Urban Giraffe – Page 13 – Life, The Universe, and WordPress

Czech food (and the effects of globalisation)

I’ve been introduced to a lot of Czech food recently, courtesy of some Czech friends, and it’s been a fun (if sometimes weird) experience. It’s also given me the opportunity of visiting real local-style places. I haven’t quite decided what the criteria for distinguishing a ‘local-style’ place is yet, but if it’s in anyway intimidating then it almost certainly counts.

The food I’ve been served reminds me a lot of the food I used to eat in England as a child: heavy, meaty, and simple. Popular foods here are dumplings (potato and bread varieties), meats and meat sauces, bread, cabbage, and cheese.

Fried food is far too popular, and a meal may consist simply of fried mushrooms, boiled potatoes, and some tartar sauce. Tasty, but not particularly healthy.

As an unconfirmed vegetarian it can be a frustrating experience, although there are some notable exceptions (the excellent Radost FX being one).

I’ve had some pretty unexpected surprises. For some reason, eating spinach with cream is very popular here. Now I love spinach on its own, but with cream? Using my basic understanding of Czech I ordered what I thought was a spinach pizza. The menu mentioned spinach (spenat) and cream (smetana), but I figured it was spinach, with some sort of sour cream in a small side dish. Alas not, it simply meant spinach and cream. It would actually have been alright if it hadn’t been for the raw egg placed gently on top. I missed that word entirely!

Possible MSN scam

I’ve noticed a couple of the contacts on my MSN list have started displaying ‘http://msncheck.41m.com – free way to check who blocked and deleted you on msn‘. Naturally I went to this website to investigate and found that it promised the ability to check if anyone has blocked or deleted me, provided I gave my msn username and password.

Now there is no way I’m giving my username or password to anyone, let alone an unknown website. However, I was curious as to what would happen if I did. I tried the website with false information:

Note the ‘your login info will be stored on our server for future use*’. This is the closest to any sort of privacy statement and/or website intent.

Dr Zhivago

I’ve been churning through a lot of books recently and so I thought I’d talk about some here.

First up is Dr. Zhivago. I’ll admit a distinct liking for Russian literature, ever since Crime & Punishment blew me away. The country is so big and has so much history. I just wish I could explore it all. As I do not possess an unlimited budget I have to make do with whatever books I can get my hands on, and this was provided by Boris Pasternak.

I knew almost nothing about this story. I’ve never watched the movie, although I was aware it was a big thing back in the 60’s. It even seems to have been remade for the TV, and stars the delightful Kiera Knightley (shown above for decorative effect).

Japanese theme

Another addendum to the Giraffe theme, with a Japanese localization courtesy of Tai. The .mo file can be found on the Giraffe page, and the WordPress localization file on the WordPress localization page. Test it out from the sidebar Localization menu.

Thanks once again to Tai.

Hot bugs

Prague is being subjected to a minor heat-wave at the moment, and towards the end of last week it managed to break records, reaching around 38 degrees. Pretty hot and coupled with a high humidity it makes for very unpleasant and sticky days. Sleeping at night can also be difficult, partly because of the temperatures, but also because you need to leave open windows, and so invite all sorts of outdoor noises and bugs.

The noises are a side-effect of living in a narrow street with tall buildings on both sides. Even relatively quiet sounds echo upwards, and in the dead of the night everything just seems louder anyway. Of particular note are three Terrier dogs (currently residing near the bottom of my least-favourite-dogs list) that like to make themselves vocal, and an owner that doesn’t seem to mind.

The bugs have been more of a nuisance though. Usually I’m pretty much immune to bugs. They seem to ignore me, for whatever reason (bad blood and bad taste maybe), but over the weekend something had a royal feast on my back. Currently, judging by the marks, I’m suspecting a giant bat. It really makes you wonder what exactly is going on at night when you’re sleeping.

It’s all Greek and Japanese to me

Thanks again go to Tai for his translation of the second part of the Theme Guide series into Japanese. Great work!

Also, Simos Xenitellis has produced a Greek localization for the Giraffe theme. You’ll need the .mo file for the theme, and the .mo file for WordPress (taken from this Greek translation website and converted into a .mo file). Check it out from the Localization menu in the sidebar of this website, or visit his website for the full effect. Thanks Simos!

Adding a localization menu to WordPress

You may have noticed a small drop-down menu labelled ‘Localisation’ in the sidebar of this blog. It’s something I’ve been playing about with since localising the Giraffe theme and, while it doesn’t magically translate the entire blog, it does provide a viewer with a simple method to change the locale.

But what is a locale? In WordPress terms it refers to the framework around which your posts are displayed. That is, the words, phrases, dates, and times, that surround your posts. For example:

Try the live version now, if you want. You’ll need a Chinese font to display the Chinese localisation, but the others should work fine.

Pinyin converter

I’ve added a small Pinyin converter to the InScript plugin. Pinyin is a method of transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet. As Chinese is a tonal language, it is important that these tones are included in the pinyin. This is achieved through the use of accents and other marks over certain vowels.

The reason for the converter is that these accents are not easy to type, especially for people with keyboards in an accent-less language (i.e. English). It is possible to enter the characters using some form of character mapping tool, or by entering the HTML code directly, but this is not an intuitive method.

Instead, a popular technique used on many websites is to write the tone as a number. For example, zhong1guo2 would indicate that the ‘o’ in zhong needs the first tone applied, and ‘o’ in guo needs the second. While this is an easy method of entering the text, it does not look good, and is another layer to understanding the tones themselves.

Icy Box IB-360 Review

A recent escapade in hard drive recovery made me realise that I wasn’t doing anywhere near enough to keep my system safe. Forget all about viruses and spyware and all the other computer-based threats; if your hard drive goes kaput then you are seriously screwed.

I looked into various backup software programs, but they all required me to spend considerable time burning DVDs. The best backup routine is one I don’t need to think about. My attention then moved on to a secondary, and larger, hard drive that could be used to make an exact copy of my primary drive. No hassle, no fuss, and painless recovery should anything go wrong. That’s the theory.

As I have a laptop my only option was to make this drive external. Most hard drive manufacturers make their own external drives, but they tend to be pricey. If you’re prepared to handle a few screws and bits of cable then you can get an identical device for a lot less money by purchasing a hard drive and hard drive casing, and putting it together yourself.

Learning Chinese

I’ve been trying to learn Chinese for over half a year now and, well, it’s kinda tough going. Not only do you need to learn a whole new way of speaking, but you also need to learn two written languages: pinyin (the English transliteration of Chinese words, so you can actually read anything), and Chinese characters themselves.

The spoken language is difficult in its own right due to tones. These are like the accents found in other languages, but more complicated and unfortunately much more important – getting the wrong tone in a word can change the meaning completely, to the extent that you could call your mother a horse by using the wrong inflection.

This is further complicated by different dialects. The majority of people in China speak Mandarin, while people in the South (and most of the Hong Kong expatriates around the world) speak Cantonese. They both use the same characters, but they are pronounced very differently. Actually, that’s not entirely true – Mandarin speakers use ‘simplified Chinese characters’, while Hong Kong and Taiwan use ‘traditional characters’. Sometimes they look similar, sometimes not.

Did I mention the other half-dozen regional variations? It’s enough to cause you to weep.