To apply for the Z visa from the UK your company will need to provide you with the following documentation:

1. An employment permit

2. An visa notification letter

For them to get this documentation you will need give them:

• Passport (should be valid for at least 6 months with blank pages)
• Education (degree) certificate & academic transcript
• Criminal record (obtainable from your local police force or faster from Disclosure Scotland)
• Medical record (GP or hospital should complete, sign and stamp Physical Examination Record for Foreigner)

Copies of the above need to be notarised by a Notary Public (search Google to find one near you), legalised by the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (in Milton Keynes by post or in person), and finally certified by the Chinese Embassy (in London/Manchester/Edinburgh) IN THIS EXACT ORDER.

Once your company has made the application for the employment permit / visa notification letter and sent them back you can then apply for the Z visa at the Chinese Embassy (appointment required) or Chinese Visa Application Center (more expensive but no appointment needed) for which, in addition to the aforementioned documents (plus photocopies), you will need:

• Completed Chinese Visa Application Form
• One passport photo affixed to the visa application form

Unfortunately all of this is very expensive and time consuming - I would recommend budgeting at least £400 and 6 weeks to complete the full process at a bare minimum. Once you arrive in China you will need to obtain a Residence Permit which I will save for another post (once I’ve been through it myself!).

Good luck and if your experience differs or you have any other advice to offer please comment below!

…called Chrome (not yet live) and presented it in comic form. No beta to play with yet but the concept presented looks exciting. To my mind second generation browsers (FF3 included) have almost reached their limit and this introduces some pretty revolutionary new thinking, certainly in terms of the technology behind it, which should hopefully provide some good competition to further propel innovation across the browser market. Best of all it’ll be entirely Open Source.

I hate to say “I told you so” but this is moving exactly as I predicted last year - the web browser is becoming the operating system.

Lots more detail Google Blogoscoped, ReadWriteWeb and Tech Crunch.

Having first disabled the plugin I tried to restore my comments from the previous days backup but unfortunately due to a character encoding issue that didn’t work either and I was left in an even bigger mess! Using the import feature of the DISQUS plugin didn’t seem to do much good either as only about 1/5 of my comments were being synced back to Wordpress and there didn’t seem to be a way to force it do the rest.

After contacting their very helpful support people I managed to find a rather unorthodox solution which I thought I’d share in case anyone else comes across the same problem. The following assumes that all your comments were successfully imported into DISQUS prior to any problems and that now you want to sync them back into Wordpress (it’s also not for the technologically faint of heart!) -

1. Disable the DISQUS plugin and backup your Wordpress database (essential).
2. Create a new empty wp_comments table in your Wordpress database by running this SQL script (e.g. mysql -uusername -ppassword databasename < wp_comments_table.sql). This drops the old one before creating the new version. If you’re not familiar with MySQL commands there are plenty of reference guides available online.
3. Re-activate the DISQUS plugin. If you click “Import” under the “Advanced Options” tab of the plugin you may see some/all of your comments re-sync but in my experience this didn’t work fully.
4. You’ll notice that every time you visit a post that it syncs any comments back to the Wordpress database. This is fine, but if you have hundreds or even thousands of posts it’s going to take a long time. You could wait for Google to re-index those pages but that usually takes weeks or months so the quicker way is to use a tool to crawl your site automatically. I used Xenu’s Link Sleuth (free) which is designed to find broken links but by running it over your site will also trigger the sync for each post.
5. Depending on your host you will probably want to change the rate at which you crawl the site otherwise you may get timeout errors. I found that by setting Xenu’s Link Sleuth to 10 parallel threads was the optimum speed (you can find the setting under “More options”). You may also want to exclude certain directories such as /wp-content/ to reduce the crawl time.
6. Sit back and wait for the crawl to complete. You’ll notice all your comments begin to appear back in your Wordpress database, the number of which can be seen under the main dashboard

Your millage may vary with the above and I hold no responsibility for any adverse effects but hopefully it may be of help. Apparently the latest version of the plugin (2.02) fixes the duplication issue I experienced.

Recently I’ve seen two anime films which I’m sure most people will not have heard of but which use cutting edge animation to great effect and if you enjoy that sort of thing definitely worth getting your hands on -

Appleseed Ex Machina

Following on from first film in 2004 Appleseed Ex Machina takes the unique look to the next level in evidence by a greater depth of detail and texture than its predecessor. Whilst some of the character articulation needs work it’s still a visual feast to behold. Cyborgs and mecha eat your heart! [Review]

Vexille

Whilst borrowing on a similar visual style Vexille is an altogether darker film in both its appearance and tone. Set in a self-isolated Japan of 2077 the visuals are outstanding and, even though the score by Paul Oakenfold is unorthodox, it’s refreshing and compliments the excilarating action scenes. [Review]

Neither of the story lines here are totally unique and the character development is sometimes lacking but if you’re after eye candy they might just blow you away!

Envisioning or conceptualising the future has always fascinated me. Some lucky people get to do this as a job and futurologists at Adaptive Path have recently produced some interesting videos (as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series) showcasing a possible future user experience on the web -

Aurora (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

There are some extremely cool ideas going on here with four major themes; contextual awareness (understanding and finding patterns in data), natural interaction (bringing the digital experience closer to a real one), continuity (a single interaction model between multiple devices and input methods) and multi-user applications (enabling collaboration).

