peteg's blog 2007-07-15-TapWater.autumn

Trung Nguyên: 2-4 Cửu Long, District Tân Bình.

Had a brief stop at this sort-of garden café on the way to dropping Loan off at the (old, now domestic-only) airport. It's on a side-street off the main drag going to the airport, and hence is quite pleasant.

Trung Nguyên: 50 Hồ Tùng Mậu, District 1.

Another "official" Trung Nguyên café. Very comfortable, very down-town inner city. Custom-made for the shoppers on the nearby Nguyễn Huệ and Đồng Khởi streets.

Trung Nguyên: 603 Trần Hưng Đạo, District 1.

A fairly pleasant vertical place on the corner of Trần Hưng Đạo and Nguyễn Văn Cừ on the border of Districts 1 and 5. It feels a bit unfinished; the indoor water feature needs to be repaired. There's no food but you can buy some of the Trung Nguyên trinkets, this being another of the "official" ones.

Trung Nguyên: 7 Nguyễn Văn Chiêm, District 1.

My first visit to the feted "garden café" with Tigon. It's expensive (the whole area is expensive, being next to the Diamond Department Store and all), but quite pleasant. Motorbike parking is a bit limited. This one is a bit "official", but I'm not really sure what that means; I thought Trung Nguyên was a franchise.

Haskell server-side integration for FCKeditor.

I am not a JavaScript hacker, so I have no clear idea how best to use FCKeditor. My embryonic Haskell library just spits out either a textarea or some JavaScript that creates an FCKeditor instance depending on how HTTP_USER_AGENT is set, though I can imagine someone wanting to do something fancier [*]. The POSTed data is validated against XHTML 1.0 Strict using HaXml, which seems to work well for the most part; for some reason FCKeditor uses the non-standard <embed> tag for Flash content, and I can't find a convincing reason why [**].

In the not-to-distant future I will implement the connector stuff, and Cabalise it.

[*] Apparently I still need to crank out an <iframe> to satisfy Internet Explorer, so we can either revert to XHTML 1.0 Transitional or generate some non-standard XHTML just for Internet Explorer. It's a tough call.

[**] It seems that recent versions of Internet Explorer (6 and 7), Mozilla-based browsers (Camino, FireFox) and Safari 3 are all happy with the <object> tag. Adobe has a "knowledge base" article full of non-reasons to use the <embed> tag. The great thing about web standards is we're all empiricists now...

Lest I forget, Haskell and Unicode.

One reason I ran away from all of the CMS systems implemented in PHP is its (historically) crappy support for Unicode [*]. Standard Haskell, on the other hand, has required the Char type to be able to represent a Unicode codepoint for quite a while now. Unfortunately there are a few libraries that are not Unicode friendly, such as just about every library interfacing with C.

Concretely:

HSQL needed some work to get it to talk UTF-8 to PostgreSQL.
Most but not all of the CGI library is Unicode friendly. I don't know enough about the various RFCs to know what's encoded as what, so I don't know how to do this right. For example, how are Unicode filenames handled?
The regexp libs are a bit of a minefield (the user-interface is quite complex, and those C libraries are unknown quantities), so I have avoided using them.
HOPE itself is almost entirely encoding-agnostic, apart from the top-level (where it builds a CGI header for the webserver's consumption), and HaskellDB just punts around the strings fairly blindly, doing a minimal amount of escaping. Good job, Björn.

I really, really wish Haskell had a decent story about character encoding at the I/O level. Back in 2002 people seemed to get really excited about doing something about it, but that mailing list is dead now. I guess the hope is that once ByteStrings and all that are bedded down, the I/O layer can be rebuilt on efficient foundations, fusion will take care of performance issues with codec layers and so forth.

Update: ConradP has surveyed some Haskell character munging libraries.

[*] perl has good Unicode support, if one is happy to play the guessing game as to what format each string is in. I feel that strong typing — clearly separating characters from strings of bytes — is just what is needed here.

Halfway through the project, I begin to talk about the project.

So the game here is to build a CMS-style website for DRD, who are presently using an unmaintainable ASP mess. (Heh, I think that's the old ASP, not ASP.NET, but what would I know.) I decided to renovate Björn's Haskell effort, HOPE, which looked, superficially at least, pretty hackable.

