tomo's blog

Saigon MobileDevCamp 2011

Submitted by tomo on November 8, 2011 - 2:16am

This past weekend was the third annual Saigon MobileDevCamp held at Bach Khoa University. Although I'm mainly a web developer, as the event was billed as a brother to BarCamp, I decided to go and check it out, meet some people, support my friend Dan, and see if anything from the event could be applied to the upcoming BarCamp Saigon on December 11th.

Like BarCamp, the venue is a local university. However, the quality of facilities between a regular Vietnamese university like Bach Khoa and a foreign-operated campus like RMIT are on a quite different level. Most rooms were without air conditioning and became quite hotter than I'm accustomed to. In the morning there were a number of sessions on developing mobile apps (I checked out a session on PhoneGap but missed the Unity 3D session). In contrast to the BarCamp ideal, guest speakers were invited to give sessions which were planned and scheduled beforehand. Topics were confined to the "mobile development" theme.

After lunch, the main event would be a 24-hour coding competition. As I was already waking up far earlier than usual to attend the conference which I hadn't even properly registered for, I had no intention of joining the hackathon but I would eventually be overcome by my friend Cong's excitement for Doing Things.

The Contest (click to expand)

19 teams. 5 persons max. 24 hours. 3 categories.

There were 19 teams of up to five people competing. We were number 19, registering about an hour after the competition had begun. (Not only was I the only foreigner on our team, I was the only foreigner on any team. The rest of the foreigners were there to hang out and talk to people, which was all I originally intended on.) Participants included employees of sponsors as well as students.

At the start of the competition, MC Minh announced in Vietnamese the three categories that apps could be in: spelling, medical emergencies, and fighting pollution. (I think I misunderstood initially, but later an email in English was sent out.) This prevents teams from having ideas and apps already in development beforethe competition. This, along with the 24 hour time limit and 5-man team limit, are the constraints we were working with; otherwise no judging criteria were announced. It's unrealistic to expect to develop much of an application in 24 hours and we knew this going in. We would later realize how little the actual code mattered.

Once the 24 hour clock had started ticking at 2 PM and neither Cong nor I had joined any teams, we decided to see what we could come up between the two of us. We went outside for some fresh air (actually, cigarette smoke) and discussed some ideas for the spelling topic but we dismissed them the most quickly. We came up with an idea for the medical emergency category but when we came up with an idea for the environmental category, one which we could talk about at length and come up with numerous uses for, that's when Cong called up Hong who also liked the idea and joined our team as our third member. We were probably the smallest team there.

During the hacking event there is a large room available for participants to use and even sleep in. At night there was a pizza party. For me, the room was too hot and humid so we decided to leave and find someplace more conducive to hacking for the remaining hours. We even considered renting a hotel room for 300,000VND but in the end we decided to just go to my house which at least has soft places to lie down, a working (at least better than Bach Khoa's) wifi connection, and air conditioning. The only problem was that it was a bit far from the competition so we lost some time commuting there and back. We also got soaked by rain on the way.

Hackathon

A hackathon is a chance for hackers to push themselves both mentally and physically. Although in previous years, teams who skipped sleeping at all didn't fare so well, I'm sure most people didn't get a good night's sleep. For our team, besides a short nap, a dinner break as the rain was dying down, and a breakfast break for my teammates, we were hacking the entire time we were at my house. As the hours wore on, I found myself getting more easily frustrated while staring at nonfunctioning code, code that it would often later turn out didn't need to be written. In some ways, the experience is similar to working at a startup with even shorter horizons.

Our Idea (click to expand)

Our idea with this: we live in an apathetic world where social problems that were once taken care of by the local (think village) community are now left to a (criminally) unresponsive government. Littering, driving dangerously, and domestic violence may be crimes which are witnessed by millions of people every day who simply think "it's not my business". The saying goes, "No good deed goes unpunished". Clearly, the world needs a hero. But there are heroes all around us or at least people doing heroic things. We just don't recognize them as heroes. In real life, there is no Superman. But suppose each of us is a Clark Kent, hiding an "inner Superman"?

