Like a few other cultures in the world, modern China comes with thousands of years of tradition behind it. As with those others, it sometimes struggles to find a way to make that tradition and history mesh well with modern life (most often by simply jettisoning the former). However, every once in a while, you’ll see an example of how the Chinese will take a tradition and … get a little carried away with it. The results are as breathtakingly brilliant as they are horrifying.

The first example I came across was in late 2006, early 2007, when I read about the practice of minghun, or ghost marriages. Essentially, having an unmarried son in traditional China is bad enough — having him die without being married is nearly unbearable for some, so they endeavour to find him a bride. Various members of the clergy will offer to help the family find a family recently bereaved of a daughter whose horoscope is compatible with that of their son, and then arrange to have the couple ‘married’ and then buried together, so that they may enjoy a happy (and apparently quite frisky, according to academic Ping Yao) afterlife together. In some cases, the family of the male will compensate the family of the female for the hassle.

And that’s where the entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese comes in and things start to get carried away. Normally, families will rely on networks of friends and relatives to find these deceased single women to marry to their deceased sons. But in some cases, there are none to be found, or those found are too long dead to be appropriate for the deceased son. Suddenly there appears a market for brokers who will help expand the search and find an appropriate bride, for a fee of course.

Now, in order to earn that fee, sometimes brokers will start bending the rules. For those cases where they truly cannot find an appropriate corpse, some will find themselves resorting to grave robbing. Knowing that a newer corpse will do better than an older corpse, some will stake out funerals, wait until the evening, and then nip the fresher corpse in return for a higher fee.

Which leads some extreme people to just start murdering women to get the freshest corpse possible and the highest price. Sure, they’ll target prostitutes, the mentally handicapped, the infirm, and other easy targets at first, but even those will get hard to come by and it’s only a matter of time before they’re arrested after abducting somebody off a city street at night.

I more or less forgot about this over the years, however, and it was only recently that I came across another example that made me put it all together and brought back memories of the ghost marriages. The second incidence came from a news report about arrests at a funeral.

Again, centering around burial traditions, it was noted that many people in poorer parts of the country believe that the larger the send-off you give somebody into the afterlife, the more the deceased is honoured. Families will thus try to ensure that as large of a crowd as possible will attend the funeral.

When mere appeals to people’s decency or sentiments doesn’t work, you start bribing people to show up, perhaps with free booze and food, or by making important people attend the proceedings.

But when even that fails, once again, the enterprising business mind comes to the rescue: why not hire strippers to perform at the funeral. It’s never hard to find farmers who are willing to hang out somewhere for a few hours when there are hot naked women to be had.

This, in fact, led to the formation of funeral stripper troupes, and subsequently government “funeral misdeed” hotlines. Thus, the arrests in Jiangsu province (interestingly enough, also in 2006, although the news has just come around again) of five people involved in organising these funeral strippers.

Now, before you decide to berate me for looking down on the Chinese or otherwise laughing at their silly traditions and beliefs, please note that my intention is exactly the opposite — to show how the magical combination of a massive population (1.4 billion and counting), thousands of years of history, and a mercantilist / entrepreneurial spirit I have not seen elsewhere in the world can, on extremely rare occasions, come together to produce brilliantly bizarre results. You can say a lot about China, but you can never, ever say it’s boring.

Further reading:

• http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1296184.ece
• http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/world/asia/05china.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_marriage_(Chinese)
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5280312.stm?lsm
• http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/55/054.html
• http://mrjam.typepad.com/diary/2008/05/the-tale-of-the.html
• http://jfh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/3/207

A local photographer of Malaysian/Singaporean origin by the name of Stefen Chow (no, not Steven Chow) once uttered what I find to be a brilliant way to understand China and its history:

If you want to understand the first 3000 years of China’s history, go to Xi’an.
To understand the last 300 years, go to Beijing.
For the last 30 years, go to Shenzhen.

(paraphrased slightly).

That really about sums it up.

Visit the JustLooking home page

I am happy to announce the immediate availability of JustLooking 3.3.3. This is a minor maintenance release, and includes the following:

• A couple of minor bug fixes related to resources and window sizing.
• Romanian translation (ro) by Silviu Turuga
• Arabic translation (ar) by Mohammed Al-Yousef
• Portuguese (Portugal) (pt_PT) translation by André Lamelas

The JustLooking home page has links to the new files to download.

