We are packing for next week’s Software Development Management Training in Cheng Du, where I will deliver three training sessions during the five day training. They are Microsoft Product Cycle Model Overview, Development Process and Tools in Microsoft, and Software Usability. The training will start from Sept 23 to Sept 28.
Tonight, I enjoyed the ice cream mooncakes from Haagen-Dazs. The Belgian chocolate flavor ice cream is really nice, as described on its web site: “When the first spoonful melts in your mouth the moment is pure pleasure”.
Haagen-Dazs changed its products a lot to meet Chinese styles and festivals. It seems Haagen-Dazs did great job in penertrate into the mooncake market of Shanghai. As I know, more than 10,000 joint-venture company employees received Haagen-Dazs mooncake certificates from efesco. This is also the third year I receive the Haagen-Dazs mooncake certificate. It must be one of the big deals of this
It is not long since Haagen-Dazs appeared in Shanghai. I still remember I attended the opening ceremony of Haagen-Dazs in Shanghai Center six years ago. Now, it has opened about four stores in Shanghai (based on the stores I know). There are two Haagen-Dazs stores near the building I am working in. One more store is under construction near my old apartmnt. It also expanded its coverage to Beijing, Dalian, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, according to China Online’s report.
I have chatted with Bill Lum about another European company IKEA. I told him the store is very profitable in Shanghai and Beijing.
“If there is a holiday or a promotion, there are sometimes as many as 10,000 people here, so many you can’t move”
said Linda Shi, PR manager of IKEA Shanghai Store
Source: siamfuture.com
It is very true. When the store opens in 1997, I have visited the store and only few people are there. The price in the store is considered very high. Now, every Saturday, there are so many people that “you cannot move”. It is more like a supermarket of furnitures.
They are going to the second store in Shanghai. With 35,000 square meters’ store area, the new store will be the largest IKEA store in Asia. I was very supprised when Bill told me IKEA opened a store in San Francisco only one year before.
Update March 30, 2003
New IKEA store will open on April 16, 2003 in Shanghai… FULL STORY
Tomorrow is the traditional holiday in China, known as Mid-Autumn Festival. I’d like to send my best wishes to my dearest GF, my families my friends, my old classmates, my colleagues, and all visitors of this site.
Mid-Autumn is an occasion for families reunion. Families get together to eat moon cake. However, I am 1000+ km away from my parents in Luoyang, and 12,000+ km away from my brother in Toronto. I regret that I didn’t send the moon cake to them earlier so that they can get it on the Mid-Autumn Festival night. Fortunately, I will enjoy the holiday tomorrow with my GF. It is also sweet.
Today, I got a question from my reader:
Are there any reasonably priced shuttle services to get me from Shanghai Pudong airport to my hotel near Peoples Park?
It must be a very frequently asked question. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get an answer — I checked on the web but couldn’t find any useful resource before I gave up after five minutes.
Here is my suggestion:
The most convienit and cheap way to get from Pu Dong Airport to anywhere in the dowtown is to go by the Airport Bus. There are five lines connecting Pu Dong and downtown Shanghai.
| # | From | To | Price (RMB) /Estm. USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pu Dong Airport | Hong Qiao Airport | 22 RMB / 2.65 USD |
| 2 | Pu Dong Airport | Shanghai Exihition Center (Near Ritz Carlton or People’s Square) | 19 RMB
/ 2.28 USD |
| 3 | Pu Dong Airport | Zun Yi Road | 20 RMB / 2.40 USD |
| 4 | Pu Dong Airport | East Jiang Wan Rd. | 18 RMB
/ 2.16 USD |
| 5 | Pu Dong Airport | Shanghai Railway Station | 18 RMB /
2.16 USD |
Source: etang.com
The service time is 6:00~19:00 for downtown or 8:00~21:00 for Pu Dong Airport. For more information, you can call +86-21-38484500.
Hope this is useful for you if you travel to Shanghai.
See also:
Updated: Questions and Answers
Felicia from Singapore asked
What is operation hours & days that the bus from Pudong Airport to Shanghai Exhibition Center (Route #2) and vice versa operate?
