Crystal is happy to announce our collaboration with the International School of Beijing. We have long focused on the education market and today proves a milestone in our current offerings to international schools in China and throughout Asia. We are pleased to be chosen as the sole provider for curriculum mapping software and it’s infrastructure.

Business

The extensive reporting and analysis acts as a huge cost saving mechanism, and most importantly, reducing the sweat and tears to get a single report. It’s now available in the same place, 24 hours a day. This will help the 4 regional offices throughout China plan and execute, what was before, a logistical nightmare of spreadsheets into an efficient, user focused, User Interface. Structure and rules have mean’t the regional offices work in the same manner (even with their subtleties of searching for users) on a unified system with central support.

Technical

We have upgraded the previous CakePHP framework 1.3 to 2.0 and will have a mini update to 2.1 once a few weeks have past. In our initial tests, the performance increase with no code optimisations was between 10% and 30%. When we optimised our queries, loops and other tricks, it was up a further 20%. Considering it’s running on a tiny 128 meg VPS running NGINX, and taking 400 simultaneous connections, we have plenty of resources to spare.

As there is a large amount of emailing happening on the system, and the processing of statistics, we decided to offload the process to a task shell rather than have the user endure long pauses between actions. The networks within the British Council are sometimes overloaded and any timeout on some actions just add to the wait. The task shell runs via CRON through a series of worker processes. Beanstalkd was originally planned as the scheduler but it was overkill at this stage. We have a separate mailing script firing every 5 minutes, sending 20 emails each time. The job & statistic shells handle general upkeep, the starting of new jobs and the creation of reminder emails.

What next?

Using geo-location has opening up a new possibility with mapping examiners and trying out new experimental interfaces for allocation. There is also a lot of room with making automatic allocation using Game Theory. The fairness engine we propose will automate even further, but require a human approval. We wish to improve the social aspects of the site by offering more information about destinations. Examiners have a chance to travel after work, or extend their stays. If they can communicate to other examiners of a great restaurant they found, the ecosystem can benefit from it. Lastly, online expense management would be a great addition. This can link in further with finance systems already in place where only the fapiao/receipts need to be processed.

Previously, IESGlobal were relying on 3rd party CRM software which didn’t integrate very well with their outdated website. Using Drupal Views and a fresh approach to the role and permissions system, we are allowing them to use an integrated Drupal CRM solution.

We also looked heavily into their target audience, and existing marketing channels (Flickr, Facebook) to improve the way they can centralise their media and marketing updates. Flickr galleries are embedded seamlessly, and future Facebook updates can be added.

A second phase has been completed on WunschArb. We have added a highly structured content section to easily navigate a large body of content heavy in categories. Again, Drupal and Views allowed us to directly create filters to navigate it.

We have more updates coming soon and are in heavy development mode on a number of projects which need to be out by Chinese New Year – January 22, 2012! Then it’s party time!

So if you’re in China, some of the sites are blocked so you will get an Er Error. The rest are Yes or No. Let me know how accurate it is :)

The code in question:

function visipisi(url, cb)
{
  var count = 0;
  var start, cachedTime, uncachedTime;
  var cached = new Image(), uncached = new Image();
  var determineVisitedness = function () {
    cb(cachedTime < 0.05 * uncachedTime);
  }
  var errCB = function () {
    count = -10;
    cb(null);
  }

  cached.onload = function() {
    cachedTime = (new Date()).getTime() - start;
    if (++count == 2)
      determineVisitedness();
  };
  uncached.onload = function() {
    uncachedTime = (new Date()).getTime() - start;
    if (++count == 2)
      determineVisitedness();
  };
  cached.onerror = errCB;
  uncached.onerror = errCB;

  var start = (new Date()).getTime();
  cached.src = url;
  uncached.src = url + ('?' + Math.random());
}

Source & Code
Original

Bam, new design for Snow Polo World Cup:

We will have a fairly complete player profile gallery as well as a number of other juicy tid bits in this website. The games commence in 61 days time!

We also have 2 new staff on the back-end side. We can now focus on customers bigger projects which are increasing during this period. Fresh eyes, fresh ears and fresh projects!

