I have not sent a single Christmas card during my 40 years on this planet and the lazyness has become a principle of sort along way.  So don't expect a card from me in the mailbox.  However, I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas.  Since the economy couldn't possibly get any worse next year, I'll see you all smiling from cheek to cheek next year.

Thanks to Marc Canter, I learned where the word F.U.C.K. came from.  Its actually an acronym that stands for "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" and was used in old England as a technical term to charge anyone caught in illegal cohabitation, obviously a very common offense.  When I first came to America 26 years ago, I couldn't speak a word of English.  The very first word I learn at my Junior Highschool was — you guessed it — fuck.  The word was so useful that I could spend a whole week with just that word and meaningful silences.

My year end rituals is work.  I worked 18 hours on Thanksgiving Day and 21 hours the day after to meet a deadline.  Same thing happened year after year, for the past 20 years.  November and December are my nightmare months.  At 40 years young, this ain't good.

"Scott" thinks out loud about SAML and its relevance to Google Federation and Weblog World.  He even throws in a pretty diagram.  My thoughts on SAML is still baking.  I doubt I'll have anything really brilliant to say until I am either stuck inside it at least knee deep high.  I am hoping it happens before 2002 is over.

What I like the most about Radio is that Radio is dynamically updateble and extensible.  As "Dave" and UserLand staff evolve Radio day by day, my version walks in step.  Radio third party software developers have also started to do the same.  For example, Marc Barrot's activeRender tool, used here, is updated each time I fire up Radio.  Both Microsoft and Sun has a lot to learn from Radio.  Only if Java and .NET had similar capabilities…

The Net needs zero-install extensible client platforms.  Java WebStart and .NET meets some of the needs, but both require the user to install 6 to 20 megabytes of mostly unused code and lacks the ability to incrementally update and extend the platform.  The same applies to Flash.  Unless the platform itself can be updated and extended incrementally, its not zero-install in my opinion.

Here are some suggestions for improving UserLand Radio.

Category post to e-mail – I subscribe to many mailing lists.  Discussion topics of those mailing lists frequently overlap with my blog categories.  For example, my Online Payment category and the 3d-secure mailing list.  When I post a message on either one, I usually post on the other as I have done with my Extending 3D-Secure post.  So, an optional Radio feature that automatically does this would be convenient.

Category post to Usenet – same as above except post is made to Usenet.

Private Category to Public Categories – while most news aggregation is happening at the client end, there is room for intermediate news aggregation that aggregates posts from multiple blogs. User can set this up by specifying one or more post destinations, each corresponding to a Public Category.  This feature leads naturally to introduction of editorialized news and invited columnists.

Syndicated News Filters/Prioritizer – I subscribe a good set of RSS feeds, but I am usually interested only in certain topics.  It would be nice to be able to filter or sort news by requiring presence or absence of certain words and phrases for each subscribed RSS feed.  Also, it would be great if I received regular reports of words and phrases my RSS feed subscribers are interested in.

It happened over the past two months while I waited for SUNW to bottom and I don't know exactly why, but I heard the coffin closing on Sun.  Sun is going the way of SGI with a damsel in distress, Java, in its arms.  Where did I put my double-edged sword?

On Internet, the porn industry often is the technological leader when it comes to marketing.  This time, they came up with something new: porn popups. It takes advantage of a feature that is starting to show up in movie players such as Microsoft Media Player.  The feature allows a movie to contain instructions to open and display an embedded URL in a web browser when you view the movie.  Distribution typically starts with Usenet and the Web and relies on the Message is the Product marketing approach, meaning people will distribute it to others if the movie is enjoyable.

I don't know if others already have a name for this new marketing technology, but I am going to call it Media Popup for now.  It can be applied not only to movies, but to other popular media types such as music, games goods, and others.  If there aren't any MP3 players out there that does this already, I am sure there will be soon enough.