As always, any feedback, comments, or gifts of bottles of wine are appreciated! :)

Enjoy!

How things have changed in a few short months since I wrote an article commenting on my lack of understanding of the Twitter phenomenon. I now use it daily, and even much more so than Adium or Skype for much of my chattering with Beijing locals (you should absolutely be following me, @marcwan). In some ways, writing little 140 character messages in twitter space is like farting in the wind – who knows who’s going to notice. But there is one surprising side-effect of these short messages that I’ve decided I really enjoy: It encourages better writing.

Of course, many people will smply strt wrtng lke ths 2 get thngs 2 fit, but for those people who use Twitter for more professional goals, and attempt to maintain a (reasonably) polished appearance there, the 140 character limit forces you to really think about what you’re going to say and how you want to say it.

As somebody who all too often uses words like actually, really, absolutely, reasonably, and softens many sentences to make them avoid seeming too concrete or prescriptive, Twitter has really forced me to cut these out and start writing more succinctly. This is a good thing™.

(Interesting side note: you can type a lot more Chinese in 140 characters you can Western languages. Those characters pack a lot of meaning, and you can basicaly write a paragraph or two per Tweet. Contrast that with the struggle to fit a single sentence in the same space).

So, here’s to hoping my blog posts become increasingly less long-winded. All thanks to Twitter. Who’da thunk it?

One of the things I have always enjoyed about Asia is the feeling of constant change. As a self-confessed junkie of experiences new and different, I find seeing everything slightly different every day soothing and intriguing, as opposed to stressful and disorienting. Watching a country like China not only change and evolve, but do so in a loony-short period of time is nothing short of intoxicating. While many people I know don’t exactly understand the scope or speed of these changes, I have a perfect example to show this: The Beijing subway system.

When I first moved here in 2006, the subway system was dominated by Line 1 – the straight east-west line – and line 2 – the line that follows the second ring road around the core of the inner city. Add in an extension in the east and a big sweeping line to try and catch the area north of the city, and you have the following map:

As an interesting side note, while circular subways and roads look really pretty on paper, I firmly believe they are an urban planning disaster. The rest of your transportation system basically degenerates into short straight routes to get people onto those circular systems, which then become massively overloaded and break down, yet remain the only way to get around anywhere. Witness Beijing’s 5 ring roads. The inner 2nd Ring Road is a giant parking lot. The 3rd, with a radius maybe 3km wider, is also a mess. Only the 4th and 5th Ring Roads, which stay well away from the city, finally have reasonable traffic. But to get anywhere, you basically have to still get on the 2nd or 3rd rings, which means you’re not going anywhere fast in this city.

Fast forward two short and very exciting years to the 2008 Olympic games, and the Beijing subway system already looks like this:

Ignoring the Feng Shui people screaming about how asymmetric or ugly the new lines are, the city is trying new lines that cut across key neighbourhoods requiring coverage, and also trying to get people to other key neighbourhoods (i.e. Guomao where Lines 10 and 1 meet up) without pushing them onto the circular Line 2. The new Airport Express line lets you choose between Lines 10, 2, or the giant Dongzhimen Bus Terminal, which is right where it meets the Line 2 station.

This is what we have now, although the map will be out of date in 6-8 weeks: Line 4 from the Northwest corner of the city down to Beijing South Station (trains) will be opening then.

But the city is still woefully undercovered by subway tracks. Unlike other metropolitan areas, however (poor Toronto comes to mind), that limp along with outdated and overused undergrounds, the Chinese are determined to solve this. Behold the plan for the next 6 years.

The nice thing is? It will happen. From simple and toy like to world-class in 10 years. Nice.

I was doing a bit of ego-searching on my name today to see how my websites and books were doing in search rankings.

I was presented with the following adwords link on the right:

I wonder how much Marc Wandschneiders go for. I bet it’s not very much.

Visit the JustLooking home page

I am happy to announce the immediate availability of JustLooking 3.3.2. This is a minor maintenance release, and includes the following:

• An important JPEG image rotation bug fix.
• A completely new Croation translation by Orlando Mali (thanks!).

The JustLooking home page has links to the new files to download.

As always, any feedback, comments, or gifts of bottles of wine are appreciated! :)

Enjoy!

