I used to enjoy reading Slashdot, but it has turned pretty sarcastic, silly, and pointless for the past year.  Useful replies have become rare gems.  Idiotic uninvited jokes reins.  I am turning off Slashdot because the noise has risen above the message.  So long /.

What follows is a going to be pretty controversial and I don't have hard numbers to back it up, but my instinct tells me it is true.  Blogging will ruin Google's PageRank algorithm.  Bloggers are highly clustered group with unusually large number of interlinks between each blogs.  Bloggers also tend to cover pretty wide variety of topics.  Google was not designed with the rise of blogging in mind.  I predict that blog sites will rank high in almost all topics in the near future, rendering Google useless unless blog pages are treated differently.

Went out the Half Moon Bay with my wife and son this afternoon.  Half Moon Bay is about a small bay facing the Pacific ocean in the middle of San Francisco Peninsula.  It was only 15 minutes away from my house in Redwood Shores.  My wife tells me that I need to be near water to be healthy according to my Sa-Joo.  Sa-Joo predicts the future based on exact time, day, month, and year of birth.  Lunar calendar is used.  Any way, this is why I live in a water-front home although I think I would be happier living in a mountain with lots of trees around me.

Back to the visit to Half Moon Bay.  Weather was great with only a bit of wind.  We saw a dead sea lion on the beach rotting away.  We also saw many seals near the beach.  One even came within 10 yards of where we sat.  I clapped and it looked at me like "Hey, dork.  Never seen a seal before?"  I have seen a few seals swimming near the Oracle Headquarters just five minutes from my house when the tide was in, but I have never seen one from my house.  They probably blocked the waterway.  It would be troublesome to have lost and hungry seals invading my deck.  Get invaded daily by ducks, geeses, swans, and racoons is enough trouble for us.  This is how I got bitten by a racoon.

At the beach, I saw some USO (Unidentified Swimming Objects).  They seemed to be about the size of tennise balls and large swarm of them were riding the waves at the beach.  I didn't have a binocular so I couldn't see what they were.  I never seen anything like it before.  This leads me to my thought of the day: what is the function of mundane?  When we get used to something, it becomes mundane.  Is this an effect or does it serve some useful role in the way a human mind works?

Its a funny joke for people who reads argues and laughs.  I like Pandas but, having been bitten by one of their cousins, Racoon, I don't feel the urge to pet them.  Oh boy.  They sure have powerful jaws and sharp teeths.

I am back from the poker tournament.  19 players showed up so there were three tables.  To make the long story short, I crashed just before the 6th hour, the final no limit game.  For 5 hours, I was doing great, sharpshooting weak players and pumping bets when I had good hands.  I built up a large pile until I went against my instinct when faced with a bluff.  That put a crack in my confidence and I started losing slowly.  I missed hands I should have been in and even forgot to squeeze when I should have.  By 6th hour, my stack was too low compared to the ante which kept rising hour by hour.  So I got impatient and attacked with a shaky hand.  That stupid mistake and one good player was enough to clean me out in one hand.  It was my first poker tournament and I learned a lot.  I'll be more ready when the tournament comes around again next year.

My wife is coping with her sister's illness.  So am I.  My son is still cluess, but he has toned down his usual antics and trouble brewing instinctively.  A good boy.

Tonight is the private poker tournament I mentioned a month ago and I'll be glad to be away from all the worries for a few hours.  My strategy is to be the Rock until the sixth hour when no limit rule starts.  Then I'll try to gain control of the table by swinging really hard, hopefully confusing bad players and knocking out some top players.  After that its mostly a mix of grinding and crushing.  Poker is fun, but this will be more like work.  Wish me luck.

Sony Ericsson Clicker is a shareware that lets you use a Sony Ericsson phone as a universal remote by running and controlling scripts on a bluetooth-enabled Mac using your phone.  Scripts can be fired when your phone enters or exits with Bluetooth range around a Mac.  This got me thinking about proximity authentication.  I am sure others have already thought of this, but I haven't enumerated the issues involved before.

How it works: As I enter a room with a computer, the computer (C) detects and authenticates me by forwarding a challenge sent from the authentication authority (AA).  My proximity ID (bluetooth-enabled phone with smartcard capabilities) sends back a signed challenge as response which C forwards to AA for verification.  Upon receiving result back from AA, the computer knows who I am and enables nearby dumb devices that I am allowed to use.  Meanwhile, the authentication server notes that I am in that room so access from other rooms can't be made.  When I exit, C disables the devices.

Theft: To prevent illegal access using lost or stolen proximity ID, one or more PINs can used and session can be time limited.  Entering the PIN in the morning as you enter a hospital should provide access to most staff-only doors for 8 hours.  Bank vaults can require a PIN to be entered upon entry and every 15 minutes.

Strongarm: To prevent illegal access at gunpoint, access control database can require presence of others to enable access.  Bank vault can require a guard to be present in the same room or in route to the room.  The guard can be required to reauthenticate before reopening the vault to let me out.  Pressure-plate can be used to make sure there is no unauthorized person accompanying me.

Crowd: If there are multiple authenticated persons in the room with a range of access permissions, context specific policies can applied.  Usually, highest access permission in the room should apply for the entire room.  For example, computer can enable missile launch control only if there is a commissioned offer in the room.

Proximity authentication is less intrustive than other authentication schemes in the physical world and is ideal for environments where there are difficulties with using hands to handle security token and keyboard.  Surgery room is one such place.  I am assuming that there are no interference problems between bluetooth and medical instruments.

Mostly bug fixes.  Eclipse 2.1 schedule is still on track for a final release end of this month.  Download here.

After just a few minute of using RadioStation, I can say I LOVE IT.  Go try it folks.

One more GUI change suggestion.  I frequently edit my posts, but there was no visual hint telling me how to edit old posts.  Put up a toolbar button and add context menus.  Double-clicking a post to edit is not obvious to grandmothers and me.

So far, FM RadioStation is nice.  It sits on top of Radio, so launching RadioStation will launch Radio as well.  Memory footprint is about same (yikes, now I lose 50 meg instead of 25 meg).  There is no performance impact from RadioStation, unlike Radio which sucks up a lot of CPU cycles sporatically and frequently just when I am doing something (like rebuilding a million line project).  I wonder if Dave tuned Radio lately.  Would it be possible to completely port Frontier scripts to Python?  Python-based Radio would certainly invite a lot more people to play with Radio.

Hey, I really like blogging with RadioStation.  At the very least, I am no longer stuck inside a small textarea and don't have to worry about losing by clicking on a wrong link.  Yippy!  Ooops.  I thought I got mail, but its RadioStation boinging me because it found some news article for me to read.  Confusing and wrong.  People expect e-mail to require active participation, but not news.  News should just sit there (its presence at a known location is the user notification) and wait for people to notice it.  A small corner of a newspaper turned 60 degrees or so displayed on the left or right edge of the screen is the right level of user notification.  Since there are frequent need for this sort, there should be a auto-slideout vertical bar on the left (left as que for incoming) for this sort of thing.  Hey, I like this GUI idea.  I think I'll build one for myself and play with it: no more stupid popup bubbles, blinking titlebars, nor boings in midst of my classic music.

Can you notice the way using a different tool change writing style?