How did Yahoo come to render the name of the Chugoku Expressway (a motorway in western Japan) into English as China Road?

Some 14 cars in all were involved in the chain-reaction crash on an expressway named China Road in Yamaguchi prefecture, leaving 10 people with minor injuries.

The name Chūgoku (中国) in Japanese refers both to the country China and to a region of western Japan. In both cases, the literal meaning is middle country (or kingdom); in the latter, that’s a reflection of the fact that Japanese culture was historically centred a bit further west than it is now.

But isn’t that confusing? Not really; the context is usually clear enough, though the tourism industry is a notable exception. It’s no worse than having Georgia refer to both a state of the US and a country in the Caucasus: in practice, it’s rarely an issue.

Here’s coverage of the same incident from a Japanese newspaper:

山口県下関市の中国自動車道で４日に発生した高級スポーツカーなど１４台が絡んだ事故で、１４台のうち８台がフェラーリ、１台はランボルギーニ、３台はベンツ、２台はトヨタ車で、自動車販売店などによると、フェラーリとランボルギーニの車体価格は約１６００万～３０００万円台で、総額２億円程度とみられる。

In this instance, the road in question is called 中国自動車道 (chūgoku jidōshadō), usually and officially given in English as Chugoku Expressway. You could translate it literally as China Car Road, but that would be wrong. Moreover, you’d have to be able to read Japanese without actually knowing anything about the geography and culture of the country. My hypothesis is that someone put a Japanese article through an automatic translator and tidied up the English.

Hearing that the Christmas decorations have already gone up in Oxford Street has given me an idea for how we could resist the annual months-long assault on taste and decency. It’s a very simple idea.

Between now and December, every time that you visit an establishment featuring an indecently-early Christmas-themed display, greet each employee with a hearty ‘Merry Christmas!’ They’ll be sick of the whole thing by Hallowe’en.

I recently signed up for email notification of my credit card bill. I received my first ‘Payment Due’ email a few days ago, and—well, let’s just say that it’s not entirely accurate:

Hello Rajesh,

The next payment for your Barclaycard Visa card account ending 2007 is due on 14 Oct 11.

I’m not called Rajesh, my card number does not end in 2007, and my payment is not due on that date. But apart from that, flawless service.

It doesn’t fill you with confidence, does it?

Tomorrow is the start of my second week at my new job, working for the Government. Working for the Man. Maybe we are the Man. It’s probably different from what you might expect: I still don’t wear a suit to go to work, for example. So far, I’m really enjoying it.

More specifically, I’m working for Government Digital Service on the single government domain project. Government procurement is typically associated with big consultancies, bigger budgets, and long delivery timelines. By contrast, this is being developed in-house by a small team using agile practices—and we’re going to do it better!

Some of you might find it, well, surprising that I’d choose to go and work for the government, but the idea of making government online services actually good feels pretty revolutionary and even a bit seditious. Given that some amount of government is necessary (which is, I think, accepted by most people with the exception of anarchists), it’s also necessary for people to interact with the various arms of the state, but the online facilitation of this hasn’t always been as good as it could be (to be generous). I’ve got a chance to be part of the solution, and to work on a project with national impact that really should make things better for everyone in the UK.

If you want to know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, you should probably read:

• Martha Lane Fox’s recommendations for the future of Directgov
• About the Government Digital Service

It really does feel like working in a start-up: there’s a lot to do in a short time, and a sense of energy and urgency about the work. I’m finding it quite invigorating.

I first tried Club-Mate at Metalab in Vienna in 2006, but I hadn’t drunk it again until I was in Berlin last month for Euruko 2011, where it was freely available. Over the course of a weekend, I grew to like it. It’s a German soft drink brewed from yerba mate, and it’s popular with hacker types in Germany. There is a UK importer who sells it by mail order, but as it’s a bit expensive and inconvenient, I thought I’d attempt to recreate the drink.

I used the OpenCola recipe as a benchmark for quantities, and adjusted the amount of sugar using the nutritional information of Club-Mate. The recipe’s pretty simple: mix hot water, yerba mate, sugar and lemon juice, leave to brew and cool down, filter out the bits, and you have the syrup. This is then diluted with carbonated water to make the final beverage.