A: It operates seven days a week. The first bus will leave Shanghai Exhition Center at 6:00 AM and returns at 8:00 AM from Pudong Airport. The last bus will leave Shanghai Exhibition center at 19:00 and returns from Pudong at 21:00
Is there fix timing for the buses daily eg departure every hour or half hour?
There is no fixed schedule for the bus. There is a fixed interval of 15 to 20 minutes. For busy hours, it is scheduled with 15 minutes interval and the interval is 20 minutes normally. There is no definition of busy hours or normal hours. Mabe it depends on the mood of the operator. :-)
How do I go about getting bus tickets from Shanghai Exhibition Center to Pudong Airport?
You can buy tickets after get onboard the bus. You don’t need a ticket to get onboard.
However, it is a little bit wired to find the bus stop. It is at the gate of Shanghai Exhibition Center on Nanjing Xi Rd. (or someone call it Nanjing Rd. West), opposite to Shanghai Center (Shanghai Center is also know for the Portman Riz-Carton Hotel inside). Please check your hotel receiption for detailed walking direction – there is no bus stop there though.
9:50 PM
As I promised before, I will share with the steps to set up a webcam to broadcast real time video with Windows Media Encoder in this article.
Before I begin, please visit my webcam page to experience what you are going to create. (It will open a new window.)
Overview
There are two part of this article. The first part is the client side configuration. Please make you check you can view the content of my webcam from your Windows client. A simple troubleshooting guide is included.
The second part is the server side configuration. I will guide you to setup the hardware and software on the server side, so you can broadcast what your webcam captures to the whole world.
Client side platform supported
Your experience will depend on the operating system you are using.
Bandwidth required
I am using broadband in my home. You should also use a high speed connection. I have tested it from different locations around China. It works very good for both broadband connection or T1. My friend Bill Lum also told me that he can view the video smoothly in San Francisco. For modem dial-up, maybe you can only see black window, with “buffering” always there on status bar. Try a faster connection.
Troubleshooting when connecting
Check the status bar of the Windows Media Player. The correct status bar sequence should be
If you see Ready in status bar but the video does not come out, it means there is a connection problem, or the Windows Media Encoder is not running on my server side.
If you can only see stable Buffering, it must be a speed problem.
Hurry, tell me how you made it
Well. After addressing the client side requirements and troubleshooting steps, let’s take a look at the server side.
Hardware
A normal computer that can run Windows XP is fine. Mine is a Intel Celeron 440, 256M Memory. Pretty low configured, isn’t it?
OS
I am using Windows XP. Windows 2000 will also do.
Webcam
Any webcam should be fine. I am using Samsung Anycam. The only annoying thing I met was, Windows does not natively support it, so I need to download driver separately for it.
Media Server
Broadcasting from home does not need a Windows Media Server, the only software you need is Windows Media Encoder. It is FREE. You can download the latest version from Microsoft web site.
Install the Windows Media Encoder
Download Windows Media Encoder (9 MB) first. Installation the Windows Media 9 Series is as easy as installing any other Microsoft product, even easier. Click Next forth and click the Finish button will do the work. The only additional step you need to go is choosing “I agree” at the End User License Agreement page.
Configure Windows Media Encoder
Follow the New Session Wizard. It should be very easy step, since more of the questions are easy to understand. Here are some tips:
After everything is done, click “Start Encoding”. Congratulations. The server part is done.
How about the client then?
To test, you can open Windows Media Player, click Open URL… on the File menu. In the “Open URL…” dialog box, enter your media source like this,
https://home.wangjianshuo.com:8080
(It is valid source and you can try to open it)
Substitute the source with your server name and the port you chose.
If you can see the video, you can go ahead to create a web page so others can directly view it on a web page as I did.
You can copy the source code of my page into your page. You are free to do so and you don’t need to link back since I got the source code from MSDN sample.
Congratulations
If you have successfully setup your own Windows Media server and can broadcast to the Internet, I will congratulate you on the achievement. I will feel very happy for the 1.5 hour I have spent on this article. My only requirement for you is to write a comment under this article and share the URL of your online broadcasting station with my readers.
“Oops. It does not work as you said”
It may also be common. Write a comment under this article so all the community members, including me, can help you on that.
Happy broadcasting!
