Alastair Tse

I ate a a lot while I was in Hokkaido. I'm a big fan of seafood, so this was essentially heaven to me.

Hakodate (函館)

This place was our first stop in Hokkaido after training it for 6 hours from Tokyo. It's a big port town on the southern part of Hokkaido. We arrived on the last train to get there that night (around 10pm). After checking in to our hotel, we tried to seek out the closest seafood bonanza. Unfortunately, it was pretty late by then and most places were shutting, but we did find this one place only two blocks away from where we were staying.

The meal was a bit underwhelming, but because I was super excited about being in Japan it didn't really register till after I saw the photos. I had some crab sushi which may have been leftovers from the start of the day :(

The next day was much better. we stayed at the Toyoko Inn (東横イン函館駅前朝市) which is conveniently located right next to the Hakodate Morning Market (朝市). Heaps of fresh seafood here, even a game where you can fish your own live squid to eat:

It was snowing pretty hard, so we took shelter in a nearby restaurant (函館朝市浜一食堂). We later found out that just around the corner near the side closest to the station in the market was a complex of nice cheap noodle and rice restaurants. But we settled into this cute little place that was inside the market.

I ordered scallop and salmon roe sashimi rice (ホタテいくら丼). This was as sweet and delicious as it looks. I just love scallop, especially when it is fresh. There were heaps of stalls selling live scallop so I had no doubt that this was pretty fresh.

and pp had some ramen with a crab rice. They seemed to be famous for crabs in this part of the world, crab was always an option.

Hirafu/Niseko

We set of to niseko the next day in the afternoon, having had some lunch inside a department store with some japanese-styled western food. The train ride was long but pleasant, but we made it into Niseko/Hirafu by 6pm. One of the lines we took only had four trains a day, a one hour trip from a place called Oshamambe (長万部) all the way up to Otaru. It was a tiny single carriage train:

You'd imagine up on the mountain there's not much food. In fact, there was a lot of really nice places. Of course, we had to have some shabu shabu:

We went to this fabulous place called Yo (aka, Hurry Slowly).

I'm not sure why the two different names, but maybe one is the hotel that is attached to it and the other is the restaurant name. It was very dark there, but we had some hotpot again - this time with paper:

and some grilled prawns -- and sashimi:

The best thing about boarding in Japan is that on the slopes you get really good ramen, rice, etc. I didn't bother taking pictures of those, but there was one that really stood out. Up on the Hirafu mountain, there was a hut call the 1000m hut. We had boarded past there for three days, and only fourth day did we go in because we needed to find a toilet. And it was an amazingly cute little rest stop:

and it did food too, japanese anime style. This was a meat bun (not sure what meat, maybe a cut of pikachu meat):

Our friends found out there's this fine dining place called Kamimura, which we went to for a 8 or 9 course meal. By the end of it I had butt cramps because it took so long. I gotta say that I wasn't very impressed (mainly because I'm not a fan of fine dining), but these were some pics that were acceptable:

And finally, to round off the snow boarding on the last day, we had diy okonomiyaki at Kabuki, which was incredibly fun and smelly. I've seen this done in front of me by professionals at Abeno Too in London, but we had to do it ourselves, so of course I couldn't wait to try:

All I can say was no one got food poisoning.

Otaru

We stopped over in Otaru for a day, a kind of impromptu stop because I planned it at literally the very last minute. I think I found only two hotels on expedia in that area, so I ended up having to use my Japanese skills and Rakuten to book an awesome spa hotel called Otaru Furukawa (street view) right in the middle of town with a open air onsen on the top floor overlooking the town. This hotel has one of the most awesome looking lobbies for a multi-story hotel.

Otaru is one of the other major port towns, and yet again, excellent seafood. As soon as we checked in a dumped our bags we headed for a seafood store right around the corner from our hotel. You had to buy/select what you wanted downstairs in the market and then go upstairs where they prepare it for you for "free". I thought the deal was nearly too good to be true, but it was exactly like that.

We chose to get some scallops, octopus, prawns and crab. The crab was cooked, but the others were prepared with half sashimi and half grilled.