Here’s the recipe for the syrup (yields about 500ml):

50g	yerba mate (with stems/con palos)
500ml	water (boiled and allowed to cool slightly)
250g	unbleached cane sugar
5ml	lemon juice

Mix ingredients and stir well. Allow to cool for 1 hour. Remove larger particles using a cafetière and allow to settle. Alternatively, you could make a monstrous teabag with some muslin and save a lot of effort with the cafetière.

To prepare the beverage, mix 1 part syrup with 5 parts carbonated water.

I used Rosamonte yerba mate con palos, which conveniently gives nutritional information on the side for 50g in 500ml of water—exactly what I used. On this basis, the finished drink according to my recipe contains 0.16g of caffeine per litre, slightly lower than the 0.20g of the genuine article.

My verdict? It’s pretty close, at least, as far as I can tell without having a bottle of Club-Mate to compare it with. It tastes like it might be a bit too sweet, although my measurements tell me it has less sugar than the real thing. Let me know if you try it or come up with any improvements.

I subsequently discovered that I’m not the first to try: I’ve come across some other attempts to recreate the beverage, some of which require more complicated equipment.

I’ve said in the past that I think the BBC’s approach to cross-platform support is flawed. In summary, instead of using non-preferential open standards and protocols¹, it relies heavily on a single supplier—Adobe—to support multiple platforms. It turns out that relying on Adobe for cross-platform support is not a very sensible thing to do.

Monocultures tend to be harmful, and Flash retards innovation: you can port a web browser to almost any platform with enough memory and MIPS, but you can only run Flash on devices for which Adobe has ported it and on which they will license you to use it². The barrier to entry for new systems and architectures is thus higher than it needs to be. We’ve been using 64-bit computers for years, and yet Adobe still hasn’t managed to port the chthonic horrors³ of the Flash codebase to 64 bit Linux⁴. Apple has in fact done the world a huge favour by making Flash seem simultaneously undesirable and unnecessary.

If you want to use the BBC iPlayer and you’re not using one of the blessed platforms that get a custom implementation, you have to use Flash, because it’s cross-platform, innit?

Well, yes, it is cross-platform, insofar as it works on a few of them: Windows (Intel architectures only), OS X, and Linux (x86 only).

There’s also an offline application, the iPlayer desktop. That’s cross-platform, too: it uses Adobe Air. I say it’s cross-platform, but with Adobe’s attentions and engineering standards being what they are, Air was only ever available as a 32-bit Linux build, and I could never get it to work on my 64-bit machines.

That’s possibly one of the reasons it’s had such a low uptake, along with the fact that Air applications feel unpleasantly alien on every platform, of course.

And that’s why Adobe has given up on Air for Linux.

But the really important point is this: if your cross-platform solution relies on the vagaries of a single supplier, it’s not really cross-platform.

I doubt that many people will mourn the loss of Adobe Air, but the corollary is that the BBC iPlayer desktop can no longer claim to support Linux.

That’s a shame, but it was also an utterly predictable consequence of the strategy of relying on Adobe.

¹ The iPlayer for iOS uses plain old HTTPS, but manages to lock things down by checking that the device has an Apple-signed client certificate. All open standards, but not a level playing field.

² “Authorized Operating System(s)” means the desktop or standard-laptop version(s) of the operating system(s) set forth in Exhibit A […] For the avoidance of doubt, “Authorized Operating Systems” does not include embedded or device versions of such operating systems.

³ Have a look at the RTMP spec, for example: the endianness of the protocol is not even consistent. That’s not the hallmark of good engineering practice.

⁴ An alpha build of Flash for Linux x86_64 was available for a while, but they withdrew it after one of the regular cross-platform zero-day vulnerabilities was announced. Yeah, that’s right: the exploits are cross-platform, too. D’oh.

One can imagine that one of the tasks of sub-editors at the Daily Express is to go through the copy and change all references to darkies to ethnics or non-whites instead, in the mistaken belief that that somehow makes the whole thing not racist. Perhaps it’s even an automated computerised process.

It’s still racist.

This is the Express’s front page for today:

9 million living here are non-white, says government report.