Updated
I came across a very interesting site yesterday by reference of andersja’s blog. There is a page named Freedom to Reproduce Content?, I found another blog with 72 comments. Wow. It is a very popluar web site. Finally, I found it is the web site for the famous weblog book – “Web Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs“.
In chapter 3, the author mentioned Blogger Code. It is interesting that someone over there are developing different strange tools and codes to claify bloggers. It is very cool and interesting.
Here is my blogger code
B1 d++ t+ k s+ u– f+ i- o+ x– e+ l c
You can use this decoder to decode it.
P.S. My Blog on broadband in Shanghai was mentioned on Rice Cooker today. Thanks.
Today, I was shocked when I found my name appreared on my favorite weblog andersja’s blog. It is even more astonishing when I found my name was related to something negative – copier.
“I like writing articles and other content for my weblog, and I like tinkering with design – visually and technically. Now, wangjianshuo has copied my CSS stylesheet and also other MT config elements very closely, and I’m not entirely sure if I’m comfortable with it.
Other people occationally nab links without linking back… not exactly weblog etiquette, but something we’ll have to live with…?”
andersja wrote.
I have to say, it is my fault not to be careful enough to link back to the site I copied from or inspired by for all instances. However, I did link back in some blogs.
I have changed my site after I saw andersja’s post. For some of my readers of page was directed by the post, I still keep a copy of my original page, so you know what andersja said is true.
I wrote a comment to clarify the whole thing. This is the comment I posted with a little bit change to add hyperlink to words instead of leaving the unclickable URLs.
Hi andersja,
This is Jian Shuo Wang, the “copier?you mentioned in your blog.
== Firstly, I apologize ==
First of all, I have to admit that I have used your CSS completely and I added category link function as you did on your site. I sincerely apologize for it since it has made your feel uncomfortable.
== But the true is, I did link back ==
You may misunderstand me on linking-back. The truth is, I did link back.
On my first blog at MovableType Successfully Installed on Windows XP, at the end, in the Acknowledge section, I wrote:
“I also want to thank andersja, the owner of anderrsja’s blog. His site on weblog are very well done. I learnt a lot on categories and the pertential usage of MovableType from his site.”
Certainly I swear I did it on the day of Sept 11 instead of adding it after you got angry. Geo, my friend at http://russianlegs.com can also confirm it, since he also commented after my blog.
In the acknowledgement part, I mentioned the categories function on your web site. It inspired me a lot and I decided to make my own category links. I finally completed the function on the day before yesterday with the help with MovableType document.
I noticed you may have read this article since you wrote comment for this blog on the same day — Sept 11, 2002 09:48 PM:
“Thanks for your feedback and congratulations with getting Movable Type running on XP – very cool (I haven’t seen it done before :-)
Happy blogging!
Posted by: andersja on September 11, 2002 09:48 PM?
Maybe you didn’t notice I linked you back on my first blog.
== More evidence that I did link back ==
On my forth blog, I started my paragraph with
“Inspired by andersja’s Optimizing Movable Type (part 3) – get more readers , I sent my blog site to DMOZ.org.”
Posted by Jian Shuo Wang at September 14, 2002 09:31 PM | Categories: MovableType
As you can see, as a beginer of blogging (only 6 logs so far), I have read carefully on many of your articles on your site and was trying to follow your steps to setup a blog. This includes registering my blog on DMOZ.org. But after I did, I wrote in my blog to thank andersj for the great inspiration you gave me.
I wrote six blogs so far and two of them mentioned that I am inspired by your site. I didn’t put you on a seperate link for your site on the right pane of my first page. The only reason is, I am running this blog for less than one week and there is too much things for me to improve. I am going to do so now.
== The facts ==
I have commented on your page on and received your quick reply. This is very helpful for me. Although I have been web developer for many years, it is the first time I setup blog and the first time to play with Perl and MT stuff (as I mentioned at the beginning of my first blog. I worked very hard to get some idea from other great site like yours. I was using MT’s default CSS template. I just wanted to change the font to Verdana instead of the odd font. At that time, I copied your CSS and made very little modification and used it in my site.
== Anyway, I apologize ==
Again, I admit I did it. I should have mentioned somewhere on my blog, but I haven’t yet. That is “not exactly weblog etiquette”. I will go back to change it to the default one immediately if this made you uncomfortable.
