Category: General

Thoughts on war protesters marching

Some folks are saying that war protesters are doing Saddam's work.  I think not.  Both warmongers and war protesters are doing what they are supposed to be doing: balancing.  Can you imagine a society consisting entirely of people who will go to war over slightest provocation?  Likewise, can you imagine a society consisting entirely of people who believe war should be avoided at all cost, even destruction of a major city?  Both kinds of folks are helping create a balance that prevents all of us from going overboard altogether.  Here is an instant proverb:

When you start a fight, make sure you have someone around to stop it.

Even better would be to have someone around to talk you and your opponents out of the fight before it starts.  Unfortunately there is no one inside Iraq to talk Saddam out of his mad ambitions.

Mok3 is Nice

Mok3 is currently showing their stuff at the Demo conference.  I really like it.  Essentially, it creates 3D scenes from photographs, like turning picture postcards into 3D popout cards.  Technology behind it is fairly obvious but meshed and polished to form a neat tool.  Nice.

Digital Identies in the Small World

I went out this morning and bought a copy of Duncan Watts' Six Degrees because I wanted to catch up with the latest on the Small World phenomenon, particularly in respect to digital identity.  While there is a resurgence of interests over the result of Stanley Milgram's experiment known as "Six Degrees of Separation", there hasn't been much discussion over how it applies to the digital identity problem domain.  I think a robust self-organizing and fully distributed web of trust can be built using the Small World phenomenon.  Relative success of PGP over PKI serves as a good indication that this approach deserves further study.

Here are some links to (very) few papers related to this.  Note that these are recent (2001-2003) papers.

Small Worlds in Security Systems: an Analysis of the PGP Certificate Graph
IP6 – Self-Organized Public Key Management for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

While my searches were mostly fruitless, I did run across an intriguing software named Six Degrees that offers some aspects of Universal Personal Proxy functionalities.  It monitors e-mail traffic as well as desktop user activities to help the user find e-mail messages and files related to the currently selected object (called Focus).  I like its use of the word Focus and how it integrates with Windows and Outlook.  Its abuse of drag and drop was not, however.  Check out an animated tour of Six Degrees here.

Robotic News Anchors

News of K-Bot, an android prototype with a wide range of facial capabilities, made me realize that we will soon see robotic news anchors delivering news 24 hours a day.  At first, novelty will encourage some underdog news organizations — like that crazy Russian newstation with stripping news anchor — to experiment with bots as talking heads.  Voice and face expression hints can be provided by a cheap 'reader'.  Ultimately, it will be cost saving.  Why pay big bucks to hire wrinkly Barbara Walters when you can buy a sexiest looking custom-made-in-Hollywood android news anchors for Barbara's one month salary?  If audience gets bored, just order a new one.

Come to think of it, why do we need robots anyway when we can use computer generated graphics in realtime?  You can even use famous heads like Julia Roberts or Michael Jackson.  I want the Three Stooges co-anchoring my 6 o'clock news.  Bush can do the weather and make akward jokes.

Daily: Web of Files 2

A file in a typical file system resides within a hierarchy of directories, a tree with directories as branches and files as leaves.  Each directory has a name unique within its parent directory, so a file's location can be specified with a sequence of directory names.

To get a web of files, we can turn directory names into keywords and associate them with files.  Deferring issues related to the significance of the keyword order, we can imagine a file system UI that looks like this:

keywords: [Incoming, Win32, Blog]
========================================
  Name …
—————————————-
  blogx2.zip
> newscrawler13.zip
  Syndirella_20030216-src.zip
========================================
related: [commercial, Win32, Blog, …]
website: http://www.newzcrawler.com
…

Top section is used to view and edit a list of keywords defining the view.  Middle section list items related to all the keywords listed above.  Bottom section shows information about items selected in the middle section.  Keywords related to the selected item is also displayed.  Much of information about an item can be retrieved lazily from the web.  Note that listed files may be stored anywhere on the disk as long as they have ancestor directories named 'Incoming', 'Win32', and 'Blog' in any order.

At this point, its already useful.  However, it would be nice if the same UI can simulate traditional file system browsers, allowing the user to navigate using hierarchically.  More on this later.

I like Colin Powell

With him in it, I can withstand the stench of sincere idiocy in the Bush Administration.  Its too bad that his influence might be diminishing.  Chaney, Rice, and Rumsfeld are helping Bush make world history, the unpleasant kind.

A Backlash in Washington?.   I certainly don't know any of the facts, but I'd guess that the more hawkish members of the administration — who resisted Colin Powell's recommendation to use the UN to build consensus originally — are sitting there with "I told you so" looks on all of their faces. [Scott Loftesness]

Tim Oren’s Ruminations on VC business

Tim Oren, a newbie VC with programming background (since 1968!), provides some insider tips on how VC works.  He paints a bleak picture for entrepreneurs, but what he said rings true.  I guess I am sort of in the 'network', but I have yet to find an idea that I can spend other people's money and life on.  Its not that I don't have great ideas, too much in fact.  It is the willingness to take responsibility for other people's lives.  You know how some people just take their responsibilities too seriously?  Yup, thats me.  I gotta lighten up and become a believer.

Ruminations on venture capital, trust networks, and information theory  …  (C) is part of what keeps this from degenerating into an ol' boy club. According to my friend AnneLee Saxenian at Berkeley, over 25% of Valley startups now have CEOs of Indian or Chinese descent. (Lame local joke: "The Valley is built on ICs. Yeah, Indians and Chinese!") One of my partners is Indian, so he's tapped into the so-called TIE crowd. (TIE = The Indus Entrepreneur, both Indians and Paks). These guys are awesome networkers. Being Israeli or Korean or Brit also helps, but not quite so much.  …  [Due Diligence]

Its true that Korean entrepreneurial network in the Valley sucks when compared to Indian or Chinese networks.  Tim's blog is recommended.

Google Day

Today is Google day in blogspace.  I think they bought Pyra Labs to beef up their News service with personal opinions and server-side news aggregation.  But it doesn't really matter what the original intentions were.  I am sure Google will end up where they never expected to.  More interesting for me is who will follow next?  Yahoo, AOL, and MSN will feel the pressure to step up their blog-related plans.

Daily: Why URL?

Why do I need a URL?  Do I really need to a location?  Why can't I just enter a set of keywords, like I do using Google, and just drop things into the page to share them with others?  That would allow me to store instructions on how to sew socks at "101st, Easy Company, Christmas, Socks" and allow anyone in 101st to get at it including Easy Company.  What happens in the background is that a set of P2P data services respond to the set of keywords and volunteer to store whatever data I throw into the browser window.  More on this later.