Tag: china

Night owls, code monkeys, and siege lions. 代码猴子和攻城狮。

Today I want to talk about a few words that are curiously similar between English and Chinese, and one word that is just curious.

In English, we tend to call people who are active late into the night, night owls. In parts of China, (small) owls are called 夜猫子 yèmaōzi, literally “night catty”. (I don’t know which parts of China would that be, but I guess it’s northern China.) More often, it’s figuratively used to refer to people who stay up late – the same as English night owls. The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary also offers another word for late sleepers: 夜游神, literally “nigh-roaming god”, refers people who wander at night.

英语中对晚上还在活动的人叫做 night owls 夜猫头鹰。中国某地的方言 (北方吧？) 管猫头鹰叫做 “夜猫子”，也用来指晚上很晚睡觉的人——和英文night owls 一样。对这种人，现代汉语词典记载了另外一个可以用的词：夜游神，比喻晚上游荡的人。

Also in English, you might know people who program as “code monkeys”, invoking the image of a million monkeys banging on the keyboard. (Wiktionary editor Equinox notes this word is “slang, sometimes derogatory”. Of course, it can also be used self-deprecatingly.) Chinese has the perfect translation for this phrase: 程序猿 chéngxùyúan, pronounced exactly the same as 程序员 chéngxùyúan “programmer”. However, instead of using the character 员, that marks a person’s occupation or membership, as in 驾驶员 driver, 服务员 server or 演员 actor, instead the character for apes, 猿, is used, making it “programmape”. (Well, humans are apes…)

英语里，有时也称写程序的人为 code monkeys “代码猴子”，不由得让人想起百万猴子敲打键盘的形象。(维○词典编辑 Equinox 对此词的注释是 “俚语，有时贬义”。当然也可以用来自嘲。) 中文对这一词有一个绝妙的翻译:“程序猿”，发音与“程序员”完全相同；但是将驾驶员、服务员、演员中表示职位或团体的“员”一字，换成了“猿”。

Sometimes typos also make new words: one jocular name for engineers is 攻城狮 gōngchéngshī “fortress-attacking lion” or “siege lion”, again having the exact pronunciation as 工程师 gōngchéngshī “engineer”. The story is like this: Tencent is the company that developed the hugely popular IM program QQ (800 million users) and WeChat (300 million users – about the total population of United States) among other services. One of its microblog accounts posted that one of its security guards managed to go through rounds of interviews, and became an engineer at its research institute. A rare event in itself, and a notable accomplishment indeed. But instead of 工程师, the post coined the word 攻城狮, or siege lion. And the rest is Internet history.

有时候手误也会造成新词：称工程师为攻城狮。发音也是完全一样。来源似乎如此：腾讯公司（旗下QQ用户已达8亿，微信用户已达3亿——约与全美国人口相当）一微博上帐号贴出保安通过层层面试后，成为研究院的工程师的消息。这本是很罕见的事件，也是值得赞许的成就。但原帖使用的是“攻城狮”三个字……于是就传开了。

References

The Chinese National Day Golden Week, and other holiday-shifting craziness

October 1st is the National Day of the People’s Republic of China.

十月一日是中华人民共和国国庆日。

In the United States and Canada, statuary holidays like this tend to be on Mondays and Fridays, which creates a “long weekend”. The National Day in China, however, is a little different. The whole country do no work for a whole week! Many take vacations, so people call this the “golden week”. As a result, the tourist spots become crammed with people, all the expressways get congested from one end to another, and plane tickets sell out (I don’t know how are the trains doing). Hardly a way to take a relaxing vacation.

在美国和加拿大，这样的法定假日大多都在周一和周五，这样的安排创建了“长周末”。但中国国庆有些不一样。举国上下一周七天全部放假！许多人会去旅游，所以人们称这是“黄金周”。于是，旅游点看到挤满的人山人海，高速公路从一端堵车堵到另一端，而订机票也成了不可能的任务 (我不知道铁路那边怎么样)。完全没有放松的假日。

But the National Day is only a 3-day statuary holiday, so how is it possible that everybody takes a week-long vacation? The keyword here is “transferred holidays”: weekends that are swapped with days in the “golden week”. The State Council publishes a notice every year (like this one for 2014), deciding which rest days are swapped with which working days. Then add another weekend that would fall inside the golden week, and tada! You get a 7-day holiday.

但国庆法定只放三天假，怎么会所有人连休七天呢？这里的关键字是 “调休”：用平常的周末，与黄金周中的工作日对调。国务院每年会发布一份通知，决定哪些休息天与工作日对调。再加上黄金周里本来就有的周末，连休七天的假期就这么产生了！

The drawback is of course, you still need to work these two days transferred out. Before 2014, that means working 7 days in a row. For 2014, the days are shifted from a week before and a week after, so only two weeks of working 6 days in a row.

