Month: August 2003

Weakinesses

In light of Wiki troubles the Pie/Echo/Atom group is having, I thought I should just jot down some suggestions that could reduce some of the problems.

Stop Flash Floods

A busy Wiki page accumulates a lot of information quickly and the urge to reorganize the page in mass mounts.  Don't.  People identify a page by its content, not just its title.  Editing the page, particularly the first two screens of content are like flash floods that wash away recognizable landmarks and leave the Wiki user disoriented.

Instead, create another page and point to it.  This means introduction of page versions where each version represents structural changes.  Within each version, changes are accumulative.  There must also be a way to link to most recent version and list and enumerate the versions.  Page versions account for ahistoric nature of Wiki to some extent.

Doors, Places, and Objects

While every Wiki page are web pages, you must assign distinctive roles to those pages.  Some pages act as doors, directing or discouraging movement to places and objects.  Some pages act as places serving as containers for objects like documents and provide constraints for activities such as general musings or topic related discussions.

Pages acting as objects like documents should have a clear division between the object and the actions.  For example, Wiki page for Archiving API spec should have the draft spec at the top and discussion about the API at the bottom.

Too Many Pages

Discourage creation of Wiki pages on whims.  Assign people rights or buffer with a wait period (1 day) before a new page can be created.  Similar pages should be merged by adding a new page instead of deleting or reorganizing.

Bionicles

One of the things that keep me humble are Bionicles.  I just can't figure out why kids like these unattractive half-finished looking junk of a toy from Lego.  Since my son likes them enough to have a large collection, there is obviously something there.  Maddest thing is why kids are buying identical bionicles that differ only in colors.  Bionicles drive me nuttier than Barney.

Anyway, I took some pictures of Bionicles for my son so he can post it to his Club Lego home page.  Here is one of those:

Good Bionicles on Thin Ice

Hyundai Suicide

Jung Mong-Hun, chairman of several Hyundai jaebol companies committed suicide early morning of August 4th by jumping off a Hyundai HQ building.  He was the man who was supposedly pressured into providing the half a billion dollars wired to North Korea just before the historic meeting between the heads of North and South Korea.

Half-a-Billion Dollar Handshake

Kim Dae-Joong, the former Korean president who caused all this mess, should have been jailed for abusing power IMHO.  At the very least, he should have returned the Nobel prize he got for that paid-for meeting.  As to Kim Jong-Il, I think he should forget the nukes and concentrate on finding a better hairdresser.

Epiphany at the Summit

It has been like climbing a mountain covered with a maze of trails and fellow climbers.  For the past two months, I have been lost in the cloud, but now I have climbed out of it and seen the summit.  I don't know who else have reached here before me, but I suspect most people are still stuck in the thick cloud that turns the summit into an island.  It is a great feeling just being here.

Pie/Echo/Atom Final Name Vote

As requested on the Pie/Echo/Atom Wiki, this is my blog post to spread the news:

Final Name Voting is in progress and will end on August 15th.

There are only seven cleared candidates so far and not much of voting is going on either.  The choices are:

  • Barbwire – 1 vote
  • Dada – 1
  • Elbo – 2
  • Feedcast – 7
  • Loki – 0
  • Sygnal – 0
  • Wyre – 2

Of this bunch, Feedcast is the only one that doesn't make me cringe.  My only complain about it is that it's a bit long and it sounds like a mundane product name, not a cool standard name.

I proposed SIX before but there were some negative feedback.  How does Seven sound?  Six plus me is Seven.  Seven feed, Seven API, Seven-enabled.  Hmm.  Is there Seven Part, Inc.?;-p

Zeroconf Rising

I love the zeroconf stuff and am happy to see more open source zeroconf projects and products emerging.  Why?  Because my instinct tells me this area of technology is going to explode soon.  Mix zeroconf with location services and WiFi.  Kaboom!

Check out the screenshot of Howl on right by Swampwolf (via je_apostrophe via Ted Leung).

For information on zeroconf and related IETF specs, go to http://www.zeroconf.org.

Technical information about Rendezvous, Apple's Zeroconf implementation is here.

More zeroconf infomation:

If you have links to other zeroconf implementations, please let me know via comment.  I also haven't been able to locate Howl source code on Swampwolf website.

As Joe Cheap walked into Seoul's Yong-San district, he flipped his PDA on and queried his Bargainer 2.0 to see if any of the stores have the new Ding-a-Ring gadget for sale.  Finding five, he activates the Live Auction task.  Within a second, he receives five bids and direction to the store with the lowest bid.  As he strolls to his destination, he receives a 'they'll kill me if they found out' offer from another store via IM.  Joe taps on cancel auction button and turns around with a smile on his face.

Meanwhile Doug Hardball arrives on a bicycle and activates his PDA to harvest the local prices which are not available outside this district.  Scanning the prices, he notices that the prices are higher than the district that hired him.  As Doug moves on to the next shopping district, Sam Sneak, the district's disinformation manager snickers.  He tagged that harvester just last week on instinct.  Now, the harvester is carrying away fake prices with stealth beacon tags that will help him collect evidence to present to the national e-commerce association.

TypePad Launching August 4th

Last bit of info released by Six Apart was the launch date and the price.  It's August 4th 11:59pm so if you want your TypePad blog starting date to be August 4th, you will have exactly one minute to do it.  Check it out.  Feature chart showing the three service levels alone is worth some pondering since the missing dots on these types of charts tend to show more than those inkblots psychologists use.

Contratz to Anil, Ben, and Mena.  TypePad looks good.

Update #1: TypePad  beta blogs are using RSS 1.0.