lady sprinkled spring onion across the dumplings.

Scooped up two tickets worth.

Prepared to put the pottle in the bag. When I first arrived, someone wanted a second pottle over their served pottle full of dumplings to keep them warm and fresh or something. The serving lady wasn't going to be having any of that sort of frippery going on.

And handed over to me. The thing about dumplings is that they are filled full of scorching hot broth. I have to spend five to ten minutes walking home and even then they're just cool enough to eat.

Good stuff.

Want want plaza

2011-04-15T02:05:00.000+12:00

Nothing really to say about this, just posting it as an observation of the strange name choices made over here.

How many burning buildings do you need?

2011-04-14T02:07:00.004+12:00

After standing and watching a burning apartment building in the distance, the last thing I want to know is that I live in a building of my own with a bunch of dumb-arse smokers.

Let's throw our cigarette down in the wooden lift floor!

And again!

And for variety, just outside the lift!

Saw this as the hotel I was staying in as well, on their carpet lift floor.

Hong Kong - Star Ferry's Harbour Tour

2011-04-13T20:07:00.008+12:00

Having enjoyed the ferry trip back and forwards across the water, and having a few hours to spare on my last day before I could pick up my passport, I decided to take the harbour tour. It basically circulates around the bay, from terminal to terminal, until an hour later you return to your starting point.

This grubby, dirty area is where you ring a bell. Then you wait for twenty minutes until someone finally comes and takes your money and sells you a ticket. Then a little later you are led back out and in the entrance to where the ferry arrives.

This is a map of some kind. Interesting? No idea, I never read it.

The price and timing list. I took the 60 HKD afternoon tour.

The ferry arriving.

Waiting..

Some buildings and a lightly smoggy blue sky.

More of the same.

And finally a smoggy bay view.

Altogether, this was a soulless experience that in no way was as enjoyable as the much shorter earlier trips.

Tom Yum crisp

2011-04-12T20:01:00.001+12:00

Went looking in a reasonable cheap Hong Kong supermarket for interesting snacks to try. Found this Thai-style Tom Yum snack.

Imagine if you gathered all the dried herbs and spices that make up a soup, didn't cook them, and crusted them to nuts of some kind.

It was like eating potpourii :-(

Hong Kong - Thank God It's Friday

2011-04-10T19:41:00.001+12:00

Lacking satisfying quality junk food in Shanghai, I decided to go into Thank God It's Friday as I passed it by on the street. Big mistake. The first warning should have been its location on the sixth or so floor.

I got a nice window seat. Well, it was a window seat.

First up was the salad. Too much dressing, and overpriced.

Next up was the burger. Small and way overpriced.

An exercise in over-buttered bread and lack of flavour.

And last was the chocolate dessert. Oh wait, they didn't bring that and when I asked for the bill they tried to charge me for it. Then they didn't return my change, when I paid the bill - maybe I was supposed to tip? In any case, the entire menu was unappealing and several of the things I tried to order they didn't have.

Hong Kong - Ferry passage

2011-04-09T19:29:00.009+12:00

One of the things recommended to me to try when I made it to Hong Kong, was the ferry. This was actually one of the cheapest, more enjoyable things I did there. It was something like 2.5 Hong Kong dollars to take it from one side of the water, to the other.

There was too much smog for my liking, it kind of ruined the view of Hong Kong in general.

Lots of passing boats.

The destination terminal, a nice brief ten minute ride away.

The ferry from the destination terminal departing before ours arrived.

Much more enjoyable than the subway - and cheaper!

Hong Kong - The Peak

2011-04-08T18:54:00.002+12:00

Another tourist attraction that I decided to see in Hong Kong, is The Peak. Basically you go to the tram stop at the bottom of the hill, buy a return ticket, wait in line and then ride the tram up the hill.

I arrived just after it opened, where the queue was about this long. It was a much better time to arrive than when I left, where the queues were huge. Life's too short to queue :-)

It's expensive to enjoy yourself in the tram.

But you can always enjoy the heady view.

