8 posts tagged with "Categories | Random Thoughts"

Last week, returning from a business trip to Shanghai back to Beijing, I again chose Air China for the return flight. Just before check-in, I noticed on the Air Travel Mini Program that the aircraft model was listed as 919/100B. It took me a moment to realize that this is actually the C919!

I'm not an aviation enthusiast and not very familiar with all the intricacies of airplanes. However, even for someone like me, the C919 is widely known, being one of China's major achievements in the field of mechanical engineering and high-tech last year.

In fact, China's large passenger aircraft project started earlier than most people, including myself, would think: proposed in 2001, demonstrated in 2003, and officially launched in 2007—even before the Beijing Olympics began, and Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd. (COMAC) was formally established only in 2008.

Yet, it wasn't until May 28, 2023, that the C919 made its first commercial flight. In the year following, only China Eastern Airlines operated routes using the C919. Air China's first C919 flight is already a recent event from September 10th this year.

The B-919Y model I flew on this time is Air China’s second C919 aircraft. If I'm not mistaken, its maiden flight was on November 14th—just 5 days before I flew on this plane on November 19th, less than a week apart! This was really a random occurrence as I didn't even notice the aircraft model when purchasing the ticket (maybe even if I had noticed then, it might not have been the C919, since it hadn't been officially in use yet).

Since I was so lucky, I just had to document it a little.

On this day last year, also November 20th, I rebuilt my blog and published the article SQYBI.com: Relaunching After a Decade.

Over the past year, I have indeed been diligent with this blog: a total of 17 articles were published (one of which was just for padding), including four articles from two series updates. Although there were periods of inactivity lasting two or three months, from a self-evaluation perspective, I still believe there has been consistent output on this blog—which is somewhat satisfying to me.

Exploring two separate paths, let's discuss each aspect. Objectively, the number of articles produced is fairly satisfactory; however, starting from the second half of the year, the time and motivation for writing have gradually diminished. Thanks to creating this All Articles page during spare time, one can quickly see that June-August and October-November were major inactive periods. If it weren't for an unexpected burst of productivity at the beginning of September, it would almost equate to a major gap starting in June lasting nearly half a year.

So, let's start by talking about these two inactive periods.

Since the last time SQYBI.com went offline, I've attempted multiple times to handwrite a blog system myself.

This might seem simple, but it's actually quite challenging. In SQYBI.com: Relaunching After a Decade, I mentioned a few details. Back then, although frameworks like Django provided a foundation, and I (painfully) completed the basic functionality, the frontend frameworks at that time were too rudimentary. Besides CSS issues, writing dynamic updates based on AJAX was also very cumbersome.

Fortunately, over the past decade, many new frameworks, languages, and service providers have emerged. Thanks to Node.js, React, Docusaurus, Cloudflare, ChatGPT, Brevo, GitHub, wysimark, Giscus, and possibly other infrastructures I haven't mentioned, I was able to quickly build the current version of this website.

After relaunching the blog, I had been using Giscus as the comment system. However, I noticed that over time, nobody was leaving comments anymore.

Giscus is based on GitHub, and as is well known, GitHub is inaccessible in China. Combined with some previous configuration issues, Giscus couldn't be displayed on some mobile devices even when using a VPN.

Though I don’t know exactly how much this affected people's willingness to comment, I decided to replace it with a self-developed comment system. After all, I can't simply assume all visitors have a VPN. Additionally, this gave me a chance to pick up where I left off on my blog system, at least completing a substantial functionality once and for all.

Another reason might be that after recently redecorating the website, Giscus's frontend seemed a bit out of place. Although adjusting CSS might achieve coherence, the workload would be significant. As it turns out, even developing my own system, most of the time was spent adjusting CSS.

A bit of self-praise, this counts as deeply customizing Docusaurus. I wonder if anyone else uses Docusaurus to build a blog and has done so much secondary development. If so, I'd like to check out their site.

It's been a while since I updated the blog. A few days ago, I published a new article and upgraded the version of Docusaurus along the way.

After solving some compatibility issues, it felt like something was different. So, I carefully read through the Docusaurus update logs and found that they indeed added many useful features recently.

After making changes according to these features one by one, I decided to briefly summarize these updates and the corresponding modifications on SQYBI.com.

Disclaimer: This article contains no advertisements, although I do hope to get ad revenue someday.

About a month ago, I left a company where I worked for over seven years and transitioned to a new industry, starting a new job.

Because of this, I'm currently in the initial stages of various tasks and have a lot to learn. As an introvert pretending to be an extrovert, the social pressure is not insignificant. Along with previous colleagues and friends wanting to catch up and my own search for housing, I indeed haven't had much time to update my blog. Even the photos from my trip to Japan in early April have only had a few edited.

Time flies, and now it's already the latter part of the month. To avoid a gap in May, I decided to write this article.

Happy New Year, everyone, despite not having updated in quite a while, half a month flew by!

This article used a word in Chinese: 路书 (LuShu). It has different meaning under different situation. ChatGPT translated it to "itinerary", but I think it's not accurate. However, it is only a codename, and I will explain it in the article.

Before every trip, we inevitably engage in some travel planning.

For me, the most critical part of trip planning is preparing an itinerary that includes various travel routes and schedule arrangements.

Unless our physical condition doesn't allow it, our trips generally proceed along the general direction recorded in the itinerary, although of course there are various minor adjustments according to actual conditions. Whether you want to conveniently check later segments of the route, record sights you've already visited, or adjust your path on the fly, a handy itinerary software is naturally indispensable.

I want to share some useful itinerary software for domestic and international travel based on my own experience in this article. Hopefully, they can be helpful in everyone’s next travel planning.

Here's a summary of the software I'm recommending along with some key points, but I believe most readers are more concerned about my experience in using them.

Software	Applicability	Pros and Cons
Google My Maps	International	Excellent basic functions; very few additional features, average mobile usability
Gaode Itinerary	Domestic	Adequate basic functions, serious product and development team; somewhat rudimentary features, lacks walking navigation
exping	Domestic	Excellent basic and additional features, community features don't interfere, extremely user-friendly on mobile; web experience is poor and problematic

For the past decade, the homepage of SQYBI.com has always featured the following text:

Since my DreamHost hosting is out-of-date, I moved SQYBI.com to Linode VPS. However it will take a period of time to write a new blog application and import old data. Please be patient, SQYBI.com will come back!

Of course, there's also the bit that was added later:

Well, it's not back yet. I'm not sure when it will be back although the main part of the blog app is finished.

To be honest, I never had a clear plan for the website's relaunch. So, when it finally was about to go live again, I found myself at a loss for what to write. After all, the relaunch, much like the initial downtime, came unexpectedly.

Having not produced any new content for a long time, naturally, I want my first piece of writing upon returning to be something comfortable. So why not start with something I’m clearly familiar with—the time around the website’s shutdown ten years ago.