Andrew's boring web log

Cost Saving hits Shanghai HP

The darkness of global recession has hit HP in Shanghai. Literally darkness, in a bid to reduce our office electricity bill the lighting has been reduced by half (removing half of the buildings neon tubes). Management have assured us that the new plastic reflectors offer the same amount of light as before. Well judge for yourself in the photo, old lights on the left, new improved on the right.

Of note the HP Asia tech conference has been canceled, as has all travel for internal meetings. While I quite agree that cost savings in hard times are necessary, I don’t believe office lighting is something that should be saved on. I wonder when the water in the toilet will be turned off.

The Shanghai Salt Spoon Ferrari

My salt spoon arrived in the post last week. The Shanghai health department believes the citizens of Shanghai use too much salt in their food and it is time this problem was addressed. I live in Lujia zui in Pudong and my girlfriend and I often see a red Ferrari buzzing down South Pudong road. I always ask her how do people in Shanghai afford such a car and her reply is that it must be a movie star. In fact I have a new theory, I believe it is the boss of the Shanghai Salt Spoon factory.

China's corruption is endemic, it is all pervasive. I recently heard that Google China no longer presents an error 404 on pages the Chinese government doesn't want you to see, rather they present a page stating that the government has blocked this site. The government denies this. So are things really changing, especially after the Olympics?

Well the salt spoon says it all really. Whatever you are told take it with a pinch (small spoon no more then two a day) of salt ;-)

Shanghai World Financial Center - Opening Day

So the tallest building in China, the Shanghai World Financial Center opened and I went up. I had to queue for 2 hours, (the official opening time was 2pm). The cost to get to the Skywalk at the very top (100Floor) was 150Rmb a person. I definitely feel it is worth the price, especially when you look down and see both the Jin Mao and the Pearl tower below you. When visiting Shanghai it is a must see.

There are a few issues though. You are forced to watch a stupid light show before you enter the lift, showing official mascots so that you can buy more merchandise when you reach the shop at the 97 Floor (or maybe 94 I can't remember). More over Shanghai's pollution levels are horrendous. The day the building opened was fortunately one of the clearest days I have seen in a year, yet as the picture shows, that is not saying too much.

Also having been up the Twin Towers in New York and Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, you realise that Shanghai is really nothing to compare to either. Perhaps its the construction work, or the pollution or something. Shanghai still has a very very long way to go to have the same awe inspiring look and feel of New York or Hong Kong.

If I had one day to visit Shanghai I would see the Bund and then go up the Shanghai World Financial Center.

Wow Shanghainese is just so different to Mandarin

Living and working in Shanghai, I hoped to pick up some Shanghainese, but without any really good teaching/learning resources this is actually quite hard. Its fine picking up the odd word here and there, but the youtube video below shows just how different the language is to Mandarin.

I love chinesepod.com and its a shame that they don't have any Shanghainese pod casts.

Variable vomit bucket aka in memory database aka visitor pattern aka reference to array of hash reference.

Maintaining legacy code is painful and boring. Great designs, over years dissolve into blobs of spaghetti. Although this can happen to Java code, there is no doubt that the situation is far worse in Perl.

The product that I am moaning about once started out life as a beautifully object oriented and somewhat designed tool. Over time, bug fixes and enhancements, along with summer interns turned this into a maze of dead code blocks and nastiness. A mixture of ksh and awk scripts appeared. VBS code to supplement windows native functionality that simply could not be done in other ways (networked paths, spaces in file names). XML input files with XSL transformations, suddenly need to be dynamically altered to accommodate a new feature, the DTDs kind of work.

All this however is nothing to how badly the hash of hashes can be abused to render code utterly unmanageable. All you need do is pass this reference to every module in the project and just add your own hash to this reference. Set some data in the parse, dump this data into the reference. Need this data in the XML writer no problem you remember the name you used in the reference. Hell, why not even dump some blessed objects into the reference as well.

But what about if you forgot the name of your variable, what about the idea of namespace, I mean what if someone else adds a file and name and overwrites my value:

$rh_opp->{file}->{$name}

I know I will just give it a more abstract name, that will do the trick.

$rh_opp->{aFileCreatedByAndrew}->{$name}

This I can only describe as a variable vomit bucket and is the quick and dirty solution to any bug or enhancement these days. In code reviews a good explanation is to describe this as the visitor pattern, implemented globally for everyone on your team to use.