Activity for these past few months:

I tried to fix the concurrency issues. There was/is [*] a lot of confusing code that looks like it might be safe, but wasn't. It might have worked if the DBMS provides coarse enough concurrency, and traffic is sufficiently light. (I don't claim to have fixed everything yet, and there are limits to what we can do.)
As part of the above I hacked the daylights out of HaskellDB and HSQL, but only conforming their PostgreSQL backends with my higher-level changes [**]. Specifically I tried to extend their notions of a relational database to encompass constraints [***], and add support for the serial datatype.
- HSQL seems adequate as a low-level SQL interface, at least as far as these things go in Haskell [***], so I don't know why anyone would reinvent that wheel (ask them).
- I would strongly recommend against trying to use HaskellDB, despite the heroic efforts of Björn et al. It's nice in theory but quite limited and very complex in practice. If I were to do this project over, I would drop HOPE's dependency on HaskellDB.
- I am now painfully aware of the semantic gap between Haskell and SQL databases. What we really want is serialisation and querying of algebraic data types, that is, something closer to XML technology. The only group I know that is taking persistence seriously at the typed, higher-order, etc. programming language level is the mob working on Alice/ML, and if I had a spare life I'd marry that with Benjamin C. Pierce's work of the past ten years or so and develop a mergeable, distributed, queryable storage manager for a decent language.
Added a lot of I18N support. This is as-yet incomplete, of course, and I'm not very happy with how I've done the dynamic part of it. One major outstanding issue is how best to support multi-lingual tagging.
Shifted away from Björn's home-brew and somewhat buggy hmarkup to the Windows-user friendly FCKeditor. I have my qualms about this, but I've got to consider my user-base.

Some of the abstractions in HOPE are fantastic, and others are head-scratching, tantalisingly close to being so. If I have the time and enough brain capacity, I'd really like to re-do the notion of resource so we can (for example) generate site maps and have fewer URL paths scattered through the code. So, good effort Björn.

If you're interested in any of this, you can take a look at the darcs repos at http://peteg.org/haskell. Please note that everything there should be considered alpha quality and under chaotic development.

[*] My changes are so pervasive that it's better to think of my version as a fork rather than a continuation. The database schema is quite different and currently requires PostgreSQL, so I doubt it is useful to any current users.

[**] This has some nasty ramifications. One is that it is unlikely that my code will be merged into the mainstream darcs repos, as I have no interest in or time to fix the other backends. (I refuse to encourage anyone to use speed-over-correctness software like MySQL.) Due to this, I doubt one can use the shiny-new cabal-install to suck down the myriad dependencies of my version of HOPE, as you'll need some stuff from my repos, and other stuff may as well come from the official places.

[***] Somewhat ironic to me is that all the low-level Haskell SQL bridges I've seen have a very limited view of what a relational database is; usually the bridge just ships SQL one way and gets a list of rows back, and provides a very basic table description mechanism. I haven't seen any support for defaults, triggers, constraints (foreign keys, primary keys, uniqueness, etc.), and while there is usually support for transactions, it is difficult to figure out what that means as the bridges all try to be backend-agnostic. Conversely there are a lot of attempts at making rows and queries type-safe.

Trung Nguyên, 42-44 C10 Nhiêu Lộc 2, District Phú Nhuận.

A fancy place just near Mike's apartment building, which is clearly marked on this map (the orange-red thing on the far right). Very comfortable and not too smokey for an indoors joint.

Trung Nguyên, 272B Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh, District Bình Thạnh.

On the north-western corner of the monster roundabout at the intersection of Điện Biên Phủ and Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh (the big fat highway heading north of Hồ Chí Minh City). There's a massive Trung Nguyên sign out the front, but it's otherwise unimpressive.

An Economist visits South East Asia.

Megan McArgle skillfully articulates some keen observations about the economic situation in Cambodia and Vietnam, and in particular how difficult it is to bridge the chasm of cultural norms.

Trung Nguyên, 1A Phạm Văn Hai, District Tân Bình.

A large night-clubby kind of place, with big comfy couches and that special kind of dinginess, quite close to the airport. I went there with Loan after visiting the v-heart project.

v-heart, a workshop for people with Down Syndrome or Cerebral Palsy in Gò Vấp.

Loan found out about this project from Yumiko-san of the spinal injury project at Cho Ray Hospital. In essence the participants are trained in the use of a loom that looks to my eye almost identical to this picture (that I nicked from Apple's already-excellent and now much-enhanced Dictionary.app). It's funded by a Japanese group.

Café Trung Nguyên, 53A Phù Dổng Thiên Vương, Đà Lạt.