Visit the JustLooking home page

I am happy to announce the immediate availability of JustLooking 3.3.1. This is a minor maintenance release, and includes the following:

• A quick bug fix for image blurring in the main window that I accidentaly re-introduced in 3.3.
• A completely new Turkish translation by Oğuzhan Öçbe (thank you).
• Updates to French and Korean

The original 3.3 release announcment has links to the new files to download.

As always, any feedback, comments, or gifts of bottles of wine are appreciated! :)

Enjoy!

In a word: yes.

Features aside, which those of us stuck with older iPhones won’t be able to use (No compass? What will I do when I’m lost hiking on the Great Wall?), the new operating system has made some serious performance gains in the web browsing arena. The graphic going around the intarwebs right now:

Even on the same old iPhone 3G, browsing performance is massively improved. Hopefully there are other performance improvements in the OS, such as app launch times or general lagginess you tend to see.

I absolutely love how these results are still all an order of magnitude slower than a reasonably low-end mac laptop. 15-45s vs … 1.3s. Excellent.

Visit the JustLooking home page

I am thrilled to announce the immediate availability of JustLooking 3.3.2. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger or newer) based computer. JustLooking is a Universal Binary, and can be run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. The program is and will always be very free

• Download JustLooking-3.3.2.dmg now (HTTP – USA)
• Download JustLooking-3.3.2.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB)

Version 3.3.2 of JustLooking is the best version yet, and contains some massive changes and improvements over previous versions:

• Switching between images is significantly smoother and less jerky than before.
• Images can now be sorted by the same order as “Finder”, or by date, with support for reverse sorting.
• Shuffle mode for full screen slide show.
• You can now rename files or move them to a different folder
• When you ‘save as’ or move an image to a different directory, you can now tell JustLooking not to switch folders and reload the file list.
• Image properties and meta data (i.e. Exif) are now properly saved along with files. Colour Profiles are also correctly managed now.
• Zooming is fixed to be a bit less unpredictable
• File resizing and saving is also much better than before, although, due to limitations in the CoreImage filters I’m using for resizing, still not perfect. The huge white lines seen in previous versions after resizing are now gone, but there are still some unfortunate artifacts on occasion. I will completely rewrite this code for the 4.0 series of JustLooking.
• The JustLooking application icon looks less horrible now.
• New Slovakian translation!

JustLooking 3.3 ships in the following languages:

• French
• Italian
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Dutch
• Slovenian
• Polish
• Korean
• Catalàn
• Finnish
• German
• Slovakian (new!)
• Turkish (new!)
• Croatian (new!)

Swedish, Russian, Traditional Chinese, and Norwegian have not been included in this version as they are getting too out of date now.

Feedback and Bug Reports

I will soon begin work on 4.0, although I have a full time job now (gotta pay the bills, y’see), so the progress will be a bit slower again. If you have any feature requests, please do let me know, and I will endeavour to add them.

A few hundred times a day, I run across a Chinese character that I’ve never seen before. Or – quite frequently – one that I’ve seen and looked up a dozen times, but for which I can never remember the meaning. I make a point of getting off my butt once or twice a day to look it up again. On rare occasions, I will be rewarded with a character whose meaning is: itself.

My favourite two examples so far are:

• 崂 (láo)
• 兖 (yǎn)

The first is typically defined as “The 崂 in 崂山 (láoshān)”. 崂山 is a national park / nature area near the city of Qingdao (青岛) in Shandong (山东) province. The 崂 character really has no other use apart from the occasional transliteration of a foreign sound

Similarly, 兖 refers to the Yan River and the major city which lies on it, Yanzhou (兖洲 – yǎnzhōu). That’s it.

You know you’ve made it big in China when you get your own character (汉字 – hànzì) that a zillion Chinese kids have to study and memorise.

Twice now in the last couple of years, I have needed to know the number of seconds in a year for some code I’ve written (always web-site stuff, it seems).

Twice now, in the last couple of years, I have immediately known that there are 525600 minutes in one year. Because of the musical “Rent”. The most god-awful mind-numbing tediously horrible 2.5 hour nap in my life.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, a quick summary:

• Everybody has AIDS.
• They’re homeless bums, but they’re bohemians, so it’s cool.
• Did I mention everybody has AIDS?

