The first panel of today’s Luann comic strip is in Chinese. Apparently Luann’s old flame Aaron Hill is shacking up with a Chinese girl in Hawaii and is learning to speak Chinese. Since the strip doesn’t provide subtitles, as a public service here’s what they said:

Aaron: 對不起 (pronounced dui bu qi): Sorry.
Girl: 沒關係 (pronounced mei guan xi): It doesn’t matter.

OK, maybe not too exciting, but it’s kinda neat seeing actual Chinese instead of the random scribbles that often are used instead.

Got a good bit of work done today. One of the projects I’d had on the todo list for a while is an automatic reminder system for my user’s domain renewals. I don’t have a whole lot of these, so I had been doing it semi-automated. But that means that I was a bit inconsistent on how often and how soon I’d send out reminders.

I already have a mysql db on my server for some forum boards and a game, so I figured I’d make a new db in that and use it for storing the info. I had to go through a few iterations before getting the schema right, but not too bad. I have a feeling I’ll want to expand it in the future though.

Then I created a few perl scripts to manage the data. I entered most of the data manually through one perl script, and just for domains expiring through the end of the year. The one piece of data that is automatically updated is the expiration date for each domain, which is automatically fetched in a perl script from whois queries and then updated in the db if needed.. I’ll have to add a way to only do intermittent updates of these though, as whois servers dislike it when one server makes lots of queries in a short period of time.

Then the third perl script goes through the db and sends out renewal notices for domains expiring in less than 60 days, urgent renewal notices for less than 14 days, and an urgent expired domain notice from when the domain expired until it is actually deleted. This reminder service is scheduled to run weekly. I want to expand it though so it runs daily but only sends biweekly notices until less than 14 days, and then weekly from then until it is deleted.

While there’s still some improvements to be made, including automatically seeding the db from the server’s DNS and/or web server configs, it’s all up and working after only a few hours of hacking on it. Not bad.

Yesterday I was playing around with streaming video after edwardv demoed his streaming audio experiments with Windows Media Encoder. I have a video server back in Santa Clara where I can record US TV and download it to watch here. I’d thought about doing video streaming as well, but hadn’t really looked at what would be required. After seeing what edwardv had thrown together, I decided to look into it myself.

It was actually surprisingly easy to set things up. I have a 768kbps uplink over there, so I played around with various encoding rates to see what was stable. I found that 525kbps video and 64kbps audio was very stable and while not great quality, was quite watchable. Unfortunately, the satellite receiver on it has flaked out, so I need to wait for Voodoo to get home and give it a kick. For testing, I was streaming AVI files, though I verified that streaming from inputs worked, though all I could see were the receiver’s menus.

If the NHL gets their act together, this will be nice for watching hockey games live. It’ll be interesting to see how well watchable fast action like hockey is with those kinds of bitrates. Thanks edwardv for giving me a push on video streaming.

The last technical puzzle this week is one my friend in Austria, Pazu and I have been trying to solve for a while. He has a PHP application that is supposed to allow one to upload files to the server, except on my server it doesn’t work. Our first suspicion was that it was because my server runs PHP5 which is incompatible with some apps designed for PHP4.

This week we got it to the point where if he ran his own instance of Apache on my server that it would work. Since we thought it was the PHP version, and since he tested with an installation of PHP4, I downgraded the main server to PHP4, and it still failed. We then did various tests to show that his personal version of Apache could run it under PHP5, so eliminated that as a problem. There’s still several differences between his install and the main server’s so I’ll need to sit down and test each change one at a time to see what makes it break. We’ve already eliminated the most obvious one of what user id the server runs as.

Wait a minute! It’s not February!

One of the things about living in another country is that some things you’d expect to be the same are different from back home. Two of these events occur this week.

Today is what is called either Chinese Valentine’s Day or Chinese Lover’s Day. This occurs each year on July 7th. Now you’re probably thinking that I’ve gone completely off the rocker, because today is clearly August 11, 2005. But it’s also July 7, 94. The July 7 part comes from the lunar calendar which is aligned to the 28 day lunar cycle. That’s why you get Chinese New Year sometime in January of February depending, literally, on the phase of the moon. The 94 part comes from the Republic of China having been officially founded in 1912, or year 1 on the Republican calendar.

In everyday life, most people follow the Western calendar for months and days. For the year, it’s a bit more common to see the Republican year being used, though the Western year is also fairly commonly used. For most of the traditional holidays, the lunar calendar is still primarily used. Since most people use the Western calendar, this means that there’s a bit confusion about exactly what dates holidays fall on each year. Some people celebrate their birthday on the lunar date, some celebrate on the Western date, or some celebrate both. As for Valentine’s Day, both the western and Chinese version are celebrated by most people.

The other holiday this week is Father’s Day which is celebrated on August 8 (on the Western calendar). Mother’s Day is celebrated on the same day as in the West, but Father’s Day is different. There’s a good reason for that though. The date of August 8 in Chinese is 八月八日 (8 Month 8 Day, pronounced ba yue ba ri), and can be abbreviated as å…«å…« (88, pronounced baba) which sounds similar to 爸爸 which is also pronounce baba (though in different tone), and is the Chinese word for Dad. This is fine with me, since the Western Father’s Day is about a week after my birthday, so this spreads things out a bit.

So Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Father’s Day!

