By @edent · Book Review china chinese · 3 comments · 300 words · read ~166 times.
This is an astonishing book. On the one hand, it's the basic "Harry Potter" trope - a young orphan is gifted, gets sent to school to learn magic, becomes pals with the other weird kids, has adventures, and fights a monster. Except here, Harry is Chinese, is sent to Oxford University to learn magic, and […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review chinese Sci Fi · 200 words
Yet another compendium of Chinese sci-fi stories - and there are some great stories in this collection. There are also some essays about what makes Chinese science fiction Chinese. Based on my (limited) experience, I'd say one of the defining characteristics of the Chinese SF I've read is the way exposition is dispensed with and […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review chinese Sci Fi · 550 words
This is an anthology of modern Chinese science fiction, loosely grouped into three main themes. I'm sad to say that some of the stories are a lot of hard work. One is barely sci-fi - more like a spiritual paean to the souls of people caught in a disaster which, bizarrely, has a throwaway line […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review chinese NetGalley Sci Fi · 2 comments · 200 words
This is a curious - and slightly unsatisfying - collection of short stories. There's no cohesive theme; some are about space travel, some alien invasion, some about madness on Mars, some about interstellar religions. You bounce around between themes without much chance to reflect on how different authors tackle the same subject. The stories alternate […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review china chinese · 200 words
I've had a long-held fascination with China. I took Mandarin at University and, a few years ago, I was lucky enough to go to Beijing. So I was excited to pick up this book of short stories about modern China. It is a mixed lot of tales about Chinese people both in and outside of […]
Continue reading →By @edent · chinese mandarin NaBloPoMo unicode · 1 comment · 700 words · read ~1,502 times.
Imagine you have a series of number you wish to sort. Sorting is a well known computer science problem - generally speaking you compare one value to the next and then move the item either up or down a list. With "English" characters, that's fairly easy. When a computer sees the character 1 it's really […]
Continue reading →By @edent · chinese email i18n unicode · 4 comments · 450 words · read ~4,923 times.
We all know what an email address looks like and how to validate them, right? A few years ago I got the Chinese domain name 莎士比亚.org. You can browse to it, link to it, and send email to it. Or can you? When I tried two years ago, none of the major email providers supported […]
Continue reading →By @edent · chinese domains email rant · 18 comments · 450 words · read ~1,008 times.
I was listening to a podcast recently which was kind enough to mention one of my blog posts. The presenter said: ...and you should Google for this, because I'm really not sure how to pronounce this. Is it shu-huk-spur? dot mobby? Le sigh! It's a conversation I have most weeks when I'm on the phone […]
Continue reading →By @edent · chinese Open Source shakespeare · 1 comment · 450 words · read ~231 times.
I'm very pleased to announce the launch of 莎士比亚.org - beautiful and readable copies of Shakespeare plays in Chinese. If you would like to help, the text is available on GitHub for people to correct. Why? I've long held a fascination with Shakespeare - hence the name of this website. At university I studied Mandarin […]
Continue reading →By @edent · accents chinese github racism usability · 11 comments · 400 words · read ~2,485 times.
One of the interesting aspects of privilege is how it lays bare our unconscious assumptions about the world. A male software developer may never consider that a user would want or need to change their name. Thus they would design a product which ignored the millions of women changing their names after marriage. It's very […]
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