An incredibly cute three-story house that would be right at home in the Blue Mountains in Australia. A cà phê sữa đá #5 costs just 13 kilođồng, fully 7 kilođồng less than in Hồ Chí Minh City.

Trung Nguyên, 114 Lý Tự Trọng (corner of Thủ Khoa Huân), D1.

Just up the road from Bến Thành Market, cunningly concealed on a corner facing away from the traffic streaming down both one-way streets. This one's a cosy little "brown café" that wouldn't be out of place in Amsterdam.

Trung Nguyên, 346 Nguyễn Trãi, D5.

The twin of the paradigmatic one on Trần Hưng Đạo in District 1. It's a bit more austere and hence less atmospheric, but the coffee is just as good.

Trung Nguyên, corner of Nguyễn Đình Chiểu and Nguyễn Thiện Thuật, D3.

This one's a bit like the old Century Tavern / Bar Century in Sydney; the downstairs is nondescript, but upon winding up some stairs one finds a hermetic air-conditioned room containing several smokers, with a curved series of windows fronting the street corner. The view here is of a steel telegraph pole, from which a thousand wires emanate. The decor is somewhat similar to both the Century and the standard-setting Trần Hưng Đạo joint.

The upstairs looks like it's setup for karaoke... mirrorballs, lights, those spinning light things.

Addendum to last post: I should emphasise that Trung Nguyên coffee is similar in style to what is found on the streets of Việt Nam, albeit brewed-on-your-table in one of those cute filters they use. Some street vendors only get hot water in the mornings, and so by the time I visit them they only have half-day-old black sludge in a Coke bottle.

Cà Phê Thềm Xưa, 371 D1 Nguyễn Cảnh Chân, Q1.

Loan's usual, due to it being a garden cafe and relatively close to DRD. It's part of a chain (I think of three) that includes the one our In-Country Manager Chị Lan took us to, in District 3, back in July. I've got to track that one down...

Trung Nguyên Cafés.

Hồ Chí Minh City is a place to buy coffee, with vendors on every street and every alley (presently exchanging a foreigner's five kilođong for the caffiene-and-sugar hit of a cà phê sữa đá) and all the hotels (the Legend Hotel charges .50 for a very mediocre American-style drip coffee). Mai got me onto the Trung Nguyên cafés, which are apparently a Starbucks-style franchise. If there's anything to be said in favour of tariffs, Trung Nguyên says it; I have difficulty drinking street coffee now.

The problem with it being a franchise (and this being Hồ Chí Minh City) is the difficulty of getting a list of addresses for the cafés. Fortunately I can crib from here (and please excuse the erratic character decorations):

1 Trần Hưng Đạo, District 1.
Diagonally opposite Bến Thành Market on the roundabout. The first one I went to, with Loan one Saturday afternoon. My local, I have a table there. Don't be put off by the big love-heart on the door, the waitresses will take good care of you. Head upstairs for more of that 50s Art Deco feeling.
On the monster roundabout at the intersection of Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm and Điện Biên Phủ at the top of District 1, opposite Mike's workplace, the impressive-looking Institute of Agricultural Science of South Vietnam.
On Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm between Nguyễn Đình Chiẻu and Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, District 1.
1 Bủi Thị Xuân, District 1, opposite the park.
Somewhat like my local on Trần Hưng Đạo but not as atmospheric. Mai steered me to this one.
Nguyen Van Chiem, next to the Diamond Plaza.
Today it was closed for renovations which will clearly take some time.
32 Mac Dinh Chi, District 1.
Couldn't find this one, but the numbers go strangely on that street.

I haven't been to (and they may not exist):

114 Ly Tu Trong, District 1.
44B Chu Manh Trinh, District 1.
349 Hai Ba Trung, District 3.
150D Ly Chinh Thang, District 3.
10 Nguyen Thong, District 3.
46 Chu Mạnh Trinh, District 1
2A Nguyễn Huệ, District 1.

Apparently one can purchase their coffee in Australia.

What one reads in Việt Nam News.

Việt Nam News is "The National English Language Daily", published by Việt Nam News Agency.

One can obtain the Sunday edition on Saturday. (Sunday's is more of a Good Weekend-style supplement, a week-in-review and some feature stories, rather than new-news.)
The comic strips are Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes and Rubes. There is a find-these-words-in-a-matrix and a rather strange and Americentric crossword.
There are some editorials but no letters-to-the-editor.
From Tuesday 2007-09-18:
- City drivers fail to heed traffic safety month: The traffic in the two main cities (Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City) is terrible. Apparently in August there were 987 fatalities and 746 other injuries in more than 1,000 road accidents, though it is unclear if that is just for the cities or country-wide. (I've heard it said that wearing a helmet makes one feel more safe, ergo more likely to push the safety margins, so I wonder if the imminent law making them compulsory will improve these figures.)
  