We wanted to attack a problem that was beyond just our ability to solve. We wanted to create a better world, not just entertain. We wanted to think beyond the contest, while still participating within its constraints. We wanted to do well, but more importantly do good.

The Solution

Our solution was to create an application that makes it simple (in a way only possible with modern technoloy) to be recognized and recognize others for doing simple deeds that might otherwise be too mundane to mention (mundane being what most people's initial impression of Twitter's concept was), meaning also that it's "not worth doing". At first, we would be increasing awareness of the dismal situation within and around each person, then encourage them to take small actions to improve the situation with friends and strangers. There are still some good people left in the world; others are at least good enough to act altruistically if it's convenient enough. Not only would you receive recognition for your history of good deeds, we would arrange for local businesses to sponsor the top do-gooders on each district's leaderboard, giving them access to influential people (in a way that Klout is trying and failing to do). This would provide operating and marketing income as well as give people an extra push to participate.

Some Use Cases

You see a truck hit a bike. Before the truck driver has a chance to get away you snap a quick photo of the truck's license plate, tag it as a crime-in-progress, and your photo and location are quickly uploaded. Now, anyone else using the app in the same neighborhood can spot the truck and force it to stop.

You see a pile of trash near a canal. You snap a photo and tag it "trash" and as you're clearing it up, a fellow user who lives nearby comes to help. When you've cleaned up the area, you both snap shots of the results and receive thanks from each other and some latecomers.

You get stuck in traffic. Up ahead you see that several cars are in the wrong lane and are stuck in gridlock. You post a "traffic" update with location and a few people about to leave work, and a friend in a taxi approaching that intersection thank you.

You see a new crack in the road. You snap a photo of it and send the link, which includes the GPS coordinates, to the local authorities. After a few weeks, the crack hasn't been fixed and has grown wider. Eventually, the post gathers "thanks" and comments from a number of people and someone is forced to take responsibility for the fact that action wasn't taken earlier.

You see your neighbor abuse his wife. What can you do? After publicly shaming him, you receive some helpful advice in the comments.

Your neighborhood has a small plot of unused dirt, so you plant a tree there.

There are also the good things others are doing. When you see someone who is not a police officer stand in the street and direct traffic. When a mother scolds a child for littering. When a stranger tells you your bag is unzipped, or your phone about to fall out of your pocket. The person who sticks a big block in a pothole. The person who stops a taxi from entering a crowded one-way street in the wrong direction. The person who subdues a drunken belligerent Australian when the police couldn't do it for two hours. The inspector who refuses a bribe. The seller who throws out dirty or spoiled food. The car that doesn't enter a backed up intersection and block it when the light turns red.

SoLoMo

The idea has all of today's buzz words. It's social, mobile, and local. It has crowdsourced goodness. It will post to your Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. It's green, social enterprise that profits from companies that want to greenwash. It's got gamification. It's a location-based service measuring real reputation online. It consumes web APIs like Google Maps, while exposing its own API for others to mashup.

Implementation (click to expand)

Drupal | REST | iOS | Your Social Networks

The mobile application stores and retrieves data from a website we developed for it. I developed a web backend and frontend using Drupal which exposes a REST API which was consumed by the iPhone app which could use it to login, create and retrieve local status updates with photo and location much like Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare. Other people could then see what people were doing near them and either thank them or leave a comment, or even go there in person and help -- it could be happening a hundred meters away. By posting updates and getting thanked you earn points which puts you on the leaderboard for your local district and can lead to being awarded badges, like "trash hero". The idea was we would find local businesses to sponsor each district and give prizes to the community leaders while getting to be associated as an upstanding member of a neighborhood.

We integrated with Google maps to show location and also used their reverse geo-code API to find the ward or district name, so people could "follow" a neighborhood irregardless of distance -- like their home. Furthermore, there was a one-way "follow" relationship like Twitter and Google+ to get all of a local hero's updates. More followers leads to more thanks.

The web version (same Drupal site as the API) has all the same functionality as the mobile app and more. We developed an iPhone app for the contest, but an equivalent Android version would be easy to build. We used Twitter Bootstrap as a foundation for the frontend design.

In the future, we could strongly integrate with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and any other social network which allows geo-tagging of posts, so their posts appear inline with your local hero timeline.

