Its two months old, but if you haven't seen it yet, check out the Spamdemic Map, a map of relationships among spammers.  For best effect, drilldown to fullsize.

My Radio's Refers feature has been broken for a while now.  I don't know if it is something I did or not.  I'll have to dig into the internals of Radio.  I like Radio, but its pretty hard to figure out where things are and how things get done.  Radio needs a cross referencing tool…

Lately, I had trouble using cut-copy-paste via keyboard.  I don't know whether the problem is with my left pinky finger or the control key, but I frequently end up with C instead of control-C.  This is very annoying since I use cut-copy-paste everyday countless times.  So I started thinking about better clipboard UI mechanism.  When I woke up this afternoon (ahem ;-), I found PointClip, both the idea and the name, in my head.

PointClip is a fixed size FIFO clipboard containing objects selected or activated by the user using the mouse.  As you click and drag on pieces of text, hyperlinks, and files, objects or references those objects are entered into PointClip as old objects are removed to make room.  It works as if the cursor has memory: most recent stuff my cursor touched.  No more control-C for copying things.  Control or shift key modifier can be used to distinguish cut from copy.

Paste operation is initiated by holding the right mouse button down for a period longer than normal mouse click.  A popup menu of items in PointClip is displayed.  Selecting any of the item will cause that item to be pasted in.

Until I build a prototype, I won't know how well this will work, but it seemed useful enough to share.

Sensory overload is a relatively unexplored area in Human-Computer Interface.  In most case, you want to avoid it because user interface that overload the senses will confuse more than inform the user.  In some specialized cases, you want to overload the senses to promote intuition over logic in presence of an information avalanche.

For example, a stock trader has to monitor hundreds if not thousands of information sources in realtime to make informed decisions.  But today's trader tools use primarily visual means to deliver information and human eye has relatively poor bandwidth when compared to other sensors.

A possible solution I came up with (ten years ago?) was to use the whole body to deliver information.  This means a chair with full force-feedback capability, using gyros and hydrallics, powerful embedded speakers, and joysticks for delivering fine-grained force-feedback to hands and to receive inputs.  Hooking up the chair to NASDAQ will mean the user will feel and hear every bumps and twists the market makes on top of visual data piped through a surround video.

My theory is that such a device will cause a sensory overload which will induce either a mental breakdown or a trance in which sum of all the information emerge as intuitions and subconscious reactions.  Even if one learns to use the chair successfully, one can last only so long because one year on the chair will be equivalent to a year of combat flying.

If you tend to think visually like me, here are some sites you might enjoy.  An Atlas of Cyberspaces is a fun place with many neat visualization techniques applied to visualization of the Web.    OLIVE: On-line Library of Information Visualization Environments is more academical (read: long boring words), but not bad for a source of occasional deep thought sessions.  Finally, a collection of links related to information visualization at InfoVisu site.

In this monster post, "Scott" discusses my Market-based Credit Card (MCC) idea along with Bill Me Later, a single institution version of MCC.  I wasn't aware of Bill Me Later and there wasn't much information at their website, but Scott's description of their system sounds intriguing.  With a single institution, many control and scalability problems dissolve to manageable technical issues.  It will be interesting to see how their system do in the market.

One interesting aspect of MCC is that the system should work for any transaction amount.  It can handle car and home loans as easily as buying a book at Amazon.  Institutions bidding for car and home loans will be different from those bidding for $30 credit card purchase, but the cardholder doesn't see a different.  The difference at the backend is that, for small purchases, institutions will consider only cardholder-specific risks and only in veto mode (approve by default unless the account is flagged).  For large purchases, institutions will consider transaction-specific risks as well as cardholder-specific risks.

Another interesting aspect of MCC I failed to mention: there could be more than one market.  You can have country or region specific markets to mirror political boundaries and industry specific markets (i.e. mortgages) to mirror industrial boundaries.

It is too easy for engineer to anticipate too much and XML Namespace is a frequent host of over-anticipation.  While XML geeks consider tag name conflicts as an impending doom that must be averted religiously through XML Namespaces, such conflicts are uncommon in practice.

While RSS elements may be reused by embedding in other XML documents, how many such composite document formats exist in reality?  If there are, it is easy enough to introduce a wrapper element that clearly marks module boundaries like this:

<myformat>
  <a>…</a><b>..</b>
  <rssmodule xmlns="blah"><rss>….</rss></rssmodule>
</myformat>

In above example, <rssmodule> element is used to trigger RSS element processing.  RSS elements other than <rssmodule> may or may not have a namespace associated.  If not, then only <rssmodule> element will have a namespace.

Note that this technique works for embedding other modules such as iCard and xCal inside RSS without shoving XML Namespace down everyone's throat.

To this day and age, we still have to guess the encoding format of a text file.  Even in this age of Unicode, we are burdened not only with country-specific text encoding formats, but also thousands of proprietary formats about which public information is not only unavailable, it may be illegal to discuss them.

If you are bilingual like me, you are likely to run into encoding format problem daily which is why IE has an Encoding toolbar button: a dumb application specific solution for a mistake we made collectively over the last fourty years or so.

Why am I pissed off about?  Spam!  I get so many spams about penis enlargement that I am adding a Outlook rule to filter "penis" and "enlargement" in the subject.

Speaking of getting pissed, one of my father's friend, Kim Doo-Han, is arguably the most famous gangster in Korean history.  He is so famous that several movies and TV dramas have been made; most recent one is currently being broadcasted.  What does he have to do with getting pissed off?  Well, he eventually became a Korean Congressman and, during one particular Congress session, he poured a barrel full of pig urine all over the Korean Congress because he was pissed off about all the dirty politics going on.  He is gone now, but he is my kind of a guy.  Puts a whole new meaning to the phrase pissed off, eh?

I hope you all had a great weekend.

This is a copy of a message I posted on Internet-Payments mailing list today.

Speaking of Next Generation, here is an idea I had four years ago.

Today, card issuers have limited control over risks stemming from real-time changes to cardholder's financial risk profile and market conditions. While this problem can be minimized by averaging the risk exposure over the cardholders, this is not fair to cardholders in good standing because they are being charged more. How can financial institutions gain better control over risk while providing cardholders with best rate possible?

One way to solve above problem is to use credit card as an electronic loan application along with dynamic risk profile associated with it. Acquirers forward transactions to a transaction market where multi-faceted transaction risk profile is attached. Some of the risk facets are cardholder, card issuer, card acquirer, merchant, transaction type, amount range, duration range, etc. Source of information for these facets are provided by different parties.

At the market, financial institutions bid for the transaction by matching the transaction's risk profile (sum of cardholder, card issuer, and merchant risk profile) with the institution's target risk profile. Some transactions are not live, meaning that they are old transactions returned to the market because transaction risk profile no longer meets original transaction owner's risk profile requirements (i.e. cardholder lost his job one month after he purchased a car).

With today's technology, building multi-faceted risk profile in real time is not likely to be scalable. More realistic implementation will deal with cardholders instead of transactions; that is financial institutions bids and asks for the right to handle a cardholder's transactions.

Where do Visa and MasterCard fit in this picture? They can run the market. There are no apparent changes to card issuer/cardholder relationship other than lower interest rates that changes over time to reflect changes in the cardholder's life and the world around him or her.