This might very well be a throw-yourself-off-a-bridge kind of admission … I’m overcome with shame.

When I first arrived in Beijing in 2006, the city was booming. Everything seemed to be gearing up for the 2008 Summer Olympic games, and the locals couldn’t build fast enough. Part of this insanity was the embracing of everything Western, including Western-style grocery stores. For most of their history, the Chinese have been going to farmer’s markets, or 农贸市场 (nóngmàoshìchǎng) in the local vernacular. The folks here ply their wares selling fruits, vegetables, wheat products such as noodles and bread, or meat, but rarely a mix of them. When I first arrived in the city, we found one lady who wouldn’t rip us off too much, and would sell us vegetables at a fair price so I could cook at home. The arrival of the western-style supermarket looked a direct threat to their existence.

A key example of this was the newly opened 华普超市 (huápǔ chāoshì) or Hypermarket (Huapu is a transliteration of hyper) just up the road from my old house in Beijing’s Soviet neighbourhood. In addition to all the foods that locals were familiar with, there were huge sections carrying new, strange western goods such as cheese, bacon, breakfast cereals, more soda than you could shake a stick at, and candies, candies, candies. There were pretty uniformed girls hawking these goods heavily, and, more interestingly, other uniformed people explaining to the locals just what exactly things were, how you would use them, and why you would use them – “Yes, it’s smoked pigs’ leg. You put it in a frying pan and cook it, and then eat it along with some fried eggs for breakfast”. The locals weren’t sure what exactly they were buying, but with all the hullaballoo in the run-up to the Games, it must be good, so they patiently tried it out.

The French couldn’t open up their massive Carrefour stores fast enough to keep up with demand. All of the locations in Beijing were complete mad-houses on any given weekend, and there too, in addition to roast ducks, pigs feet, or the freshest in local seafood types, were the people helpfully explaining what red wine is and how to drink it, and what the best kind of washing machine and toaster over you should be buying would be.

You can’t touch this

Cue forward three years and one successful Olympic games, and what a difference in Chinese supermarkets today. Not unexpectedly, things have calmed down a lot since the Olympics, and while the local economy hasn’t crashed as hard as those in the west, things are definitely more sedate here now. In nearly all of the supermarkets I’ve been to over the last month, there has been quite the retrenchment in terms of products sold – gone are the breakfast cereals, the huge selections of dairy products and cheeses seen before, and even Carrefour’s wine section seems smaller. Even fruit, produce, and meat all seem to be reduced as well, with the stores now mainly making their money off staples such as rice, pulses, and dry goods (and instant noodles – never forget instant noodles).

The farmer’s markets and fruit stands are doing as well as they’ve ever done, and selling better produce than the super markets. This suits the local’s buying habits well, as they adore haggling over price with the vendors, and the fixed pricing scheme of supermarkets piques the local mindset to no end. Indeed, instead of encouraging the Chinese to adapt to unfamiliar Western dietary habits (sweet? for breakfast?), the large stores have had to really work hard to identify what the produce markets are missing, and focus on those – hence the increase in oils, rice, frozen foods, and cleaning supplies, with a huge decrease in perishable goods.

Does that mean there is no likelihood of the locals’ diets changing any time soon? One clue would be that the size of the soda and candy section at any given supermarket remains large and always looking to expand. Expect larger Chinese children in the near future.

And for those foreigners living in Beijing who simply can’t fathom waking up without a bowl of Frosted Flakes or fresh baguette, there are always the foreign supermarkets catering to them. Just expect to pay Manhattan-like prices for that half-pound of gorganzola cheese.

On Friday night I was at Nánlúogǔxiàng (南锣鼓巷), when the following conversation took place -

The scene: Me, standing around idly playing a game on my iPhone waiting for some friends to finish browsing in the jewelry store, watching the people strolling past.

Chinese guy (very drunk): Ha-looooooooo!
Me (looking up): ?
Chinese guy (getting closer): Ha-loooooooooo!
Me:  Ha-looo?
Chinese guy (still drunk):  Do... you ... uh ... speak ... Chi-neese?
Me:  Yes.
Chinese guy (pointing): 啊太好啦！麻烦你告诉我那边是南边还是北边？
Me: 南边。那边是北边。
Chinese guy: 哈哈哈！我知道了，必须告诉我的女朋友！
Me (smiling)
Chinese guy: Thaaaaannnnk .... you!
(runs off)

Never a dull moment in this city.