The portions were so big, we embarrassingly asked the waitress whether she forgot that half was going to be grilled. We watched her go into the kitchen to talk to the chefs and they were laughing, and she came out to confirm that it was indeed only half grilled and this was really only half the food we ordered!

Not long after we had our meal and did our fair share of walking down the road, we stumbled across a soft serve place that was advertising a three flavoured soft serve, which I could only guess was taro, milk and melon.

The guy behind the counter was a skilled soft serve machine operator, and the fancy machine was operated by foot. Too bad I didn't take a video, but his style was top notch as you can deduce from this pose.

Another short walk and we stumbled into a baked rice cracker store with another set of colorful flavours! We couldn't resist.

And then not far from there sat a Otaru Burger stand! I was bursting at the seams, really wanted to try it but I just couldn't. So I took a picture to remember this failure by.

Finally, our last proper meal in Hokkaido was at a kaiten sushi place that I wrote about. I was too busy eating that I didn't take many photos of the food, but here's two to demonstrate.

All in all, a really delicious holiday in Hokkaido. And as I said, interspersed with some snow boarding.

I finally posted some long overdue photos I took during my trip to Japan back in Feb.

They're not so great, but I just thought I'd share them with every body because I've been dying to blog about some interesting things I did and saw there but couldn't because there were no pictures.

In Otaru (小樽) up in Hokkaido, we had kaiten sushi (aka, conveyer belt sushi, sushi train, sushi go round). It was pretty amazing, not really the food, but the technology on display.

Right from the start, the table booking system was fully automated. So instead of having to talk to the waitress, you put in your details on this machine with your name, number of people and you're given an estimated time of seating. Then if you have a Japanese cell phone, you can scan the QRcode and bring up the live view of the waiting list page. So you can wonder out for a walk or get notified as soon as your number is up.

Once you're seated, you're confronted with this double decker conveyer belt. Talk about space optimization. The sushi goes on top and miscellanous bits like mugs go in the bottom.

Although, at this stage, turns out the manual interaction with the sushi chef is required as there aren't any fancy screens to order custom bits and pieces. In fact, the specials are written in Japanese on these pieces of paper. Once something is sold out, they get removed.

When we asked for the bill, instead of counting the plates by hand, the waitress comes over with this RFID scanner and just sweeps it across the plates we've accumulated. We were so fascinated with it we asked her to do it again. In fact, she does it twice anyway as to make sure there's some error checking (?). Turns out underneath each plate is an RFID that identifies the plate and the type of plate it is.

After the bill is totaled, we're given this blank plastic card which is our token for the bill. We take the bill to the payment counter and the amount we owed is stored inside. The bill is scanned by the checkout lady and we're told the amount we have to pay.

All in all, it was a fascinating experience. We never stumbled across other hi-tech sushi establishments in Tokyo - but maybe we were just going to the wrong places.

I just released a small project called WebViewScreenSaver for Mac. It is available on github and is open-sourced. You can download the binary for 10.6.

The idea is very simple: Make any page on the web a screensaver.

The screensaver takes care (the relatively simple task) of ensuring no keyboard or mouse events leak into the web view and so you can display a website and not worry that someone could subvert it and access your account, or maliciously rickroll you.

Usage

You can use it in a variety of ways. Currently, I use it at work as an ambient display to display tweets about our product (via sites like visibletweets.com) or to display an internal feeds driven through a web server. I also use it to display a flickr slideshow. More and more dashboards and visualization are running on the web, either with maps, javascript or flash and many of them look great as a screensaver.

The screensaver's options will allow you to set a list of URLs to cycle through with a custom time interval.

Background

I don't think this is a new idea, but I couldn't find anyone who had done it for the Mac. We often build dashboards that are hosted on a website, they're very easy to build and there are now even more sophisticated ones like geckoboard that look super-sexy.

However, running a web browser in a logged in account is dangerous. I've seen people build proper full blown apps and do many secret keystrokes or password protects in order to make sure someone can't quit the app and access the console or desktop.

