The blog has been a bit quiet for the last month because I’ve been in China having a bit of a holiday. Look out for more pictures and posts coming as I get round to it!

I thought I’d share a few snippets of Chinese culture as I come across them from while I was away. Today I’ve got some modern Chinese pop music, wedding customs, and spicy food (not all in one pot, fortunately) for you to digest.

I think it is a fair statement to say that China is completely different in just about every possible way from the UK. Sure cars still have four wheels and a steering wheel, people still have two legs, arms and eyes, and the sun rises in the east (东) and sets in the west (西), but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Food is served and eaten differently, the customs are completely different, and subway stops are so far apart you couldn’t walk it if you wanted to.

The videos from PDC, Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference back in October are now online. Channel 9 were live at the event, and had some extremely interesting interviews in the “backchannel” for the conference.

They spoke to Scott Guthrie, head of the developer division at Microsoft, who covers all kinds of topics including how to get started developing with Windows Phone 7, and some great demos of Windows Phone 7 apps to inspire developers looking to work with Windows Phone 7.

Check out the video below for the full interview and demos.

The other day at an event I went to, I had the opportunity to have a go on a Nokia N900, Nokia’s flagship Linux-powered mobile phone.

Check out the video and photos below to see the N900 in action.

I’m afraid there’s no getting away from it – the N900 is somewhat of a disappointment.

First off, the hardware – generally clunky and difficult. The phone is huge and heavy compared to everything else out there; the slider for the keyboard is clunky and the slider for the camera is flimsy; the touchscreen is a joke.

I admit I was expecting the touchscreen to suck a bit, as it is capacitive; however it is a continually poor experience that I found simply difficult to use. Sliding anything is a struggle, and selecting some of the minuscule icons I’m sure is a physical impossibility.

The software is an equal let-down. The entire operating system is completely unintuitive; the screen is constantly locked in the horizontal view, so the phone is nigh-on impossible to operate with one hand; and as I said, some of the controls are simply too small to operate in conjunction with the poor screen.

I suppose the advantage of the OS is that it is based on Linux and can do the closest resemblance to multitasking of any mobile platform, but the fact is it is simply too difficult to operate (yes, even for me) to put up with.

Nokia must do better if they want to survive in the face of iPhone and Android. The last really decent phone they brought out was the E71, but they cannot survive on business sales alone (thanks to BlackBerry).

At their developer event Google IO, Google took the opportunity to announce WebM, a new project for pushing a video codec for HTML 5 that everyone can agree on.

I’ve been a long-time supporter of HTML 5, and have been getting excited about its prospects for some time. However, the announcement of this codec makes me even more excited than before.

Finally, we have a codec that all of the major browser vendors will be supporting for HTML 5. Finally, developers need not dream of a utopia where they only need encode their video once, and have it work on all major browsers – with HTML 5 and WebM together, we can now have that dream as new builds of the browsers are released.

The Imagine Cup is a worldwide technology competition aimed at students, where you get to let your creativity and programming skill run wild, and win great prizes while you’re at it!

Check out the video below for more on the Imagine Cup.

If you want to read more on the competition, check out the