Month: June 2004

R.I.P. Orkut

Orkut is now a spam-filled waste and inappropriate for professional use.  What a waste of a good opportunity.  I am now starting to appreciate LinkedIn's more conservative approach.

Creative or Reactive

If the history remembers me, I would like to be remembered as someone who constantly struggled against the limits of creativity.  While I have been accused of excessive creativity by many, I am constantly and painfully aware of how incidental creativity is.

My mental model of human brain is a bed of wax on which a steel ball of consciousness rolls about.  The model captures my belief that thinking itself changes the person and affects how the person thinks in the future.  More one travels the same path, the channel of habitual thoughts deepens and thus raises the necessary force needed to escape the channel into new areas.  Events happening around us affect the direction and momentum of the moving ball.

From this perspective, being creative means possessing a oddly shaped mind that reacts in uncommon ways to common events and brainstorming aggregates oddity for higher yield.

Smart TODO Patent

Automatic handling of TODO comments in source code is something Eclipse has been doing for a while now but Microsoft has been granted a patent the feature.  The patent was filed on March 6, 2000.  I forget when Eclipse had the smart TODO feature.

Open to Opportunities

I have been consulting for most of my career, but the consulting lifestyle has gotten rather stale over the years.  I have been looking at some job offers lately but I have not seen one that made me jump with enough excitement to walk away from my consulting practice.

So I thought I should make it known that I am wide open to opportunities and see if more attractive opportunities surface whether its a job, partnership, or ventures.

Microsoft Expression 3.3 Preview

A preview version of Expression 3.3 which Microsoft acquired from Hong Kong-based Creature House last year is available for free download (page say it's for Creature House users, but the installer doesn't check).

Expression is a vector drawing tool like Illustrator and CorelDraw.  Unfortunately, it's UI sucks just as badly so expect to get lost.  Capability-wise, it's impressive.

It seems rather solid for a preview and I haven't noticed any crippled feature yet.  Maybe it's a finished product released as free download under Preview cover to hit Adobe's bottomline.  Turning a market into a desert is another path to monopoly if you got deep pockets.  But then probably not.

Antialiased Text

What did I do this weekend?  Work, of course.  I finally started on the souped up on-screen newspaper renderer.  GDI doesn't support anti-aliased text, GDI+ was too slow, Flash doesn't have an API I could call, and Quartz is OSX only, so I had to put one together myself.  Key requirement is the ability to fill a large screen full of anti-aliased text and images and switch between two zoom factor fast.

By fast, I mean fast enough to trigger the illusion of viewing a real page instead of a painted screen.  That's the magic sauce that will get people into reading on screen.  You would know this too if you spent a few days doing crazy stuff with newspapers while your wife looked on with a worried look.

The good news is that I got a good enough result with some experiments that I am going to invest more time on the project.  The bad news is that it's not fast enough to do zoom transition animation.  I'll have to add some cheap visual hints to trick the reader's eyes instead.

Farewell To President Reagan

Former President Ronald Reagan died today.  A sad day of mourning for me.  I know his policies were controversial but I liked him very much, more than any other American President I had before or after.  He was and still is Mr. President to me.

I felt safe when he was in the Oval Office and I could believe his every words.  Maybe it was because he was the Great Communicator.  Maybe it was because he really believed.  Even when he was saying tough words, I could feel the compassion in him.

I don't feel that way when I hear Bush speaking.  I don't believe his words and I don't feel safe.  Maybe I am just misunderstanding him because he is the Great Miscommunicator.  *sigh*

Farewell Mr. President.

Dudley Pope’s Ramage Series

I have read C.S. Forester's Hornblower series, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, Alexander Kent's Bolitho series, and Dewey Lambdin's ongoing Alan Lewrie series, but I am still hungry so I am starting on Dudley Pope's Ramage series.

I am not buying the reprints because there are, I think, 18 books in the series and the reprints are not yet available for all the volumes.  So I am going to haunt the used bookstores like I did with the Bolitho series.  I hate reading a series out of order though.  Getting all the volumes at once wouldn't be good for me anyway since I am a book addict who can't stop without difficulty once I get going on.

Read, eat, sleep, and repeat until empty shelf.
Exception Thrown: RestroomException

Microsoft’s Double-Click Patent

This is an edited version of my comment to Joi's post on Microsoft's so called double-click patent.

The patent is not really about double-click but about a way to use a limited input device (i.e. a cheap button on a mobile phone) to trigger more than one function, morse code sent from user to the mobile OS if you will. It adds functionality without increasing cost nor adding clutter. What it does is map functions to like this:

Down-Up -> F1
Down-1/2sec-Up -> F2
Down-1sec-Up -> F3
Down-Up-Down-Up -> F4

and so on.

IMHO, this is not a trivial patent but a rather innovative new use of existing technology to overcome limitations of mobile devices.  Is it a general innovation?  No.  But it is innovative if you consider the context of its application and you would not think it is an obvious solution if you were the one assigned to solve this problem.

Frankly, I prefer my Next-App (aka Appy) button idea better since user doesn't have to remember the correct pattern. Instead, the user just flips apps as if flipping pages until they get to the one they want to use. In the end, users remember 'where' the app is (i.e. 3rd app) and click the button that many times as they move the device up for use.