Month: April 2005

Traditional Korean Music

I enjoy all kinds of music but I particularly enjoy traditional korean music.  If you are interested in listening to some, the best album to get started with is the OST album for the Korean movie Sopyonje.

It starts with a bamboo flute instrumental titled Thousand Year-Old Millenium Crane.  The instrument is called daekoom, my favorite instrument, which sounds similar to shakuhachi although I think it's deeper and coarser in a satisfying way that sooths (actually more like hollowing) the aching parts of your heart (lungs?).  Some daekoom songs will leave you totally drained emotionally though.

Then it moves on to several pansori songs which to me sounds like a fusion of rap and opera.  I just love pansori!  The only problem is that the CD might be difficult to find outside Korea.

Good Nap

I had a good nap today…
because I needed an excuse to post this picture.

I don't know whose puppy it is
but it reminded me of my old dog when she was a puppy.

She used to sleep like that with a full belly,
sometimes pissing on herself without waking.

Serving Large PDF Files

If you have large PDF files at your site, you might want to read this Microsoft technote explaining how IE handles content types associated with [Netscape] plug-ins (i.e. Acrobat) and programmer-level workaround Matt Raible.  I suspect IE's weird triple request was to support some misbehaving yet popular plugins.

I am not sure if popular web servers like Apache and IIS comes with built-in filters to address this problem.  If not, then this opens up another golden shareware moment.

What’s up between Japan and Korea

History Lesson: Heart of the matter by Hayami Ichikawa and others at Asahi Shimbun in Japan pinpoints the real issue behind the ongoing conflict between Japan and Korea over Dokdo (Takeshima) islets: Koizumi and his cabinet are clueless.

Hayami understands why Koreans are so upset over Dokdo and explains it well:

To the South Koreans, Takeshima, a group of islets called Tokto in Korean, represents a symbol of Japan's 1910-45 colonization of the Korean Peninsula.

The incorporation of the Sea of Japan isles into Shimane Prefecture on Feb. 22, 1905, is viewed as a prelude to what Japan was later to inflict upon the peninsula.

It's now 2005 and it seems to be happening all over again.

Japanese government's history whitewashing service covers US too because mentions of the fact that no WMD has been found in Iraq were removed from school textbook drafts at the request of Japanese government officials.

Pretty funny?  Well, not if you consider that Japan is trying to buy a seat in the UN Security Council.  Brrrrr!

MSN Desktop Search

Looks like MSN has the upperhand so far in desktop search.  I have little interest in finding out first hand though so I think I'll wait for a non-beta release.  I don't know about others, but I rarely need to search system wide for documents on the desktop.  For searching text files, I use built-in search capabilities of Eclipse and Visual Studio or Agent Ransack, a free GUI grep of sort.

Google Satellite Maps

Google recently added satellite images to it's map service which I found useful for finding bike commute paths from my house to a client whose office is just across the marsh.

I thought there was a path along the edge of the marsh but examining the satellite images revealed otherwise (vector-based road maps don't show bike trails but high resolution satellite images do).  Since I don't like bicycling along side cars, biking to work is not an option.  I can, however, canoe to work although getting out of the lagoon in my neighborhood requires me to carry the canoe on my back like Vikings did.  But would Vikings have done that if they had only work at the other end instead of kill, rape, and pillage?

Anyway, a neat feature of Google Maps is that you click on a travel direction and see the location like this:

Very cool.

Groove, Not Gravy

Apparently, Groove was sold to Microsoft for $120 million in cash (via Dave) which falls short of $155 million invested into Groove.  Since Microsoft was the largest investor, it's share out of the $120 million is about $80 million.  That means Microsoft bought rest of Groove for just $40 million.

Groove investors got some of their money back for which founders gained some respect.  Microsoft got a bargain (?!?) and a new CTO.  And employees got nothing for their shares.  Phew!

WordPress: Making Amends

Looks like Matt now understands the real problem and is making good efforts to recover from the incident.  Exchange of comments to Shelly's post, in particular, has some excellent tips for public relations which set Matt on the right course.

In retrospect, I must admit I was (and am still!) in a highly irritable state of mind.  It's been a little over 10 days since I quit smoking and I am starting to crater already.  I think I can…Choo-Choo! (sound of me chewing niccotine lozenges)…I think I can…

Stealing with Mouth Wide Open?

Last night, I've been thinking about Russell's post on PSP in which he wrote:

So I snagged Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow this weekend via BitTorrent and then converted it to run on my PSP.

Actually, it wasn't that he snagged a major movie off BitTorrent that had me thinking.  He wouldn't have been able to unless it wasn't a common albeit illegal and shadowy activity.

What had me thinking was his response to the obvious questions:

I simply described an activity that many, many people are already doing with or without me. Do you really think that not talking about this sort of illegal use of BitTorrent is going to somehow protect it?

While my answer to his question is no, I do think talking in public about illegal activities does somehow cause changes, changes which the affected or interested parties (i.e. MPAA, FBI) may consider extremely harmful and thus proceed to counter by setting examples.

Based on my mutated theory of ying and yang, what belongs in the shadow should stay in the shadow.  Failing to do so leads to chaos.