The support for H&S pattern in Dow I described before is at 3250.  Sincere (> 30 minutes) penetration below 3250 will trigger sell programs.

I just discovered Kanon, apparently a famous Japanese hentai multi-ending game translated to other mediums as well as languages, by reading a Korean version of the game transcript.  All I can say is, wow.  Its like Bill Murray's Groundhog Day in a way, but more disturbing.

I also read Korean translation of movie transcript for a famous Japanese movie titled "Secret".  In Secret, a woman dies in a traffic accident but her soul wakes up in her daughter's adolecent body.  Akward and interesting situations ensue with her husband and her second life.  Real surprise is the ending where I found myself pretty pissed over what I felt is one of the worst kinds of betrayal.

We got a somewhat stumpy looking Head-and-Shoulder pattern forming on the Dow.  Sell-side's momentum at this point of the day likely mean 1000 more points on the downside within next ten days just in time for the Iraq conflict climax.  Exciting times financially.

I am constantly amazed by the relentless pace of advances in computer generated animations.  However, most animated figures still seem to be filled with air.  Even motion-recording doesn't seem to correctly reflect the distribution of weight and momentum in moving figures.  While some of this is due to using abuse of slow-motion over zooming — probably due to lack of details and depth in animated faces and eyes — one can clearly see this problem whenever a figure walks around.  Given that realistic presentation of weight and momentum is usually cheaper, in terms of computation, than other vogue animation graphics techniques, I think this is an area that could see huge improvements in the near future.

Wildgrape NewsDesk is a .NET-based RSS viewer.  There is not much there that I haven't seen before in an RSS viewer, except clean (less feature means less clutter) and somewhat crispy (tender loving care of layout) GUI with no-nonsense functionality.  What caught my attention is its use of .NET 1.1 beta framework.  Geesh.  I thought I was taking a big risk by using .NET 1.0!

More I use .NET, more problems I find.  Interoperating with Win32 is a chore, having to manually import Win32 API one function at a time, an error prone process.  There are odd bugs too like RegistryKey.SetValue method's confusion over UInt32.  What bothers me the most is the lack of aggressive plan to increase .NET installbase.  20 megabytes is not something users will casually download unless its porn.  Only solution I see around this problem is to bundle .NET Framework 1.1 with IE 7.  Will Microsoft do this?  I doubt it.

I don't think .NET will be ubiquitous on desktops until .NET 3.0 is released two year from now.  Until then, .NET makes sense only for server-side software.  So the situation is a mixed revisit to Windows 3.1 and Java.

While great deal of webapp look and feel can be accomplished with plain HTML, CSS, and PhotoShop, fancy stuff must be done using DHTML.  There are many cross-browser DHTML libraries for 4th generation browsers (i.e. IE 4, Netscape 4.x), but I don't recommend them because a) 4th generation browsers make up only about 6% of all browsers, and b) they are no longer being maintained.  While 5th generation DHTML libraries support only 5.x or better browsers (i.e. IE 5, Mozilla), there are less tricky workarounds and gotchas.

At this time, there are very few actively maintained 5th generation DHTML libraries and most of them are not complete and lack sufficient documentation.  The one I recommend is DomAPI.  DomAPI 3.01 was just recently released so go take a look.

Privacy – If I write something for just my family and friends, who owns it after the copyright timelimit?  Does copyright law apply only to materials with copyright notices?

Property and Copyright – Where is the line between property and copyrights?  What about art works?  Should the public own the copyright to Picasso's paintings?

National Borders – Who is the public?  Should citizens of France have the copyright to literatures written by American authors after some timelimit?

Copy and Mutilate – What if I distributed copies of old literatures with key sections replaced?  Am I violating a law?

I believe the public should not have rights that it is not willing to take.  Most people in America are not even aware that copyrights have a time limit.  If the public had sufficient will to limit copyrights to 1 year, it could have.

While US remains the center of the Web, glimpses of the future are often found at the fringes like the online porn industry and Korea.  In Korea, you can easily see how Internet Cafes can change the society itself like the opium dens of China's past.  While not everyone is doing it, everyone knows someone doing it, so they are all affected one way or another.

One common phenomenon in Korea is contents restricted to members.  While Korea's content industry is thriving, thanks to its broadband industry, most of valuable contents and services are inaccessible to non-members.  Requiring users to become a member and accumulation of membership has become such a common place that you are required to login everywhere.  Becoming a member is not easy either since you must have a Citizenship Number.  I was assigned one when I was born there, but it has since expired.  While not everysite checks validity of the Citizen Number live, I have noticed an increasing trend recently.

So what are Google and Yahoo to do in a world where identity turns into a bottleneck: if you can't find it, it might as well not exist.  Search and Identity technologies must find a way to co-exist without creating a bottleneck of the worst kind.

I am smoking again.  This time I lasted only a week.  At least my wife is understanding.  What broke the camel's back is that I simply couldn't get any work done.  I would sit in front of my computer and my concentration would evaporate with each eyeblink.  So I am smoking again and able to hold a thought for longer than a minute.  As soon as this project is done, I'll try to get back on the wagon again.