If..Else Log

• Posted on: 26th February 2007
• Tags:
• books
• reviews
• recommendations
• novels
• 2007
• words

It always amuses me to see the surprise reaction when I mention that I enjoy reading.

"What? You Read? Books? You mean programming books, right? No?"

Personally, I find that there's a simple joy from curling up on the sofa with a good read and so am always on the lookout for recommendations on books to read. However, as someone reminded me recently, you have to give to receive and so, here's a list of the books I've read so far in 2007.

The Book Thief

It was probably the gorgeous looking cover that first grabbed my attention, and the idea of Death as the companionable narrator that helped pull me in but it was the charming and lyrical writing that really won me over. The Book Thief recounts the story of Liesel, a 9 year old girl growing up in the midst of a world war. Struggling to survive the darkness of Nazi Germany, she's comforted by being taught both words and kindness by her foster father. Indeed, it's a love of words which not only leads her to become the eponymous book thief but also indirectly leads her to the humanity that lies behind a war-torn nation. Playful at times (especially, Death's narration), tragic in others but always moving. A lovely and recommended read.

The Secret History

Where The Book Thief takes a complex setting and retells it with innocence and gentle simplicity, The Secret History is almost the opposite; taking the setting of an arts college, Donna Tartt explores how obsession and emotion intertwine and culminate in a modern Greek tragedy. Narrated in the first person and in hindsight, it tells the story of how a student finds himself accepted in a group of reclusive Classics students, an act which begins with acceptance and friendship before the inevitable tragedy of human emotion leads to an accidental murder and the eventual emotional breakdown of the group. Whilst the complex but well-written story is lovely to read, it does over-steep itself in melodrama at times; nonetheless, it's an beguiling and suspenseful read.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection

This probably doesn't quite qualify as a book but I love Calvin and Hobbes too much to care:) If you haven't read Calvin and Hobbes, then you owe it to yourself to take a look. And if you do, then you probably don't need me telling you twice…

The Shadow of the Wind

When a father takes his son to a library of rare books and gives him the choice of any book, it leads a young boy into a tale of intrigue, murder and doomed love. After Daniel Sempere chooses a book by an unknown and supposedly unrenowned author, he finds him the centre of attention by a mysterious stranger and the tragic circumstances behind the author of the "Shadow of the Wind".

Whilst a fairly enjoyable read, the Shadow of the Wind reminds me of a Dan Brown novel, not only in the way it fashions murky intrigue but also in it's single-faceted characterisations. However, in the same way that The Da Vinci Code didn't overly suffer from the weak writing, the (writing) flaws aren't necessarily fatal for Carlos Ruiz Zafon novel. It's a pleasurable enough read but more one to borrow than to buy.

Anansi Boys

I loved Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and whilst Anansi Boys is less epic and more comical, it's an equally delightful read. The main protagonist is Fat Charlie, an ordinary guy with an ordinary life who has finds his life suddenly become more than ordinary when his dad, the trickster Anansi, dies. Gaiman's dark humour shines through in what is a modern fairy tale of family love and self-acceptance. Anansi Boys does take a while to get going but it soon becomes a page-turner.

Moneyball

Being british, I have to confess that Baseball is both a sport which strikes little interest in me. However, I was a fan of Lewis' Liar's Poker and the favourable writeups of Money Ball across the web were enough to convince me to give this a go. Telling the story of how the Oakland Athletics, a poor underdog in the moneyrich world of Baseball, and how their canny manager exploited the Baseball market bias and weaknesses in drafting players to beat teams with many times the bankroll. As with Liar's Poker, it's Lewis' engaging writing that help make Moneyball a good read even for non-baseball fans.

Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?

I like trivia and I like collecting trivia which is why, back when I did Physics in college, the back pages were the main reason for me reading the New Scientist. If you've read any of the New Scientist "Last Word" books before, you'll know what to expect. Everyday questions are answered for the layman. You'll either find it a pointless read or, if you're like me, a fun way to wile away the time.