So what? It’s true, but … so what? Didn’t we have enough of the idea of racial purity after Germany, Yugoslavia, or Rwanda? Nothing good can come of this line of thinking. What matters is how people get on with each other and with the rest of society, something that this front page does nothing to contribute towards.

The huge rise over just eight years means more than nine million people in England and Wales – equivalent to one in six of the population – are now from a “non-white” background.

Why does it matter what colour they are? Plenty of people immigrate from elsewhere in the EU, but the Express doesn’t care about that. It’s the number of “non-white” faces that it focuses on.

I don’t know how these statistics were measured, but it’s also worth pointing out that children from mixed couples will augment the number of people from a “non-white” background. Unless you’re an armchair racial theorist obsessed with the dangers of miscegenation (the Daily Express’s target market?), that’s actually a positive story about immigrants integrating into society. We know that Muslims are more likely to marry non-Muslims than Christians are to marry non-Christians, after all [link to follow].

“And if immigration continues at this rate our population will hit 70 million within 20 years and immigrants will account for half of new households. We are already feeling the pressures on maternity units and schools.”

At last, an argument that’s not obviously racist. However, it’s flawed. First, there’s nothing magic about the number 70 million. Second, more immigrants means more taxpayers—as you may recall, immigrants are a net contributor to society through their taxes. We’ll need to build more schools and maternity facilities, but we’ll have more money to pay for those things.

In contrast, the number of white Britons has remained static over the same period.

And here’s something that’s just not true: a table in the same paper shows that the number of “White Britons” fell from 45.72 to 45.68 million over the 2001-2009 period mentioned.

Next time someone starts wringing their hands about how free online news is destroying newspapers and quality journalism, show them this and raise an eyebrow.

Tomorrow is the last chance for electoral reform in our lifetimes.

The choice is between AV, the Alternative Vote, and FPTP, First Past The Post, the current system. Other forms of voting exist, but tomorrow’s choice is simple:

• Yes: change the system to AV
• No: stick with the current system

Be assured: voting No is a vote for the status quo. You won’t get another choice for PR or MMP or anything else at a later date. In this respect, the referendum echoes the binary choice that is often forced on voters by FPTP.

If you believe the Conservative narrative, FPTP delivered three terms of a Labour government that left the country broken and destitute.

If you believe the Labour narrative, FPTP has delivered a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government that is going to destroy the NHS, education, and leave the poor and disabled to starve.

If you believe either (or, indeed, both!) of those narratives and still think that FPTP serves us well, I’d invite you to interrogate your internal assumptions very carefully.

Some of the arguments against AV are rather specious: in particular, I refer to the idea that some voters are counted multiple times. This is meaningless from a mathematical perspective, but it also misses the point, which is to return a candidate with broad support from the constituency. In this respect, the fact that the Monster Raving Loony candidate is eliminated early and his voters’ second preferences go to a more popular candidate does not give them multiple votes: rather, it results in the returning of a candidate with wide appeal and greater legitimacy.

AV will, for the first time, allow us simply to vote for the people whom we want to represent us. No longer will we be forced into a binary choice between the only two possible winners in a constituency. No longer will we have to second-guess our neighbours’ voting patterns in order to cast our own ballots. No longer will the ballot choice resemble a dilemma from a dissertation on game theory. No longer will the direction of government be determined by the votes of a few tens of thousands of swing voters in marginal seats.

I encourage you to read a couple of very good posts on the subject before you vote:

• Is AV better than FPTP?—a mathematician’s analysis of the subject that addresses many of the No to AV campaign’s arguments
• On AV—a discussion of the relative merits and demerits of AV, FPTP, and PR

Vote yes tomorrow. Vote for a better system. Vote for a change, because it’s your last chance in this lifetime.

Japanese elections are a remarkably noisy affair: trucks drive around playing recorded exhortations to vote for a particular candidate for weeks beforehand. Candidates stand in public areas and drone on through microphones. It can be quite tiresome. But here’s how not to deal with it:

A Briton has been arrested in Tokorozawa, Saitama prefecture, on charges of disrupting the electoral process after grabbing a candidate’s microphone and shouting, “Japanese elections need to shut up!”

