Month: June 2003

Back to the Missing Future

I got back last night, but was too tired to get online.

Eric Kidd, a 27 year old programmer, writes about the Missing Future for small software developers, the magic dust that made Silicon Valley and Microsoft possible in the first place.

"But this dream is nearly gone. It's getting crushed between the awful power of Microsoft, and the onrushing juggernaut of open source." – Eric Kidd via Dave Winer

He echos my post from last year:

Between Microsoft monopoly and Open Source religion, I fear software market is between a rock and a hard place. – Don Park

Gone Camping

I am going camping today with some friends down at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park.  It is not that I like camping itself.  I just enjoy the tranquility and the buzz of nature.  When I am sitting in the wood and close my eyes, I can hear a particular kind of silence that calms me.  At Big Sur, I won't have to bang pots to keep spoiled bears away either.

Yosemite is one of the worst place to camp because you spend the whole trip paranoid, thanks to the bears, instead of relaxing.  If you do, reserve a spot somewhere in the center of the camping ground unless you enjoy staring down hungry bears.  And be prepared to be woken up by sound of gun fire during the night.

Anyway, I'll be gone for a few days.  Meanwhile, stay out of trouble kids.

Universal Robots tag

Current standards for robot exclusion, robots.txt and robots META tag, are effective only for page level robot exclusion directives.  In light of Google versus Blog controversy, I think it makes sense to introduce finer-grained robot exclusion tags.  Here is a sketchy proposal:

<robots> Tag

<robots> tag advises web robots whether data and links following the tag are indexable and/or followable.  <robots> tag may be used in HTML or integrated into XML application-specific schemas.  It has only one attribute, 'content', with same case-insensitive values as the content attribute of the robots META tag, specifically ALL, NONE, INDEX, FOLLOW, NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW.  'content' attribute is required.  <robots> tag is an empty tag, meaning it has no child elements nor textual contents.

<robots> tag's namespace URI is "http://www.robotstxt.org/xmlns&quot;.  Namespace declaration is not required in HTML documents.

HTML Example:

  <robots content="noindex" />
  <table id="blogroll">....</table>
  <robots content='index' />
  
...

XML Example:

 <channel>
 <robots content='none'
 xmlns="http://www.robotstxt.org/xmlns"/>
 <title>Don Park's Blog</title>
 ...
 <item>
 <robots content='all'
 xmlns="http://www.robotstxt.org/xmlns"/>
 <description>...</description>

Processing Guidelines

  • With HTML documents, robots may search <robots> tags by searching for string pattern "<robots" to find next indexable and/or followable areas of the document.

iTunes: Death of Record Companies

Check out this short Business 2.0 piece showing how each dollar collected per song is divided up.  Artists get 12 cents out of a dollar.  The music download service (i.e. Apple) gets 40 cents.  That leaves 48 cents up for grab as music download industry emerges, expands, and consolidates while the real world music distribution business shrinks.  I expect record companies will start to dwindle during the expansion phase as they start losing artists to the music download industry.  There will still be middlemen, but record companies will be left with peddling only oldies.

Flash Mobs in the Bay Area?

Thanks to Joi Ito for mentioning Flash Mobs (not the Macromedia kind) in Manhattan.  What fun!  Will there be one in the Bay Area?  I want to experience one.  If there isn't, I can organize one I guess.  I suspect there will be Angry Flash Mob variation soon or later ganging up on Soup Nazis.

Huggable

Tim Bray comments on his observation of airport greeting behavior.  He notes:

"There are some cultures where hugging is just not done, and while a lot of these people are Chinese-looking, it’s not as simple as that."

Korea is one of those cultures although, as he mentioned, it's not as simple as that.  I am Chinese-looking (actually more Japanese-looking than most Japanese) and I am not really into hugging.