Empress Orchid

I decided to pick this up after I saw both my sister and a friend reading this. Empress Orchid is the story of the mother of China's Last Emperor and her struggles in the court of Imperial China. Whilst I enjoy books set around historical eras, I found myself struggling as Orchid did with her endeavours in the forbidden palace. The narrow confines of the experience, the one-dimensional characters and the difficulty in empathising with any of the protagonists meant that I can't really say that I enjoyed the read. It does pick up slightly towards the end of the novel, but it's still not a book that I would personally recommend. That said, my sister enjoyed it so YMMV.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

Jared's previous book (Guns, germs and steel) was a brilliant look into some possible explanations for the rise of Western Civilisation. Exploring Easter Island, Viking Greenland and the Maya, Jared takes a brave stab at the other side of the coin by attempting to look into possible reasons why certain societies fall and perish. However, whilst Guns, Germs and Steel managed to succeed with well thought out reasoning backed by case study, Collapse is less successful. In examining specific circumstances and societies, it does a decent enough job but it's in trying to extrapolate and weave these explanations where it falls short. Whether it's due to the small sample set or the narrative, the analysis feels neither substantive nor authoritative to be truly convincing. Collapse is a well written read which works best as a collection of lessons and case-studies into failed societies; however, it perhaps would have been better if it constrained it's ambitions a bit more.

Over to you

Looking back, that does seem to have been a relatively busy couple of months of reading ¹. Whilst I'm generally a fast reader, even when I was young², this was more due to having obtained a few books courtesy of Christmas, being without home internet access for most of this year and having a lazy new year:)

However, you can never have too many books to read so going back to the reason for this post; what books are you reading and what books would you recommend?

1. It's actually a bit worse than even the above list suggests as there's a few books I left out because they were part of a series or because I haven't finished them ("The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" which I don't like so far and thus, probably won't finish and "Never Let Me Go" which I do and probably will). Now, if only bookstores ran loyalty card schemes… [back]
2. As an amusing aside, I remember a time during Infants or maybe Junior school when we had reading periods. I'd finished reading the book that I was given and got up to ask the teacher if I could have another one. The teacher, looking at her watch and the rest of the class still making their way through their books, didn't believe I could have finished and proceeded to quiz me all about the book. Despite answering all her questions correctly, I don't think she was entirely convinced on that occasion though she did give me another book to read [back]

• Posted on: 19th November 2006
• Tags:
• CSS Edit
• review
• CSSEdit
• MacRabbit
• OSX
• web developer
• mac
• text editor

One of the characteristics of serious developers is the importance that they attach to their tools and working environment. When you're spending a significant amount of time each day developing, it's natural that you'll want that experience to be as comfortable as possible¹.

It's for this reason that it isn't surprising that we build up a large amount of brand loyalty to our favoured tools². The knowledge capital investment that goes into using these tools means that we're significantly more productive using them than without. To be more scientific, things just "feel right" when using our preferred tools³.

That said, being serious about our jobs, we're willing to explore and take a look at what else is out there and occasionally we uncover gems that allow us to put down our own polished treasures. One such gem is MacRabbit's CSS Edit, a new version of which was released earlier this month.

Enter CSS Edit

The idea of a "CSS editor" is a strange one; surely, a general text editor ala Textmate or Editplus would be enough. But to apply such blanket dismissals would be to say that a hammer is the only tool that you'll need. Far from being a limiting or marketing feature, by focusing on a specific application, CSSEdit turns into a must-have tool in a developer's toolkit.

Live previews

1. Edit
2. Save
3. Upload
4. Refresh
5. Rinse
6. Repeat

This particular workflow is all too familiar to web developers. Automatic FTP uploads (cf. Transmit) or working on local files can help mitigate the process by getting rid of task 3, but a fair amount of a developers day does seem to be taken up by mechanical processing.

Hence, CSSEdit's live preview is a wonderful boon. If you've used the live-editing feature of Chris Pederick's excellent web developer FF extension, you'll have some idea of the usefulness of the feature.

