This is an astonishing book. On the one hand, it's the basic "Harry Potter" trope - a young orphan is gifted, gets sent to school to learn magic, becomes pals with the other weird kids, has adventures, and fights a monster. Except here, Harry is Chinese, is sent to Oxford University to learn magic, and faces up to the reality of colonialism and Empire. Oh, and the magic is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I lived in Oxford for several years (although, thankfully, I wasn't a scholar) and…
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Yet another compendium of Chinese sci-fi stories - and there are some great stories in this collection. There are also some essays about what makes Chinese science fiction Chinese. Based on my (limited) experience, I'd say one of the defining characteristics of the Chinese SF I've read is the way exposition is dispensed with and replaced by poetry. Mankind streamed across the river of time, aiming straight for the Door Into Summer. In that moment, our tiny planet was falling like a single…
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This is an anthology of modern Chinese science fiction, loosely grouped into three main themes. I'm sad to say that some of the stories are a lot of hard work. One is barely sci-fi - more like a spiritual paean to the souls of people caught in a disaster which, bizarrely, has a throwaway line about aliens in it. One is an interminable description of domesticity which, if I've understood correctly ends in a manic sequence where an elderly author travels back in time to fuck someone who may or…
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This is a curious - and slightly unsatisfying - collection of short stories. There's no cohesive theme; some are about space travel, some alien invasion, some about madness on Mars, some about interstellar religions. You bounce around between themes without much chance to reflect on how different authors tackle the same subject. The stories alternate between Chinese authors and English-speaking authors. Again, it feels a little disjointed. Will general audiences not read Chinese sci-fi unless…
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I've had a long-held fascination with China. I took Mandarin at University and, a few years ago, I was lucky enough to go to Beijing. So I was excited to pick up this book of short stories about modern China. It is a mixed lot of tales about Chinese people both in and outside of China. But, with the exception of a couple of stories - they just fell flat for me. I found it hard to assess if the stories are intended to be realistic or allegorical. As the author is a journalist, I thought the…
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Imagine you have a series of number you wish to sort. Sorting is a well known computer science problem - generally speaking you compare one value to the next and then move the item either up or down a list. With "English" characters, that's fairly easy. When a computer sees the character 1 it's really seeing the Unicode character U+0031. When it sees 2 it's really seeing the character U+0032 and so on. The Arabic numbers we use (0 - 9) have an identical ordering in Unicode. This makes it…
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We all know what an email address looks like and how to validate them, right? A few years ago I got the Chinese domain name 莎士比亚.org. You can browse to it, link to it, and send email to it. Or can you? When I tried two years ago, none of the major email providers supported sending to non-ASCII email addresses. Today, I tried again with six of the big "Western" webmail providers. How did they do? Show Me The Data! I tested by trying to send an email to test@莎士比亚.org and the Punycode repre…
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I was listening to a podcast recently which was kind enough to mention one of my blog posts. The presenter said: ...and you should Google for this, because I'm really not sure how to pronounce this. Is it shu-huk-spur? dot mobby? Le sigh! It's a conversation I have most weeks when I'm on the phone to someone - usually a call centre - and they ask for my email address. "Sierra Hotel Kilo Sierra Papa Romeo Dot Mike Oscar Bravo India" Whereupon I am inevitably asked: Is that dot com or dot …
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I'm very pleased to announce the launch of 莎士比亚.org - beautiful and readable copies of Shakespeare plays in Chinese. If you would like to help, the text is available on GitHub for people to correct. Why? I've long held a fascination with Shakespeare - hence the name of this website. At university I studied Mandarin as my minor degree. I was a clumsy student, but enjoyed the regularity and poetry of the language. I discovered the Chinese writer Zhu Shenghao had translated many of Shakesp…
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One of the interesting aspects of privilege is how it lays bare our unconscious assumptions about the world. A male software developer may never consider that a user would want or need to change their name. Thus they would design a product which ignored the millions of women changing their names after marriage. It's very temping to see software as racist when, in reality, it's more likely to have a root cause of unconscious assumptions. Take, for example, GitHub. You can host all of your…
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There are loads of really delightful Simplified and Traditional Chinese True Type Fonts available on the web. There's only one issue - the file sizes are really large. In many cases, too large to effectively use as a web-font. For example, this calligraphy style font is 3.4MB. The beautiful Paper Cut Font weighs in at 14MB! That file-size is far to heavy to embed on a web page. Subsetting Generally speaking, font files like .ttf contain a representation of every single character. 0-9,…
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