One of my favourite restaurants here in Beijing is a place by the name of 黄河水 (huánghéshǔi), or Water of the Yellow River. It’s a Sha’anxi Province (through which the yellow river flows) restaurant, has fantastic noodles, and caters to the locals, which means crazy crowds and lines, simple menus, and low prices.

Most chinese restaurants periodically update their menus and decor with new prices and signs. 黄河水 is no exception, and recently redid their interior. But instead of calling themselves a pulled noodle (扯面) restaurant now, they pulled out the most crazy simplified character any of us have ever seen and started calling themselves a biāngbiāng noodle place. Biāngbiāng is the sound noodles supposedly make when you stretch or pull them, sort of like boing or twang in English.

The character they found for biāng is pictured above. At 42 strokes, it’s hands down the hardest character that I or a Chinese teacher friend of mine have seen so far. None of the dictionaries, computers, or books I have looked at so far have it either. In fact, it’s the only instance of the sound biang I’ve ever seen in Chinese (If you look at all the possible vowel/glide and consonant combinations available in Chinese, a reasonable percentage of them never occur), and is probably made up based on some dialect.

Even nuttier would be that the traditional version, without the simplified radicals, would have at least 10 more strokes, putting it well over 50 !!!

China is currently going through a huge cultural debate as to whether the Simplified character movement of the 50s was a mistake and as to whether they should go back to the traditional characters. As somebody who has learned all of his Chinese in the former, and only had exposure to the latter in the Japanese versions, I will just mention that I’m insanely glad I learned the Simplified ones ….

[Note: This is an article I wrote one day while I was living in Sendai, Japan, in January 2004. I just found it while browsing through my Writing folder and thought I’d post it]

After just over six months of living here in Japan, the question I am most asked is: “How is life in Japan different from back home?”. The other night, at nearly two o’clock in the morning, I stumbled across something on Japanese television that serves as a helpful piece of evidence for my otherwise fumbling and awkward responses.

I was on the phone at the time with my fiancée, who is currently in Seattle completing her studies at the University of Washington. I had been up late reading a linguistics textbook, so it was no problem for her to call as she woke up. Since Japanese apartments are rarely as warm as I’d like them to be, I turned on the TV – as if this would magically make things warmer – before wrapping myself in a blanket and sitting down in the chair next to the telephone.

We chatted about the usual things: the cats, the Korean student living in our house with us, and the problems with the computers that inevitably crop up when the only person with any real knowledge about them leaves for any period of time. As my eyes wandered around the room, they would occasionally settle on the TV screen, where it appeared as though two pairs of males were wandering around with camera crews.

One pair, consisting of a somewhat sumo-like gentleman along with his much skinnier and shorter sidekick (it’s entirely possible that the more petit of the two was of average stature, but it was difficult to say in close quarters), was chasing pretty young Japanese girls around a train station, trying to get them to talk to them in front of the camera. As is normal on Japanese television, a constant stream of text in a funky font would slide across the bottom of the screen, transcribing each utterance they made. Of course, not being very proficient at Japanese, I could only read about 30% of it, and continued to let my eyes wander.

“Oh, and BB (that’s Boutros-Boutros Ghali, our one year old male Egyptian Mau) threw up again. He ate a rubber band, the dumbass,” came the voice over the line, drawing me back into the conversation. Our cats are very cute, but stunningly dimwitted.

The second couple of Japanese men, both of normal stature, also appeared to be spending non-trivial amounts of time running around trying to get pretty young girls to talk to them as well. They were in a bar talking with a girl band with three members. The sumo guy and his sidekick had since walked into a ramen bar, and had managed to get the three girls working there to agree to do something for them, again all helpfully spelled out for me at the bottom of the screen in an alphabet I can only barely read at extremely slow speeds.

“And I managed to get a new network hub, replace all the cables, and plug everything in. And it all works! Aren’t you proud of me?”

I really was, but at that time, strangely more concerned with why the four men were all in a hot-tub that had a rope drawn across the middle to divide them up into their groups. The hot-tubs were, in fact, what they call onsen here in Japan. Being one of the most seismically active countries in the worlds means lots of lava under the earth, which translates into some delightfully hot water coming forth from the ground. The Japanese, being incredibly crafty, harness this hot water and have places where you can go sit in it all over the country. It’s extremely common to see people doing this on evening television variety shows – the only caveat being that, while onsen typically separate bathers by gender and all are naked, on television they are wrapped in a towel.