Mashing-up and sharing data using an innovative interface lies at the heart of the demo and I liked the way that it allows you to organise people, things and places in 3D space. Whist it clearly needs further research and refinement I could see being extremely useful considering the mountains of information most of us sit on and produce daily.

The problem with concepts is that they rarely become reality. Steve Jobs hit the nail on the head when he talked about the development of concept cars -

“You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

Simply put, turning concepts into reality without loosing the integrity of the original vision is very hard. This applies across many areas in life but there’s nothing more exciting than when it actually works out.

One concept slowly being turned into a reality is that of the semantic web (which I’ve written about before here and here). The video below is not a concept; it’s an evolving reality and, dare I say it, rather an amazing one! -

Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data

Although it might not be ready for the prime time yet I can see huge potential in projects like Freebase Parallax for a radical shift in the way in which people navigate information way beyond the traditional boundaries of static pages hard-linked together. This is the first step towards the future of unlocking information in data and knowledge in information.

If you know of any other interesting projects I’d love to hear from you!

I only have one word to describe the opening ceremony to the Beijing 2008 Olympics - Spectacular!

China certainly knows how to put on show and with Zhang Yimou at the helm you wouldn’t really expect anything less. London now has a lot to live up to but I can already guarantee you it’ll be tame in comparison to this.

I’ll let the photos do the talking… can’t wait to download this in HD!

All photos © Getty Images - larger versions can be found at The Big Picture

Some relatives of mine spotted one of the cars while they were having a walk in Surrey (just south of London) and had a chat with the driver as well as taking some pics of the gear he was driving around with.

Apparently the array has 7 cameras at the top with laser range finders just below (to record geospatial 3D information) and an extremely accurate GPS receiver to record the position. All the data is saved to a computer in the boot with 1Tb storage discs which he said he used several of each day!!  It’s controlled by a simple touch screen interface which sits in the passenger seat.

Not the most fun job in the world but the technology is pretty cool!

The amount of data they must be archiving alone defies belief and strongly reminds me of the philosophical issues raised by Jean Baudrillard in his book ‘Simulacra and Simulation‘ whereby he questions how can you tell the difference between what is real and what is a copy when the copy is as detailed as the original?

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the map that engenders the territory, and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

There’s a warning in there somewhere for Google!

A little over a month ago I posted about my desire to relocate and work in China again. Well, after a great deal of research and interviews at odd hours of the day and night I’m pleased to be able to announce that I will be relocating to Shenzhen (next to Hong Kong) in just over a months time!

I’ll be working in the same field as I do currently but in a slightly different role for a new company and, all going well, intend to stay out there for a couple of years at least. I’m a little sad to be saying goodbye to London which has been my home for the past 3 years but feel ready for a change, new challenges and above all an adventure!

The process of obtaining a work permit and the appropriate visa (type Z) is the first hurdle on my journey which is so far proving to be a complete nightmare. Not only am I required to submit verified copies of all the usual documents but also have to provide comprehensive medical reports, criminal records (of which I of course have none!), and education certificates. Frustratingly no official documentation is available for the process which is eating a lot of precious time and money but, keeping the end goal in mind, worth it!

A Little About Shenzhen

Shenzhen is a city of over 12 million people which only 30 years ago was a small fishing village until becoming China’s first Special Economic Zone in 1979 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. With the help of massive foreign investment it has since grown at a rate unseen in human history before and is now the largest manufacturing base in the world (your iPod/iPhone was born there!) and southern China’s major financial hub.

With no recognisable centre Shenzhen is a city like no other and has been described as a “vast field of urban experimentation” for modernist architects who have thrown the concept of the 20th Century city right out the window. Much of this highly dense skyline was built in the last decade and its populous is a mix of intellectuals with a high level of education, and migrant workers.

It’s proximity directly north of Hong Kong has further propelled its development and there are even plans for the two cities to integrate over the next decade to create a metropolis large enough to rival New York and Tokyo. Whilst it might have close neighbourly ties the cost of living in Shenzhen is considerably lower.

With average temperatures of 22°C year-round (around 34°C currently) it’s certainly going to take some getting used to for someone used to English weather! Whilst I have never been to Shenzhen I can’t wait to get there

Last but certainly not least, many thanks to everyone who has offered help and advice. I have no doubt I will be asking for many favours over the coming months as I adjust to this new life so please bear with me!

Microsoft are a perfect example of this dichotomy. Each new version of a product they release includes tonnes of new features which will be of no use to 80% of users whilst at the same time making the product more difficult and obfuscated to use. Just look at all the toolbar and menu items available in Word for a perfect example.

Whilst radical innovation may include completely new ideas and concepts there is a clear distinction between this and simply adding new features for the sake of maintaining a false sense of progress and momentum. Apple understand this and hence produce products which are orders of magnitude easier to use than anyone else. Everything has clearly been well thought through and is joined up ~ using an Apple product is a pleasure rather than a chore.

At its core innovation is not about adding new features (although may sometimes include this); its about creation and improvement through research and experimentation to provide valuable user experiences. Concentrate on the critical core 20% of your service or application and make improvements there before you start bolting on new things (if ever). Careful thinking is always required to exploit new ideas and whilst this is an individual process many people simply don’t seem to get it.

In summary: change is good, change for change sake is not. Innovate, don’t obfuscate!

BIG news coming soon! I’ve wanted to post about this for weeks but have had to hold off while things were finalised. All will be explained soon