korea

I’ve just released Webconverger (Web kiosk) USB&ISO versions built with stable Debian etch.

Webconverger has received some good feedback and press. I would like to thank Daniel Bauman for his rather excellent Debian Live work on which Webconverger is based.

I was hoping that Webconverger could support every locale, now it looks like I need to produce a separate ISO/IMG (or at least apt-get hooks) for every locale. One reason is that Iceweasel/Firefox extensions don’t scale very well. Try install every locale and dictionary extension. I dare you. Sidenote: I wonder why no one has packaged the dictionaries for Iceweasel.

In other news, I’ve been playing around with scim (keyboard switcher) and Korean locales. It seems to work though the title bar didn’t render hangul characters right in dwm. After some investigation I discovered there isn’t such a thing as a single “generic” Unicode font. This came as a shock to me.

Typical ttf only have 65536 glyphs, so no one font will do. Jeff Zhang also informed me about free Unicode fonts. Though I think especially in CJK environments proprietary fonts are unfortunately more common. Or I don’t know why microsoft-gulim isn’t in msttcorefonts.

Anyway the Korean version of Webconverger turned out OK, though I doubt any Koreans will be using it. It’s all sadly ActiveX out there.

My package wordpress 2.0.10 didn’t quite make it to etch in time as I was waiting for CVEs! 2.0.10 will be coming soon though…

It always amazes me how much work can get done in breaks like Easter. It’s great that etch is out. And whoa, the weather is great.

2 years ago I took out travel insurance for my travels. I think it cost me about 150 GBP for a year and I found it completely useless.

I was mugged in Saint Petersburg on my last trip there and getting a police statement is a bureaucratic nightmare. In many countries I have travelled the police are the very last people I want to deal with after I was imprisoned by the corrupt Russian police. This process can takes ages and can be costly (bribes). My schedule is usually pretty busy, so in many cases I can’t wait for a “investigation” to complete.

Another instance where I lost some stuff was the Tsunami. I actually bothered to get a police statement from a fucking crazy police chief who beat the crap out of some local in front of me. Later my mother called to say my Insurance doesn’t cover me for natural disasters. Actually I think locals stole my stuff, not so much the Tsunami, but that’s hard to prove.

So as I am about to embark on another expedition in South America, I investigated travel insurance again and this time I am reading the small print and asking questions.

Since I have a bunch of travelling experience I asked the insurer a few questions about an attractive policy.

Are my possessions insured if I get mugged? I have a laptop and camera equipment worth about 1000 GBP. If I get mugged and injured I will get 100 GBP. Of course I need a police statement as proof and must report the incident within 12 hours. In some counties police stations are closed more that 12 hours a day. My equipment is actually insured up to only a total of 500 GBP, with each possession worth a maximum of 250 GBP.

Of course I need to have the original receipts and recent valuations of each stolen possession. Insurers also take depreciation into account. For example, if your 1000 GBP laptop is one year old, in the insurer’s eyes it is actually worth 500 GBP. That’s right 50% depreciation a year. Also you’re only allowed one “mugging claim” per trip. Well, I’ve been mugged more than once in my last trip!

What happens if my laptop and equipment get damaged by luggage handlers? Sorry, fragile items are not insured.

Hijack, 30 GBP for each 24 hour period my vehicle is under hijack. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Cancellation is absolutely useless as every airline will make alternative arrangements or at least refund you if there is a cancellation. If there is a delay because of industrial action (most common case), you’re not covered.

Missed departure. If you vehicle breaks down you have to provide evidence the vehicle is properly serviced and maintained and the recovery was made my a recognized breakdown organisation.

10 GBP for each 8 hour travel delay. 1.25 GBP an hour. Is that what my time is worth?

Ok, the most important is probably medical. For this to work you must call the insurance before you get treated. In many countries calling the UK is very difficult. In the times I’ve been omitted to hospital, the last thing I want to do is to be negotiating my treatment with my insurer.

There are many cases where I am not covered for medical. For example if I injure myself doing “activity sports”. There are strange conditions for this. For example I am covered for up to 7 days of horse riding.

Insurance claims in my experience rarely pay out. When they do, they often minimise the damage. For example I had a computer struck by lightning. They sent me a crap computer which they thought matched the specs of the computer!

When insurers don’t pay out, you probably will not have the resources to take them to court. There also can be very slow to pay out. By that time you probably have had to cut your trip short. Most insurers only allow you to claim once you are back in the UK.

Is it worth it? I can understand how the insurers want to protect themselves from false claims and people not taking the proper precautions, but I think I’ve definitely hit some problems.

I am quite fit, but I still worry about crazy hospital bills. I would definitely not take out any insurance if I knew hospitals would be reasonable. In many countries like India they are reasonable. In fact in Russia & Australian/NZ there are reciprocal health agreements with the UK. But in some places I’ve travelled like Korea, expect 600USD charges for seeing a doctor and running a few tests.