Make a small change to the colour of hyperlinks in your css file⁴; this is instantly reflected in the preview window. The preview window uses Webkit as it's underlying rendering engine so you're seeing how the page will look in Safari.

Even better is that you can use your css file as an override for any file/url. This is easy to overlook so I'll say it again. You can override or edit the css for any page without making changes to that given page's markup.

Want to edit your WP theme's css but don't want to make a local/temp copy? All you have to do is click the "Add URL" and "Style Sheets" buttons. You can even pull down a copy of the active CSS stylesheets for that url into your workspace and start working off that. You can see how your CSS looks across all your pages (home page, comments page, blog posts, etc) without writing out markup for each of those pages.

Note that this isn't WYSIWYG but WYSIWYW. You're still in control as you're editing your css file by hand but some of the unnecessary roadblocks are removed.

X-Ray

Even if you use semantic classnames, and logical markup, there are times where you want to check how a particular element is marked up. Instead of viewing the source, you can just click on the X-Ray button and then click on the element that you want to inspect.

Once again, this isn't groundbreakingly new (for example, the FF users with the Firebug extension will be used to this feature as will Xylescope users) but it's refreshing to see it built in. It's yet another testament to the benefit of a focused app.

Rules pane

By focusing purely on editing CSS, CSSEdit is able to add organisational enhancement aimed at making life easier. One simple but important example of one is the styles pane. This provides a convenient grouped index of your CSS rules.

Rather handily, the items representing each of these rules visually represent what the rules look like (e.g. colour, background, type) making it easy to look for and access a particular definition. In addition, you can use the search-box as a filter to make looking for that elusive class that much easier.

Milestones

Every developer will know the benefit of versioning. The ability to "rollback" to a given stable version is an important life-saver to anyone working with code. CSSEdit introduces milestones, which you can use to represent saved states.

It's rather like Photoshop's snapshot system by giving you piece of mind unobtrusively and without difficulty. Now you can proceed to experiment without fear of breaking or losing that working version⁵.

Closing off

Rather than go through all the features, I've just given a tour through some of the ones which I think are particularly handy. There's also your usual editor features such as code formatting and intellisense but what I like about the app is that it does one job, namely edit css, but does it extremely well. It's not perfect and there are some things that I miss (code folding is one) or have no need for (for example, the properties pane and css validation features are all but unused) but all in all, I love it.

The greatest praise that I have for it is that whilst I'd still use Textmate as my general purpose editor, CSS Edit is now my editor of choice when it comes to CSS. Now if only it would let me choose a dark background colour for the code pane…

On an aside

With the advent of "sponsored posts" that are cropping up all over the blogosphere, I will just point out that this post has no affiliation or connection with MacRabbit, CSSEdit or any other party. These are just the words of a happy customer; the fact that it seems so positive is because I like it. No hidden agenda here.

It's annoying and disappointing that I even have to consider writing such an anti-disclaimer; the most damaging aspect of these so-called paid reviews is that they add noise and doubt so as to harm legitimate reviews.

1. This, of course, isn't unique to developing but is common to any activity or job that you do frequently. Someone commuting daily or playing sports professionally has different demands from those who only do so sporadically or as part of their hobby. Comfort, reliability, familiarity are all concerns which you may be willing to sacrifice when you're only semi-serious but not when it's crucial to your working life. [back]
2. Which also helps to explain why "versus" threads/posts (cf. vi vs emacs, Mac vs PC, FF vs Safari etc…) are always cauldrons for fiery discussions. [back]
3. Flamebait notwithstanding, this is probably one of the significant factors behind the large fanbase that vi and emacs still command. [back]
4. By working of your css file and not a 'temporary css session' as found in the web developer extension, you remove the hackiness nature/temptation. [back]
5. This isn't an excuse however to not use a real source control system to manage your code. I personally recommend Subversion but anything that isn't the abomination that is MS Visual SourceSafe will do. [back]

• Posted on: 2nd May 2006
• Tags:
• cssreboot
• reboot
• css
• design
• 2006

And so another CSS reboot comes to an end. This time around, there have been some real treats in store for design fans but with the sheer number of rebooters this year, you might have missed a few. So here are a selection of my favourite reboots of Spring 2006.

