After Japanese PM visited a cemetery where Japanese war criminals are buried, some 200 Japanese politicians and assemblymen made the same trip. To China and Korea, such visits are equivalent to German PM visiting Hitler's grave. Considering that there are ongoing land and natural resource development disputes without any relief in sight, expect things to heat up considerably and possibly result in some small scale military 'accidents'.

Most of the actions will be between China and Japan though because Korea is currently in midst of an internal feud between freedom of speech and national security.

It began with a Korean college professor posting some inflamatory articles online which praised North Korea and trashed America. Conservatives roared, saying he should be arrested and charged for endangering national security. Liberals want his freedom of speech rights respected. Interesting backgrounds: both the current Korean President and the current secretary of justice used to be human rights lawyers. Current leader of the opposition party is the daughter of General Park Jung Hee, the original military dictator of modern Korea who got assasinated by his own man.

Fun stuff. My opinion is that the professor is not altogether there but it makes no sense to jail a man for being crazy unless he hurts someone. Let him say what he wants and let his thoughts infect others. Time to crush them is when they band together and actually do something violent. Given that past Korean governments frequently used fabricated national security incidents to remain in power, more tolerance is called for, not less.

Dave Sifry writes that splogs consist of only 4.6% of blogosphere. I am not in the business of tracking such numbers so I don't know whether the numbers are right or not. However, my splog experience is definitely not jiving with his numbers.

Ego search, as Dave calls it, is what I most often used to find out who linked to me. Is it ego searching when a company searches for blog posts containing the company, product, or executive names? Anyhow, it's definitely broken since anybody can inject name and keywords into their post, relevant or not.

URL search doesn't help much either since injecting a link to me in a post is just as easy as injecting a name or keyword.

I can't help wondering how Technorati determines whether a blog is fake or not because it takes more than a glance for me to tell whether a blog is fake or not. I can't tell who wrote the posts. Anybody can loot posts from elsewhere as a whole or partially and post it to their own blog. I think link statistics is not conclusive enough either.

What I am trying to say is this: don't throw numbers at me; give me the experience I used to have before all the spam blogs and aggregators started appearing.

I am giving up on blog search engines because their search result quality has dropped drastically in the past couple of months, thanks to blog spammers.

Blog spammers are using backlinking, name droping, ping spamming, comment spamming, post ripping, tag spamming, content obfuscating, and what ever means they can think of to give their contents, ads, some eyeball time. The funny thing is, they are still not being as sleazy as can be because spammer contents and links are still mostly honest. It won't be long before this age of spammer innocence passes.

Until much better solutions are hatched and delivered, I'll just hang up my blog searching hat on the rack. Til then, thanks for all the fish.

Korean press is reporting that flash memory used in Apple's Nano was provided by Samsung at $54 which is supposedly half of normal price. Hmm. I wonder what Samsung got in return if this is true.

Technically, Ning is essentially a listing and linking plus skinning platform, simple yet flexible enough to meet quite a number of simple application needs. Functionality of Ning-based applications are not feature-based but people-based just like real world town markets.

I think Ning is a good thing because it enables users to create and experiment with services they need or ideas they had quickly and cheaply. As to their business plan, I have some doubts but I can also see several paths they can follow to reach the green acres. Execution wise, I think they need to improve on it greatly. Scalability? No big deal IMHO if the capital and the talents are there. Platform business? Not really. I think Ning is more of a crossroad town that could turn into a boom town.

Incumbant Korean government is the most technically savvy and open minded in Korean history so it's not surprising that Blue House (Korean equivalent of the White House) has many bloggers and Blue House website uses RSS 2.0. Nice.

Building your own notebook won't save you any money and likely cost you a bit more but, in theory, you can replace broken parts or upgrade as needed yourself. In practice, I don't think bare notebooks available today allows this. Anyhoo, here are the links I visited:

• Google on DIY Notebook
• Tom's DIY Notebook Guide
• DIY notebook component store

Republicans in the Congress had it coming for a while but the culture of corruption and arrogance is not limited to Republicans. It's just human nature. I wish we could 'fix' the Congress so abuse of power can be curbed directly by the people.

One idea I had was to take away voting power from congressmen and senators and give them to randomly selected citizens who does the voting, representation as jury duty of sort. This is how I see it working:

House of Representatives is disbanded. In return, the Senate is expanded to handle the workflow. Senators propose legislations to be put to vote by randomly selected citizens who listens to presentations by the senators and others via the Net, or if they lack the equipment, at their local cityhall. When they vote on a law, they can also vote on the senators who proposed the law. If the law is not passed and votes against the writers is above a certain threshold, the writers lose their seats in the Senate instantly.

Crazy?

The only reason I bought Acrobat was to convert documents into PDF. I have no use for its other features and I've always felt I was wasting good money for too little.

Just today, I came across PrimoPDF which does what I want and does it for free! I tried it on an invoice to be sent to my client and saw that it worked as advertised without anything fishy like adding advertisement watermarks. It acts like a printer so any printable document can be converted to PDF using this. Recommended.

Update:

Actually I do have one other use for Acrobat which is to test Acrobat plugins I occasionally get dragged into writing like Arcot's SimpleSign which is offered by American Bankers Association (ABA) and Identrus (also probably Wells Fargo) to digitally sign PDF documents. But writing Adobe plugins is like pulling teeth and I would never do it voluntarily so this use doesn't count.