  There are 3.5 million registered motorbikes in HCMC, which apparently get their riders around at a speed of 3kph at peak times, and 6-8kph at other times; this makes walking look competitive on this basis.
- Asian Development Bank projects drop in inflation rate next year: The ADB reckons Việt Nam will have an inflation rate of 7.8 per cent this year, and 6.8 per cent next year. I hope the INGO bean counters are taking note!
- Local writers join Swedish book fair: three lucky Vietnamese are having their work featured at the Göteborg International Book Fair. At least one, Hồ Anh Thái's Trong Sương Hồng Hiện Ra (A Rose Appears in the Mist), has been translated into English, apparently under the title Behind the Red Mist.
From Saturday 2007-09-22: USAID supports disabled employment:

HÀ NỘI — An employer council was organised yesterday by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to discuss strategies for promoting employment of the disabled.

The council, called The Blue Ribbon, aims to provide employment opportunities and skill training for the handicapped and raise awareness of the benefits of hiring them.

"The Blue Ribbon Employer Council is in a position to take the lead and make the business case for hiring people with disabilities in Vietnam," said United States Ambassador to Vietnam Michael Michalak at the first Council meeting.

Assistance programmes worth million have been launched by the United States to help the disabled in Việt Nam.

This is excellent news, and I hope we hear more about it.

Their main competitor in HCMC is the Saigon Times (apparently a business rag), which I haven't read.

Handicap International: HCMC Spinal Cord Injury Project

In the afternoon, Loan took me to visit the Spinal Injury rehab centre in District 8, which is quite close to District 1. This place is very impressive, a large peaceful campus on a canal with a lot of facilities for physical and occupational therapy, developed quite recently by some Belgian people.

Artistic Hand Embroidery Workshop.

In the morning Loan took me to visit Trinh's embroidery workshop out in the Phú Nhuận district. The art is quite large, the size of a piece of A4 and larger, and very beautiful. Trinh employs some people with disabilities in the workshop.

Sao Mai Computer Centre for the Blind

Huy kindly took me out to Quận Tân Bình (Tân Bình District, a long way from Quận Một) to visit Mr Phúc, who is the vice-director of Sao Mai Computer Centre for the Blind. We chatted at length about their education projects and web accessibility for people who are (almost) completely blind. In brief, modern screen readers are quite good; the one Mr Phúc uses (JAWS) apparently uses the Internet Explorer engine to figure out what's going on, implying that anything Internet Explorer can render, JAWS can make sense of, including Flash. So apart from the usual web hygiene of standards compliance and good design, I got the impression that there is not much a website need do to be accessible to people who use such assistive technology.

He also had a braille reader, which he told me is lower-bandwidth but higher fidelity, and so is mostly useful for syntactically fiddly things like coding.

A little blah blah, The Last Vestige: Philip Brophy

Thea somehow laid her hands on some of Philip Brophy's work, which she played for us at Lush. This included (some of) Evaporated Music (where he overdubbed various filmclips from my childhood), a Hal Hartley-esque homage to Melbourne and a beautiful Japanese girl, and an extended take on the gender wars, framed by an apocalypse.

Cử kindly ran me through a game of Chinese Chess after lunch. As is his wont he played both sides of the board, emphasising strategy and the need to discern the opponent's goals. In his gentlemanly way he engineered a win for me after a bit of back-and-forth.

(This post is also an attempt to get Unicode working. I'm in the market for a Unicode-savvy Mac OS X editor... more later. This entry was brought to you by Apple's TextEdit, which I would almost be satisfied with if it had XEmacs-style M-/ completion, didn't wrap lines, ... oh, OK, it falls fair short. André suggested Aquamacs and TextMate. All I know is that setting up X11 is beyond my patience.)

The first casualty of the tropics came as a surprise to me; apparently the CCDs in Canon PowerShot A75s are prone to humidity and heat issues. This morning I trekked out to the Canon service centre, where the guy took one look at it and told me to come back tomorrow.

The second casualty of the tropics was my throat; I'm having a re-run of (something resembling) that awful green-muck-inducing respiratory disease I had in Canberra. The doctor prescribed some antibiotics, and with all those health warnings we got, I think I'll be taking them this time. Now, to sort out the insurance paperwork...

