Month: January 2003

Card theft becoming a major issue in Korea

Organized thieves are creating fake cards using stolen information and using them to withdraw cash and make expensive purchases.  Apparently secret PIN is getting stolen too either because Korean cardholders often share it with store clerks, friends, and collegues.  It is also a common practice to lend your friends and family your credit card as a friendly gesture.  One can also overhear secret PINs being spoken out loud if you stand near a POS station at any department stores.  Result is 11 million bankcards having to be reissued by a Korean farmers co-op bank.  Kookmin Bank is also seeing evidence of large scale bankcard security compromise.  Looks an environment for massive switchover to smartcard is being created.

Sharing Location Information

With advent of moblogging, people will soon be able to associate notes, images, and audio with specific locations.  One key problem is the difficulty of assigning attributes to those ad-hoc location-bound data.  If I am at location (x,y,z), I can associate (type=restaurant, name="Isobune Sushi") to the location, but unless that information is shared by others, its ends up being just a note to myself.

What should happen is whenever someone adds information to the location (i.e. taking a picture), shared location attributes bound to the location should tag-along.  This means that if I take a family picture at a popular Grand Canyon vistapoint, I won't have to fumble with phonepad to annotate it because the common location name "Grand Canyon" will already be there.

UI for browsing and navigating location bound information space will be a challenge though.  One needs to be able to 'browse' to nearest restroom information with just a few button clicks.

Dealing with bad RSS as a community

Mark Pilgrim raises the inevitable question about ill-formed RSS and how to deal with it.  Mark offers parse-at-all-cost as a solution.  I think this problem can be solved completely if:

  1. RSS feed proxy services with 'tidy' (parse-at-all-cost) and occasional validaton service becomes common place allowing either the feed producer or the consumer to deal with ill-formed RSS.
  2. Encourage development and use of RSS/XML writer libraries instead of writing out tags and contents directly.

Discovering Kanon and Secret

I just discovered Kanon, apparently a famous Japanese hentai multi-ending game translated to other mediums as well as languages, by reading a Korean version of the game transcript.  All I can say is, wow.  Its like Bill Murray's Groundhog Day in a way, but more disturbing.

I also read Korean translation of movie transcript for a famous Japanese movie titled "Secret".  In Secret, a woman dies in a traffic accident but her soul wakes up in her daughter's adolecent body.  Akward and interesting situations ensue with her husband and her second life.  Real surprise is the ending where I found myself pretty pissed over what I felt is one of the worst kinds of betrayal.

Head & Shoulder on Dow

We got a somewhat stumpy looking Head-and-Shoulder pattern forming on the Dow.  Sell-side's momentum at this point of the day likely mean 1000 more points on the downside within next ten days just in time for the Iraq conflict climax.  Exciting times financially.

Weight and Momentum in Animations

I am constantly amazed by the relentless pace of advances in computer generated animations.  However, most animated figures still seem to be filled with air.  Even motion-recording doesn't seem to correctly reflect the distribution of weight and momentum in moving figures.  While some of this is due to using abuse of slow-motion over zooming — probably due to lack of details and depth in animated faces and eyes — one can clearly see this problem whenever a figure walks around.  Given that realistic presentation of weight and momentum is usually cheaper, in terms of computation, than other vogue animation graphics techniques, I think this is an area that could see huge improvements in the near future.

120 Days to .NET Please?

Judge Motz ordering Microsoft to ship Sun's Java VM in every copy of Windows will mean a renewed hope for Java desktop applications.  Its too bad that there is no 'shared' JVM support nor responsive GUI yet in Java, but this is a good turn of events.  I wish Judge Motz would order Microsoft to ship their own .NET Framework with every copy of Windows within 120 days.

.NET Blues

Wildgrape NewsDesk is a .NET-based RSS viewer.  There is not much there that I haven't seen before in an RSS viewer, except clean (less feature means less clutter) and somewhat crispy (tender loving care of layout) GUI with no-nonsense functionality.  What caught my attention is its use of .NET 1.1 beta framework.  Geesh.  I thought I was taking a big risk by using .NET 1.0!

More I use .NET, more problems I find.  Interoperating with Win32 is a chore, having to manually import Win32 API one function at a time, an error prone process.  There are odd bugs too like RegistryKey.SetValue method's confusion over UInt32.  What bothers me the most is the lack of aggressive plan to increase .NET installbase.  20 megabytes is not something users will casually download unless its porn.  Only solution I see around this problem is to bundle .NET Framework 1.1 with IE 7.  Will Microsoft do this?  I doubt it.

I don't think .NET will be ubiquitous on desktops until .NET 3.0 is released two year from now.  Until then, .NET makes sense only for server-side software.  So the situation is a mixed revisit to Windows 3.1 and Java.