Then when you reach the top, you enter the bottom of this building. At that point, if you've paid the premium fee you can go out onto the roof and get a better view.

Greenery at a confusing angle.

The city with a nice natural healthy haze.

A path through the bush. This looked quite appealing. Next time I am going to go up the hill, clog my arteries with one of the many junk foods sold there.. and then go for a nice healthy walk.

A view of the tram tracks up the hill, where I arrived from.

The other side of the hill.

The plaza at the top of the hill, and the mall on the other side of it.

The help center is an old tram.

Not sure if the wording was wrong, or my English is not to good. But something about this seemed Engrish-like.

Some runners came down the track over the hill. Wish I could be doing that myself, but the health wasn't too good.

This path goes back down the way I came. I walked down it for half an hour until I realised it didn't go down, but round the hill. So I walked back up..

.. and took the tram down. Oh well.

Worth it? No idea. Beats sitting in a hotel room :-)

Street vendor disappearances

2011-04-07T23:35:00.000+12:00

Last week, I was talking to a coworker who lives in the same complex as me how the street vendors had all disappeared. Today I came off the metro to see no street vendors, but lots of people standing around. One of the street vendors had her cooked goods and cooking paraphernalia on the ground, but no cart. Then suddenly a horde of policemen descended on her and took some of her paraphernalia.

In the picture above, you can see steam rising off the "sweet potato and corn cart" which all the policemen are gathered around (waiting for it to cool?). And on the back of the truck, you can see the "unremarkable omelette cart" waiting to be taken away. I wonder why the police do this.. street food is one of the many enjoyable things that make Shanghai and I imagine China in general a great place to live.

Hong Kong - Miscellaneous pictures

2011-04-07T16:52:00.003+12:00

One of the things I liked about this part of Hong Kong, were the pedestrian overpasses that you could take to get around. It beats waiting at traffic light pedestrian crossings, and makes for a more enjoyable tourist experience.

Near the ferry terminal, the main pedestrian overpass that goes right into this part of Hong Kong has this construction going on underneath it. What's going on? A new metro line? Some huge building? Beats me.

Further up the hill, there's a park. And I took a photo of it. Which I'm posting here. There's plenty of parks in Hong Kong, which is quite nice if you want to sit down and have a rest.

Vegetable pancake street food

2011-04-07T02:01:00.000+12:00

The number of street vendors at my subway stop almost doubled, both in the morning and evening. They included this vegetable pancake type deal. Quite tasty. Cost 2.5 RMB for one.

Hong Kong - Avenue of Stars

2011-04-06T16:24:00.021+12:00

One of the tourist attractions five minutes walk from my hotel, was the Avenue of Stars. It's basically a strip of pavement on the waterside, with concrete "stars" featuring names of people mostly unknown to me.

It wasn't so busy at this point in time.

Here's Jackie Chan's star. It's very hard to get a photo of a star without the shadow of someone else looming over it.

Take for instance this clown, who is characteristic of the problem. A stream of people wander from star to star, putting their foot on it and taking a picture.. or god forbid, a movie of their foot on it. To me, it looks like a sad attempt to establish a remote dominance over whomever the star belongs to. But someone I asked back in Shanghai told me, that it's more like a "I am here thing." In any case, this clown stood there for several minutes videoing the intricacies of his foot on a lump of concrete with Jackie Chan's name on it.

There's a few statues along the avenue, one of Bruce Lee I think, and this of.. I am not quite sure.

There's a free night time light show. I wasn't too well, but sitting in a hotel room is hard to bear, when you're in a different and interesting foreign country. So I headed out and took a gander.

The actual light show is.. hmm.. how to put it positively. A restrained affair that takes care to be subtle and not to excite anyone much. If it wasn't free, I would have asked for my money back :-)

Hong Kong - Triple-O's

2011-04-05T16:12:00.015+12:00

Travelling by subway is kind of soulless, so I tended to travel by ferry from the side of Hong Kong where my hotel was, to the side where the visa office was. Walking around the area near the ferry terminal, I came across this place. It's hard to find a decent burger in Shanghai, so I decided to try one here.

