My bicycling friends at Shanghai Jiaotong University

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Trick

I had the greatest bike ride last Friday night. I had gone out to the bar & had dinner with some co-workers and was headed home around 11 PM, riding home on Shimen Rd. #1 just north of Weihai road, and in the other direction I see a mass of about 20 cyclists on nice bikes all wearing helmets. As I say to everyone, a helmet is a sign of an experienced cyclist. I double and triple took, and after a minute, I turned around and rode after them to say hi!

The group is from Shanghi Jiaotong University 上海交通大学 and since they had recently finished classes, they were going for an all-night bicycle ride in Shanghai.  I met lots of nice people and we talked culture and food and cycling.  My phone had died so I couldn’t take any photos, so I exchanged email addresses with a few riders and they emailed me a photo this week.

Hi to Jessie and Ginn – thank you for the photos!  I’m always up for a friendly bike ride in Shanghai.

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Sunshine

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Trick

First sunny day in as long as I can remember! The rainy season has been miserable the last few weeks, but maybe it’s finally passing?

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Another year in China

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Trick

I got my renewed visa back today, I’m legal for another year in China!

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More styrofoam anyone?

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Trick

It’s like an ant, carrying a Cheeto on it’s back – the physics of it actually blow your mind.  But it’s common here in Shanghai – you’ll see a 3-wheeler bike with stuff piled up so high you can’t believe it’s even holding together, and yet it somehow is.  Here’s an amazing one I saw today on my bike ride in northern Shanghai, around Taopu.

From Drop Box
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Great Circle Mapper & a year’s travel

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Trick

I moved to China a wee bit over a year ago, and I’ve had the pleasure of doing a ton of traveling since.  I never thought I’d actually say “It’d b nice to stay still for a minute” – I’ve always wanted to go see lots of places in the world, and my job provides me just such an opportunity!

Sarah asked me last week how many miles I’ve flown in the last year, and I realized I hadn’t been keeping track.  So I made a spreadsheet!  The Shanghai-Chicago flight is the longest flight I’ve ever done at 7,000 miles / 13 hours, but I’ve flown over 100,000 miles this year, which is an absurd number.

This gives me an opportunity to show off one of my favorite websites, the Great Circle Mapper.  It allows you to put in two or more airport codes and it’ll plot you a map showing your actual flight path.  Here’s my first year of travel:

You can also view it on the website with my flight path details, which shows the mileage.

Cool, eh?

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Break time

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Trick

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One of the parks right next to the office.

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Beijing & Great Wall in photos

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Trick

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My first free software contributions

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Trick

In 2003, I was a young college student, bored one winter.  I had been using the Xfce window manager on my Slackware Linux machine, and I liked to use XMMS to rock out the tunes while doing my CS homework.  Or maybe while drinking some beer.  Anyway.  Xfce was younger then and didn’t have a lot of panel plugins, but panel plugins were all the rage those days.  I decided to try and write a panel plugin to remote control XMMS.  With the help of some kind developers from the Xfce project and good example plugin code, I was able to create the first version of the xfce-xmms-plugin.

I worked on the code for just a few months and it was released and downloaded by many. I left the code be and some others have picked it up since.  Thanks to Kemal Ilgar Eroğlu for picking up maintainership, and the others who have contributed patches over the years.  I moved onto using the GNOME desktop environment shortly thereafter so I didn’t end up needing the plugin anymore, but I have been known to use Xfce on occasion for a lighter desktop experience.

A visit to the plugin website shows that while a lot has been added, my fantastic original artwork, created in The GIMP, is still intact today.  I wonder if anyone is still using XMMS anymore? I’m sure there’s someone :)

November 11th, 2003: my first free software commit to the world.  It was CVS back then, then converted to Subversion and onto Git these days.  I was also using my university CS account which I think is disabled.  The history is also preserved in the Changelog file in the source download and even amazingly goes to show that I was going by the handle “pat” back then.

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Banshee on Mac OS X: Nice to see you!

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Trick

 

Screenshot of Banshee 2.3.4 running on OS X

A few years ago, I used to write some plugins and a little bit of code for the Banshee project.  As I grew in my job at Mintel, I lost energy for working on Banshee but the project carried on and has grown from version 0.x to 2.x in a few years time.  I keep using Banshee on my Linux laptop, but a year ago I made an odd choice of buying a Macbook and I’ve been hating iTunes ever since.  iTunes really sucks.

I was catching up on old blogs the other day and found that Aaron has moved on from Novell and that some old & familiar names have stepped up to help with maintainership.  Pretty cool stuff guys.  Oh and the Mac OS X builds are much more regular than they used to be, and it’s working great!

One tip: If you’re looking for the latest version of Banshee on OS X, the website is a bit out of date.  Go straight to the GNOME download server for the latest OS X build which is 2.3.4.

Furthermore, if you’re running Banshee on Ubuntu and love Amazon MP3 and the GNOME project as much as I do, please give this a read.

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Worst vacation idea ever

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Trick

A few weeks ago I picked up a case of mononucleosis, which has been a real joy.  As I’ve been off work for two weeks now, sitting around home waiting for my body to slowly recover, I’ve actually taken the longest break from work I’ve ever taken since starting at Mintel in 2006.

Thus, I’ve decided that getting Mono is the worst idea for a vacation ever.  If I’d had more energy, I would’ve jetted off to somewhere a bit more beautiful than rainy/foggy Shanghai to rest.

I’m returning to work this week logging on from home to get caught up and start working on some small projects.  I have a spare bedroom which I rarely use, but it does have a small desk in it that I’ve decided to make my work desk.  My landlord left some of her furniture in here, so it comes complete with the delightful pink chair, lamp and trash.

My desk working at home

Complete with pink furniture which was left by my landlord

 

 

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