Please be assured that I am not “fighting back” in this comment. I am still grateful for everything you did on your site, including sharing your setup experience of MT and your tips to optimizing MT. They inspired me a lot. That is the source of my first blog “MovableType Successfully Installed on Windows XP” and later, “Webcam Set Up, Broadcasting Shanghai”. I will also continue to share how I created the site and how to make things work as you did. I agree with you weblog etiquette is very important and I am always trying my best to follow. Sometimes I may make mistakes and I will be fully responsible for that.
Please do not hesitate to let me know if any of my content or behavior makes you think I do not respect other people on the net. I’d like to hear and like to improve.
Best wishes
Jian Shuo Wang
The Copier
As always, Anders replied very soon after I posted my comment. I agree with him on this reply:
To copy from one = plagiarism
To copy from many = inspiration! ;-)
I continued to send email to him and explain the whole story. It seems the mistake has been recovered and the issue has been settled.
More on credibility
Anders is a very kind guy who wrote this only to encourage innovation instead of plagiarism. This reminded me to check throughout my site to ensure I “properly give credit where credit is due“. It is essential to build up the credibility of the site I own.
I was refered to this page by andersja’s page. After that, I found Spartaneity Project is a very good source for credibility.
Result of the review
After carefully reviewing the content of my site, I found I did something good and something bad.
To be honest, I didn’t realize it is so important to add link to sources before this accident. I used it to make it easy to verify accuracy of the information of my site. Now it means something more important to me – to show respect to others by giving others credit. This is the most easy and powerful way to build up my own credit.
I have setup a webcam, broadcasting the street scene from my window in Shanghai.
Click here to view.
How I made it
[coming soon]
Update: The steps are available here.
I am going to improve the camera so that it can be viewed by many people. Now, as far as I know, it should work fine on Windows XP. It may also work on Windows 2000 with Windows Media 7.0 or higher. I cannot garentee you can see it if you are using older version of Windows. Please let me know if you can view online broadcasting or not. Simple click the comments link below. Tell me, “I can see the cars and people moving on the street. My system is … ” or “I can see nothing, except the blank Windows Media Player and Ready on the status bar. My system is …” Thanks.
Today, I found this piece of news about broadband in Korea. This is one of my interest recently. Please read this first.
And the numbers are impressive ?South Korea has the highest per capita broadband penetration in the world. Slightly more than half of its households have high-bandwidth connections, compared to less than 10 percent in the US. The growth in broadband has surged in the last three years from a few hundred thousand subscribers to 8.5 million
As luck would have it, urban apartment dwellers have a lot of broadband capacity right under their noses, courtesy of Kepco, the public power utility, which developed a network of fiber-optic cables for its own use years ago. In 1996, South Korea allowed Kepco to lease the unused 90 percent of its capacity, giving upstart providers a cheap, instant last-mile solution. Sharp competition with Korea Telecom, which the government forced to open its network in the early ’90s, has driven broadband prices down to the world’s lowest levels. All-you-can-eat service is available for as little as $25 a month.
I partly disagree with the report on some details.
South Korea has the highest per capita broadband penetration in the world? No.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings report, Hong Kong seems to be the top region in the world, with amazing 66.6% of people accessing Internet using broadband. German 45%, Switherland 43%…. United States ranked low with 17% broadband access, not less than 10%.
… drives broadband prices down to the world’s lowest level? Maybe.
It is true that it is of the world’s lowest level, but it is not the lowest price in the world. In Shanghai, ADSL (type of DSL) charges 130 RMB ($15.7) each month. For 100M broadband, like GWBN, it costs only 100 RMB ($12) for one month.
Korea did great job in broadband deployment? Yes.
It is amazing to see how Korea is wired with broadband. The online game, PC Baangs, and the certification for buildings…. all sound exciting.
Much more problems ahead for broadband deployment in Shanghai
I checked local media to find the comparasion data in Shanghai. At last, I found this one:
Internet users in Shanghai exceeded one million last week. 61.7% in urban area chose traditional dial-up, the other 38.3% chose broadband.
source: Jie Fang Daily (Chinese site)
However, the situation here is not that good than in Korea. Another report from Eastday.com (Chinese site), only 5% of the residents are subscribers of broadband. News about the finanical difficulties for some broadband companies is full of media.
