Lalalala doo
March 18th, 2022
Back to Blighty and the weather is glorious! I totally forgot the sky could be this shade of blue. And where better to go than the local beach which festooned with these traditional fishing boats.
Oh how I missed the seagulls
Catchily named “RX142” (RX means “Rye” by the way)
“R4” and various bits of fishing junk
March 7th, 2022
Chongming island 崇明岛 is a large island on the north of the Yangtze estuary. And while it’s technically part of Shanghai it’s actually very rural and makes for an interesting day out.
Ferry to Chongming island
Getting there from the city is a bit convoluted. The quickest way is to take subway line 3 to Baoyang Road and take a bus to the ferry terminal of the same name. The ferry takes about 50 minutes and costs 16 RMB. Make sure you get the one to Nanmen 南门 as that’s the most touristy part.
Walking along the Yangtze river
I walked along the bank of the Yangtze river for a little way from the ferry terminal. It was really hazy. Might have been pollution but the air quality report that didn’t seem too bad…
Chongming academy
Next stop was Chongming Academy, an old Confucian school. Nothing spectacular to look at, but there’s some interesting exhibits (in Chinese) in several of the buildings about the history of Chongming island. Apparently it used to be an important centre of cloth production, and now it’s trying to reinvent itself as an ecotourism destination.
After that I took the bus to the wetland park in the north of the island. The bus trip is around an hour, which I wasn’t expecting, but the view along the way was interesting. One thing you’ll notice straight away is almost everyone on the island is old (quite common in rural China). The other noteworthy thing was the number of churches – I counted at least two plus some crosses on walls – which I hardly ever see on the mainland.
Harvested grass in the wetland park
With all the time spent travelling I only had time for two attractions but there’s also some temples and a forest park, so maybe you could make a weekend of it.
Here’s a pro tip: the last boat back to the mainland is at 6pm. If, like me, you miss this it’s also possible to take a long-distance bus back to the mainland via the bridge at the south of the island. The bus leaves from the bus station near the ferry terminal and takes about 1.5 hours to reach a subway station on line 6.
March 5th, 2022
A double day of sightseeing today in Qingpu district, which is in the far west of Shanghai. My first stop was Zhujiajiao ancient town. I didn’t have very high hopes considering the other old towns in the Shanghai suburbs have been over-commercialised and not very interesting, but this one was surprisingly quiet and well preserved. There are a couple of small paid exhibits including a garden, temple, and a craft museum.
Zhujiajiao ancient town
Next I rode all the way to the end of line 17 to try to get to Dianshan lake, Shanghai’s largest lake. I was going to walk there but thought better of it and got on a bus. The place you want to go to is called Xicai 西蔡 and there’s a long path around the lake with great views.
Dianshan lake
Years ago when I used take the train to Suzhou I was always fascinated by this massive skyscraper built seemingly in the middle of the countryside. I saw it again today on the other side of the lake. I still don’t know what it is. Only in China I suppose.
The mysterious tower
March 1st, 2022
Last week I took a trip up to the 100th floor observation gallery in the Shanghai World Financial Centre the second tallest building in Shanghai. For a time it was also the second tallest building in the world, but it’s a fair way down the rankings now.
It’s the one on the left that looks like a bottle opener
The 100th floor ticket costs 180 which is cheaper, higher, and less crowded than the Oriental Pearl Tower, so triple win. You can save 60 RMB by only going to the 94th floor, but why bother.
The observation deck is pretty empty
The best time to visit is around sunset on a clear day, that way you get both the day and night scenery. The gallery isn’t ideal for taking photos in the day time though because the windows have a lot of glare, and there’s no outside area like the Taipei 101.
Sunset with the ever present haze
February 27th, 2022
For a while now I’ve been searching for a simple lightweight text editor to use when editing configuration files as root and when SSH-ing to remote machine. My normal editor is GNU Emacs with 15+ years of accumulated baggage which makes it pretty slow to start up. I’ve tried the various workarounds like the Emacs daemon and TRAMP but it still feels like a lot of faff compared to just SSH and starting an editor. I’ve also tried nano and vi, but my Emacs muscle memory makes them too annoying to use.
Recently I’ve settled on mg, a venerable Emacs clone that’s maintained as part of the OpenBSD base system and also available on Linux.
It starts up instantly and with the minor configuration tweaks below is pretty ergonomic.
global-set-key "\^z" undo global-set-key "\^?" delete-backward-char global-set-key "\^h" delete-backward-char global-set-key "\e[1;3C" forward-word global-set-key "\e[1;3D" backward-word global-set-key "\e[1;5C" forward-word global-set-key "\e[1;5D" backward-word auto-execute *.c c-mode auto-execute *.h c-mode make-backup-files 0 set-default-mode indent set-fill-column 72
February 25th, 2022
Not much here, just a photo, but it’s somewhat remarkable since I almost never come to the city centre since I moved here.
Probably the best thing you can do here is ride the yellow and white ferry. Zig-zag across on the different lines. It’s quite fun.
January 25th, 2022
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work on my VHDL simulator and I’ve just released the first new major version in over a year and a half.
Download: nvc-1.6.0.tar.gz
This release is signed with my PGP key ID 74319F1A: nvc-1.6.0.tar.gz.sig
This release contains many improvements and bug fixes detailed below, but the highlights are much improved language support, especially for configurations and some VHDL-2008 features, as well as better debugging support.
--relax=impure option allows pure functions to call impure functions.fst2vcd(1). This should improve compatibility with other tools.--ieee-warnings=off to disable warning messages from the standard IEEE packages.--dump-arrays option is passed. This is disabled my default due the significant performance and memory overhead.make -j.$prefix/lib/nvc/ instead of $prefix/share/nvc.--disable-vital disables building the VITAL packages whose license status is unclear.fetch-ieee.sh script which did nothing since the last release has been removed.--codegen command, which has been deprecated since 1.3, was removed.--profile option now prints internal simulation statistics instead of the top processes by CPU time.January 22nd, 2022
A new year, a new version of Xcowsay! Just a few minor changes this time:
-t option now allows fractional time values (e.g. -t 0.5 to display for half a second).Download: xcowsay-1.6.tar.gz
This release is signed with my PGP key ID 74319F1A: xcowsay-1.6.tar.gz.sig
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