I didn't actually look at the menu on the outside, the one inside was kind of confusing. Otherwise I would have tried something more interesting.

Seeing the menu offered the option to add extras like eggs, I decided to New Zealand it up, and added a fried egg. All they needed was the option for pickled beetroot and pineapple slices and it would have been even better.

The burger was pretty lacklustre, but this was on the table. It looked a lot more promising, but I wasn't hungry so decided to come back.

On the day I was leaving Hong Kong, I came off the ferry and gave it another shot while waiting for the visa office hours where I could pick up my newly work visaified passport. This was actually pretty lacklustre also. Never again, this place.

Hong Kong - Visa Trip

2011-04-04T01:48:00.005+12:00

In order to get a working visa, I had to leave China and get it in another country. Hong Kong is the closest most convenient place, so it's where everyone goes. Airplane food on the way over.

My hotel was the Ramada on the right. Pay per view porn channel pamphlets on the table beside the bed, pay per view porn advertisements on the television when I turned it on. Definitely a bit different from China, where that shit does not fly. The restaurant in the center offered homestyle heavy carb-laden meals.

A closer look.

Bought a meal there. Unfortunately, most of their meals seemed rather stodgy, but the value was pretty good for Hong Kong.

Their coffee. This came free with the meal. Too bad it had milk in it, why do people do that to their coffee? What do I care, I don't drink coffee anymore anyway.

Free wireless internet in Hong Kong was hard to find, Macdonalds was the easiest place to find it. Decided to get breakfast there one day.

How can a business sell slop that looks like this?

Thankfully, I found another cafe underneath Macdonalds which had better coffee and unlimited free wireless, not the half hour affair they had at McD's.

Decided to splurge out and try the apple pie. Tasted mostly like nutmeg or cinnamon. Not very appealing.

Went back for breakfast another day. The eggs were still raw on top, with raw whites.. ewww. And the rest was a token endeavour, got about six beans.

A shot of the visa office. I waited a bit before I went in. It was a pretty painless affair.

Can't wait till next year, although I think I will go to Outback Steakhouse everyday, not just once..

Work lunch collection

2011-04-03T01:41:00.004+13:00

I have no idea what these lunches were. Well, most of them anyway. But we're getting more meat and less bone fragments in the meals, which is a good thing.

That last one is actually a KFC meal. It's certainly better than a cold and bland burger.

Jian bing with breadstick

2011-04-02T01:35:00.008+13:00

Not sure if I have posted a photo of this yet.

Weird "Linked-In" recruiting emails

2011-03-16T14:09:00.000+13:00

I often get emails saying something like "Hey, I'm SOMEONE from REPUTABLE COMPANY. I saw your profile on Linked-In and we'd like to know if you are interested in POSITION with us." Yesterday's email was for "Senior Python Developer".

I reply to these saying how I already have a job, but that I deleted my Linked-In profile a year or two ago and that I'd appreciate it if they could tell me where they got my contact information. The resultant emails include backpedaling and claiming that they must have seen a forum post by me, my (non-existent) github profile, or something. Consistently. The initial email always states Linked-In. But follow up inquiry by me results in hand-waving.

The emails always come from some HR person at a reputable company. I'd love to know what is going on. Is Linked-In selling my old information (even though I believe I deleted my account) as part of a database? Is there some lead harvesting service that collects this information and sells it?

Making a jiān bing

2011-03-05T02:20:00.030+13:00

As I witter on about often on this blog, I love Chinese street food. One of the things I would like to do, is get as much information about it as possible so that should one day it no longer be available to me, I can try and make it myself. Or at least approximate it in some way, with a feeling of authenticity :-)

I originally took a video of someone making one of these jiān bing (煎饼), but each vendor does it a little bit differently, and thinking about it pictures are less bandwidth and more instructive.

The first step is to spread the batter layer (probably just flour and water). I don't have enough chinese to ask about ingredients, although since I know the words for flour and water, I could probably ask if that was all it was. Anyway, the next step when it is no longer wet is to break an egg over it and spread that as another layer over the first.