Red

Earth and fire, red is an under-utilised colour amongst web designers. So it's a pleasure to see that those who did choose red were also amongst my favourite entries.

Rob Goodlatte bats off with a wonderfully warm and worn entry; the palatte chosen work well with the style of the site. Kyle's firey entry roars with it's bold background and colour scheme. And Prabhath embraces a more earthy design; natural and personal, Prabhath was also one of the few to have gone with a fluid layout.

Other notable entries: codesign

Green

From one colour of nature to another, though green does appear to be more popular amongst developers. That said, this shouldn't be such as surprise; whilst red is bursting with emotion and boldness, green is altogether more calm and relaxed which, perhaps, makes it more appealing to designers.

Fortyeightdesigns is one such lovely entry; the balanced colour scheme work well with the classic textures and the slightly curvy layout works a treat. Snook has gone in the other direction with his use of green; more edgy than earthy, it has a matrixy, old-school programmers feel to it. And like that programmer favourite, vi, it's crammed with little secret commands that might escape you on your first encounter. Freshbranding makes the most of it's name with a design that has a fresh, clean feel. It's, perhaps, a common studio design but one that's been pulled off well.

Other notable entries: Zooiblog, BusinessLogs, FortyMedia, ThannyLe

Dark

As much as designers like to consider themselves creative and different, it's always funny to see common trends. Light text on dark backgrounds has always been one of those cyclical themes that pop in and out of existance and it appears it's now time for it to reappear. However, dark colours do look good and are relatively easy to pull off so which is why it's had a good turnout this year.

It's probably no surprise to see Bryan's entry feature well. His last design was immensely popular and having done this 21 times before, he's a bit of a veteren to this redesign game. It's also nice to see that he hasn't forgotten the food banners. Alex Graul's entry at m.ossy also caught my eye. A Lovely use of columns and contrast, it's an impressively minimalist design pulled off with class. David Longworth has stopped blogging but he hasn't stopped designing; the reboot for Orange Tape Studios was another one of those simple designs that has been executed well. Background, colour scheme, type and layout have all contributed to a strong design.

Other notable entries: Totalspore, BrokenKode, EchoFaith, Niggle

Light

And from the shadows, we step into light. White has always been an extremely popular choice; whilst grey on black does look cool, it can become a bit of a strain on the eye when you're reading for long periods and thus, it's good to see sites embracing a more content friendly design. Natalie's clearly gone for such with the readable type and generous content area; whilst she's perhaps gone a bit overboard on the homepage, the internal pages are lovely to read. In redesigning his blog, Jeff has clearly gone back to the grid. Both internally and on the main page, Jeff has masterly utilised columns so as to present information with clarity and cohesiveness and nary a hint of confusion. DesignSnack's redesign is reshuffling and tidying of the previous look and feel. It's now less of a gallery and more of a Digg for designs; however, whilst its exterior is aesthetically pleasing, it's lacking from a design and functional viewpoint. I'm not convinced it's a successful reboot but sadly, I'm also a sucker for visual sweetness something which this design is coated with.

Other notable entries: Jorge Quinteros, Yoram Blumenberg, Derek Punsalan, Matt Brett, Intellicode, Twisted Intellect, WebJillion.

• Posted on: 23rd April 2006
• Tags:
• ifelse
• reboot
• cssreboot
• redesign
• design
• site

Having supported the last CSS reboot, I thought that it was time for me to join in and reboot this site as well. So, with not long to go, I decided to put on my designer boots, knuckle down, and work on the next iteration of ifelse.co.uk. Despite interruptions such as dealing with a kitchen renovation and FA cup football, I finished ahead of schedule. As such, instead of teasing you all with reboot previews, ¹ I've decided just to go live with the whole gig.

