Looks like W3C is still on it's downward spiral. I've had my own hits and bumps with W3C and it took me a long time to wash that W3C taste out of my mind. Looking back, I think what the world needs a more modern form of standardization process for technology related standards, one that supports incremental improvements and immediate deployment as well as ability to fix past mistakes.

As an engineer and an entrepreneur, I often have 'this needs to be standardized' moments. The need can vary in size from large to small and type from trail-breaking to fence-mending. Needless to say, the distance from such a moment to watching the printer spend an hour printing out the final recommendation is beyond bearable.

What I would like is a place where I can go to find others to quickly find others with similar interest then workout common solutions in weeks instead of years a W3C standardization process usually takes. Note that there is no process, just a place. The rest is left to the people to work out, somehow, driven by their needs.

The place is both a social network as well as a battlefield for de-facto standard makers, a place that depends on nimbleness of its occupants to make up for mistakes.

My wife and son are returning today from a long visit to Korea. Believe it or not, this annual visit was one of the things I promised when we married 14 years ago because she is very close to her parents. The trip is usually a month long but this time she was a way for half a month longer. Needless to say, I missed them both pretty badly.

I hope they arrive safely. I had a bad dream of my wife this morning, bad enough to call to delay her flight if she wasn't already airborne. Now I am so nervous that I can't focus on anything.

Update:

They arrived safely and smiling because the airline upgraded their seats to business class after she complained about something at the departing end. A bit of wisdom according to my wife:

In America, you are rewarded for being nice. In Korea, you get ignored instead. To get better service in Korea, you have to get nasty.

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p dir=”ltr”>Rather sad but my experience agrees with hers. Until things improve, don't bother waiting in line when in Korea. Just go right up to the counter, ignoring those already there, and talk to the person behind the counter in a loud clear voice, even if the person is already talking to another customer. Note that some things are common across cultures. If you yell, 'I need a box of condoms!', you'll be stared at no matter where you are.

Israel is known for practical battlefield innovations but, gosh, I would hate to be the one wearing these silly looking camo covers designed to hide helmet outline. Maybe the intention is to shoot while the enemy is busy laughing.

P-P-P-Power Up!

Sprint's plan to rollout WiMax with help from Intel, Motorola, and Samsung is making big waves this week. The news is even bigger in Korea. Watching an event unfold in two languages is confusing though. In Korea, the technology is called WiBro and is being presented as a technology developed mostly in Korea. In the US, it's called WiMax and Korea is only part of the picture. Hmm.

I think Sprint is not rolling out WiMax but Mobile WiMax which is called WiBro in Korea. WiMax and Mobile WiMax differs in that devices will work even while moving at fairly high speed. I don't know what, if any, advantages regular WiMax has over Mobile WiMax though. The exciting thing about Mobile WiMax is that it may eventually get fast enough to download a movie faster than I can drive to the nearest BlockBuster.

A funny bit: Qualcomm is synonymous with vampire in Korea because of all the royalties they made with CDMA. So Mobile WiMax is a sweet revenge of sort.

Cool tool for .NET developers. Regulazy lets you build regular expression for extracting data simply by selecting ranges of text and assigning a name to each. Some hand-tweaking will be necessary for production use but it looks like a cool tool for lazy/practical developers. Too bad it doesn't generate Java regex.

Final version of MyEclipseIDE 5.0 is out. FYI, 5.0 is the version to use with Eclipse 3.2. If you've been using 5.0M2 like me, you can update using Eclipse Update Manager.

Supposedly, MyEclipseIDE 5.0 is fully compatible with WTP. I dislike WTP's funky UI but most Eclipse-based tools with server-side functionality require WTP so this is important.

This morning I read an interesting Korean news article (Korean) about millionaires in china. According to the article, 91% of those with $10 millions or more in asset are close relatives of high government officials. Shocking, I thought. I couldn't find the chinese government report mentioned in the article though.

Looks like the blogosphere is rediscovering the security risk of subscribing to blog feeds which I last blogged about in Comment on Microsoft Embracing RSS. The risk is inherent and not limited to blog feeds but to all forms of syndication, including OPML. Simplicity of the carrier formats and wildfire-like nature of social technologies are the two primary risk amplifiers.

Starry eyed, we are drawn to bonfires like mash-up and AJAX, enchanted by the moment and forgetful of the dreary dawn. Too poetic? Then here is a controversial soundbite for entertainment:

AJAX and mash-up are like bath house orgies and RSS and OPML are like intravenous drug addictions.

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p dir=”ltr”>It's not completely right nor completely wrong. Use as directed: as food for thought and not for furthering your arguments.

While reading a korean novel, I've learned of seoup-chup (seoup = get?, chup = resident mistress), a practice that existed during the Chosun era for divorced women. Back then, men could throw his wife out (a practice called sobak) when she is guilty of any of the seven sins that could be committed by a wife (i.e. not producing a son). As far as I know, wives can't throw their husbands out so it was a one-side practice.

After getting thrown out, a women could a) return to her parents in shame, b) commit suicide, or c) stand near a sunghwang-dang (a kind of local shinto-like shrine I think) at early dawn and follow the first man she sees (fate?). Seoup-chup is certainly an odd practice from modern perspective but very interesting I thought.

I don't know if the man had the right to refuse but I imagine it would be difficult to refuse if the woman threatened to commit suicide. Upper class women back then carried a little silver knife called eonjang-do for that purpose. My grandmother had one too but the blade had rusted away when I saw it.

Hmm. GOOG chart is not looking too healthy and support at 350 don't look that solid either. When it goes, YHOO will be caught in the downdraft and it's support at 25 might not hold this time. I hope I am wrong for the sake of recent YHOO buyers.

I must…resist…my old chart reading habits.