iSVG

Since before the iPhone was released, there was speculation that it would support SVG.  After all, WebKit supports SVG, and Safari is based on WebKit, and the iPhone uses Safari.  But alas, the build of Safari that went on the iPhone did not include SVG support… nor, more famously, did the iPhone support Flash or Silverlight. Rats!

Realistically, it doesn’t make a huge impact in the total deployment of SVG on mobile devices.  For all that they are cool, iPhones make up a pretty small margin of mobile devices.  Opera is probably deployed on more devices, and it’s supported SVG for a while.  SVG is used on the BlackBerry, as I understand.  The BitFlash and Ikivo SVG players are deployed on something like half a billion phones, both for content viewing and as the GUI of the device itself.  But… still, having it on the iPhone would be a bit of a coup, and would enable lots of neato Webapps.

And as of yesterday, when I updated the firmware on my iPod Touch, SVG is now supported natively!

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Some Say in Fire

Today, the Large Hadron Collider started its slow proton acceleration to our inevitable doooooom (stay tuned for changing conditions)!  My two favorite doomsday scenarios are:

  1. It will produce persistent micro-blackholes, which will devour the Earth in a massive fiery conflagration.
  2. It will produce super-stable strange matter, which will convert the less-stable nuclear matter of which the Earth is composed into more strange matter, like Vonnegut’s ice-nine.

I find this kind of dualism comforting.  Whimper or Bang.  Good or Evil.  People are consistent, even in their nightmare scenarios.  God bless you, Robert Frost:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Home Safe

As I grabbed our last bag off the carousel, my mobile rang with a call from my sister C.  This was the first I heard about the devastating earthquake in Sichuan, China.  We had considered traveling there, based on a recommendation from a Sichuan local we’d met while visiting the rice paddies, but the stomach flu cut our travel schedule a day or so short.  So, we were never anywhere really near the danger zone (though some did feel it in Beijing, I understand).

Thanks for everyone who contacted us to make sure we were safe.  This adds a sad note to our great experiences in China, with the warmth of the Chinese people and the beauty of the country.  When I visit a place, I get an emotional connection to it, making it more real for me, and I hope we can somehow help… though with so many lives lost, so much destruction, it’s a little hard knowing we can only help the survivors, and then only so much.  M and I feel really lucky.  (Sorry, this comes out rather clumsy, but I don’t really know what to say in the face of something like this… I guess I just wanted to let everyone know we’re safe.)

Back in Beijing

We stayed in sleek Shanghai for several days, recovering (first M had the stomach flu, then I played the copycat the next day, though with much milder symptoms).  We saw the impressive Shanghai Museum and the amusingly propagandistic Museum of Urban Planning, shopped in a trendy hutong and in the shops outside (and inside) Yuyuan Garden, walked the Bund and saw the Pearl from across the river, and spent a rainy day in art galleries, all with free lodgings, bikes, and frequent use of a driver.  Our hostess was very gracious, which I hope we can repay when she visits her daughter (our friend K) in Chapel Hill.  I worked a bit, too, attending a few telcons and answering some emergency emails.
But we’ve been back in Beijing for a few days, seeing a few sites we’d missed the first time we were here.  Today we saw a Taoist temple; it was quite a welcome novelty after seeing so many Buddhas in temples and museums… I’m as weary of images of Buddha as I was the ubiquitous “Madonna and Child” motif after months traveling Europe years back.  We also visited a small unrestored temple with gorgeous carvings and statues… they had the original intricate paints, not the cartoonish solid-colors of most of the refurbished temples we’ve seen here.

I was surprised at first to see so many active Buddhists praying in the temples here, since I thought most religion was wiped out in the Cultural Revolution, as it largely was in Soviet Russia.  But M pointed out that the larger number of religions here may have led to a more adaptable approach… Communism is just one more bureaucratic religion that will be absorbed into China, the latest of many.