Presentation, judging, and lessons learned (click to expand)

All teams had to be physically present in the main room at 1PM on Sunday, which effectively meant we lost over an hour of hacking time. We arrived just in time for the deadline, but then waited another 4-5 hours to give our presentation and demo. We had probably slept less than 8 hours combined among the three of us, and by the time it was our turn to present, I was nearly completely faded. There's a lesson in that.

Humans Get Worn Down By Serial Decision-Making

Our first lesson was this: don't present last. Don't expect judges not to be mentally exhausted after several hours of listening to presentations. Don't expect that their state of mind will be the same when they started as when they're about to finish.

Don't Alienate The Judges

In short: Our presentation was a failure. It was a trainwreck that lasted 10 minutes. By the time we were presenting, a strict 10 minute time limit was being enforced. I think our presentation was designed for 20 minutes. Both Cong and Hong had experience with previous MobileDevCamps and they had made a presentation for the app before I had finished coding.

We opened with a video of a toddler in China being run over by a truck, a clip that sparked outrage all over the world including Vietnam and within China. It was bad form. My partner hadn't realized that two of the judges sitting in front of us were actually from China. They were visibly upset, not taking kindly to the implication, and this set the tone for the rest of the presentation. Meanwhile, other judges wanted to watch the video again. Not only did this upset the Chinese judges but the other sympathetic organizers were also quite upset by the possibility that we had jeapordized future sponsorship by the Chinese. By the time we were done talking about the video, we only had 5 minutes left, and hadn't even opened the app.

Fake It.

In the remaining time, we struggled to explain the idea behind the product and finally give a quick demo of some of the features. We ran out of time before showing off some of the minor features. One of the judges expressed interest in hearing about the implementation, and we missed a chance to impress based on technical features. There just wasn't any time.

So that's it. We lost. We learned some lessons.

1. Be one of the first to present if you can.

2. Don't single out and alienate judges.

3. Don't build clean, well-architected software with maintainable code. In real life, this matters. For this competition, it doesn't.

The greatest tragedy perhaps (besides not winning) was that the presentations were all made in private with the judges. Having groups present their apps for everyone to see, or at least putting them somewhere online, would have been the BarCamp way. As we didn't receive any feedback or anything from the judges, it would have been nice to share what we all worked on for 24 hours (multiplied by nearly 100 people) and be able to learn from others' experience. Even if there wasn't time for all to present, I don't think I was the only one interested in seeing at least the demos from the winners.

P.S. Our second idea was this (click to expand)

In Vietnam, emergency response service is nearly nonexistent. If you get into an accident where you need emergency medical treatment you will most likely die. People are reluctant to take you to the hospital because the hospital will then expect you to pay the bill. Taxis don't want to deal with getting blood in their seats. If nobody contacts your relatives or if you don't have enough money in your wallet to pay the hospital on arrival, people will just let you die because they don't feel it's their business. See Idea #1.

Our idea was to make it so your friends and family could automatically be contacted in case of emergency. Many phones have a feature where without unlocking the phone, the phone can still make emergency calls. But what if the phone could also send an SMS message and some friends as well as post a call for help on your Facebook wall, your Twitter, your FourSquare, etc. along with your location. It could turn out to be a follower on Twitter you don't follow back who happens to be nearby who saves your life. In Vietnam, this type of "hail Mary" is more likely to get a response than the local 911-like service. Of course there are problems, like the fact most people wouldn't think to install the app until they're laying there dying, if that.

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Daily Twitter Posts - 10/28/2011 - 11/04/2011