… or my experience of becoming an ODP (Open Directory Project) editor.
Inspired by andersja’s Optimizing Movable Type (part 3) – get more readers , I sent my blog site to DMOZ.org.
While you’re there – consider signing up as an editor: it’s easy to sign up, there are lots of tools available for you to do your editing, and loads of support to be had from other editors. — andersja
This is a cool idea, so I signed up today to be an editor of http://dmoz.org/Regional/Asia/China/Provinces_and_Regions/Henan/Luoyang/ catalog. This is the city I was born and I’d like to help to build up the portal. It is strange that there is only two sites listed under this category.
I am interested in usability analysis recently and tend to review the usibility of all web site I come across. This is no exception this time – I found it easy to locate the link of “Become an editor”. However, it is confusing that the notice of “This category needs an editor” are seperate from the Adverstisement of “Become an editor”. Why not merge them together by simply say “This category needs an editor. Apply now.” with hyper link of application form?
For the application form, it seems normal, like thousands of similar pages. However, I am quite confused by the section to submit 2 or 3 URLs. This is the road-block to submit my review form. What I am going to do is to submit a review form so I can continue to contribute to the community, but the form designer may thing I must have prepared everything and be ready for this question. To continue, I have to grasp some sites very quickly and submitted it. To be honest, I think the quality shown by these three samples are not the quality I will contribute. It is much lower, since I was not concentrated on that.
How to improve?
There should be seperated into two steps. The first step, you register a user name and password, so you can become a candidate in the database immediately. Later, in order to get reviewed to become an editor, you have plenty of time to come back to complete the sample URL question. This makes more sense.
Zeal.com is doing a better job
Zeal.com is doing the same thing as DMOZ.org. Zeal obviously knows better about community then its competitors. Zeal.com does not only judge whether you are qualified to become a contributor or editor, it also help you to learn and become qualified. The Zeal.com provide guidelines to educate community members to write good descriptions and put sites into the right categories. It also setup the mechanism for peer-to-peer review. The quality quotient reflect the qualify of a contributor, which helps to improve the overall quality of the dictionary.
“Listing may take anything from 2 weeks to several months, so once you’ve submitted, just try to forget about the whole thing… ;-)” andersja said
I cannot agree with you more on that. Submission for free or volunteer based communities should never be too serious. Just submit and forget. It will make life much easier.
11:50 PM
I have been asked about how I can access Internet. For friends in Shanghai, they are curious about the broadband, which is new to the city.
Dial-up: Basically, residents in Shanghai have lots of choices for Internet access from home.
Telephone #: 8163
username: 8163
password: 8163
The Internet service fee will be charged to the caller’s telephone bill. This is very convenience. We don’t need to apply a user account. (What about other regions in the world? Writhe comments and let us hear you.)
Broadband
There are many service providers are competing to gain more market share here in Shanghai
Let me share some facts of the broadband I am using.
Speed The inbound network cable provides 100M access to other servers on the LAN, and provide pretty good Internet access rate (not very sure about the exact bandwidth now) I tried to download some files, the transfer rate displayed on downloading dialog box is typically 40 KB/sec to 100 KB/sec.
IP address GWBN is providing dynamic, real IP address.
inetnum: 211.161.107.0 – 211.161.107.255
netname: GWBN-SH-COMMUNITY145
descr: FOR GWBN SHANGHAI # 145 RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITY BROADBAND NETWORK USERS’ BROADBAND ACCESS
country: CN
admin-c: JM97-AP
tech-c: JM97-AP
mnt-by: MAINT-CNNIC-AP
changed: mengjian@gwbn.net.cn 20020715
status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE
source: APNIC
I guess the so-called “# 145 RESIDENTIAL COMMUNITY” refers to Vanke Waltz Garden. That means 773 families are sharing the 255 IP addresses. It is pretty good, since only about 5% of the residents are subscribers now.
I randomly checked some IP from 211.161.0.18 to 211.161.253.18 and found them all belong to GWBN. It seems the company has lots of IP addresses for the broadband services.