The Tokorozawa office of Saitama police on 23rd April arrested British citizen Edward Jones (34), a teacher of conversational English based in Nishinippori, Aragawa-ku, Tokyo, on charges of violating the public election law.

It is alleged that, on the evening of 23rd April, on the pedestrian path in front of JR Tokorozawa Station, the suspect grabbed the microphone being used by a city council election candidate in mid-speech, and shouted [in Japanese], “Japanese elections need to shut up!”

According to the city police, Jones had been drinking with a friend immediately before the incident. A campaigner reported the incident at a police box. A member of the station staff then detained the suspect on the station premises.

I translated the article from Sankei News.

What the suspect is actually alleged to have shouted down the microphone is “日本の選挙はうるさい”. The literal meaning is “Japanese elections are noisy”, but the word うるさい (noisy) is commonly used not so much as an observation of sound pressure levels as as an invitation to the originator of the noise to desist from producing it. A better translation might even be “Japanese elections STFU!”

Thanks to Andrew Plummer for directing me to this story.

Repeat after me: I will not let your lack of planning become my crisis. Keith Mitchell at PIPEX taught me this.——Bill Thompson

I don’t care about downtime nearly so much as I care about data loss, so, from my point of view, I’m pretty happy with the outcome of the Amazon Web Services problems last week.

To recap: Amazon AWS services hosted in Virginia suffered connectivity problems which weren’t fully resolved for several days. This affected a number of large sites, such as Reddit, and the hosting platform Heroku.

The reasons for using AWS instead of dedicated hosting are still valid: it’s quick, easy, and cheap to provision servers and storage because it’s an anonymous, automated system. Of course, those advantages turn to disadvantages when something goes wrong: it’s still an anonymous automated system that doesn’t really tell you much about what’s going wrong or when it’s going to be fixed.

But you know what? I think that’s OK. Computer systems fail, sometimes catastrophically. Hardware breaks. The only reason anyone noticed the Amazon outage is that it affected a large number of sites simultaneously. Running your own systems may make it easier to find someone to blame when they go down, and to nag while they try to fix it, but would it really be better? Can you hire the networking and database expertise you’d need at the price you’re willing to pay? Can you set up a multiple-location backup system that actually works?

A sense of perspective is important here. We’re talking about hosting websites, not brain surgery or moon landings. No one’s dying. People overreact, it may be a bit embarrassing, and it’s not nice to be the target of frothy-mouthed panic from jittery middle managers, but that’s not really critical. If you didn’t have a continuity plan a week ago, then you didn’t think the service was that important. As the quote above says, your lack of planning is not my crisis.

The worst possible outcome of the AWS downtime would be a reactionary exodus from AWS to another hosting platform that hasn’t failed yet. It won’t be any better.

Now, you might complain that Amazon said that this outage wouldn’t happen, so you didn’t plan for it. Have you planned for nuclear strikes on the eastern seaboard of the United States of America? If you have, then congratulations: the AWS outage probably didn’t affect you. If you haven’t, then you implicitly accepted the risk of downtime. In most cases, that’s the rational choice, but it’s also an acceptance of the fact that your website is not critical.

Amazon’s recent outage affected connectivity to virtual servers on the US east coast, and, by extension, RDS, their hosted database service. One of the interesting features of RDS is that it provides automated snapshots of the database at daily intervals. During the downtime, anyone using an affected RDS database was able to create a new working database instance from the last snapshot with two or three mouse clicks. Far from being a failure, that’s actually a remarkably resilient system, and a quality of backup far better than most people would manage running their own database servers. However, given the potential loss of up to 24 hours’ data, or the difficulty of re-integrating the data from that period later, I suspect that many people would have chosen simply to wait for connectivity to be restored. That’s an acknowledgement that preserving data is more important than uptime.

Take fright at ‘the cloud’ if you will. Run back to traditional hosting providers. Pay them lots of money. Wait days for them to rack up servers. Fill in change requests in Word documents whenever you want to do something. Make sure that they set up regular off-site backups of your databases and storage. Ensure that those backups work. And then, next time Amazon goes down, you’ll be safe. But don’t fool yourself that you won’t have downtime, or that it will be any easier or more reliable.

There are ways to architect applications for high availability, but they come with costs and trade-offs of their own. It’s your choice.