Vietnamese Traditional Massage Institute

I have no clear idea what this place is called; the above is from the Lonely Planet. Apparently there is a tradition in many towns in Vietnam for visually-impaired people to be employed as masseurs, though the profession has as somewhat sullied reputation here more generally. This particular establishment is run by the local Association for the Blind.

I went there with Mike after lunch, before playing badminton, which may have been less than ideal. Like many other people I had a less than satisfying experience; it appears to depend a lot on who you get.

Loan, with her cousin, took me to the Sakura Hoa Anh Dao café, where each of the waiting staff are mentally impaired in some way. Cutely they put a stuffed animal on each table to ease the burden of remembering where things need to go to.

Vietnam gets thrashed, Hồ Chí Minh City goes ape.

Even after a heavy 4-1 loss to Japan in their final Asia Cup pool match, the streets of Hồ Chí Minh City were abuzz with merry people waving the national flag and honking their horns like they were preparing to overtake the world. Tomorrow will be a national hangover, and I'm sure there'll be a RJL Hawke figure somewhere saying "Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum".

Panorama from Mike's apartment building.

Mike shot this panorama of District 1, looking south from his apartment building, which I think is called the "Mieu Noi Apartments". There are some great photos of the area here, and some stomach-churning images of the canal.

I stitched this together quickly and roughly with DoubleTake, hence the big "DoubleTake". Perhaps I'll redo it with something free, one of these days...

Hồ Chí Minh City for plane people.

I'm still too busy-lazy to do a decent write-up of what's been happening this last week-and-a-bit, so here are just a few pointers for the curious (and my future reference):

Google Maps doesn't have a decent map of this city; apparently this is as detailed as it gets. Vinacarta is much better but their geocoding is not that great and the map is not insanely detailed, neither of which come as a surprise to anyone who has tried to find a decent map of HCMC. Here's an attempt at embedding:

I'm staying in a hotel on a lane around about the "o" in Pham Ngu Lao, near the top-left, and the DRD (Disability Resource and Development) office is somewhere on Ho Hao Hon street, which is in the centre at the bottom. I would've marked these in Vinacarta but it doesn't seem to work with FireFox.

Pham Ngu Lao is the backpacker district, so things are a little pricey around here and the touting gets old fast. Conversely it is quite convenient to the downtown, and as the room itself is quite decent I'm content to sit tight for a while yet.
The taps in my hotel room are Swedish-style.
These are my fellow DRD workers, whom I met on Monday. From left to right: Huy (my counterpart for web development), Loan (fingers in may pies), Cử (employment-related stuff, funny man), and two shy ladies who I need to get to know better.
I still have no idea how to enter Vietnamese characters into XEmacs or HTML documents, even after some serious googling; the MacBook is of course happy provided I stay in Mac land. The future is doubtlessly Unicode, but the present looks like a mess. So, sorry for the lack of decorations, things will improve in time.
There are loads of Vietnamese-English dictionaries around, e.g. vdict. If I have time I want to convert one of these dict-friendly ones to the Apple Dictionary.app format.

I start work proper tomorrow, with hours 8am to 11:30am, 2pm to 5pm (I think). The massive thunderstorm tonight will hopefully make it easy to catch up on some sleep.

First of the big questions.

Is the tap water in Hồ Chí Minh City drinkable? All the tourist sites claim it is not, but the doctor at our training week in Canberra claimed that, with some filtering that would not be considered paranoid in Australia, the water in South-East Asian cities is drinkable. Does anyone know?

The most encouraging comment I can find is here:

Hồ Chí Minh City is one of the places that you CAN drink the tap water - thanks to the US Government, during the American War, and recent massive upgrades using Japanese technology and plastic water mains pipes.

I'd be prepared to give it a go if I can lay my hands on an active-charcoal filter (or better); the photo he showed of a mountain of used plastic water bottles was pretty disheartening.

Update: I spoke with Pat, another AYAD working on urban water quality issues somewhere around here. He claims that the tap water still contains gastro-inducing bacteria.

Today I got to see the JICA project that aims to rehabilitate people who have suffered some loss of brain function. They (the medical staff, mostly physical therapists, and Loan and Bich from DRD) took a group of young adults to Dầm Sen Park, in much the same way as I used to help Barb do with the Up! Club. Note the mechanic doing on-the-spot repairs just off the edge of the dodgem car arena.