Beijing smog – a world capital sinks into dirt

I visited Beijing December 12 and 13. What I saw on December 12 was good, what I saw on December 13 was shocking.

Ubuntu Linux 11.10, dreaded Gnome 3, dreaded Unity

The recent Ubuntu 11.10 is a big disappointment. If Unity or Gnome 3 are the answer, then it must have been a silly question. These interfaces are neither mature, nor are the practical. Great Fearless Leader Linus Torvalds himself condemmed Gnome 3 and switched to XFCE.

I made a different choice for myself, based on “why do I always have to upgrade? My Thinkpad X220i is running perfectly well with Ubuntu 11.04 and Gnome 2, fast, beautiful, no glitches, no crashes, what could possibly improve by upgrading?”

My decision is, Ubuntu 11.04 with Gnome 2 is remaining on my Thinkpad without upgrade till death do us part. If ever, I will probably switch pure vanilla Debian.

The last Windows Upgrade that I appreciated was Windows 2000, which rocked at that time.

Setting up a WDS network with Apple TimeCapsule and several Airport Express

There are a lot of posts on the internet, about Apple WDS setup being complicated, speed being slow, and so on. Nonetheless, I tried a WDS, and it works well. Here is the story.

I recently moved house. The new place is a solid concrete construction with 4 floors, lots of interference from neigbouring networks, not ideal for running a wireless network.

First I started off with having a Time Capsule as base station, one Airport Express in bridge mode and two as remotes. It didn’t work. From the room with the ‘remote’ Airport Express I did have an internet connection, all Airport Express and the Time Capsule showing green light, but hardly any data would flow. Some googeling revealed, that the Time Capsule (Airport Extreme) 802.11 n only allows for ONE single relay/bridging/remote, but I had three.

So, I decided to bite the bullet and set up a WDS, because a WDS does not mind how many relays and remotes there are. The configuration can be straight-forward, or it can turn into hours of fiddling with settings and desperation. The following assumes you are familiar with the Airport Utility and that you know, that in the Time Capsule when clicking the drop down menu you have to hold ‘alt’ in order to show the WDS selection.

Four rules for creating a WDS using Time Capsule and several Airport Express:

1. Name/mark the Airport Express for easy recognition, so that you will know later which one has which function in what room

2. Write down the MAC addresses of your Airport Express and the Time Capsule base station

3. Make a plan and stick to it

4. Configuration. Never start off with configuring the WDS in the Time Capsule/Airport Extreme base station first. It should be last.

I set off as follows:

1. Base station ‘Watson’ as the WDS Main, Airport Express Lestrade, Holmes and Moriarty.

2. For simplicity sake, I refer here to the MAC Addresses as MACWatson, MACLestrade, MACHolmes and MACMoriarty.

3. Situation: Even at 100% it was not possible to connect to the internet through the Time Capsule Watson from the upper floors of the house. Target: Bridging the connection from the Time Capsule Watson to the upper floors, using WDS. The plan: Watson WDS main, Lestrade relay, Holmes and Moriarty remote.

4. I plugged all Airport Express in the same room within solid range of the Time Capsule base station. I started off with Holmes and Moriarty as WDS remotes entering MACLestrade as ‘main’ in the WDS settings of Holmes and Watson. Upon restarting restarting they blink yellow, that is normal.

Then in Lestrade WDS relay settings I entered MACHolmes and MACMoriarty as remotes, and MACWatson as WDS main. By now you will have a lot of yellow blinking of the Airports Express, possibly they also disappeared from in Airport Utility. Not to worry.

Last but not least I changed Time Capsule Watson to WDS main and entered *only one* remote, MACLestrade. I then unplugged all Airport Express and plugged them back in. It takes a few minutes, and if they restart all lights should eventually show green, on all units (if there are still blinkenlights, then there you should look into the error log of Airport Utility).

I then proceeded to plug the Airport Express into sockets in their rooms of final destination upstairs.

Result: The WDS works fine, from first to fourth floor, and I am rather pleased by the speed of the connection.

Food costs push up Shanghai’s inflation (oh, really?)

Shanghai Daily today reports, that inflation in Shanghai would be easing less than than the nationwide inflation rate. They attribute it to the food cost in Shanghai and want to sell state-subsidized food items to bring down inflation.

This completely misses the point.

Shanghai’s rents are rising, and increased rentals are passed on to the prices of goods. That is the reality behind rising prices in Shanghai. Already there seems to be a trend of de-industrialisation in Shanghai owing to prohibitive cost on all ends. That is why the city government published their intention to morph Shanghai into an international finance hub.

With big fanfare they announced the creation of an international trading board on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. This, however, was thwarted by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange Control (SAFE), the watchdog that ensures that no China resident changes more than USD 50,000 per year into RMB.