Submitted by tomo on November 4, 2011 - 12:45pm

Twitter

11/03 09:25 I have a question. RT @tuoitrenewsvn: Truck hits three bikes, two women die http://t.co/bVOuIPx4 #
11/02 05:44 @caligarn Quality of orgasms over quantity. Clearly, we can test both. (I see you've changed your avatar for the 1923438th time) #
11/02 05:14 @nguyenhimself @dynamicscholar It will be a lot of tedious work, but I'm willing to take it on. In the name of advancing science. #
11/02 04:12 "Study says a woman's walk reflects her vaginal orgasmic history" - Not sure what to make of this. May need to do further research on my own #
10/31 05:52 @dynamicscholar Any website can be attractive on the frontend. Drupal is truly beautiful on the inside which you can't see w/o admin account #
10/31 05:51 @dynamicscholar http://t.co/yPpFYJ99. Some case studies: http://t.co/qDpPypJg And list of 10 Drupal sites: http://t.co/KrZ7sGKQ #
10/31 05:07 @dynamicscholar What kind of design do you mean? Graphic design / Drupal theme? Or examples of fully developed Drupal sites? #
10/30 04:26 @dynamicscholar The charm is there, floating in the water. My street is usually passable, and I have escape routes. #
10/30 02:06 @dynamicscholar Huynh Tan Phat? You made the news! So did my hood. http://t.co/yS29yP4f #
10/29 05:59 RT @mybigfatface: Today I was called a cheap dog pussy by a tuk tuk driver. #onlyincambodia #
10/29 05:28 @SaigonSean Never? Vietnamese people seem quite content to transport themselves through #poowater (ask @dynamicscholar) #
10/29 03:04 Saigon has some 100 km of canals. Instead of taking advantage of it for transportation or tourism, it's a toilet and trashbin for neighbors #
10/28 05:14 @caligarn Are they? They're in tune with Japan's mobile consumers: got adoption of 3G, NFC, smart cards, QR codes. Think mobile, not web. #
10/28 04:43 I want a pair of these gloves, built into my motorbike: http://t.co/haxDjPCM #
10/28 04:25 Idea: Local network appliance that mirrors Google Apps and cloud storage for quicker, offline access. Think Git for all your work. #
10/28 04:07 @peoplewithideas Taking over a domain name is not too hard w/ a bit of social engineering. Quite hard to lose domains by lapsed renewal now #

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Daily Twitter Posts - 10/14/2011 - 10/21/2011

Submitted by tomo on October 21, 2011 - 12:45pm

Twitter

10/20 07:03 Deceitful eateries blacklisted in southern Vietnam: http://t.co/Rg887bHG #
10/19 07:28 RT @tuoitrenewsvn: Hanoi man chases, scares traffic violators (video) http://t.co/NdgnLQtF #
10/18 12:31 @jon7b @Jane_Minnie Hahaha, now you know. #
10/17 05:45 @ourman Planning on providing a hit list to the Vietnamese government? :) #
10/17 04:02 Insane growth numbers? Vietnamese Facebook users grew by 51% in Quarter 3 2011 and will soon pass Singapore http://t.co/QdiVS1R8 #
10/17 02:38 @NBNQ "All animals are equal - But some animals are more equal than others" - Animal Farm #
10/16 05:12 Lots of buzz about Siri, a company Apple recently bought. But Android has had voice control apps for awhile: http://t.co/MJeqBecU #
10/16 01:43 @ChrisGNguyen As an expat, more international food choices is great! I'd like to see enterprising domestic companies produce the same items #
10/14 06:51 @dynamicscholar If I could cut ears from head, I'd leave 1 in Berlin & 1 in Detroit. But may make a trip to BKK for BedSupperClub.Stay safe. #

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Daily Twitter Posts - 10/07/2011 - 10/14/2011

