Life, The Universe, and WordPress
All the general blah
A quick note to say that I’ll be away in Singapore & Malaysia for the next few weeks and my computer will not be joining me. Hopefully if the weather holds I’ll be able to get in some snorkelling, but otherwise I’m looking forward to a lot of nice food and and interesting places.
Jumpa lagi!
A new design! I decided I needed a new and fresh look and the result is the still-in-progress ‘Guangzhou’ theme. My hope is that it’s both easier to navigate, as well as being lighter and more suitable for future work. Comments, as always, are welcomed.
In conjunction with the new theme I’ve made use of WP-Cache and Gravatar cache, which should result in a noticeable speed improvement. The site itself has undergone a good clean, with all invalid code being replaced, all dead-links now corrected, and the addition of new sections for software, articles, and about myself.
On top of that I’ve added a new plugin: HTML Purified. This plugin changes the default comment filter and replaces it with HTML Purifier, a very exhaustive library that checks, validates, and corrects HTML. Not that WordPress is insecure by default, but this just beefs it up a notch, and ensures that comments are both safe and XHTML valid.
It’s that time of the year again in Asia when the much revered and reviled fruit, the durian, is in season. If you’ve never come across the durian, it is a large spiky fruit somewhat resembling a bulbous cactus.
Here’s a quote showing the reverential awe it can inspire:
Imagine the best, most delicious, and sensuous banana pudding you can imagine, add just a touch of butterscotch, vanilla, peach, pineapple, strawberry, and almond flavours, and a surprising twist of — garlic! Like many of life’s greatest experiences, eating durian cannot be adequately described with words. Durian has a characteristic delicious flavour, creamy texture, and tantalizing fragrance that is just… durian! — the king of fruits, nature’s most magnificent fruit gift.Durian Palace
The taste is certainly very unique, being both appealing and slightly repulsive at the same time. It does make a great filling for a dessert, especially when cooked in durian tarts or inside pancakes. Raw durian can be very strong, and is equivalent to eating garlic – it’s a taste you’ll find repeating on you throughout the day.
On first tasting it I thought it like the flesh of some animal in a state of putrefaction.Henri Mouhot, French naturalist
China is an old country with a lot of history and, to an outsider looking in, with a lot of strange and alien customs.
Recently I was invited along for a foot massage at a local spa. This industry is well established in China, and they’ve been practicing these treatments for thousand of years. While having my feet massaged (which for just under one pound was a bargain), one of my friends suggested I try Ba Guan treatment. They described it as something where glass jars are attached to the back, removing moisture from the flesh. There are many reasons why someone would have this done, one being that it helps people with a, for want of better word, dodgy stomach. Aha! Sounds great, I thought, I have that.
It’s funny how the world works. Only the other day I was complaining to a friend about the lack of musical events here in Guangzhou (or, at least, musical events I’d want to listen to) and that if anyone did come over and play, someone such as Muse for example, I’d buy a ticket in a heartbeat. A couple of weeks later and I’m watching TV when an advert comes on for a concert… Muse are playing in Hong Kong – just two hours away. That’s close enough for my prophecy! It took more than a couple of heartbeats, but suffice to say that I’m already booked in and feeling pretty pleased.
According to the site I have this to look forward to:
Following 2003’s chart-topping masterpiece “Absolution”, the trio released their fifth and yet another UK number one album “Black Holes and Revelations” in July 2006. Hit singles include “Supermassive Black Hole” and “Starlight”: the former is a dance tune with a twist that sounds like a cross between Beck and Marilyn Manson with a dose of Studio 54 glamour while the latter is an Abba gig on the moon. “Knights of Cydonia”, a surf-prog number, is another favourite single taken from the album.
An Abba gig on the moon. Nice. Sure beats my ears bleeding from the more local Twins concert.
I’ve no idea what to expect from the concert itself. Hong Kong is not exactly known for it’s rock scene, and the concert itself is conspicuously on Lantau Island, far away from civilisation (next door is the airport). Admittedly this is because the Asiaworld Expo centre is located there (where the concert is playing), but I also suspect that Muse’s prog-rock warblings may cause a few puzzled looks if it neighboured any civilisation.
Hong Kong here I come (again)!
My first post of 2007 will be spent talking about the last month of 2006. I realise that it’s been a shockingly long time since I wrote anything here (five months, to be exact), and also that I’ve been incredibly bad at keeping up with emails and comments (my apologies to anyone who has contacted me – I will get back to you).
I spent the whole of December in Europe. Two weeks of this was in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the rest with family for Christmas in England. After a year in Asia it was great to go back home and be able to go about my business without being a cause for curiosity. It would be very trite of me to say that nothing had changed. It would also be quite untrue. A lot of things have changed, and none more so than UK airports, which can now be summed up very succinctly: a royal nuisance. Long queues and over-zealous security made every journey an extreme test of patience. Even leaving the train at the airport’s train station was not simple, and security were unhappy that I’d thrown my ticket away between leaving the train and exiting the station.
One major frustration I find living in China is that the internet is not nearly as useful as in the West. What little information is available is hard to find, hidden deep in forums, or is covered in annoying animated pictures (a predilection of Chinese web-sites, unfortunately*).
Anyway, with this in mind I’ve been busy helping to put together a ‘Best Of’ website for Guangzhou, the city in which I currently live. It’s not complete yet, and there are big holes in the information, but it tries to give some real information (or at the very least, information that I would find useful).
Consider this a plug for the aforementioned site. If you’re interested then you can visit it at bestofguangzhou.com. Even better, if you’ve been to Guangzhou or live there now, please do send an opinion or review!
Note to any Chinese web developers – you do not have to fill every square centimetre of screen space with writing or moving images. My computer should not run at 100% just to visit your website.
So far I can describe my summer in Guangzhou with one word: wet.
It may just be the tail-end of typhoon Chanchu which, after having devastated the Phillipines, messed up much of South-East China and came very close to Hong Kong. Or this may be perfectly normal.
Friends tell me that I should expect the summer to get hotter and stickier. All very therapeutic I’m sure, but now I understand exactly why there is always so much washing hung out from Chinese windows.
When it’s not being hot and sticky, it’s being hot and rainy. In the space of one day the weather can change from this:
To this:
Now that’s what I call variable!
An attempt to give my website a bit of spring cleaning has resulted in several new WordPress plugins.
The first is Tidy Up, which adds the ability to run HTML Tidy through all your posts and comments and produce a report on the quality of your HTML. If you’re feeling brave you can also have the plugin automatically fix any problems.
Next is Search Regex. As the name would suggest, this is a search and replace plugin. It allows you to search and replace phrases inside posts, pages, comments, and meta-data. In addition to plain text searches, you can also use full PHP regular expressions. This makes it very easy to bulk-modify a WordPress installation, should you decide to move directories. Several other similar plugins exist, but I couldn’t find one that provided the regular expression capability that I needed.
Although a little delayed, I did recently have a wonderful trip to Thailand. Being the over-active kind of person, I wrote about this at length here. Maybe someone can learn from my mistakes.
At the same time I was sent this photo, allegedly from a public toilet in Bangkok. I’m not sure what it’s advertising, but it’s a great idea.