So, while we were discussing the latest batch of bills that had arrived in Seattle, I was watching a hot tub with four men in towels, an announcer with a scoreboard, and a dividing line keeping the two groups apart. And then, from behind a rice-paper screen, arrive two girls in towels. They look somewhat nervous, smile at the camera, say something in Japanese, and get into the hot tub with the two normal guys. Then arrive three others, who get in to the tub with the sumo and sidekick. This continues until a commercial break, which distracts me and encourages me to pay closer attention to the phone conversation.

When my eyes next return to the screen, after some discussions of exercise (we’re both members of the latest and greatest fad diet: eating less and doing more exercise), there are many girls on both sides of the tub, and the two normal guys have 22 points to sumo and sidekick’s mere 11 points. Something about a bi-kappu flashes across the bottom, but I don’t quite catch it – two year old children are significantly more proficient at this language than I am. Where are those points coming from?

Well, stroll in the three girls from the restaurant, all in towels, again looking shyly at the camera. The camera then proceeds to focus in on two of them, and label the first C-kappu, while the second is B-kappu. C-kappu was worth 3 points while B-kappu was only worth 2. Then it became clear to me: they were getting points for the size of the girls’ breasts. An A-cup was worth 1 point, B-cup 2 points, and a C-cup 3 points. Each group of guys was supposed to go pick out 10 girls, and they would total up the collective breast sizes, and see which group was better at finding the ladies with the mammoth mams, as it were. Sumo and sidekick were down to their last three girls, and, trailing by 10 points, it wasn’t looking good.

But then they struck gold. The third girl, with all the shyness of somebody neither fully comfortable with her body, nor with talking about it in front of a television camera, quietly announced that she was an F-kappu. That was a full 10 points, rocketing sumo and sidekick to 26 points. The television exploded with noise, text scrolling across the bottom, and I couldn’t even really pretend to be fully engaged in my telephone conversation any more.

“Uh honey, I think they’re measuring women’s boobs on the TV here in Japan.” The camera vainly tried to zoom in on her ample bosom, as if to verify their magnitude, but the bulky towel clumsily wrapped around her torso helped them defy measurement. The sudden find meant that the score was now 26-21, with the two normal guys pinning their hopes on their last two girls. In a country known for women of petite stature, they would need some good fortune to win. The last two girls came out, and – the show cut to commercial.

Now it’s worth saying that this isn’t particularly gripping television watching, and thus, in an attempt to ensure my continued status as “engaged”, I returned to the telephone conversation in full. When next my eyes drifted back to the TV, sumo and sidekick had found themselves robbed by a couple of C-cups, who together tipped skinny guys over the top to a 27-26 victory.

And that was pretty much the show. I’d like to say that this was one of those odd shows that come only at two in the morning (like that weird show in Italy we saw in 1999 where girls come out on stage and take their tops off in front of a creepy, leering guy who looks like a 6’ tall Ron Jeremy), but I’d be lying. With other shows where girls sit in the onsen and bad mouth each other before launching violent streams of hot, frothy water at each other with the slam of a button, or guys, in a display of insane frugality, wrestle and catch 40kg octopi and eat frogs, this is pretty normal fare for Japanese television. I’d also like to say that this was a one-shot show, but that also appears to be untrue, as the credits at the end heartily reminded viewers to come back next week, when they’ll be getting pretty young girls to sing in a karaoke bar.

What a strange and wonderful country this is.

Beijing has been a furnace of late. Over the last three days, the temperature has reached at least 35C (95F) every single day, with some days getting into the 36-37C range.

Thus, it was a bit of a jolt to my system when I want to check out the weather reports this morning and was presented with the graphic you see here. Tonight’s low would be in the -573C (-1064F) range. Never mind that this temperature is, of course, impossible, and well beyond absolute zero (which measures in at a wussy -273C) – it’sa be cold.

Now where is that sweater I packed away for the summer? I might be needing it after all ….