But the big news is that we’re moving office! The office floor was sold to a single company so we’re went hunting in all directions to find something which reflected the way we wanted to work. We now have an apartment office in South East Beijing (Near VIVA!). It’s much bigger than our current premises and this allows us to grow. It’s a little tight in the engine room at the moment so it will be a welcome change.

Happy Fridays from Crystal Asia!

The intention is sound, right? You want people who are familiar in mainly Facebook, G+ and Twitter to share your page. In reality, they act as a visual buffer between your content and comments/end of the page. They are also very identifiable with advertising. The only exception to this rule (which was quickly put in it’s place) is the Facebook Like button, and now the +1 from Google Plus.

This is due to habitual familiarity more than anything else. In reality, these are useless.

What most people forget is that there are real people there reading your site and the have more than one thing going on inside their browser, and also outside. If they want to share it they will use the oldest sharing method possible: Cut-and-paste. If it’s in a conversation they will “send you the link”. We do this because without that mental bridge between personal action or person to storing or memorising the link, it is largely useless. ie. The idea of bookmarks but even more: Browsing History.

So just because everyone else is doing it, don’t. Get back to basics. Write something worth remembering.

In China it’s not such a good idea to rely on Google to do this as the service is throttled and intermittently unresponsive… frustratingly unresponsive.  Sina Weibo, the Twitter of China has GeoLocation based on IP’s as part of their API (http://open.weibo.com/wiki/Geocode/ip_to_geo). We can get this from a IP request:

http://api.t.sina.com.cn/location/geocode/ip_to_geo.xml?ip=60.194.172.177&source=$appkey

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<geoResult>
<geos>
  <geo>
    <city>0010</city>
    <longitude>116.39794</longitude>
    <latitude>39.90817</latitude>
    <city_name>北京</city_name>
    <province>32</province>
    <prov_name>北京</prov_name>
    <pinyin>beijing</pinyin>
    <more>中国 北京 北京 电信通</more>
    <ip>60.194.172.177</ip>
  </geo>
</geos>
</geoResult>

Now I need to see how good and accurate this on 500 users. I can accept a 10% deviation… and I’m actually wondering how close the latitude and longitude really is. If I can actually get it within 200m of a major exchange I’d be happy but something tells me things are not that organised :)

Adobe says to ZDNET:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Tech Crunch sums it up nicely:

The notion that Apple wouldn’t include it on the iPhone because of performance issues was pure hogwash.

The same thing was said in 2009.

The same thing was said in 2010.

The same thing was still being said in 2011.

So you’ll forgive me when I snicker a bit at the news tonight that Adobe plans to cease development of their Flash player for mobile devices.

I think this will carry on through right into all their product lines as they usually do but why do both Flash and HTML5 on PC’s? Why not just do HTML5 and use that through AIR? They can still use ActionScript… but why bother? They can go runtime right into javascript.

Anyway… what does this mean for you? Well, we create you HTML5 device ready websites which work in all browsers (degraded gracefully for IE6) and you don’t know the difference. Better for us, better for you, better for Google and Baidu (SEO).

The future is brighter :-)

ps. Steve jobs was right.

So if South Korea does it (and they’re fairly Microsoft friendly there), will other countries in Asia follow suite? China might have it’s own plans for stopping spam.. since a lot of it comes from China itself.

It is a short term solution in my opinion. They will just connect to the new proposed port of  587 instead. But it will take time, and they have the advantage..  and it is legislation…

Zombie Storage has the lowdown:

Do these government agencies actually think blocking port 25 will reduce spam? Most of the issues stem from open relays (yes, I’ve noticed several on my IP block) or insecure servers. Botnets are a problem but using another port doesn’t fix that. From what I can tell they are also recommending people break port 587 by accepting both SMTPS and SMTP connections. Further they recommend 465 for SMTPS just to break the spec more.

The Korean government has long had a system of deep packet inspection so the technical implementation of a nationwide firewall over a port isn’t new or unprecedented. The steps may prevent some spam but really, I doubt it will amount to anything substantial. They can’t block all email and the system would probably fall over with IP forging techniques.
Update: I’ve asked a few people and it seems to be a joint initiative by the two departments and not actually a law. Although it does have penalties and apparently you get emailed warnings the first few times.

Original: http://zombie-storage.com/?p=95

Korean website: http://www.block25.or.kr/