Submitted by tomo on October 14, 2011 - 12:45pm

Twitter

10/13 12:21 Some days you struggle to remember a word. Today that word was "calque": borrowing a foreign word-phrase, by translating it word for word. #
10/13 11:04 @dynamicscholar Booka Shade? Envious. Saw them at DEMF a few years back. #
10/13 06:06 @jon7b @nguyenhimself If you're dying to relieve that exp. I may have some headless vaxen back in the US, but prob. running NetBSD, not VMS #
10/13 05:35 @nguyenhimself I do own a copy of K&R. ;) RIP, The R in K&R. #
10/13 04:48 "The number of fatalities during the traffic safety month was the highest", big increase from Saigon's suburban districts #
10/13 04:42 @betoneko @CotterVN Not like Japanese Pizza Hut. Artisanal, flavorful pies w/ untraditional ingredients. Favorite of at least 2 friends. #
10/13 04:11 @betoneko Baby Spoon is great if you have a Japanese tooth. Filling pastas, creamy variations on omu-rice. Only been to Ben Thanh location #
10/13 03:54 This week the world lost a truly important person in the modern computer world, whose work underlies Mac OSX/iOS. RIP Dennis Ritchie #
10/12 10:38 P.S. I have some NeXTstation slabs for sale. http://t.co/un6spADV Collector's item! #
10/12 10:25 Steve Jobs was the reason Apple products were good. If you believe this is true then you should not plan to buy any future Apple products. #
10/10 10:51 @PedroInSaigon ...and I'm somewhere between the idiots who ride bicycles and the guys who drive Honda SHs. #ghettofabulous #
10/10 10:49 @PedroInSaigon If we simply correlate income/car ownership with intelligence then Americans are geniuses, Vietnamese are retards #
10/10 10:47 @VLStudies I think the ministry should clearly signal high but stable future oil prices, subsidize food input fuels and public transit #
10/10 10:38 @PedroInSaigon Having a car can mean being a driver (company car or for a family), being somebody's wife/mistress, being a son. Ability? #
10/10 05:34 @PedroInSaigon @ericburdette I'd say having a car in Saigon is more correlated to family connections than ability to honestly earn money #
10/09 11:56 Saigon temperature updates really only need 3 values: use a/c, use fan, turn off fan #
10/08 10:28 Vietnamese customer service: after placing an order online, TheGioDiDong let my phone ring 1x, had no record of my order when I called back #
10/07 08:48 @nguyenhimself @Jane_Minnie Put it this way: if I threatened to knifestab you, would you show up? Now if I invited you for coffee.... #
10/07 05:49 @Jane_Minnie Coffee next week sounds good :) #
10/07 03:31 "10 years ago we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope, and Johnny Cash. Now we have no Jobs, no Hope, and no Cash." - Unknown #
10/07 03:02 MORE POOP! RT @shilkytouch: WANT RT @brokepimpstyles: Poop Powered Bike To Tour Japan http://t.co/1kFhcVo2 #
10/07 03:00 @Jane_Minnie I have mixed feelings about your mixed feelings. How best to sort this out? #

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Space required to transport 60 people - Cars, Bikes, Busses

Submitted by tomo on October 13, 2011 - 3:25pm

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AutoMySQLBackup

Submitted by tomo on October 9, 2011 - 1:09am

I'm using AutoMySQLBackup v2.5 and haven't upgraded to v3.0 because the new version splits out config from code (nice) but also expects you to put everything in /etc (not nice). It's a fairly simple script made complicated by this new version which even includes an installer script now, which is more reason to keep with the old version.

Some changes I made:

OPT=" --quote-names --opt --skip-lock-tables"

I'm running this script out of cron and I don't want to lock tables which the web server is serving, even if it means some rows will be out of sync.

Then I change all "rm -fv" to "rm -f" because OpenBSD rm doesn't have a "-v" option, which if my assumption is correct means "verbose" and it's not useful in this script.

Since my databases aren't so small anymore, I've had to set MAXATTSIZE="20000". I also want to filter certain tables (big ones that never change, cache and log tables) and AutoMySQLBackup 3.0 has a new setting CONFIG_table_exclude for this.

The section of new code that does this is:

    if ((${#CONFIG_table_exclude[@]})); then
      for i in "${CONFIG_table_exclude[@]}"; do
	opt=( "${opt[@]}" "--ignore-table=$i" )
      done
    fi

In 2.5 we can add these tables manually to the OPT variable after the "
OPT" line, e.g.

$OPT="$OPT --ignore-table=foo.bar --ignore-table=foo.baz"

This saves a lot of disk space and space in my Gmail account used for storing backups.

