Some analysts are predicting that when the bullets start flying in Iraq, stock market will rally. I agree, but I suspect the rally will be short lived with only about 300 to 500 points on the upside, leaving us still within the 1000 point down draft situation. My reasoning is that removing uncertainties around war with Iraq will still leave North Korea and the Economy weighing us down. Some people thrive on yo-yo market, but its risky without the ability to watch every ticks and tides. As for me, I stopped watching ticks and tides and started watching people. After all, its the people who buys and sells.
Month: February 2003
Joi Ito’s blog
Joi Ito's blog posts about Japan are similar to my blog posts about Korea, providing personal glimpses into Japan and Korea. I am thinking about adding a blog category in Korean for my fellow Koreans to read, but I couldn't be too controversial because my father is not exactly anonymous in Korea. Anyway, its comforting (?!?) to know that Korea is not any more rotten than Japan. All I knew of Japan before were learned from their movies: samurai, yakuza, anime, and porn (^^!). Thank you, Ito-san.
Eclipse 2.1 M5 Released
Eclipse, open source Java IDE used by WebSphere, keeps rolling ahead. M5, the last 2.1 milestone release, is out and its got tons of little usability features (see its list of new and noteworthy features). I predict that Eclipse will become the second most popular IDE behind Microsoft's Visual Studio, and the most popular among open source developers. Its popularity will move beyond the Java community to include C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, and others.
Not The Animatrix
More people from the past. I was also reminded of Marney Morris's Animatrix when I read people blog about Animatrix. Is that a movie or something? 'The Animatrix' site was too busy being cool so I wasn't sure what it was about. Duh. Anyway, I worked with Marney way back in Apple II days. Really nice gal. She drew graphics and I threw them on the screen as fast as I could. I remember a particular renderer I did for Apple II's double-hires mode (twice the pixels with even crazier mapping). Fastest way I could come up with was self-modifying 6502 code. Yikes!
Here we go. Countdown to Matrix:Reloaded.
The Matrix = The Mesh
Some of us, when we hear the name Animatrix – can't help but think of Marney Morris. That was the name of her company. Marney was literally the FIRST person to make money off of VideoWorks, which became Director, which became Flash. Marney was the ORIGINAL multimedia developer. [Marc's Voice]
Nobel Prize for $200 million?
Kim Dae-Joong, the outgoing Korean President, won the Nobel Peace Prize during his term for meeting Kim Jong-Il, the head honcho of North Korea with an itch for nukes. Korean newspapers are reporting that Korean version of CIA wired $200 million to Kim Jong-Il's henchmen in Macao one day before historic meeting. The money was supposedly provided by one of Hyundae companies in return for some fishy bank loans. While I wouldn't mind getting a Nobel prize, $200 million seems a little steep.
JDK 1.5: Neutered Tiger
I have been looking at JDK 1.5 (aka Tiger) feature list and I can't help wondering if Sun is on auto-pilot or not. Why the heck are they playing around with features like generics and enhanced for-loop when there are critical features yet to be worked on, like:
- Smaller Footprint/Shared VM - if Java programs were cars, one would get 1 miles per galon. Increase efficiency or bring on the train.
- More Responsive GUI – support and extend SWT. Who cares if Swing experts can do the same with Swing. Idiots should be able to do it.
- Incremental Installation – even 7-8 meg is too much. Most Java applications need only 2-3 megs to get started. Install whats needed to run the program and schedule the rest to trickle install or on-demand.
Wake up and smell some Java, Scott McNealy.
Adam Green at Harvard
I remember Adam Green. When dBase was still king of the hill and SQL was just a glimmer in people's eyes, Adam and I talked about working together to build a smart interactive SQL editor/IDE. Nothing came of it and I lost track of him since. I wish I could be scholarly like him instead of pounding on my keyboard and yacking on the phone all day to make a living. Being a VC would be even better although more tiring, but empty trees (re: VC tree joke) in Sand Hill makes the transition near impossible.
BTW, totally by coincidence, my old friend Adam Green, the dBASE guru, and CTO at Andover, retired rich from the software industry, is now taking classes at Harvard to learn how be scholarly about the history of science. His aim is to be the first software historian. Adam is uniquely qualified to do that. He was doing his work, reading the ancient scientists, on his own, when people asked what he's doing, he'd tell them and they would look at him weirdly. Now he says he's studying the same stuff at Harvard and people's eyes bug out. I've noticed the same thing. Synchronicity. [Scripting News]
Update on Son of SML
Michael Champion referred to my SML proposal as Son of SML. SOSML sounds like a rallying cry for 'XML is in trouble' crowd. I kind of like it. Many people have made useful comments. Here are some of them:
Remove assignable content – this was causing confusion between attributes and contents as well as supporting mixed content difficult.
Use '=' to distinguish attribute from content – once assignable content is removed, double indentation is no longer needed. Only loss seems to be loss of structured attribute value support. Oh, well.
Forget """ – I agree that its arcane. Python can really mess up your brain. <g>
With above changes, here are some SOSML examples:
# comments are '#' followed by a whitespace
circle x='1.0' y = '1.0'
r='0.5'
fill color='#ff0000' # red
"some useless text as mixed content"
text "Hello"
text
a href='somewhere'
"text with a link a quote like this \" "
Mixed-content reduces readability, but thats what mixed-content crowd deserves for giving me headaches. <g> BTW, I am not entirely attached to the backslash escape character because I am a programmer leery of his biases.
Two new and possibly creepy features I am thinking about are.
- Use quotes to distinguish between element and content – this is to allow one to type in a sequence of elements easily.
- Use '/' to allow element nesting in a single line.
Here is an example using above two features and # comment
a b c d # is same as
a
b
c
d
a/b/c/d # is same as
a
b
c
d
I am probably at the edge of going overboard and risking the original intent: easy to read and write…
Bombs for my ancestors
My father was born in a village called Park-Chun 75 years ago. My grandparents are buried there and my relatives still live there although I have never met them. So Park-Chun is sort of my ancestor's place. What ties Park-Chun to the events unfolding now is its location: 30 minutes or so down river from Yongbyon, the most likely target of US bombers in North Korea. I am glad our bombs are smart.
Bombs of a more enjoyable type
Microsoft has a hit on its hand that should strengthen Xbox marketshare. Its Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball. It will open the floodgate for sex-appeal games. Will Playboy's Mud Wrestling for Xbox be next? Here is a screenshot of DOAX for your pleasure.
Don Park's Weekly Habit 