We then went to a huge bookstore, bustling with hundreds of people; I was hoping to find some English-language translations of Chinese science fiction stories, having read some Soviet sci-fi stories in the past and being interested in the Chinese take on it.   No such luck, though we did get some music CDs and a novel about the Mongolian steppes.

Finally, we ended our stay in China in teahouses… first in one in a hotel, then, coincidentally, dinner at another in the lakes district.

Shanghaied

We spent a day looking around Guilin, another day on the rice terraces, then took the bus down to Yangshuo.  Guilin was nice enough, and interesting to see (we spent most of the day in a natural amusement park of sorts, including the sad zoo, where we did get to see a panda), but the terraces and Yangshuo were spectacular.

Up in the mountains with the rice terraces, we saw the a show by the indigenous women (they have long hair, which they tie in buns atop their heads and wear like a turban), then climbed the peaks and even went a bit off the normal tourist-clogged hilltop onto the narrow trails between stepped paddies.  Here again, the lie was put to Chinese Communism, as these people were both poor and opportunistically capitalist, hawking their souvenirs aggressively in the villages and along the trails (not that we could blame them for preferring that to working the fields, and we did buy this and that).  But the sights were gorgeous, and I’d love to see more of it.

Then down to Yangshuo. This is the area of China with the striking narrow mountains, shrouded in mist.  The first day there, having started a bit late, we biked out to the river and took a bamboo raft back down, then climbed to the top of a small mountain called Moon Hill, a striking peak we’d unknowingly seen from the raft, with a semicircular arch through its middle.  At first, we got to the arch, where there was a scenic view.  But then we followed an unmarked, unpaved trail further out, and eventually up, to the top of the “hill”.  Up there, the sky and the mountains were even more spectacular.  The climb was a doozy, but it was worth it.

That night, we stayed in a place appropriately named Fawlty Towers; it was cheap, but we found out why, with a dubious bathroom, no topsheets or duvet covers for the musty and questionable blankets, and, worst of all, some bizarre wiring problem that caused the ceiling lamp to suddenly start flashing erratically (though it was turned off) at 3 AM.  When I stumbled downstairs to complain, they made us move rooms.  Don’t stay there.

The next day, we rented bikes again, and hired a guide to show us around on a bike tour of the local villages.  It rained most of the day, and I was covered in mud by the end.  We stopped at one of the villages for lunch, whereupon our guide tried to convert us… to Christianity!  I asked him to tell us about the countryside and the villages instead, but he kept coming back to religion, until I had to insist he stop it.  Truth to tell, he wasn’t much of a tour guide, showing us the path but not pointing out or explaining any of the sites unless we asked, and not even much then.  But we still had a good ride over bumpy country roads, and we cought a shower and a plane out to Shanghai.

… Where M promptly fell ill.  Luckily, we’re staying with the mother of a friend, who had their driver take us to a clinic.  Gastroenteritis, apparently, and a nasty case of it, so we are taking it easy today.

Dust to Dust, Fez to Xi’an

We rented a taxi van for the day at the Xi’an airport, along with a Danish couple we met there, to take us directly to the terracotta statues before going to Xian proper.  We had only a day here, and wanted to make the most of it.

The rows of warriors were truly staggering in scope.  Apparently some 600 sites have been discovered, according to the guide we hired.  Qín Shǐhuáng líng, the man who united China in 221 BCE, believed his soul would return to the clay, so he created not just legions of soldiers to serve him in the afterlife, but an entire army infrastructure, including a command and control center and camp followers.  I was reminded of Ozymandius’ two-fold message, and of the Pharoahs.  But he scale here is more vast.

But the driver turned out to be another Fez… he drove us not to our hotel afterward, but detoured to a silk factory… so we could get him a commission.  Then he futzed around taking us to our hotels, with the end result that M and I were too late to see the museum we’d planned on.  We raised a little Cain, and he relented and took us to another site, the Big Goose Pagoda, and got us a guide there.  I was thrilled to find there a shrine to the monk Xuánzàng, the real-life inspiration behind the novel I’m reading, Monkey (an abridged version of Journey to the West, I found out).