10:09 PM
Recently, I am involved in the discussion with some students from East China Normal University[Chinese site]. Most of them are computer science or related majors. Billy Qiu is one of them. He is a talented guy who actively initialized the MSN Messenger chat with me the day before yesterday.
After we discussed, the technical club members are going to setup some interest groups on campus to discuss technology trends and share technical resources.
Actually this is a very good idea, just as Apple’s User Group and Internet .NET Associate, the local interest groups will highly help the participants to learn technologies.
During our discussion on the proposals, Billy also shared some concerns.
“They (the students) dont like to do logistics & admin work. What they really care, and really interested is just the core technology. Knowing about the GAME rule, following the rule, making proposal, and calling group meetings… etc are very boring, they think.” Billy said.
I fully understand Billy’s concern. It reminded me about the time when I was in Shanghai Jiaotong University[Chinese site]. It is back to 1995-1999. At that time, Internet access is not popular and there is very few resources on intranet. It changes greatly recently. Take a look at Shanghai Jiao Tong University:
Despit all this improvement, the campus of nowadays in China are still far behind the pace of global IT in terms of electronic communications. I’d like to see some students on campus really think hard and think out of box, inspire others with the possibility IT may bring to their lives.
A lot of powerful tools has been avaiable for online collaboration. For example, Blogger, or knowledge managemetn tools such as SharePoint Team Services, and other online collaboration tools are very good for use on campus. During the process of implementation, students will learn a lot.
If I have to learn something, I learn it by doing.
-Arstoter
My thoughts for all the borthers
Later, I found there is no classroom reservation system, which can be used to reserve classrooms electronicly. There is no online libary services, which will help to deliver the book you want to your dorm. There is very large space there. I will keep my eyes on their progress and I’d like to see them make great impact using the technologies.
Good luck
Please check Comments below to share your thoughts on the possibilities IT will change students lives.
To be honest, I don’t know too much about Perl. However, to make the best weblog system work – Movable Type, I installed Perl onto my Windows XP machine from scretch. I believe I am not alone to install MT to Windows XP machines – although I believe there will not be too many people doing so – so I’d like to record the steps for other’s reference. It is also a good resource for myself if I need to rebuild the server.
Environment
Windows XP
Inetnet Information Server (IIS)
Install Perl on Windows XP
Download MT source code
Configure IIS for Perl and perl script with .CGI extension to work
Configure MT to work on my site
Updated: Install additional MT modules
Before you can run your MovableType, you still need to install more required ActivePerl components. As stated in Checking for Perl Modules section of MovableType Installation menual, you need to run https://home.wangjianshuo.com/mt/mt-check.cgi.
At the time I downloaded ActivePerl, it includes most of the required modules except the following:
DB_File
Image-Size
HTML-template
Typically, you need to follow these steps:
1. Start -> Run
2. Type “cmd” and click “OK”
3. In DOS command line, enter “PPM” (without quotation marks)
4. When PPM> prompt apprears, type “Install HTML-template”
5. Wait until it is installed, then type “Install Image-Size”
6. Type “Install DB_File”
7. Quite PPM program.
Thanks for Jeff for pointing this out. I forgot to add this item before.
Updated again Fail to Install DB_File
If you see this error message when installing DB_File
PPM> Install DB_File
Install package ‘DB_File?’ (y/N): Y
Installing package ‘DB_File’…
Error installing package ‘DB_File’: Read a PPD for ‘DB_File’, but it is not inte
nded for this build of Perl (MSWin32-x86-multi-thread)
You may try to follow the steps below:
PPM Install c:\temp\DB_File.ppdThanks for Samuel Wan for pointing this out for me. I have also wrote another blog entry on this: DB_File Error When Installing MovableType
Complete the installation
Updated Sending Email on Windows XP
Sending email on Unix system seems easy. Just configure the sendmail command and it will work. Typically you don’t have any SMTP server that you can configure MT to send to. To port MovableType on Windows system (Windows 2000 or Windows XP or Windows .NET Server), you will need to configure the SMTP services of IIS.
MailTransfer smtp
SMTPServer localhost
Replace localhost with the host name of your SMTP server if you are hosting the servers on two machines.
Acknowledgement
This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.