Redesigned? Realigned? Rebooted.

Each of the last couple of redesigns for this site have brought major overhauls to the look and feel; not only did each of the design bring about structural changes (for example, moving from a 3/2 column switch design to what is now known as a fat bottom design) but they also brought in overhauls with the colour scheme and imagery.

And, to a certain extent, so does this iteration. Gone is the fat bottom and in comes a new flexible multi-column design. If you were a fan of columns and you own a wide monitor, then rejoice.

However, regular readers will notice little inklings of familiarity. Whilst the header has undergone change along with the colour scheme ², it's change as evolution; I hesitate to use the words brand or identity but there's enough touches to help make this feel like the If..Else that you've remember.

The new look hasn't totally annexed the old; it's more a case of the old design gently ushuring in a new successor.

Horses for courses

The more astute of you will have noticed a few developments with regards to columns. Firstly, if anyone is reading this post directly, take some time to go to the front page. Then head back to this post. For those of you using a resolution of 1280×1024, try resizing to 1024×768. Those of you with 1024×768, try dropping down to 800×600. Don't forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Don't worry, I'll wait till you're ready.

Landing portal

OK, let's discuss the front page. This is the first place that many people will visit.

One of the things that I tried to do with the last couple of designs was to make the front page a real landing page. The home page shouldn't just be a chronological listing of your posts. It's also the place where visitors will arrive at for the first time. Let's try and hone the experience so that both the reader and ourselves benefit.

Let's highlight the lead/latest post so that we can draw attention to the important content. Let's segregate out our little asides, shorts and snippets so as to note dilute our main content. Give the readers a focused set of exit points to other content or parts of the site. By all means provide information but provide it in a way so as to not overwhelm the user.

Different layout for different situations

It's time to embrace wider screensizes. According to the everyone's favourite fresh smelling oracle, the lowest resolution on which this site is being viewed at is 800×600 by 4% of my readers³.

I don't want to provide an inferior experience to anyone, but by not taking advantage of improvements in screen real estate, that's what I'm doing. And so, with some help from our man in blue, this site is now sporting a resolution dependent layout. However, resolution dependent layout sounds so technical and sterile; I call it a tailored layout, a design that accomodates you. Besides, if Simon Collison gets away with it, who am I to argue?

There are 3 layout types; one for people with 1280×1024+, one for people on 1024×768 and one for those on 800×600⁴

Quick search

Searching was neglected in the previous design; in fact, I didn't even show the search bar anywhere else apart from the front page. That said, I do find myself searching back for old posts (mainly my shorts which serve as my personal del.icio.us) and seeing as you can't develop a website without a mention of everyone's favourite kitchen cleaner, I decided to spend a bit of time plonking down a fancier search bar.

Different layout for different situations part deux

I've talked about two layout scenarios so far. There's the front page and as well as the resolution dependent layout. What we can look at next is the internal page layouts i.e. for a given blog post. Quick question: if you're viewing a blog post, what are looking for? The answer is content. So if that's what the reader is after, let's make it comfortable for them to read.

The general layout and colour scheme already gives the content an advantage but by increasing both the content area and the type size, it feels just that much more nicer for lack of a better word. Besides, this gives me an opportunity to use larger images which is always good, right?

Your thoughts

If you've made it this far, you must either have superhuman willpower or a severe bout of insomnia. Well now it's your turn. Any feedback⁵? Besides, this is a good opportunity for the lurkers amongst you to come out of hiding and post a comment:)

1. Yes Bryan, I'm looking at you:) [back]
2. The last theme was dubbed Black Gold and though neither are dominant colours any more (in particular, the infamous gold colour has mellowed out and black has taken a back row seat to the other colours), they're still around albeit if only in more of a background role. [back]
3. Personally, I've standardised on 1280×1024 but in the last month, there were over 3 times as many readers that ran their machines with even larger resolutions than those that were still on 800×600. [back]
4. There's even a pseudo-big-footer of sorts. [back]
5. That said, can I ask kindly that browser-specific issues/bugs are emailed to me rather than being added as a comment? Cheers. [back]

• Posted on: 15th January 2006
• Tags:
• names
• etymology
• origins
• Phu Ly
• culture
• history

I wrote a short post earlier today regarding names and I thought that this would be an interesting topic to delve into and talk about.

