China Travelogue - The Great Firewall of China

As my cousin Stacy pointed out last week, I have missed my deadline.  I had set the goal of posting at least once a week here for the next year, and then only a few weeks in I missed that goal.  The cause of my shortcoming is a combination of Chinese totalitarianism and my shortsightedness.

I’ve just spent two weeks in China on a business trip.  Although I was aware of “The Great Firewall of China,” this is the first trip where it has completely thwarted my efforts.  “The Great Firewall” is the wholesale, systematic censorship of Internet access within the People’s Republic of China.  From inside China, it appears that a large number of common websites just don’t work.  Attempts to connect to them result in a “connection reset” message, or sometimes the connection simply times out with no response at all.  One of the sites so blocked is blogger.com, where I write this blog.

Reset connection to blogger.com

Timed-out connection to Facebook

There are some ways around The Great Firewall.  Virtual Private Networks or “VPNs” can be used to create an encrypted tunnel between a computer inside the PRC and a portal on the outside, through which (virtually) all network traffic can be passed.  From the user’s point of view, it is like browsing from the far end of the VPN.  There are a few problems with this solution.  The first is speed and bandwidth.  If I have a VPN connection to my home, and I request data from a website, that data has to both go into my home machine, which is limited by my home download speed, and then be sent to me out of  my home over the VPN, which is limited by my home upload speed.  There is also some delay introduced for the VPN server at my home to encrypt the data for transfer over the VPN.  All the traffic passing through the VPN has to traverse the network connection to the VPN server twice.  This can, of course, be overcome by using a fast machine with a really high bandwidth Internet connection, but it still represents a bottleneck.

There are also some more technical VPN issues.  If I’m connected to the Internet at my hotel in China, I need to make sure that the packets required to maintain that local connection to the hotel’s network aren’t shipped out over the VPN.  For example, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is used to get an IP address in most public networks.  It is also used to renew that address when it expires.  If that traffic isn’t left on the local network, then the Internet connection required for the VPN can’t be set up in the first place.

Another work-around is web proxies.  These are similar to VPNs, in that you send your request for a web-page to a server somewhere else, that that server, acting as your “proxy,” requests the web page and forwards it on to you.  That way, the routers filtering traffic from certain sites don’t know where your traffic is originating and let it through unmolested.  There are many free web proxies, but most of them don’t work terribly well, although it wasn’t clear to me if they are simply overloaded, or if China is doing a really good job of blocking them as quickly as the pop up.

To access some static web content you can use a search engine as your proxy.  Microsoft’s “Bing” works pretty well in China, and in several cases I was able to search for some content I wanted to see, and even though those pages were blocked, I could download the cached data from Bing.  This only works for web content that is relatively static, and non-interactive.  And while I could access the Bing cached pages, the Google cache did not seem to work.

It turns out that there is also a way to set up blogger to post anything mailed to a pre-arranged e-mail address.  Since I didn’t set that up ahead of time (my aforementioned shortsightedness), I couldn’t use that on this trip.

So why does China go to the expense and effort of maintaining The Great Firewall?  I think the pretense is to block “objectionable content” from the people of the People’s Republic.  It seems obvious to me that it is an effort to manage the flow of information and control the mindset and mood of the populous.  Above and beyond that, though, there also seems to be some element of supporting SOE’s (State Owned Enterprises) over their foreign competitors.  Although China apparently has a booming social networking industry, Facebook is blocked.  I would love to see the World Trade Organization, which China was so hot to join ten years ago, take a look at this aspect of it.


On future trips, I’ll know to set up more infrastructure in advance.  But for now I’m just happy to be back on the right side of the Great Firewall.

Post-A-Week Goal

A bit over a year ago, I set a goal to write a blog entry every day for a month.  I managed to carry through on it, even though it wasn't particularly easy to hold to the commitment every day.  I did not, however, take the next step from that goal, and continue making regular progress on other writing projects, or even here.  So I'm setting another blogging goal.  The goal this time is to write at least one posting here each week for the next year. If I pull it off, that means that I will write over 50 posts in the next year.  Seeing that cumulative progress is, I think, a useful step toward getting myself revved up to do other, larger scale writing projects.

Of course, one of the problems with a "Post-A-Week" is that at least one day each week I'll have to actually finish something and click the "Publish Post" button.  When I get toward the end of any given week, it then becomes a post-a-day goal, for that one day.  So I should try to make sure that I write early in the week, and not late, to keep ahead of the curve.  If my daughter ever reads this, she'll recognize this strategy from the last 5 years of me prodding her about starting her homework early.

For the purposes of this goal, I'll say that the week extends from Sunday through Saturday.  And as it is currently 12:20 AM on Sunday, November 13, 2011, this entry will fulfill my obligation for the week of the 13th - 19th!  Of course, I can write MORE than one a week if time and motivation allow, and I'll certainly try.  But at least this week I'm finishing over 167 hours ahead of my deadline!

I've got dozens of ideas jotted down, and about 25 partially written posts already stock-piled.  Time to start working through the backlog, polishing things up, and get them out into the world.  And then come up with more!

How about you?  What are you planning to do over the course of the next year?  Leave a comment below and tell me!

Habit Formation

Executive summary:  Do not read this post.  Come back tomorrow.  You are warned.