SAFE was concerned, because an international board would in effect amount to free flow of capital and a free-market exchange rate, something that would expose China, where still 50% of the GDP is the result of activities of state-owned enterprises, to market forces, which clearly is not wanted.

Turning Shanghai into a financial center would require the rule of law, an independent judiciary and an open financial system. None of this exists today, it is pure science fiction.

Mac OS X 10.7 upgrade stole my iSync – I brought it back, but…

Apple removed iSync from my MacBook Pro, when I upgraded to Lion. That meant no more synchronizing my Nokia E72 with my Apple address-book. Luckily, there is still one Mac at home that was not upgraded, so I copied iSync from there into my Lion MacBook. iSync works under Lion, however, with the iSync plugin from Nokia v. 2.3 it only syncs names and telephone numbers now. No addresses, no e-mail adresses are being synced.

Also the Missing Sync for Symbian application does not help, at this time it is incompatible with Mac OS X 10.7 and the developer did not reply to repeated requests for comment, if he is working on a fix or not.

Looking at this and the incompatibility of me.com/iCloud it seems to me, as if Apple wants to scale back compatibility with 3rd party devices, so to force Mac users to have iPhones and make Windows users with iPhones to migrate to Mac.

iPhones are not telephones, they are toys. Poor battery life, crippled Bluetooth, mediocre reception, it just does not measure up to a Nokia E72 in any way.

Contrary to Mac OS 10.7, the Nokia E72 syncs flawlessly with Ubuntu Linux 11.4 and with Evolution out of the box. Happily, Ubuntu also runs well on a MacBook Pro.

Should Apple continue going down the incompatibility path, I will switch the OS of my MacBook Pro to Ubuntu Linux.

Harmonious birthday: China clampdown on commercial VPNs, tunnels and proxies

Ahead of the Communist Party of China 90th birthday on Friday, the Chinese government has restricted internet access further by trying to cut off access to mainstream VPN, tunnel and proxy providers, in order to prevent people from accessing content deemed detrimental to China’s political and social development.

The testing of the new restrictions was done June 23/24, resulting in constant disconnects of corporate VPNs. These errors were quickly mended and implementation of the blocks was effective June 27.

Like so many things in China, implementation was sloppy. There are still open channels from China to the free world.

Who would want to have an ‘Asian headquarter’ in China, if your corporate networks get disconnected for political cat-and-mouse games?

China boom running out of steam?

The Nikkei website ran an article on June 23, warning that economic indicators in China would be pointing straight south. A major point they made was, that sales of some construction machinery were down more than 20% year-on-year.

Now people say, that the Chinese economy is also driven significantly by real estate. We looked at some apartments in a non-central district of Shanghai the other day. The 70-year lease price was somewhat equal to 40 years of rent plus interest. That does not look healthy. I wonder what will happen if the international board on the Shanghai Stock Exchange opens, giving people in highly forex restricted China the opportunity to invest money into some dividend-paying real-world companies, 100% listed, not like the domestic board with mostly partially listed, more often but not, state-owned companies, who pay minimal dividend and disregard shareholder rights.

At the same time, also in view of massive domestic debt, a further rise of the RMB exchange rate might be limited.

The downside is gaining ground here.

How to identify Chinese fraudsters posting on industrial forums

There are posts on industrial forums advertising supposedly potent Chinese manufacturers of industrial parts. More often than not these are small trading companies trying to disguise as manufacturers. If a Chinese company approaches you, there are some simple means of assessing if this is a legitimate company.

First of all, check out their website. See if the website has also a Chinese language version. If there is none, this raises the first red flag.

Then check out, if on the home page there is a small seal with a number and a link to http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/. This is a government authority that checks websites and companies for misrepresentation. This number/registration will only be given to websites of companies, who have been checked for compliance to a set of basic rules, one of them being that the website represents true facts of the company in question. All commercial websites in China require that seal/registration no. If that seal/number/link is not available, it raises the second red flag.

Then check through a whois search if the website is hosted in China or elsewhere. If hosted outside China, this raises the third red flag.

If not in China, no Chinese website, no registration seal/number, then it is highly likely that this is a honeypot for naive foreign buyers and entering a business relationship with that company is not advisable.

Correct measure for Shanghai bicycle thieves

4 properly chained and locked bikes were stolen from me in Shanghai last year. Obviously, the master-keys for all locks available in China have been passed around. Thanks to Wired Magazine I found the Kryptonite New York Legend bike lock. A classic American exaggeration, but it sure is intimidating for any would-be-thief. I got mine yesterday by post from USA, when will you get yours? More here.

The 90th Birthday or Dinner for One

The 90th birthday celebration of the CCP 2011 in Shanghai’s Jing’An district was moved forward to the auspicious date June 4, according  to  a posting in residential buildings in the area.