Luke Writes

Justin, the developer of Chinese Pera-Kun for Firefox, has released versions of the plug-in that work in Firefox 3. If you’re running the current beta of FF3, check it out.
There are also some new features in the pipeline for perakun that sound pretty cool.
Justin’s put up a donation button, so if you’ve found perakun helpful think about sending a few bucks his way to support independent (free) software!

This is Part 1 of a series of posts about my trip from Changchun (长春), where I lived and worked last year, to the Liaoning (辽宁) Province. Check out the other parts of the story as I get around to writing them:

Last year over May Day vacation Michael, Faye, Cindy, and I went on a group tour to see some of the sights in the Liaoning (辽宁) Province, which shares most of Jilin’s southern border and also borders North Korea.
The first day we climbed Phoenix Mountain (凤凰山 FengHuang Shan). The second and third days were spent relaxing & eating seafood on Big Deer Island (大鹿岛 DaLuDao) and staring at North Korea from the border town of Dandong (丹东).We’d come up with the idea of going to Dandong for three reasons: (1) its border with North Korea; (2) the easternmost terminus of the Great Wall is there, and (3) Dandong has a supposedly fantastic anti-American Korean War museum. (To give you an idea of the bias that’s reportedly on display in the museum consider the Chinese name for the Korean war: “The War To Resist US Aggression And Aid Korea”. Our Lonely Planet made the museum sound delightful.)
We ended up taking a package tour that didn’t actually go to any of the places that had originally piqued our interest, but that turned out to be OK.
Going on a trip with a Chinese tour group was wonderful. We all rode together (for hours and hours) on a big bus, stayed together in the same crappy hotels eating the same crappy food, and had an inept tour guide who gave us matching visors to wear and shepherded us from tour spot to tour spot carrying a flag. The sum of the experience was something I’d have been very sorry to have missed.
Diana’s wedding was May 1st, and our tour left on the 2nd, so we spent most of the afternoon on the 1st buying stuff to take on the trip.

Continue to Part 2

The Guardian has a pretty cool interview with 102 year old(!) Zhou Youguang (周有光), the creator of Pinyin. The interview is short but worthwhile.

Have you ever wanted to read an online Chinese article or blog post, but gotten frustrated by all the characters you don’t know? Using the Firefox web browser and one of its extensions, you can read and understand any document online that’s written in Chinese!
Firefox is a very secure web browser that’s free and can be installed on any computer system.One of the really neat things about Firefox are the huge number of extensions that have been written for it. Extensions add extra features to the browser (like blocking all ads).
I found a very helpful Firefox extension called Perapera-kun. To use Perapera-kun, just put your mouse over a Chinese character and small window pops up with the definition of the character and its pinyin.
Pera-kun has some pretty cool features. If you hold down the Shift key while mousing over a word you get more information about the character:
The plugin even recognizes compound words:

So download Firefox (if you don’t have it already), install Perapera-kun, and start reading Chinese websites! (Also check out the discussion about Perakun at Chinese-Forums.com.)