Hints, tips, and pointers

It transpires that the Flickr problems from yesterday were Yahoo-wide, which temporarily became unavailable out here. It's back on again but we'll see what happens over the next few days.

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I discovered a nice speed-up for Acroread which seems interminably slow these days. It turns out that when you load Acroread there are dozens of plugins which load up automatically. Most of these are completely unnecessary for every-day use. There are three or four vital plugins. If you download Adobe Reader Speedup and run the small setup program, most of the plugins will be disabled and Acroread will load in a fraction of the time and waste less space.

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I've just received the proofs for a magazine article about, emm, me! It's a strange one and I'll post it up here once it's been published.

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An interesting paper today on a subject I've been flirting with for a while. I'll just point it out here and hope to discuss it in more detail when I've the time.

Erdmenger, Ghoroku and Kirsch: Holographic heavy-light mesons from non-Abelian DBI. Some interesting looking results but it'll take me a while to go through everything.

Flickr really blocked this time

Previously there was a work around to view Flickr here in China as the photo server itself was blocked by URL name only. This was well known about. Now the site has been completely blocked here, at least in Beijing. In fact this is about the most concrete block I've seen since I came here.

I'm told that this is a layer 7 (application layer) block, which is apparently serious.

Posting photos is going to be tough I think.

I will miss China greatly when I leave it in just a few months but there are some things I will be glad not to have to think about.

Flickr block work-around

There's currently uproar on Flickr about the China block. There would be more if the help thread within Flickr was not blocked too. There is now a Firefox addon that will allow access to your photos.

This has now made it to Spiegel online.

Flickr blocked in China?

The photos in Flickr seem to be blocked in China. This is a really strange move. I'm a member of the Beijing Photographers Flickr group and everyone is finding the same thing. We presume it's the GFW as all the photos are viewable via proxy.

If anyone has any information regarding this I'd be very interesting to know what's going on, and why.

(Update: Flickr help has lots of info on this. It seems to be a GFW problem)

On the subject of the GFW, I've stopped using Tor now. It was too slow and by writing a proxy file which redirects to alternative IP addresses automatically, sites like wordpress and blogspot should be accessible. For those without an easy to find alternative IP address I now use the PhProxy add-on for Firefox, which allows a single click to go to any page by Proxy.

Flickr Collections

Anybody with a Pro Flickr account will be pleased to know that subsets of sets has now been implemented. This feature has been a while coming and members have been champing at the bit for it. This is a huge improvement on the previous tools for organisation. Thanks Flickr.

Unfortunately Yahoo Pipes still haven't released their documentation and until they do I'm not going to spend hours trying to do what may be impossible. This technology promises so much but I haven't been particularly impressed by what's been done so far.