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Daily Twitter Posts - 09/02/2011 - 09/09/2011

Submitted by tomo on September 9, 2011 - 11:45am

Twitter

09/08 11:44 The sound of lawns being mowed. Not in Vietnam anymore. #
09/08 10:52 Upcoming Google DevFests in SE Asia: http://t.co/ETklktF #
09/05 15:26 Watching documentary about the Concorde crash that stopped service forever. Good way to prepare for boarding a trans-Pacific flight #
09/05 14:52 @tdichristopher It was a Wikileaks cable from the US embassy in Vietnam, from finding and interviewing AmeriAsian adults in Vietnam #
09/05 13:30 @dylanduong No problem, on one condition: Whatever shirt I buy, you must wear in public! #sinisterlaugh #
09/05 12:42 Few more hours and I'll be on an airplane to America for the first time in 2.5 years. Wonder if it's changed as much as Vietnam. #
09/05 11:43 @tdichristopher Recent Wikileaks re: Vietnam, US had surveyed AmerAsians, found they had all integrated, discrimination stopped for years #
09/05 09:16 Tuoi Tre News has republished my blog post w/ permission (but no mention of original). Police Are Investigating: http://t.co/l92GZfW #
09/05 04:48 To understand what my last tweet says, use the Twitter Decoder Ring: http://t.co/Vs214aM #
09/05 04:46 顜善嬔巖嗴允曏不t唈吷曃噑庠嗱鲷凸亥丂仨丶乇儓乓(劗揦允圫s囸严懦倡侭鹔丘柺槐嫢忒爠t唈堺倱t唈婐丕珹埼円七哢蠧呕囫自t唈吷讴鏞渊帺呙冑咭巖嗴佽哻巖0簝噯呝丕1哼测樖匡螎諑歘丂2哼檂鎗俫抆哻与亩歘挍叜 #
09/04 02:18 1000s more in HCMC plz RT @tuoitrenewsvn: 2,000 cars fined in Hanoi in a fortnight http://t.co/gUThJ0I #
09/04 02:16 Increase "Gamification" w/ "an open src platform, customizable gamification elements designed to increase user interaction on websites" #
09/03 17:15 @kennynguyenus Serial decision-making is making lots of decisions in a short period of time. Think customizing a suit, car, or vacation #
09/03 06:53 I wonder if Bud's Ice Cream in San Francisco is full of confused Vietnamese tourists #
09/02 08:22 I'm slurping up my Ramen badge on PhoSquare! #justkidding #
09/02 07:04 @barijoe If you haven't noticed a slowdown in Internet speed then you are either blessed or have magic Internet. Who's your isp? #
09/02 07:01 Decision fatigue. Ego depletion. Gain more self-control, make wiser decisions with a quick shot of sugar. Break up serial decision-making. #

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10 Reasons I Left the United States (without realizing it)

Submitted by tomo on September 9, 2011 - 12:35am

Having just gone back to the United States for a week, here are some reasons why I no longer live ther. I didn't move abroad because of these reasons, but now that I'm living in Vietnam, these are some of the reasons why I won't move back.

1. Lawn-mowing. I'm allergic to not only the job of mowing lawns and the grass clippings and plant matter that gets tossed into the air, but now the sound itself puts me on edge. Somehow all the dust in the air and sound of motorbikes in Saigon doesn't have the same effect.

Read the rest of this article...

Twitter Decoder Ring

Submitted by tomo on September 5, 2011 - 3:17am

My latest Chrome extension is a quick wrapper around a "service" (hoping the provider see it that way :) to compress English text and get around the 140 character bound on Twitter.

Twitter Decoder Ring: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/idcnolgflhcckjdfpfbcehjocggffdjk

Twitter has a 140 character limit on tweets. This can be annoying when you are writing something and end up just slightly over (seeing negative character counts). So a lot of third party solutions have sprung up to allow one to tweet longer tweets by basically linking to a blog post. For example, TweetDeck does this. There is a way to compress some 140 words into 140 characters by 1) using the set of Chinese characters to represent bits and 2) compressing the English text into as few bits as possible.