Ah, I am going to miss the Korean Herald newspaper that I read everyday during my stay in Korea.

Here’s one edition’s headlines:
* Ruling party seeks pardon for tycoons

Inside the front cover is a half page advertisement for the Korea independent Commission against Corruption. Hilarious. Chaebol managers are probably going to sink Korea with their dangerous games.

The ads for some massage of some sort or another. The sex business is big here (like everywhere really), though Koreans try their best to ignore it or at least give it a euphemism. Of course the Korea Herald also publishes that propaganda crap like government cracks down on prostitutes and what not.

I’ve loved generally reading the poor reportage on Intellectual Property issues. In Korea they file patents as fast as they can, though they’re no stranger (like China) to violating it. Which is great! Newspapers would occasionally publish a story how the police cracked down on some illegal CD market or another. Truth is the vendors usually get tipped beforehand and it ends up being quite a show.

The local news is great. I love reading about protests. They are great at them here. Very inspiring.

Regional news is exciting with North Korean crises after another and Japan doing something shameful.

The rest is your usual AP collection. I like the one from this issue:

Zimbabwe may begin spying on citizens without any warrant. The government denies any sinister intent saying it is putting its anti-terrorism legislation in line with international practice.

The choice picks in the Editorial/Opinions seem quite right on the political spectrum, but I enjoy them nonetheless.

Just for the record, I always bought and read the paper. Their website is hideous.

The most rewarding moments online for me is when someone uses my work. In the case of images, to aid this process I’ve licensed my images as liberally as possible with Flickr.

Last week a Wikipedia contributor contacted me about some pictures I took of King Sejong the Great of Joseon’s grave. He encouraged me to visit more museums and take more pictures for Wikipedia articles of Korean history featuring the Three kingdoms era. I did just that last weekend and I must say I’ve never so enthusiastically visited a museum before. Not only did I take a bunch of pictures of various artifacts, I learnt far more than usual and I even took notes. Wow.

Here is a small sample of the images that have been used by Wikipedia:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-Branched_Sword
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_King_Muryeong
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Sejong_tomb_1.jpg

Now I wish this process was a little better.

If the Wikipedia contributor didn’t mail me, how would I know he used my pictures?

I don’t consider Flickr to be my central image store and I have tons of pictures that are public domain in my own image gallery system.

I wonder how I should license/tag/meta my pictures so that search engines (Google) know they’re in the public domain and people can find them.

Just visited the FIFA website to be presented with:

You don't have permission to access "http://www.fifa.com/" on this server.


Reference #18.c39ac4d3.1151325945.2723515 

Alan tipped me that FIFA has blocked access from Korean IP addresses due to so many complaints from Koreans. For those who weren’t watching Korea’s last game in World Cup ‘06. There was a dubious penalty decision that didn’t go Korea’s way against Switzerland.

I am more concerned that FIFA think the best way of handling this situation is to block access to their Website. FIFA is firmly on my shitlist.

Since I live in Seoul, I was tipped to go to SEK a large tech exhibition in Korea.

I meant to go to Linuxworld trade show earlier last week for my conference fix. Though the ticket prices were over 100USD! I expected it was one of those “Linux roadshows” aimed at the big boys. Though I am a bit disappointed my employer didn’t get involved.

Damn my conference experiences have been mixed. A paper of mine was accepted for a mobile business conference last year. Though since I was travelling around Asia and not in the employment of anybody, I could not afford to pay the conference fees. I recall something like 1000AUD. Beggar’s belief considering it was a personal contribution and I was invited to speak.

Well, I was all excited about SEK2006 considering all the “Korean innovations” that get covered by places like engadget and The Register. One John Oates is covering the event for the The Register, though I didn’t bump into him. This time my employer allowed me to wander around last Friday.

First off the venue is huge, although there isn’t much there. So it is like some Expo where one quickly feels tired just wandering around. I couldn’t find any good English maps, so I really did just have to wander around.

One particular company I am interested in Haansoft was easy to find. Though they had an awful live event with some girl band was performing. So loud. I immediately felt drained! So I walked elsewhere. I later returned to see demo their interesting Office application. They have a mobile version of their Office product too. They have designed a service to send an office document to a mobile’s number. Though the document needs to be “converted” to a special “mobile format”. Hmmm… Looked good though. I am surprised their office product so much like MS Office, down to the widgets.

I checked out LG and Samsung. Damn the girls there are hot, but I can’t help think that “Booth Babes” are sexist and degrading. I mean really. These girls are obviously models who have been trained to demo various gadgets. There are two problems with this. They are rarely able to speak any English or “tech”. The little things to keep attendees entertained like hiring artists to do caricatures is just boring. I want to meet technical people. Damn, I’m in the wrong exhibition!