当然，调出去的那两天还是要工作的。2014年之前这意味着有七天要不休息连轴转。2014年调休，是从前一周和后一周各调一天，所以只要两周连续工作六天就好。

The same holiday transfer is also applied to the Spring Festival, which is like Christmas in that it’s a traditional time for family gatherings; applied to a country that has as many people as China, this results in even bigger traffic every year. Before 2007 this is also applied to the International Labor Day on May the 1st; after 2007, Labor Day is no longer a 7-day holiday. Instead, three traditional Chinese holidays are now designated as new statuary holidays (Qingming, Dragon Boat, and Mid-Autumn festivals). For 2014, all three fall between Friday and Monday, making these also “long weekends”.

调休不止在国庆，也对春节使用；春节有些像圣诞节，两个都算是传统的合家团聚的节日。对于有中国这样人口众多的国家，其结果就是春运。2007 年之前，在五一国际劳动节也调休 (美国、加拿大的劳动节在九月份)。2007 年之后，五一不再休整周，而将清明、端午和中秋，设成新的法定假日。2014 年，这三个节日都在周五和周一之间，中国也有了自己的 “长周末”。

In the three holidays, the Dragon Boat festival and the Mid-Autumn festival are based on the traditional Chinese calendar, in which every month is 30 days; so the dates on the Gregorian calendar fluctuates each year. (Instead of leap days, the traditional calendar has leap months.) But the Qingming festival is always April 4th or April 5th; this is because it’s observed 15 days after the Spring Equinox, and the Gregorian calendar is designed to track the seasons, and the Spring Equinox in particular very accurately.

这三个假日中，端午和中秋的日期都是根据传统农历的；农历每个月都是30天，于是在格里高利历 (公历) 上的日期每年都有变化。但清明每年都是四月4日或四月5日，原因是清明总是在春分后15天，而格里高利历设计上是准确跟踪季节变化的，特别是每年春分的日期。

まもるくん

因为Second Life 上有人做了条まもるくん的裤子，却把原角色标成了Waffle Ryebread, 我发现自己正在Google上查找这两个角色的相关图片。Waffle 是 CyberConnect2 制作的 RPG Tail Concerto 的主角，而まもるくん则是 CC2 为福冈县制作的自我保护·防灾减灾吉祥物。很奇妙的是两者是共享世界设定的。所以会搞混吧。……不过这完全不重要。
Because someone on Second Life made a pair of pants of Mamoru-kun, but marked them as belonging to Waffle Ryebread, I found myself searching for pictures relating to these characters. Waffle is the protagonist of Tail Concerto, an RPG made by CyberConnect2, and Mamoru-kun is a mascot for self protection and disaster protection and prevention made by CC2 for the Fukuoka prefecture. Interestingly, they share the same canon. So it’s easy to mess up. …but that’s not important at all.

前几天，“谷歌中国”被中央电视台“新闻联播”以及“焦点访谈”等数个节目“曝光”存在传播淫秽色情内容的现象。这不是普通的新闻节目——说它是全中国被看最多的节目也不为过。所以当 Google 这一以“不要做恶”为座右铭的跨国公司被中视和政府点名以“邪恶地毒害祖国的青少年” (设计台词) 批评，着实让卡库尔很惊讶。
A few days earlier, Guge Zhongguo was “exposed” by several programs of China Central Television, like Xinwen Lianbo and Focus. These are not your average news programs — it’s not an understatement that they are the most watched programs in all of China. So when Google, a international company with a motto of “don’t be evil” was criticized by CCTV and the government as “evilly poisoning the juveniles and youths of the motherland” by name, I was very surprised.

当然，并不是所有人对邪恶的定义都是一样的。例如，自由软件基金会的创始人理查德·斯托曼就认为因为对淫秽内容的网络审查是“纯粹，无杂质的邪恶，没有什么比它更淫秽了”。我不想对此发表意见；除了说互联网上内容众多，无论什么样的过滤，不可能完美地只过滤想过滤的内容，总是会有假阳性和假阴性的。例子：卡库尔在 SafeSearch 强制开启 (是不是点名的结果呢?) 情况下搜索关于まもるくん的图片，竟然找到了很黄很暴力的上车图。
Of course, not everyone has the same definition for evil. For example, the founder of Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, considers censorship of obscene materials to be “pure, unadulterated evil, and there is nothing more obscene.” I do not want to express any opinion on this; except that there are so many contents on the Internet, no matter what kind of censorship, it’s impossible to perfectly filter only (un)desireable contents, there will always be false positives and false negatives. Example: I was trying to search pictures on Mamoru-kun with SafeSearch forced on (was it because of the criticism by name?) and found well… underage porn.

啊……不用试着去搜索了。可能就在你阅读本文的那一刻，那张图片已经被神隐了。再说，你能够通过百万守君的大布镇吗？
Ahh… there’s no use trying to search for that. Maybe as you read this, the picture has been spirited away. Besides, can you make across the giant maze of a million Mamoru-kun?