We also missed walking on the wall of Xi’an.  But we did get to see the very cool Muslim quarter and the bizarre Chinese mosque there.  The streets of the bazaar outside were so much like Morocco that we’d have found it hard to believe we were in China.  What an odd confluence of events.

Flight Delayed

We’d planned on flying to Xi’an today, but we didn’t realize that in order to pay for tickets with the reservation site we’re using (CTrip.com), we had to pay 24 hours in advance to use a foreign (US) credit card.  So we saw some local sites, got oil massages, and fly out tomorrow.  We had to make a snap decision about how long to stay there, so we will fly the next morning to Guilin.

Walking the Wall

Today, M and I hiked along the Great Wall.  We hired the same driver several other conventioneers had found, and he dropped us off at Jinshanling, driving to Simatai to wait for us there.  We walked and clambered and climbed the Wall for about 14 kilometers, past or through about 35 beacon towers (spaced, apparently, such that no space in between was out of bow range).  The Wall was crumbled in places, and breath-takingly steep in others… but that didn’t stop the hordes of locals who greeted us regularly along the way with trinkets, postcards, t-shirts, and drinks; clustered in twos and threes, they cajoled and even followed us.  They had a network of secret paths they used to get to and between towers, and they seemed to work together to some extent (“Coke? Beer? Postcard? You buy later…”).  We did buy a few things (normally water), more out of sympathy and admiration than need.  China is amazingly, aggressively capitalist.  The invaders of ages past now make their living from the Wall itself.

The Great Wall itself is impressive, snaking (or rather, dragon-ing) across the mountains, clawing up and down the foothills.  While not as old as I had thought (this section was built between 18 and 33 generations ago), it was nonetheless an impressive sight.

Shiny Happy People

My initial frame of reference for Chinese culture was my travel in Japan.  I’ve been there 3 or 4 times (twice for a couple weeks at a time, traveling around), have some Japanese friends, and know a bit about their pop culture, so it was by far the Asian country I was most familiar with.  Coming to China, I was struck almost immediately by the difference.

The Chinese are really friendly.

The Japanese are often more polite, but rather more reserved.  The Chinese may not be as polite, but they seem more genuinely approachable and gregarious.  Strikingly so.  It seems to me that they are both more polite and more friendly than Americans in general, too.  They are helpful and just seem to smile more, and the kids especially are quick to shyly say “hello”.  The parents also seem very indulgent of their kids, for what that’s worth, but they kids seem well-behaved nonetheless.

They are also rather taken with M, no doubt because of her fair skin, height, and (if I may say so) beauty.  They want to take pictures of her, and with her, quite frequently.

A slightly less wholesome side of this lightness of spirit is the ease with which I’ve seen people here slip into defense or praise of their government, and what might be a complacence about political matters.  The propaganda in China, in tourist papers and on TV (and especially regarding the Olympics), is as thick as the air; I need a knife and fork to breathe here sometimes.

Time and The Forbidden City

On our first day since M arrived, we set out to the Forbidden City, one of the must-sees of Beijing.  In front of the hotel, we bumped into a woman who works for Microsoft in the area of accessibility, and we shared a taxi, then decided to hang out the rest of the day.  She and I had a surprising amount in common, and bored M silly with talk of standards and accessible graphics.  We walked around Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, and then took a bicycle rickshaw to the hip lake district for dinner and souvenir shopping.

In the Forbidden City, I rented an audio-tour player, and relayed tidbits to them along the way.  I learned about various measurement devices there (such as a sundial) which were not merely the official standard for the empire (e.g. for time); one of the roles of the Emperor, was as supreme –even divine– authority of Heaven’s standards on Earth.  Perhaps that’s taking it a bit far, but it does emphasize the importance of standards (even arbitrary ones) in making a collection of disparate entities work together, be they formerly independent kingdoms or browsers.  It’s worth noting that even today, despite China’s breadth, it has not four or five time zones, but only one.