Then when that is spread, the first herb which I believe is coriander is sprinkled over.

And after that, the second herb which I believe is green onion is sprinkled over.

Next, the third herb (?) which is definitely pre-cooked garlic is sprinkled.

Then the "pancake" is scraped off the hot plate.

Until it can be folded over, and then the last half is scraped off the hot plate.

A small amount of chilli paste is dropped on top, and then brown paste is smeared with the chilli paste and the result is smeared over the surface of the folded pancake.

The crispy wafer is snapped in half, and placed in the "inner" part of the half-circle folded pancake.

The package is then wrapped up around the wafer, making a closed package out of itself.

Cut in half, to make two open sandwich-like sections.

Folded against each other, and placed in a bag open ends facing out ready to eat.

The price with my jiān bing guy has gone up. At 2 kuai 5 mao, he was pretty much as cheap as it gets and with one of the better products around. Now that he is back from Spring Festival, like as for other goods in China, his prices have gone up. So, 3 kuai it is now.

New Nanjing West / Chang De statue

2011-03-04T02:15:00.007+13:00

During the expo, there was a large statue of a bull on the corner of Nanjing West Rd. Eventually it was hauled away and this one seems to be sitting on the corner now.

It's got a kind of Alice in Wonderland meets.. well, naked angels in some hot place or something vibe going on with it. Beats me.

Paratha Garlic bready pancake things

2011-03-02T21:22:00.012+13:00

As usual at the supermarket, I wander past a lot of things and try and find something Chinese that's remotely appealing to my western palate. In this case, some naan-like frozen prepared things caught my eye and I decided to give them a shot.

Each pancake or naan or whatever has a sheet of plastic on each side. They're very easy to get into the frying pan.

And cooked, they don't look that bad.

These were okay. But the flavours are like commercial butter approximation and commercial garlic approximation, with both tasting chemical based. When I eat something, I want to think of sunlight and fields, not a laboratory.

Do not buy again.

Shanghai Museum

2011-03-01T20:56:00.006+13:00

Ever been to People's Square? You walk past young couples who politely say hello and try and strike up a conversation, and as you respond continuing on, they from the distance behind you vainly try and continue it in order to get you to a tea ceremony scam. Moving along, you eventually reach the Shanghai Museum. It's free to enter.

But there's a reason for that.

It's full of pots. They go on as far as the eye can see. And where there's no longer pots, there's calligraphy, and then there are seals. Not the cute kind the bounce balls, but turtle shaped ones that are dipped in ink to leave your mark. Now I find historical pots interesting, and I find calligraphy interesting, and I find seals interesting. However, once I've seen one I've seen them all and that leaves about three floors of five unique items duplicated many times.

Good for all the people who like this sort of thing. I only took the above photo because its dark and you're not allowed to have flash, and I expected to get some blurry mess out of my iPod Touch. Although, if I want to see a fancy pot, I'll go to Xi'an and see a cool soldier shaped one that will hold my limited attention span.

Supermarket potstickers

2011-02-28T00:03:00.000+13:00

I was sitting in one restaurant or another and I was translating the menu. One item on it was these crispy dumplings, and it turns out the literal translation is "pot sticker". So being in the supermarket at their low quality in-house cooked goods table (do I even learn anything from these posts?), I noticed they had these potstickers. I could have sworn the label said beef meat, but now looking at the characters I can't see it. Looking as pallid as anything on that table, it looked like they had made an effort with the insect-looking-like black seeds, so for lack of anything actually appealing to buy I bought these.

They're not particularly flavourful, so I had to dress them up with Lee-kum-kee garlic chilli sauce..

Do not buy again.

Paris Baguette snack selection #2

2011-02-27T19:57:00.007+13:00

Was out and about near the Changshu subway stop, and needed to grab something to eat. Browsing the racks at Paris Baguette I ended up with the following.

My actual lunch, bacon egg sandwiches. I try and avoid eating bread, but since this is pretty much the healthiest thing Paris Baguette sell, decided to go for it.