It's not that I don't like to be hugged because I certainly enjoy hugging beautiful women.  When a sexy woman hugs me, first thought I have is "She wants me."  Yeah, right.  What I don't do, even with beautiful women, is initiate hugging because I am just not sure if it is the right thing to do.  Aloof in a "only if you want to" way.  Wannabe cool, if you will.  Insecure, I won't complain too much about.

I also don't mind when old ladies hug me because they are motherly hugs.  Comforting.  What I am uncomfortable about are guys hugging me.  It is just awkward even with close friends.  I always get embarassed when hugged by guys and have to scrambled to look natural.  It is like wearing a wet pair of pants.  Amazing what cultural conditioning does to you.

Interestingly enough, Korean guys like to touch each other in other ways like slapping shoulders or holding shoulder to shoulder.  I don't mind that much so it must be the frontal position, a subtle detail in cultural condition.  I think it might have to do with the penis.  When guys are face to face, it's like a game of chicken, but side-to-side is like a line of battle at sea.  Is this why women seem to mind hugging less?  Because they don't have, ahem, cannons?

One thing I did notice when I visited Korea for the first time since puberty was that Korean guys don't mind dancing together.  I was embarassed when I asked a girl I met at a bar out to dance and my buddy followed us to the dance floor.  "What the heck is he doing?", I wondered.  Later I realized this was common practice.  So if you go to a dance club in Korea, you will see guys or girls dancing in clusters and eyeing other groups.  Like Tim, I felt like constructing a bird-watcher's blind to observe the Korean mating ritual.

So, if you meet me in person and feel like giving me a hug, form a line of battle with me instead.  Unless you are a beautfiful woman that is.  This battleship is ready to return to harbor anytime.  <grin/>

javax.comm rant

Here is another great post from java.net weblogs about another orphaned Java package: javax.comm.

"If Sun really wants to see Java applications on the desktop, it needs to finish the tools–all the tools–that people need to write those applications. And that includes javax.comm. I couldn't argue that javax.comm should be a high corporate priority, but there's a solution to that: contribute javax.comm, javax.sound, and any other APIs that have been orphaned over the years to the community. The "write once, run anywhere" story is GREAT, and it REALLY WORKS–but it doesn't count if it's "write once, run anywhere, as long as you don't need to talk to any devices out there."

Would I want to live in Laszlo?

By nature, I am enthusiastic and generous with complements as well as criticisms.  So it is understandable for some of my readers to think my recent posts on Laszlo are outright recommendations for Laszlo.  They are not.  I thought I should make this clear before the confuson spreads any further.

What I have written before are what an excitable traveller might have said while touring through Three Gorges or Grand Canyon.  This post is what the traveller might have said at the end of the trip, in response to the question "Would you want to live here?"

In short, my answer is no.  I will have to post the longer version later, but my answer has a lot to do with why I decided not to pursue an idea similar to Laszlo while back.

I apologize if I confused you.  I believe in simplicity, but I am far from being a simple person.

Improving Laszlo

When I am onto something, it is difficult to let go.  Laszlo has been on my mind all day.  Here are some thoughts on improving Laszlo:

Laszlo IDE

Laszlo needs an IDE.  Currently people are expected to use whatever editor they have to edit LZX files.  Eclipse is the best IDE technology out there, so integrating Laszlo with Eclipse makes sense.

Faster LZX Compiler

Engineers should not have to wait to see the result of changes they made during development, particularly at presentation level.  I don't know why LZX compilation seem so slow, but this must be fixed ASAP.  Here are some options:

  • Compile Laszlo and JGenerator to native code
  • Incremental LZX compilation
  • Finer-grained SWF generation and caching
  • Client-side weaving of SWF fragments

Wizards

Provide wizards to ease common tasks and solve common issues such as Page Back and Browser Resize problems.

XML Baby Talk

I had been expecting baby talk versions of complex XML formats to emerge for sometime now.  It hasn't happened yet so I am left with scratching my head.  The idea is simple enough, take a complex format and create a user-friendly version that maps to the more complex version via an XSLT file.