While great deal of webapp look and feel can be accomplished with plain HTML, CSS, and PhotoShop, fancy stuff must be done using DHTML.  There are many cross-browser DHTML libraries for 4th generation browsers (i.e. IE 4, Netscape 4.x), but I don't recommend them because a) 4th generation browsers make up only about 6% of all browsers, and b) they are no longer being maintained.  While 5th generation DHTML libraries support only 5.x or better browsers (i.e. IE 5, Mozilla), there are less tricky workarounds and gotchas.

At this time, there are very few actively maintained 5th generation DHTML libraries and most of them are not complete and lack sufficient documentation.  The one I recommend is DomAPI.  DomAPI 3.01 was just recently released so go take a look.

Privacy – If I write something for just my family and friends, who owns it after the copyright timelimit?  Does copyright law apply only to materials with copyright notices?

Property and Copyright – Where is the line between property and copyrights?  What about art works?  Should the public own the copyright to Picasso's paintings?

National Borders – Who is the public?  Should citizens of France have the copyright to literatures written by American authors after some timelimit?

Copy and Mutilate – What if I distributed copies of old literatures with key sections replaced?  Am I violating a law?

I believe the public should not have rights that it is not willing to take.  Most people in America are not even aware that copyrights have a time limit.  If the public had sufficient will to limit copyrights to 1 year, it could have.

While US remains the center of the Web, glimpses of the future are often found at the fringes like the online porn industry and Korea.  In Korea, you can easily see how Internet Cafes can change the society itself like the opium dens of China's past.  While not everyone is doing it, everyone knows someone doing it, so they are all affected one way or another.

One common phenomenon in Korea is contents restricted to members.  While Korea's content industry is thriving, thanks to its broadband industry, most of valuable contents and services are inaccessible to non-members.  Requiring users to become a member and accumulation of membership has become such a common place that you are required to login everywhere.  Becoming a member is not easy either since you must have a Citizenship Number.  I was assigned one when I was born there, but it has since expired.  While not everysite checks validity of the Citizen Number live, I have noticed an increasing trend recently.

So what are Google and Yahoo to do in a world where identity turns into a bottleneck: if you can't find it, it might as well not exist.  Search and Identity technologies must find a way to co-exist without creating a bottleneck of the worst kind.

I am smoking again.  This time I lasted only a week.  At least my wife is understanding.  What broke the camel's back is that I simply couldn't get any work done.  I would sit in front of my computer and my concentration would evaporate with each eyeblink.  So I am smoking again and able to hold a thought for longer than a minute.  As soon as this project is done, I'll try to get back on the wagon again.

Blog Neighborhood is a UI metaphor for viewing related blogs.  Today's blogspace is organized mostly by topic (i.e. Java, Flash), relationships (i.e. friends, collegues), or navigation (I am more likely to subscribe to blogs Dave Winer visits because I read Dave's blog).

Blog Neighborhood is a textual representation of blogs a blogger read either by browser or RSS feed.  Essentially, its a vertical list of hyperlinks, each pointing to a blog.  Vertical axis represents time, so blogs I visited most recently are at the top.  Horizontal axis represents frequency of visits limited degradation over time, so hyperlinks to most frequently visited blogs are not indented while rarely visited blogs will be deeply indented.  Axises can be switched.

Here is an example of how Blog Neighborhood looks like:

Scripting News
  Marc Canter
   Lawrence Lessig
Scott Loftesness
   Jeremy Allaire
  Mitch Kapor
    Ray Ozzie
    Don Box

Its primary advantages are intuitiveness (you don't even have to understand it to use it) and compactness (it fits easily in a corner of a blog and simple enough to display on mobile devices).

I forgot how vivid dreams can be with nicotine patches.  For example, I just had this dream where my family had a fatal auto accident (definitely not one of my favorite dreams).  In nicotine patch dreams, I have wider field of vision, deeper colors, sharper images, and longer memory afterward.  Sound quality seems about the same.

We were in our family van, heading north somewhere north of Golden Gate Bridge on Freeway 101.  Ahead of us were long lines of white Ford Thunderbirds, but the traffic was moving well past 60 mph with everyone tailgating each other.  My wife was in the passenger seat.  My son was sitting behind me in a child seat as well as driving behind me in another white Ford Thunderbird.  Then everything stops and our van started plowing through Thunderbirds after Thunderbirds.  While I am thinking, "I guess we are goners," I hear my wife yelling something like "aaaaeeee".  I then realized that she was in the middle of saying "Bye" the long way, so I started on the letter B knowing that I'll never get to the "aaaaeeee" part.  After what felt like hundreds of Thunderbirds, everything turns white and real quiet.  I peek open my right eye and find myself in our bedroom.  Whew!  Welcome to Day 3 without smoking.

Why can't I have dreams where I am stuck in an island with Kathy Ireland?  I'll risk being eaten by Ford Thunderbirds sporting shark fins.

I started reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series when the first book came out.  I have 9 volumes so far, half in hardcover as a proof of my impatience.  The tenth volume, Crossroads of Twilight, just came out.  When I scanned the USENET newsgroups this morning, I found several posts of not only the news about the book's release, but also copies of the book itself!

Because I am stuck between feeling foolish and righteous, I am holding off on ordering the new book as well as reading the bootleg PDF version.  After paying for 9 volumes of unnecessarily long and increasingly tedious series, I have lost all respect for the author whom I feel is taking advantage of people's need for closure.

I quit smoking today.  Last time, a year ago, I lasted for six months.

I am now at a point where I am nervous about blogging my thoughts and activities.  New ideas are still bubbling up constantly, leaving my mental basement constantly wet, but they are all on or near what I have been working on and where it is headed.  I guess its paranoia.  Maybe less coffee will do.

It seems Chandler guys are running into same problems I have.  When you are looking to leverage third party developers, you have to decide whether you are building an application or a platform.  Like the Chandler team, I have chosen to to take the application path, but platform side will still get some considerations as I want people to customize fully.  Even more important than application versus platform issue is the product's ability to incrementally grow.  If I learned anything from Radio, this is IT.

Sash is also slow, bloated, and bewildering.  A simple weblication that should require only a few K of JavaScript and DHTML somehow end up almost a megabyte of download.  Funny thing is that source code (wdx) files are indeed small (a few K) as expected but compressed.  What is the point of using compressed source format when binary ends up being hundred times larger?

Installation of these weblications is even worse.  You have to individually review and grant security rights to them.  Why not just download them into a quaranteened area and then ask when they are actually used for the entire group of weblications?  As it is, they are discouraging people from trying out sample weblications with all the warnings and prompting.  Its like a waiter asking the temperature and ratio of tomato over brocolli in my salad.  Can't IBM afford to have a UI specialist review Sash?

Sash is huge and makes one wonder what is in it.  Even worse is the development environment which seems as big and slow as Visual Studio.  I'll bet most users will gladly trade fancy debuggers in return for ability to directly edit with a simple text editor and test with a web browser.

Put it all together and one ends up feeling that Sash is nothing more than a pile of glittering Trash.  All the neat ideas, potentials, sweats, and dreams that went into it ends up being nothing because of bad amateurish execution.