A closer look.. The sandwich was actually pretty tasty, and well-balanced in terms of flavour, and I'd consider buying them again.

This was okay. Not too greasy, some flavour, but nothing special. Should avoid buying again.

This was not bad. Would go nicely with a cup of tea, and it did :-) Buy again.

My last experience with their twist doughnuts was demoralising. Greasy, flavourless and overly crispy. This however, was soft, tasty and just like I would expect a doughnut to be. Buy again, but poke with the tongs before choosing :-)

Crab flavoured Pringles

2011-02-26T23:16:00.000+13:00

I used to like potato chips. There used to be flavours which were satisfying to eat. These days when I buy potato chips, I wonder if whomever makes them actually tastes the crap they are making. Whatever happened to salt and vinegar as a flavour?

Feeling like potato chips one day, I decided to try something that looked like it was aimed at the local palate.. but not a batshit crazy flavour like cucumber.

So, crab flavoured Pringles.

They look just the same as any other pressed recycled potato-esque flavoured wafers in a can.

The barest hint of flavour, with the barest resemblance to crab. Seriously, there's probably so much commercial technique, chemicals and undesirable additives gone into making these travesties.. why can't they add different kinds of chemicals to pack them full of flavour approximations to actually make them worthwhile to eat? I'm choosing to give up a year of my life eating these unnatural wafers, it's not like I don't know I am paying a price for it already and aren't willing to consume more chemicals, heavy metals or whatever else goes into them.

Do not eat again.

Lemon olive

2011-02-25T19:27:00.007+13:00

The supermarket is still sold out of prunes, and the rest of the brands taste like they've been soaked in some fermentation-like pickling flavour. So I looked the next column over in the rack, and found these lemon olive things.

I'm not sure what the "fresh squeezed liquid" on the packet has to do with anything.

Where do all the christmas tree shaped, pine scented, car fresheners go when they've been hanging from the rear view mirror so long that they've dried out and cracked? If someone told me they were ground into a pulp, rolled out and wrapped around olive stones, and this was the result I wouldn't be surprised. They have a slight hint of lemon, but it's the flavour of artificial lemon, not real lemon.

Do not buy again.

Peeled roast chestnuts

2011-02-24T02:25:00.005+13:00

Another "corner store" find, chestnuts are supposed to be relatively healthy, unless that's just me not remembering anything detrimental about them healthwise. And because these do not contain any additional ingredients they shouldn't be too bad.

Looking like the corpses of chestnuts that were once alive and enjoying the sunshine, I had second thoughts about eating them.

They didn't have the best texture, but the flavour wasn't unpleasant. And since I haven't any reason to think they're not healthy, I'd should definitely keep these on the "worth buying" list. They cost around 5 RMB.

Sweet potato snack

2011-02-23T02:18:00.000+13:00

I went into the "corner store" across the road and looked for a snack that wasn't too junky and came across this interesting treat.

Sculpted out of larger sweet potatoes to look like baby ones, and then rolled in a combination of sugar and bean paste to make them look real. They're of course inferior in flavour and texture to real sweet potatoes, but the only way to get those is to buy and cook them yourself, or to buy the overcooked ones on the street.

Definitely consider buying again. I think they cost around 8 RMB.

Jew's ear with pickled vegetable

2011-02-22T01:56:00.001+13:00

I've been eyeing up the weird foods in the refrigerator of the supermarket, and the pickled vegetables are one of the lesser oddities to me as a westerner. Even the processed cheeses are not like the ones at home! :-)

Packet front:

Packet back:

Contents on plate:

These must be something which people come to like out through childhood exposure, because to my western taste buds they often taste much like a combination of weeds, cigarette ash and that flavour you get at the back of your throat when you throw up. This one however is.. erm.. tolerable :-) (and unlike some of the others, it doesn't have MSG as an ingredient).

I should definitely consider buying this one again.

Rice cake

2011-02-21T01:49:00.005+13:00

Trying to stop buying bad junk food, I was eyeing up the rather unappealing looking rice cake.