A rose by any other name

"Names are easy to understand, right? Forename, Surname; what's so difficult about that? OK, so sometimes, there's a middle name in there but that's about it, right?"

The fun starts when you consider that there are a variety of cultural naming conventions. Lets start with the basic western naming construct.

Personal Name, Family Name

The dominance of English as the dominant form of communication has also indirectly meant that the above construct is familiar to most. However, looking beyond the anglicised form, it's easy to see various divergances. Firstly, in China and other eastern countries, the order would generally be family name, given name¹ i.e. Ly Phu Cuong, Wong Fei Hong.

Even the two phased construct isn't a given as the Arabic system follows a more sophisticated naming in which an individual would be addressed as a chain of names². An example of such would be Osama bin Laden; an expanded form of his name would be Usamah bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Ladin. This would allow you to trace back an individuals family history; the bin (also spelt as ibn) means 'son of'. Hence you can, for example, work out that he's the son of Muhammad Awad bin Ladin. A similar construct is also used countries in Irish speaking countries e.g. John Michael Patrick Reilly; John son of Michael son of Patrick Reilly.

Family Name

"So, maybe I was a bit hasty there but at least I can't go wrong with saying that everyone has a Family Name, right?"

Well, step back a couple of years and you'd be wrong. Until 2004, most people in Mongolia were identified strictly on a firstname basis. This lead to a lot of confusion and severely pushed back many forms of census analysis. Upon attaining power, the communist goverment had abolished the use and record of family name, fearing that tribal loyalty would provide a power challenge.

The results of the 2004 election swung the seat of power away from the communist party and one of the more progressive legislations was to reinstigate the use of Family Names.³

Moving westwards, Russian surnames generally differ depending on the individual's gender; compare Boris Yeltsin with his wife, Naina Yeltsina. The use of grammatical gender is repeated across many other Eastern Slavic countries, though often each with their own regional variations; for example, whilst Russian names generally end with the masculine ov or the feminine ova, the suffix enko is generally restricted to Ukraine.

In Iceland, the last name is usually a patrynomic. I'll talk a bit more about what patronymic are in the next section.

The etymology of family names.

Before we move on, lets have a look at the etymology of family names. With English names, the derivation of the name can be broadly sorted into five categories:

• Occupation (Baker, Smith),
• Descriptive (Brown, Young),
• Location/Geographic feature (Hill, Rivers),
• Aspiring trait/expression (Hope, Goodspeed)
• and Ancestry.

Ancestry is an interesting one; generally, this would take the form of a Patronymic. A patronymic is component based on the name of one's father; for example, thtere is Richardson (son of Richard), and Wilson (son of William). Patronym are a popular cultural construct and arise all over the world. In Netherlands, you'd have Pietersen; in Iceland, you'd have Karlsson. There are patronymic such as di Marco (son of Mark) in Italy, and the Hiberno-Norman prefix fitz manifests itself in FitzGerald and Fitzroy⁴. Mac, the common surname prefix is also a patronymic (Mac being gaellic for son of).

In East Slavic countries, the patronymic would generally be used as the 'middle name'; for example, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who is the son of Sergey.

The other form of derivation through ancestry is the direct use of an ancestors name as the surname. For example, the Chinese family name of Yuan is believed to be descended from Yuan Taotu's use of his grandfather's name, Boyuan, as his surname.

Given name

"OK, you've beaten me over the head with your talk of family names. But I bet you can't do the same with first names. I mean, people just choose a name for their kid that they think sounds nice."

Popular opinion does have a big impact on the choice of first names. Names fall in and out of favour as time goes by. The big screen often plays a large role with many children being named after the current big star. For example, in recent times, names such as Keira and Leo rose up the charts; even Prime Ministers aren't immune.