I noticed there was already a perfectly well tested mechanism for this, which is the screen saver framework. It can take care of password protection, screen locking, screen blanking etc. All I had to do was create a webview that would embed into the screensaver view and some rudimentary preferences.

Instructions

1. Download and install the screensaver from the github download page.


2. See the project description for how to activate it and some sample URLs you can use that make great screensavers.

Part of my travel rituals these days is to try and get mobile data on a prepaid SIM card.

This time I travelled to Greece and managed to get a data-only SIM with Vodafone. I went into a Vodafone shop in Athens and asked for a prepay SIM card with data on it. They asked me whether I wanted to make voice calls on it, and I said no.

They gave me a Vodafone Mobile Broadband on Demand SIM with a 10GB for 10 days voucher. This cost me €19. All the instructions were in Greek and all the literature that came with the card assumed you have a Vodafone branded USB modem. In fact, you don't need one. You just need to make sure the device settings on your handset (in my case an iPhone and a Nexus One) is set to:

Online you can find a few references to different APN settings like internet, vmckarta and such. Those do not work on this SIM, you need to use web.session. I only found out after calling the support line.

Once you get the SIM working, you need to fire up a web browser and browse any page, you'll be redirected to the vodafone voucher entry page. From here, you can just enter your voucher number and accept the terms.

From then on, you'll get 10GB of data for 10 days. €19 for 10 days is pretty cheap considering how much hotel wifi goes for, and the convenience of having Google Maps or Google Translate where ever you go.

I only had one hitch with Vodafone where they expired my credit for a day after 5 days. I don't know whether I did something or if their systems were down, but the next day I could use it normally again.

Arrived back to London last Thursday morning. Had a great flight back, and got home in good time. And as usual, I got asked at customs about whether I had food in my luggage. Every. Single. Time. At. Heathrow. My arms were so sore from snowboarding and lugging my luggage from one side of Tokyo to another that I could barely make it down the stairs with my luggage (yes, welcome to London) when changing at Bank/Monument. I avoided taking the taxi since I wasn't really in a rush.

On Friday, I rocked into work that seemed to have surprised some people who thought I wouldn't be in till Monday. Mainly spent the day catching up on 2 weeks of email and updating everyone with a different anecdote from my awesome trip to Japan. Caught up with Jess in the evening who lives in Amsterdam but was passing by London. Hadn't seen each other for over a year. We didn't really have any plans (yes, I'm like that), so we ended up trekking from Covent Garden to Chinatown and had dinner a Leongs Legend, followed up by drinks at the Bedford and Strand. It was a lot more packed than the last time I was there. So time to find a new place.

On Saturday, I lazed around home till the afternoon, and caught a quick double caffeine shot at the Flat White in Soho. I hung out there for around an hour, saw the pulse of the cafe heave and sink as people came in tides rather than a constant stream. Trekked over to Notting Hill-ish area for some delicious modern Spanish Tapas and birthday dinner with friends.

On Sunday, I cleaned the kitchen a bit, and practised making 雞蛋仔 in the morning. I'm getting better and better at this, but still much room for improvement. Not sure what I did for the rest of the day, but I think it just involved doing laundry and probably writing some code for some personal projects.

Getting back to work after a vacation is always tough. This week was more tough than usual, lots of crazy deadlines to chase, lots of meetings to be had and things to do. It really felt like I had done two weeks of work in one. I cringed when I saw people using my app - so much more to improve on but so much more new stuff to add. One shining light at the end of the week was proof that my code was awesome when things worked in a totally different context than what we wrote it for. Good times.

I got excited about Street View launch in Hong Kong, provided me with hours of fun. Then the iPad pre-orders started in the US, but I couldn't manage to get an order in because (a) the launch is on a Saturday, so sending it to the US Office might not of been the best idea and (b) I didn't have enough money in my US accounts to get one and they wouldn't accept my UK credit card.

I finally got around to updating the address on my driver's license which I was supposed to do a year ago. I finally submitted the application online through their website (which was an ordeal because they closed the website at night!) and sent my cut up license on Monday. Managed to receive my new license on Friday which I thought was a quick turnaround.

