Red Cliff is a two-part movie and is one of the few movies from the Chinese mainland, that are released outside China. The movie is expected to gain substantial popularity outside China as well when it is released sometimes in 2009, but I am not so sure. I love the movie, and it is one of the best movies of 2008 (part 1, that is), but I’m am not sure i speak for the majority of westerners.
The movie is directed by John Woo, and that alone could bring a crowd to the movie theater. But the Recent Chinese movies that have gained popularity in the west is epic almost art like dramas. Crouching tiger was a hit, followed by Hero and the latest House of the Flying Dagger. Those movies were all an extreme beautiful mix of location, choreography and underlying music. The story in itself was not essential. With Red Cliff it is different. It has an action driven plot, and are very different from the traditional dramas so popular outside China. It lack the deep emotion appealing storyline which has been a trusted ingredient in Chinese movies from Zhang Yimou’s movies from the 80′ies and 90′ies to Ang Lees recent mainland movies. Last, it’s CGI is not on par with western expectations, which tends to be a big point of critique in the west. I could imagine this was why, the otherwise great movie The Promise failed to deliver (that, and the funny hats).

I look forward to see how the movie will do here though, when it is released somewhere in 2009.

Perapera-kun is a Firefox addon, which can show you the pinyin and translation of one or more characters on mouse over. It works with both simplified and traditional characters, and is a great aid when studying Chinese. It is truly brilliant, and works for both beginners and advanced hanzi readers.

As a facebook developer, you have the choice of writing your application as a canvas page which is embedded parsed html, returned from your script, or as an iframe. Though you have more freedom on the iframe page, you can’t really make use of the specific functions provided by the facebook framework, so the right choice would be to use the canvas page. The framework is pretty well thought of, even though it has its shortcomings. For security reasons and to generally prevent mess-ups, facebook provides their own version of javascript, called FBJS. Even though it is a serious pruned down version of JS, it does the trick.

I used the CEDICT database, for the Chinese words, and sorted them into difficulty categories according to their natural frequency. This does not necessarily reflect the number of strokes, which also can be a sign of difficulty. While not everybody has the Chinese language pack installed, I had to generate images of all the characters, and their pinyin representatives. I haven’t yet found the optimal font for generating pinyin images, so some of the representations can look a bit off.