The choice of name for a child is rarely an easy one. Chinese names are often chosen by consulting other family members (esp. Paternal Grandparents) and with extensive research. An interesting aside is that many Chinese also take up a western name as well e.g. Tony Leung Chiu Wai. I use my Chinese name as my forename (there's an interesting aside which I'll talk about later) whilst my kid brother uses his western name Michael as his forename.

The etymology of given names

"What, etymology again?!?"

OK, I'll try to be brief but personally, I find this interesting. However, we cannot reasonably summarise or encapsulate this in a tiny paragraph⁵, so I'll just give a quick introduction to this.

The popularity of many names stem from their roots in Religious texts; Michael (Hebrew, Old Testament), Muhammad (Arabic, Qur'an), Luke (Latin, New Testament). The origins of the words however, are often found everyday language. Many names derive from desirable titles or properties such as Sophia (Sofia, Wisdom). This can sometimes be in the form of multiple words or expressions such as Alexander ("Protector of men": Alex, protect; Andros, men) or Albert (Bright nobility). The decision to name the child in this manner was, perhaps, an attempt to shape the life of the child; that is, via a name, the child would be bound to a virtue or destiny. The other reason, which follows on from this, is that a name can provide legitimacy or purpose. There are certainly names that derive from titles/occupation such as Sarah (Sara, Princess) or George (Georgios, farmer).

Another popular source of names are Objects; for example, we have Peter (Petra, rock) or Steven (Stephanos, Crown). Another common example of such is in the popularity of flowers as female names e.g. Lily. Other origins include Locations e.g. Britney (Brittany) and Paris or Weather e.g. Fong (Cloud).

Another interesting thing to note about names is how they can evolve so as to jump across barriers. For example, the popular name Michael can be seen in other forms as Mikel, Mikael, Miguel as well as in the feminine name Michelle. There are always transliterations, of course. My western name is a romanisation of my Chinese name. This also works the other way, and often with humourous consequence; for example, Charlie would be transcribed as Tea Pot (Char Lae).

Middle Names

"That's the unimportant part of your name, isn't it?"

Not always so. We've spoken about the use of patronymic⁶ but in Chinese names, the 'middle name'⁷ is often a generation name. As far as I can tell, there's no analog to this in Western languages. The generation name, is as the term suggests, a name shared by all those in the same generation. For example, all my brothers share the same generation name⁸. The generation name is usually derived from a family's generation poem⁹.

My name

OK, enough. Let's wrap this up with your name?

Everyone knows me as Phu; using the western convention of Forename, Family name, it's Phu Ly. No surprises there; it's emblazoned all over my site.

In Chinese, I'd announce myself using the eastern system of Family name, Generation name, Given name as Ly Phu Cuong (pronounced Li Fu Keung). Phu means 'fortune' or 'prosperity' in chinese; Cuong means 'Strong' or 'Strength'. The transliteration of my name chosen by my Grandfather gives it a Vietnamese slant (which is not surprising as my Grandfather worked in Vietnam and is fluent in Vietnamese).

A rose by any other name

Since, in Chinese, my given name is Cuong, why Phu as my forename¹⁰? Well, I've already given away the answer. If you write my name in the eastern style, it'd be Ly Phu Cuong. Ly's my family name so Phu-Cuong must be my given name. And what happens when you write that on a form? Cuong is abstracted away as the middle name (as per western convention).¹¹

My family all call me Cuong (pronounced Keung) and when I speak Chinese, that's the name I give. However, in English, I'm Phu and that's the name I use in public.

Wrapping things up

So, this was a brief walk into the world of names. What's your name? How was it chosen? Do you have any information on the origin of your name or any interesting rules/information of your own? Feel free to add a comment:)

1. I'll use given name to denote what is commonly thought of as the forename/personal name so as to avoid confusion. [back]
2. Though as is the case with Eastern naming conventions, for practical purposes, a westernised naming convention is now commonly followed [back]