Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

I have just discovered my new favorite web shop. It is with pure joy I can announce that it is actually possible to by Danish sausages of prime quality on the net. I had only heard rumors about it, and when I checked it out, I found a butcher in Sønderborg, that sells the best south danish sausages in THE WORLD!! Start your order here now.

The sausages are from the famous butcher shop in the Marvelous city of Kirke Hørup. I can recommend the potato salami (“Kartoffel spegepølse”) and the amazing “Røget sardel”. And while you’re at it, you can just as well order a bunch of the snack sausages “ølpølser” with that too. A perfect substitute for grapes, or other kinds of fruity after dinner snacks. I am waiting with drool in my mouth, for my order of these fantastic meat filled intestines.

check it here: http://www.schmidtsdelikatesse.dk

Finally Flickr implemented a feature that has been long in development; the ability to geotag, while not having to use third party tools. Ever since Dan Catt from geobloggers.com got hired by the Flickr empire, geotaggers have been holding their breath (actually far from it, since new cool tools and applications appear weekly). But now it finally got revealed. Not surprisingly they use yahoo maps, which is kind of crappy outside the US, so third party googlemaps integrations will most likely still be popular for a while. But there is no doubt that this is the right step to go for Flickr.

Maybe this is also an incentive for yahoo maps to do something about their lack of detail, and do an upgrade like skynet (read google) just did recently in Europe.

For all of us who already had a lot of geotagged photos, they made a cool but necessary import feature, which automatically imports all the geotagged photos, to the map. The location data also has various levels of privacy, so not everyone is necessarily allowed to watch the location of every picture. The tags itself are, as far as I can see hidden but now a text appear above the EXIF data, about the location of the photo, and a link to a popup map. For me this is a great thing, and I hope many more will get on with the geotagging for no greater purpose than make to holyday photos a little more interesting. The only thing i am worrying a bit about is the risk that geotagging, using yahoo will lead to very unprecise tags. Since almost no roads, other than the major highways are represented outside US, it could be very hard to tag precise locations. Panasonic >> the next time I by a lumix, it better be with GPS!!

Although, the information about the location is a very nice feature, it is actually wrong on this picture. Victoria, Hong Kong Island, is south of the strait on the picture. The picture was taken in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Look at my flickr map here, or view my still more detailed googlemap implementation here.

I was just browsing the Finnair site, to see which flight alliance they where part of, when I found their Finnair Plus membership application form. That form actually provides you the ability to choose your Nobility status. This is the greatest feature I have seen on a form in a while. The only thing that held me back was that it is optional. I really don’t want to mess with the commoners, and also because there is no title of “sovereign ruler of the underworld”.

Actually the nobility choices possible has become more of common European middle names than actual noble titles, but I still hope this feature will spread.

I have been longing for GPS integration in cameras for a long time. I thought that there would be many possibilities with this feature such as integration with Google maps, or Google earth or various other things. And then recently I found that some people allready where tagging there photos with GPS coordinates, exactly for the purpose of doing these cool integrations as I had been longing for.

High on life I started to investigate how the easy way to do this was, and I quickly found this cool web application for the purpose of tagging ones flickr photos. Afterwards they can be viewed in the self same application, or via google earth. It seems like this is quite a new trend (a year or so), and different people are developing new ways of watching and tagging all these photos, all the time. Some nice ways of watching is via this google earth network link (kml file), or via maps.yuan.cc. You can see my pictures which I geotagged here, or by searching in the previous mentioned applications.

For now the links between these applications are only hold by private users. But maybe someday in the near future there will be a yahoo or/and google funded connection between them. That way it would be more credible, and attractive for the masses. The tagging procedure at the moment is quite timeconsuming. So the best thing would surely be GPS in the camera.

The next thing I want is pitch, roll and yaw in the tag. But it will take me some time to determine these angles, and at the moment I am not sure what to use it for. I AM sure though, that it will prove itself useful somehow.

- – Update 2005-05-02 – -

I have made a small map application, thanks to the google map api. The map shows my geotagged images from flickr. It still has some issues in IE, but in firefox it is pretty ok. Check it.

My Chinese teacher, recently send me a link to a nice site with “learn Chinese” podcast. It is called www.chinesepod.com and everyday they make a new cast, in one of their 4 leaning levels, newbie, elementary, intermediate and advanced. There is also possibility to download the transcript with hanzi, pinyin and English translation. It features an Irish guy and a Chinese girl, chit chatting and performing and explaining Chinese dialogues.

It turns out that this phenomenon actually is available for various languages. If you are interested in Japanese you could try www.japanesepod101.com, or if you are struggling with English, you could try www.englishpod.com (same people behind chinesepod).

It has become kind of big to learn Chinese in the western world at the moment. A recent article in wired describes how elementary schools and middle schools all over the world now are increasing their Chinese offerings. And recent news here in Denmark confirmed that, for Danish primary schools. With that market growth it sure is interesting for the western world to do business there. Not only to move production facilities there, but the increasing amount of richer and richer buyers makes it a lucrative export market for high quality consumer goods.

But in order to really make the language a world language, I think someday the Chinese have to abandon or come up with an alternative for the characters (hanzi). The Korean people successfully abandoned it in 1945, and the Japanese now has two alternatives. The Katakana and the Hiragana alphabet. I think, the prospect of learning a couple of thousands new characters will keep many people away. Not me though, I am struggling with my first 100 at the moment.