I have heard it said that an activity must be carried out daily for six week to become an ingrained habit.  Well, I haven't reached six weeks yet on these daily blog entries, but I know that they have not yet become anything near an ingrained habit.  I was sitting here at my desk with 13 minutes until midnight, when I really should already be asleep after being sick the last few days.  I was just about to call it a day, and realized that I've not written anything today.  I referred to my list of pending ideas (currently a bit thin, I should work on that tomorrow) and didn't see anything I wanted to write about (in 11 minutes or less) so here I am making stuff up off the cuff, and writing a lot of run-on sentences.

Should I, on these days when I'm neither inspired nor particularly interested, even bother writing something?  That depends a lot on what I think the purpose of this writing is.  If I had any delusions that I had a large regular audience (Hi Dad!) I might go for quality over quantity, and make my adoring public wait an extra day in between.  But it's not all about you, people.  The point of this exercise from the start has largely been about writing on deadline, cranking text out quickly, getting something out every day (more or less) and not being too picky about the quality (or incredibly self-referential, pseudo-intellectually quasi-post-modernist bent) of the writing.

I must admit, the 230+ page views that I got for last Tuesday's entry about blood donation did give me a little shot of adrenaline.  People actually read my words.  Maybe I could come up with even more words that even more people would want to read.  And maybe I'll even try to do that someday yet.  I do have a few tricks up my sleeve.  But today is not that day.  Today you get this.  See, I told you not to read it.

Writers Do Math, When Necessary

Writers read, a lot, according to several authors whose opinion and craft I respect. Most notably, I remember Dean Koontz in his book on writing talking about the need to read constantly. I also just like to read, because it is entertaining, and fun, expands my vocabulary and world view, gives me things to talk about with friends, and quite honestly, it's easy to do. But it also takes time. And while "I don't have time" is the frequent excuse of people who waste vast amounts of time doing inconsequential things (I'm looking at you, television, FaceBook, Hulu, YouTube, and most of the Internet), it is still hard to muster the 8 - 30 hours that it can take to read a good book.

In order to consume more books, I started listening to books on tape years ago, and I now try to have a constant stream of books on CD from the local library in my car. They're free, they're extremely convenient, and given the limited selection the library can carry, they tend to be only the most popular titles, which are often things I wanted to read anyway. Even with my relatively short commute, I get through at LEAST 30 minutes of "reading" a day, and if you include all other driving, I probably clear about a CD a day on average. That means I can listen to a 15 CD novel in about 2 weeks. Yes, you can argue about the merits of listening to someone read the text versus reading the printed page yourself, but I find the narration usually doesn't get in the way, and the time savings is well worth it.

The latest book I'm listening to is Deception Point by Dan Brown. It's a techno-political thriller that he wrote in 2001, after Angels and Demons, and before The Da Vinci Code. I'm on disk 10 of 15 so far, and the story is okay, although it frequently feels a bit thin in places, like he's milking more pages than are really merited from many of the story elements. But the things that have bugged me the most are engineering related nits which could have been largely avoided with some basic math and physics.

The most glaring has to do with the weight of a rock. I'll attempt not to spoil any of the story here, but several times there are references made to a rock which is initially described as "10 feet in diameter" weighing "eight tons." The rock is described as approximately spherical, which would give it a radius = diameter / 2 = 5 feet. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 * pi * radius^3, which means the rock has an approximate volume of 1.333 * 3.14159 * 5 * 5 *5 = 523.5 cubic feet. Using Google, we can easily convert this to liters and we get 14824 liters. Now, if it were made of WATER, and not rock, that 14,824 liters would weight about 14,824 kilograms = 32681 pounds = about 16 tons. But it's not water, it's ROCK. The rock is described as granite like, which would have a specific gravity, or density relative to water, of about 2.6. This means that it would weight 16 * 2.6 = about 41.6 tons. But even if we say it is the least dense rock we can come up with, pumice stone, the air-filled "floating rock" ejected by volcanoes, it would STILL have a specific gravity of 0.64, and a mass of about 16 * 0.64 = 10 Tons. The "eight tons" sounded wrong when I first read it, and now, especially after doing the math, it grates on me every time it is repeated.

So the follow-up question, of course, is why did this happen? Is there some major plot point I haven't yet gotten to about the rock being only 25% of the weight it should be? Or was it just sloppiness by Dan Brown, and then by his editors? Given how lauded Brown is for his extensive research, it seems strange and jarring that such a relatively obvious factual error made it into the book... And if anyone reading this knows Mr. Brown, I'd love to hear his explanation!

California Extreme 2010

I haven't written much here in the last year, but I wanted to do a quick entry about this year's California Extreme Classic Arcade Game Show. I didn't see much new at the show this year, but I did learn a lot. In an effort to inspire myself to write, I arranged with the Santa Clara Weekly to cover the show with a 500 word article. I even got a press badge to the event, and with Amanda along as my photographer, I interviewed some of the volunteer organizers.

I had always known that virtually all of the games at California Extreme are provided by private collectors, but I didn't realize how large some of those private collections are. One of the show organizers pointed out that over 60 of the games there were his. Another guy owned over 100 of the games. That just boggles my mind, that they are obsessive enough to collect that many machines, and yet also generous and trusting enough to let the attendees play with their toys.

As usual, I had a great time at the show, and I enjoyed the flash-back to my youth. It was also fun to again see and play some games that even predate me. There was a bar trivia quiz machine based on an internal slide or filmstrip projector. There was also an all electromechanical pinball machine that had only 4 digits on the score counter, and had bumpers worth "1 point." All in all, it was a lot of fun.

If you want to see the Santa Clara Weekly piece I wrote, it is here: http://scw.tearn.com/2010/07/california-extreme-2010.html.