There was a very poor showing of platforms utilising the Linux platform. Of course people have the sense to write server applications on the Linux platform. But I am tired of people using Windows as their front end. I didn’t see Firefox.

They had a couple of robots there. But they’re just glorified puppets. Really. There isn’t much intelligence there.

There was a lot of DMB stuff there. I ask one DMB chip manufacturer if there were Linux drivers. In broken English she replied yes, but no “WinCE”. Like I care. Though the couple of USB DVB electronics consumers I met, say “No Linux”. Frustrating.

I came across one agonising Korean company called Netpia. They seem to a misguided “Realnames” outfit. Doing unicode mapping to domains. Why-oh-why. They the argued the international URI standards aren’t sufficient because they need www. and .com. PLEASE!

A lot of Korean research seem devoted to video streaming. I think this is misguided too, but of course I couldn’t find anyone to debate with. Youtube and Google video don’t stream, they progressively download.

Finally I had the joy of visiting the Microsoft stand and playing with Vista! The machines they had there were top of the line and still it crawled along. HAHA! What a prize piece of bloatware. I couldn’t see anything there particularly cool except the “network map” which failed to work.

Sometime this afternoon, KT one of the leading Korean ISPs change my IP address from
222.106.128.78 to 222.106.128.198.

CRAP

I’ve asked for a fixed address, but they said they couldn’t give me one.

So this has prompted me to move my repository and projects once again (previously hosted with Jamie in the UK) from Seoul to Dreamhost in California.

In the next day most of my other hosted projects won’t work and this site will look a little funny. In the next few days almost everything will be working except Trac.

I’ve not been able to get Trac working without unacceptable crufty URLs in Dreamhost.

Update: Everything up again, including http://trac.natalian.org/

Since I see High Definition (HD) printed on the top right of World cup coverage, I wonder if it means anything.

(Previously I always thought it meant Hard Drive)

A closer inspection of the TV image doesn’t impress me. When I asked around about HD I eventually was told by someone that you need a “special aerial”. Which most people don’t have. I am not sure if the TVs have to be “special” too either. In either case the HD symbol is printed, which is misleading. So how does one know they’re actually get High Definition playback? I guess I need to go to a TV store.

Is DVB High Definition?

Is High Definition all that much better than a good analogue signal and a good monitor?

With the industry pushing BlueRay or HD-DVD, touting “High Definition”, I am wondering if they really think people will care or notice. Almost everyone I know is familiar with DVD-rip, telesync and screener qualities. Most people are perfectly happy with VCD quality in Asia. I don’t hear anyone yearning for anything better than DVD.

I for one would like to see CD media disappear altogether. This is how the latest HD (Hard Drive in this case) cam corders from JVC are marketed!

Sidenote: That 5.1 Dolby sound often associated with DVD is also stupid. Most people hate having 5.1 speakers. Don’t get me started about the stupidity of widescreen.

I hope the industry wises up a little.

One of the major problems I see in Korea is the complete lack of remotely decent hosting.

Admittedly finding a host in the UK or US is hard, but here it’s impossible. Really.

The leading Korean registrar inames offers a “complete solution” where it doesn’t even offer advanced DNS management. So I can’t add an A name record for a subdomain. It’s just completely featureless. You’re lucky if PHP works on your FTP space.

Thank god (for want of another expression, as I don’t believe god exists) for Dreamhost. I’m now hosting more and more of the company services on my own account!

Whoever is remotely interested in Web stuff in Korea has some serious stumbling blocks to contend with.

Yes, wireless network access is woeful.

I’ve setup a Linksys WRT54G at my apartment and my sister’s as an open wireless access point. The linksys Web interface could be a lot better for seeing who is connected and perhaps banning abusing users. But on the scale of things it doesn’t really matter.

Both my sister and I live in Korea where 100mbit home network connections are quite normal. So the impact of an open 11mbit Wireless access point isn’t noticeable, especially if we use the network cable from the AP. We also don’t get charged for excessive bandwidth, so it’s more of QoS issue for us and I can’t say I’ve ever noticed from my Wireless laptop.

I’m not sure if I am violating my ISP‘s “terms of service” by dishing out free Wireless access.
I know people have used my access wireless point judging by the high DHCP ips.

Those access points that demand credit cards and logins. Very silly. Especially if you like to access the service with a simple device like a Nintendo DS!

The company I work for doesn’t have a Wireless access point in the office. Which is really inconvenient for the many guests we receive, who all have wireless enabled laptops!
Also for some bizaare reason, we don’t run a DHCP server. Ok, that’s another issue entirely, but not running a DHCP server is stupid.

“Security issues” are often touted when companies operate (open) Wireless Access Points. I think they are non-issues myself.