Earlier this week the government information office announced that seven TV stations had lost their licenses and had to stop broadcasting on Tuesday. The reasons given were that the programming was detrimental to society. I already had some mixed feelings because actually, some of the channels here are pretty bad. But on the other hand, the government deciding who does and doesn’t get a license leaves me a bit uneasy. It’s been 18 years since martial law, but it seems like authoritarian practices still lurk in the government.

I don’t watch a whole lot of TV here. Most of the time if I’m watching TV, it’s watching a DVD of an American TV show. When I actually watch something off cable it’s usually CNN. So it was only today that I had a chance to flip around the channels to see what’s changed. Now I have even more mixed feelings.

That’s because they’ve added some pretty interesting new channels. To top the list, there’s BBC World, with BBC News. Ah, lovely BBC. As well, Star World which shows American TV shows was moved from the obscure channel it sometimes appeared on to a lower channel, ABC (the Australian one, not the American one), Animax and Nickelodeon were all added to the lineup. Is it bad to be in favor of government repression just because you like the result?

Let’s take a break from foreign politics for a bit and look at some of the issues in domestic Taiwan politics.

The biggest critically important current affair is whether or not farmers can sell Mangoes to mainland China. No, this is not the lead-in for a bad joke.

When the KMT and PFP party leaders (the parties of the opposition blue camp, but which hold a majority in the legislature) went to talk to PRC CCP officials in mainland China earlier this year, they were offered some lovely parting gifts. In particular, the offered a pair of pandas and a lifting of fruit tariffs. No strings attached. You’d think people would treat this as good news! But, no…

The DPP and TSU (the green camp, of which the DPP is the ruling party) were solidly against party officials going to China at all, and complained bitterly that any agreements of any sort between them and the CCP officials would be completely illegal, and riots nearly broke out at the airport when protesting their departure. Never mind that this sort of whining comes from nearly the same spirit as when the PRC complains about any current or former ROC officials visiting foreign countries, whether in an official capacity or not.

The blue camp danced around the issue by saying that no agreements of any kind had been made, but that the CCP kindly offered the panda and fruit concessions. The panda issue has been pushed aside for now because the issue needs planning and research. But the issue of fruit has been more pressing. While officials here have been hemming and hawing, the PRC went ahead and lifted tariffs on their own late last week. This now has officials here running around complaining that even a single mango sent to the PRC will lead directly to communists taking over Taiwan.

Why is the green camp so upset about this issue? There’s broadly three reasons at play. The first is that green camp believes that the blue camp want reunification at any cost and will happily sell out to the PRC. The second is that the green camp almost automatically will oppose anything the blue camp is in favor of. (To be fair, the blue camp has the same problem, and has been holding up legislation on a variety of issues that they’d probably otherwise support.) The third reason is they fear that the PRC is trying to woo political support from farmers away from the green camp.

This last point is actually a fairly reasonable fear. In general, northern urban areas lean to the blue camp, and southern rural areas lean to the green camp. By offering something that clearly appeals to a core constituency of the green camp, the PRC may indeed end up weakening their parties. The PRC is very much afraid that the green camp will move to formal independence at some point, so they definitely have a motive to try to weaken the green camp.

But if that’s their fear, they have a funny way of addressing the problem. You’d think they’d welcome the change, try to take partial credit for it, and push for more tariff reductions. Instead, they are so fearful that it might make the blue camp look good that they are willing to screw the farmers in the process. I’m not sure where the logic in that is.

The Taipei Times tends to lean in favor of the green camp, so it was quite a surprise to read their editorial today which pretty much slams the green camp for making too much of the fruit tariff issue. Read it here: Fruit war the wrong battle to fight.

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I’ve already pointed to some of Richard Hartzell’s articles claiming that under International Law, Taiwan is legally a US Territory. Today there was also a letter to the editor which nicely sums up my opinion of it: Nice theory, but who cares?

Arianna Huffington has posted another article today: Judy Miller: How Deep Do Her Connections Run?

I’ve tried looking for other sources of this information, and the current stories all seem to point back to the HuffPo. It’s interesting how this story is being ignored by the press, because even if there are inaccuracies, you’d expect this sort of thing would be looked into. Or could it be that the press think it’s more important to continue touting her as a martyr to freedom of the press? (Note to reporters: One of the key problems with the current administration is a complete inability to admit they were wrong about anything. Don’t fall into that same trap.)

Anyways, here’s a sampling of the latest:

– Miller spoke to Cheney adviser Scooter Libby (the other alleged White House source) a few days before Novak published his story exposing Plame’s identity

– Miller was able to get an embed assignment with the team hunting WMDs in Iraq and allegedly wielded inappropriate influence over it (and even with all her help, they found nothing)

– Miller has a relationship going back 10 years with Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi dissident who is the now discredited conduit of many pre-war allegations against Iraq

It just about makes one’s head spin. I would really like to see other reporters do some followup on these threads, if nothing more so it can’t be just dismissed as crazy rantings of a leftist blog.

Since the excuse that Rove got Plame’s identity from a reporter, rumors have been swirling about whether it was Judy Miller, the New York Times reporter in jail for refusing to reveal her source, was the one who told Rove her identity. The theory goes that she’s refusing to reveal her source not because of principle, but because she was the one that started the scandal. For more, see the article Judy Miller: Do We Want To Know Everything or Don’t We?

(To be fair, if this story is true, there’s still someone who leaked Plame’s identity to her. And this doesn’t get Rove and Libby off the hook either.)

In lieu of my ranting and raving here, go read this New York Times article which nicely summarizes the current state of affairs.