Sent off some US checks for depositing so that I could try and shore up my US account for the iPad purchase. I should of done this months ago, but then today I just received another US check I could of deposited. I'm lazy like that, some day I need to figure out how to change the address of that account so that I can receive my new card!

Wrapped up the week with a TGIF drinks, been a while since I hadn't had to rush off to somewhere on a Friday night. Ended the night with a really late drinks and dinner in Canary Wharf at Wahaca. It's actually quite interesting Mexican food, a far cry from the huge portions and dense burritos I've had in SF. To be honest, I kinda enjoyed Wahaca a lot more than I expected.

Trying out a new way to force myself to blog more by trying to summarize the week. Let's see if this sticks. See you next week, maybe.

this is getting more and more real, but not quite how you expect.

a lot of innovation in terms of aggregating and selling not just apps, but services. see these two beautifully designed "appstores" for talent. you can now choose your design studio or app developer based on an image, description and price.

theymakeapps.com
is a "store" for advertising iphone developers.

sortfolio is a store for finding a web designer.

If you have a mixture of US, Hong Kong and European Apple 802.11n (5GHz) equipment in your home, then it is likely you'll not be able to use 5GHz because the overlap in channels is small between the 3 regions. To make matters worse, Apple's Airport Extreme or Time Capsule doesn't allow you to manually select the channels when in 5GHz mode.

More over, UK computers are not workable with the "Use wide channel" option on Airport Extremes.

See http://support.apple.com/kb/SP20:

• Channels 1-11, 36-48, and 149-165 approved for use in the United States and Canada.


• Channels 1-14, 36-64 approved for use in Japan


• Channels 1-13, 36-140 approved for use in Europe


• Channels 1-13, 36-64 approved for use in Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand

So that means the overlap for US and Europe for 5GHz is only 36-48. That is barely 12 channels out of 100+ channels. Because you cannot set the channels manually on the Time Capsule, 5 times out of 6 your Time Capsule will not work with any 5GHz devices bought in Europe.

Crazy.

i've been doing some web development targetting iphone, and one of the things you have to learn to support is rotation.

one thing that has annoyed me recently is that when you rotate, the font size changes. google didn't reveal anything, so i thought i'd blog here about it.

if you set:

html {
  -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
}

then it will not automatically adjust the fonts of the page when it rotates. the downside of this is that the font size also does not adjust in a regular webkit browser. but if you're targetting iphone specifically, then it is not such a big deal.

If you've done some text layout on iPhone, you'll know that the documentation isn't really the greatest and clearest. The most frequently annoying thing about text layout is that there are these NSString UIStringDrawing additions that you would think can help you determine the size required to render a piece of text with a given font.

Specifically:

- (CGSize)sizeWithFont:(UIFont *)font
- (CGSize)sizeWithFont:(UIFont *)font constrainedToSize:(CGSize)size
- (CGSize)sizeWithFont:(UIFont *)font constrainedToSize:(CGSize)size lineBreakMode:(UILineBreakMode)lineBreakMode
- (CGSize)sizeWithFont:(UIFont *)font forWidth:(CGFloat)width lineBreakMode:(UILineBreakMode)lineBreakMode

Only one of the four above gives you sizes with multi-line text. Worse still, even if you choose the right one, you probably will end up passing the wrong thing into the size parameter.

In order to get the height of a piece of multi line text constrained by a given width, you must do this:

CGSize boundingSize = CGSizeMake(desiredWidth, CGFLOAT_MAX);
CGSize requiredSize = [someText sizeWithFont:someFont
                           constrainedToSize:boundingSize
                               lineBreakMode:UILineBreakModeWordWrap];
CGFloat requiredHeight = requiredSize.height;

Things to note:

1. You must pass in CGFLOAT_MAX (or a big number) for the height, otherwise your text will never flow outside of the boundingSize. This is the bit I always get wrong.


2. All the other sizeWithFont methods do not work with multi-line text. It says so in the documentation, even though it is not easy to spot.


3. You must use UILineBreakModeWordWrap for the lineBreakMode