I broke it out and chipped a few crumbly chunks from the rubbery mass.

Steaming and whatever other the options were, were out of the question so I went with microwaving.

It turned into a thick bubbling mass that was extremely tough like unhardened toffee. It also tasted like a combination of rubber and plastic, with undertones of cold refrigerated rice.

I don't think I need to remind myself not to buy this again.

Sweet potato vendor

2011-02-20T00:18:00.017+13:00

I've passed these street vendors who sell both corn cobs and sweet potatoes many times, but never really bothered to try them. So the other night, on the way home with nothing quick to eat ahead of me, I decided to give them a shot. I point at the ones I want, and the vendor weighs them on their scales and then loads them into a plastic bag.

These two cost me 5 RMB (~1 NZD). They were scorching hot and I couldn't hold them in my hand to take a photo.

The idea is good, but unfortunately I think that the standard is to cook them until the starches have broken down and they have a very soft texture. Cooking vegetables too long cooks the goodness out of them, so they're more like a dessert than a healthy snack even if sweet potatoes have a lot of goodness in them. They're definitely worth buying again though. They're everything I like about Chinese street food, natural and made in a way which seems like they would have always been made.

Subway train

2011-02-19T00:10:00.010+13:00

As a foreigner and therefore taller than most Chinese people, I can look down the subway train through the joined carriages and see a curving sea of heads. On the metro today, I remembered to take a picture. Of course, even if the resolution of an iPod Touch camera wasn't too limited to show anything, I really needed to take a video to capture the experience.

Feels like China

2011-02-18T21:34:00.000+13:00

There are many things that make China seem especially interesting to me. From the street vendors, to the overloaded motorcycles to the overloaded bicycles.

I wish people biked around delivering and carting things like this back in New Zealand. It'd be good for them healthwise, it'd be good for the environment and it'd be much more aesthetically appealing and interesting than a field of blandly metallic vehicles.

Quiet Spring Festival

2011-02-18T21:20:00.000+13:00

During Spring Festival or Chūn Jié (春节), Chinese people go and spend time with their families, launch fireworks and stuff. I wasn't planning to go home to New Zealand, and didn't feel like travelling, so stuck around Shanghai. One of the unfortunate things (for me) about Spring Festival, is that the street vendors go home and there aren't many about. Anyway, I did a longer than usual walk along a path I mostly hadn't been before and took some photos along the way.

Earlier in the morning before I headed out, people would have let off strings of crackers leaving the remnants you see below. Would have liked to have seen it, but never mind.

The roads were very quiet, as to be expected.

An empty river along the roadside. Looks quite nice, wonder if anyone uses it for anything.

I found one street vendor on Kangding in Jing'an, but I am not sure they really knew what they were doing and weren't filling in for someone else. Normally these folded into a sandwich pocket and the filling can't fall out the bottom. Not so, in this one here.

I eventually made my way downwards to Changshou subway stop area, and found another vendor as I took care of some stuff. In this case, they'd run out of herbs, and it was a mostly crispy pancake as they used up the remaining ingredients they had.

Finally, the quiet subway on the way home.

Rice balls

2011-02-18T19:50:00.002+13:00

February 17th is Chinese Lantern Festival. People eat yuánxiāo dumplings (元宵) to celebrate it, and probably do stuff with lanterns. I would have liked to go out and see some lantern and fireworks action, but wasn't feeling up to it, so someone dropped around with some dumplings to my place.

These have sesame filling, which you can see further below. You can buy a variety of these in the supermarket, perhaps all year round for all I know.

My guest boiled them in a pot, added cold water to cool it, then boiled it again. I presume that's a timing thing to ensure they are cooked, and that it's a pretty standard approach. Interestingly she used tap water, which I would never cook with due to it not being safe.

She overcooked them and the outer rice coating had the texture of chewing gum :-)

They were pretty tasty, but were so rich I could only eat four. The chewy rice coating was not so bad forcing me to eat slowly.

Would consider buying again, but I'm more of a savoury flavouring kind of guy.