It never ceases to shock me the number of websites I run into that will complain when I enter 206.555.1212 or 206-555-1212 for a phone number. Similar things abound for credit card numbers, social security numbers, and all sorts of other structured input. Some designers, in a completely useless attempt to allay users’ anger, will go so far as to put a message above the input box along the following lines:

phone numbers must be entered exactly as (xxx)xxx-xxxx

Others will provide input boxes divided up as follows:

They will then add varying amounts of script to try and help you move between the boxes as you enter input.

These hints and script tricks all completely miss the point, however, and are symptomatic of one simple thing: programmer laziness.

Your users, honestly, just want the following

This lets them type in the required input (here, a phone number) in whatever format they want. 206 555 1212, 2065551212, or 206 555.1212 should all be valid input. All one does when trying to force users to a specific format is risk the chance that they give up and go away. If your site is in the business of trying to get customers to give you money, this is doubly unforgivable on your part: it’s like begging the users to not sign up with you.

The real sad part is that this problem is so trivially avoided. The code required on the server to validate the input and filter out only those values that you want is rarely more than a few lines, and something you should be adding as part of input validation and security any way !

For example, here is how you’d get a 10 digit phone number in PHP:

function phone_num($pn)
{
    $x = 0;
    $output = '';
    while (($char = substr($pn, $x++, 1)) !== false)
    {
        if (ctype_digit($char)) $output .= $char;
    }

    if (strlen($output) != 10)
        throw new InvalidPhoneNumberException($pn);
    else
        return $output;
}

Here is something similar in Ruby, which I have never programmed a line of before 10 minutes ago:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

# i'm sure there's a way better way to do this.
phone_number = "20    6  555 12 12 "
x = 0
output = ""

phone_number.length.times do
    if phone_number[x, 1] == "0" \
       or (phone_number[x,1].to_i >= 1 and phone_number[x,1].to_i <= 9)
        output += phone_number[x,1]
    end
    x += 1
end

if output.length != 10
  puts "invalid"
else
  puts output
end

And no complaining about the efficiency about either of above the scripts – if input validation of user entered forms is a serious performance bottleneck in your application, you’ve either got serious problems with your hardware or even more serious problems with your application (more likely).

So, do your users, yourself, and your application’s security a huge favour: just write the 10 dang lines of code to be unusually tolerant of input. Chances are, you’ve already got a library of these functions somewhere.

While we’re at it: “+“ is a valid character in email addresses. marcwan+tag@example.org is a very common and very valid email address. I’m talking to you Fidelity Investments.

I’d like to introduce a new segment to my blog today called: “Really, Facebook? Are you serious?”

Point in question: the facebook logo in the upper-left corner of my Facebook homepage.

More specifically, the shockingly blurry and poorly scaled facebook logo in the upper-left corner of my Facebook homepage. Thousands of employees (supposedly), many of them über-smart people poached from the likes of Google and Microsoft – and that’s the best you can do?

Now, maybe you’re saying this is a browser problem and it’s because Facebook uses a clever and unusual font, but this is the first thing I see with pretty regular Firefox settings, and no other website seems to suffer from this same problem.

But, in all fairness, I am a crotchety old curmudgeon, so maybe my blood sugar is just too low or something.

I’ve been trying to “get” Twitter for a while now. My business colleague Alex got me to sign up some many moons ago, whereafter I wrote a couple of messages and immediately proceeded to forget about it. With the recent hype surrounding it and how it’s the most awesome important thing ever to hit the Internet (evar) – apart from Facebook – I’ve decided, however, to give it another try.

I’m still failing miserably. I find that I can barely get into Facebook more than a few times a week to see how friends and acquaintances are doing via status messages, and most of that is because of the iPhone client that makes it really easy when I’m stunningly bored in a taxi. I find Twitter even more maddeningly frustrating to sift through.

But I continue to assume that it is I who do not get it, so I keep at it. I read one article asserting that Twitter’s advantage lies in its value as a search engine. So, I started to look through it for things that interest me by conducting a bunch of searches. Apart from the fact that half the queries didn’t work or bring any values back at all, looking for things related to interesting TV shows, nethack, Adwords Advertising, and PHP programming all gave me an avalanche of junk, with only the occasional nugget of interesting value.

Perhaps somebody else can mine this data to produce something more interesting, but right now, add me to the list of people who realise they’re watching something major and important unfold in front of them, and are completely baffled by it.