I think this blog entry is to criticize Perl, in so far as it is far too flexible a language. I was once told by a colleague that to criticize a language for being too flexible is foolish, I also read:

Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun

What is wrong with enforced “Best Practices”? Having to fix and maintain code that has been utterly abused, through deadlines, interns, out- sourcing, in-sourcing, cross platform nuance etc is hell. Java seems to be less brittle. Perl collapses. Where is my shotgun to shoot the next developer to vomit in the variable bucket, then again perhaps I should just go with the flow.

Walmart Olympics

Shopping in Walmart for weekly groceries can be a dull and soulless affair, even in China. Unless, that is, you go with my friend Edward. Having lived in China for almost 5 years now, I miss all the country specific quirks. Like sign up ones name on a public advertising board, putting forward the fact that you too support the great Olympic Champions. This allows you to have your photograph taken holding a fluffy toy.

Edward, can you explain this choice of alias that you chose? Some sort of solidarity with the ancient Greeks?

For readers of my blog who like continuity, Ed is the guy that got savaged by "the cat in my flat" :-)

HP Ovii Team

The HP Ovii Team in all its glory.

From left to right, Mr Zhao Jing, Mr Wen Zhong Zhi, Mr Li Jian Bo, Mr Andrew Och, Mr Wen Nai Long, Mr Zhang Han, Mr Jin Da Shan

It was a sunny day, spring was in the air. Definitely the time for a group photo ;-)

The cat in my flat, in Dong Yuan Yi Cun, Shanghai

It was about 10am. I woke up late, it was afterall the first day of Spring Festival and thus for me a holiday. I stretched got out of bed, opened the curtains and screamed.

There sitting on my window ledge, on the inside of the window was a cute little cat. I like cats very much and so you would think that I would not react by screaming. Only I live on the 20th floor, sleep with my door closed and rarely open my bedroom window.

I had had dreams that night of a cat jumping up and down on my bed and sleeping next to me on my pillow, but put this down to the previous night's hard alcohol drinking session with my friends.

So I guess it was not a dream. My scream had woken up my friends who were all crashing at my place. Nik, Ham and Ed came in. "Whats up?" asked Ed. "Well there is a cat in my room!" I replied. "What are you on about ... Oh my face, there is a cat in your room!" Ed, had seen it. Walked over to the window opened it and let the cat out... onto some metal slats. The cat started to shake and meow. When I asked Ed later why he opened the window he said he just wanted to let the cat out and forget we were on the 20th floor.

Ed gingerly picked up the cat and brought it to his chest. It had hooked his little cute paw into the curtains. Ed gently lifted its paw. The cat changed its temperament. It became a furious ball of craws and fangs and did to Ed's hand what a blender would do.

The cat jumped behind my desk. See photo.

Ham came in and told us he saw a sign that someone was missing a cat. We got it called it and the owner collected it. She was surprised when we showed here Ed's hand. The cat has never done that before.

You live and learn.

How HP GDCC got flooded

Apparently Shanghai has not seen snow like this for 15 years. Well it was not really even snow, in fact it was more sleet. I would say that it started out as a normal day, until lunch. My boss called me and asked me to quickly pick up my laptop to avoid the flood. The flood? Noah and the ark sprang to mind. So I hurried back to find that the roof was indeed leaking at quite an impressive rate.

The quantity of water was not biblical, but did indeed leave the entire office in one inch of water. No need for Noah and the ark to save the Cockroaches, they just simply waded to the sides.

In fact all was well by the next day, but I have to admit the smell is not great, a mixture of wet dog and moldy old blanket.

I hate Karaoke, yet like Mrs Cherie Blair one can not avoid it in China

How wonderful to be invited to host our Company Kick of party. A rare privilege indeed. Even more lucky was that I was picked to sing a Chinese song. I think my Chinese is ok, but my singing ability definitely is not.

After hearing my practice efforts in the afternoon, it was agreed that to avoid utter humiliation, one of my colleagues, who could sing, would help me.

You may have noticed they even turned my microphone down and the music up so that you can barely hear my squeaks and crackling voice. The audience included our entire department of 500+ staff and of course some of our customers.

I wondered if this entire experience could be more embarrassing (a personal voyage into the depths of humiliation). Ah yes I know, post it myself on Youtube.