まもるくん (守君) 似乎是还算普通的名字。特别是在防护吉祥物之中 (这些吉祥物中包括，有没有搞错，一只橘子)……但是也有人名为まもるくん的。还有监测有没有东西掉在地上的机器人。还有防止香蕉腐烂的容器。还有一只猫。
Mamoru-kun (guardian) seems to be a rather generic name. Especially in disaster prevention mascots (including, I’m not making this up, an orange)… but there are also people named Mamoru-kun. And robots that monitor whether there are anything falling on the ground. And a container to prevent bananas from rotting. And a cat.

在英文 WikiFur 的 Tail Concerto 页面上也有人提到了 まもるくん，不过写得让人以为他是某个游戏的角色。如果是就好了。如果 Tail Concerto 能出续集的话，卡库尔会很向往吧。不过教育类游戏高达八成都很无聊，还没有单纯的说教来的要有趣。讲故事的话，也许会更能接受吧。不知道福冈县和CC2有没有制作过まもるくん的动画？
Mamoru-kun is also mentioned on the Tail Concerto article on the English WikiFur, but it sounds as if he is a character from some game. If only that’s true. If Tail Concerto gets a sequel, I would be excited. But edutainment games are often boring, even more than simple lectures. A story would be more receivable. I wonder if Fukuoka Prefecture and CC2 made any animations of Mamoru-kun?

翻了下讨论页，竟然有卡库拉迪一年前对那一段提出的问题。一年以来都没有人回复。也许讨论页并不是协作的最好的方式。PukiWiki和“旧世界”的wiki软件一样，讨论大多在页面本身上进行。这种“主题模式”虽然很方便，却会把页面弄得很乱，而且没有解决讨论者还要手工排版的问题。但是PukiWiki有一个插件可以自动只显示最近的讨论，并且还可以自动排版，大大降低了讨论的门槛。这加上PukiWiki没有有效的防雷垃圾评论防护，使得麻痹怒气维基首页现在布满了勃起障碍治疗药的广告。
Looking at the talk page, there’s something Kakurady asked about that section… one year ago. Without any replies in the year. Maybe a talk page is not the best way for collabration. PukiWiki, like many wiki softwares of “the old world”, tend to have discussions happening on the page itself. This ThreadMode is convenient, but messes up the page pretty much, and does not solve the problem of participants needing to format manually. But there’s a plugin for PukiWiki that automatically shows only the most recent discussions and formats them automatically, which lowers the threshold of discussion significantly. Adding the fact that PukiWiki does not have an effective protection against abuse, and MabiWiki main page is now full of advertisements of Erectile Dysfunction treatments.

奇妙的是 .hack//Wiki 的 Tail Concerto 条目要比 WikiFur 来的齐全。
Amusingly, the article of Tail Concerto on .hack//Wiki is more complete than the one on WikiFur.

(我的分割线哪里去了？
Where did my separator line go?)

什么？去年两门不及格？再不及格两门就要被开除了！这怎么行？
What? Two fails last semester? Another two and I’ll be kicked out? How am I gonna manage with this?

这怎么不行？
How am I not gonna mange with this?

另外，6月17日生日。
Also, birthday at June 17th.

过会儿会上图吧？
Maybe I’ll post some pics later?

[转]绿坝软件被发现存在严重的安全漏洞

转自 http://blog.cost.edu.cn/starry/?p=62

美国密西根大学的网络安全人员研究发现即将在中国境内销售的pc中强制安装的绿坝软件存在严重的安全漏洞，由于软件使用定长的缓冲区处理网页的url使得攻击者如果提供一个超长的url就可能导致程序发生缓冲溢出错误，精心构造的数据可以使得攻击者通过网页来利用该漏洞，成功利用此漏洞可以在用户的系统上执行任意代码。由于绿坝程序编写的不规范性，与此类似的漏洞还在该软件中大量存在。此安全人员建议用户暂时停用绿坝软件。

研究人员还发现绿坝软件用于图像识别的程序使用的是开源的OpenCV软件的图像识别库。而URL过滤黑名单使用的是美国商业软件 CyberSitter的黑名单库。可笑的是可能由于疏忽，绿坝的黑名单库中居然还包含一篇2004年的CyberSitter的新闻，仅仅是因为该新闻使用了与黑名单库相同的后缀名。

参考链接：
http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pub/gd/

实话说这三位作者在原文中并没有说他们发现了大量的类似漏洞，只是说他们在仅仅一天的时间内，就发现了两个重要漏洞，除了刚才所说的 URL 缓冲区溢出漏洞以外，还有下载过滤更新文件时使用 fscanf 读入定长缓冲区导致的另一个缓冲区溢出漏洞。由于网络过滤软件每天要面对用户的所有网络内容，这使得过滤软件非常容易受攻击，其漏洞的影响性也就十分严重。原文作者总结道如果绿坝像目前这样进行安装，将大大削弱中国的计算机安全。

不知道信息产业部对自己一声令下把全中国所有的电脑都变成乱发广告的肉鸡，会有什么想法？