For example, the entire paragraph above compresses into this non-sensical Chinese character string: 顜善嬔巖嗴允曏不t唈吷呈呌噑庠嗱鲷凸亥丂仨丶乇儓乓(劗揦允圫s囸严懦倡侭鹔丘柺槐嫢忒爠t唈堺倱t唈婐丕珹埼円七哢蠧呕囫自t唈吷讴鏞弣恟帺呙冑咭巖嗴佽哻巖0簝噯呝丕1哼测樖匡螎諑歘丂2哼檂鎗俫抆哻与亩歘挍叜

I have always thought it a bit unfair that Chinese Twitter users get to say a lot more in 140 characters than we English-speakers do, because each Chinese character essentially represents an idea and often a complete word, rather than just a sound in an alphabet (like the Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, or even Vietnamese alphabets). On the other hand, Chinese Twitter users aren't allowed to access Twitter so I guess it's a draw.

A description of the project to compress English words into Chinese characters is found at: http://thevirtuosi.blogspot.com/2011/08/tweet-is-worth-at-least-140-words.html and a web frontend for the Python script that does the compression can be found at http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~aalemi/twitter/

It's important to note that although the characters are real Chinese characters, the string that is created most likely isn't correct or meaningful Chinese when read by a Chinese person.

This extension uses the backend from the above blog post and provides a quick and dirty wrapper to encode English text as compressed Chinese characters.

Attachments:

decoderringsmall.png

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Daily Twitter Posts - 08/26/2011 - 09/02/2011

Submitted by tomo on September 2, 2011 - 11:45am

Twitter

09/01 12:31 The Truth Behind Online Influence (Klout): http://t.co/9E2YGFg #
09/01 01:22 The damn Vung Tau undersea cable to the overseas Internet broke again #
08/31 15:13 Waiting for more 'Could I destroy the entire Roman empire...' to be posted, story unfolding on Reddit: http://t.co/ZOYv7A6 #
08/31 11:50 @fisheggtree I'm a fan of Golden Farm products. Jars of decent salsa at Vietnamese prices. #
08/31 09:48 Incredible. Skip to 1:02. Robbery and shooting in Phnom Penh captured on security camera: http://t.co/tVdoAGq #
08/31 05:43 Twitta massive big up the DJ @PedroInSaigon in the hot seat on the 1s and 2s inside the place. #
08/31 05:05 Anyone into local biodiversity could benefit from www.lifedesks.org. Drupal, so I can help setup in Vietnam @fisheggtree #
08/31 03:22 I think it would be cool if busses had forklifts in front and could move away cars blocking intersections #
08/30 15:39 RT @TheOnion: Tea Party Congressman Calls For Tax Breaks To Put Out Raging Wildfire In District http://t.co/3Ld7Oc2 #
08/30 08:47 RT @jobnomade: Share your "coffee money" experience http://t.co/yxCDX4s like like like #
08/30 04:43 I wonder if this would work: http://t.co/nzDFWKY #
08/30 04:08 @TylerWatts @jobnomade Good reading. Now I want to organize a group of Viets to go to America's ignored poor inner cities #
08/30 00:03 You shouldn't do voluntourism: http://t.co/UdVoqe7 #
08/29 06:59 @PedroInSaigon I only bet against lottery players and other mathematically challenged people #
08/29 05:04 @dylanduong Would that be Banh Cuon Hat Gao Vang? I am a repeat customer there :( #
08/29 04:43 If all of your recent tweets are Foursquare checkins, I'm not following you back #
08/29 03:32 Creative financing is increasing in Vietnam's real estate market to attract buyers. Remember how the last subprime mortgage crisis ended? #
08/29 03:23 @tamkaizen It's turtles and remixes all the way down. #
08/28 22:45 @Seesmic Web users need this fix for zombie tweets: http://t.co/LU1Nz0N #
08/28 12:28 RIP Dan Sicko, author of the classic music history text "Techno Rebels" and Detroit electronic music sage #
08/27 07:34 @jon7b @jobnomade I mean, we can't control what we do during sleep, and we all have to sleep ~1/3 of the day every day still #
08/27 06:51 We have surprising little control of an activity we spend 1/3 of our life doing, 2 billion people doing nothing every day #
08/26 04:13 Our Milky Way has a massive planet that's made of a single diamond: http://t.co/BXgzuFY #
08/26 02:26 My 1+ hr #VietKieu interview was compressed into 4 Japanese sentences in the latest Sketch Magazine #
08/26 02:22 @k4media Thanks for the feedback and the RT, more coming soon! #

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