I haven't been using LinkedIn much but a recent job inquiry spam, received through their newly added job search service, made me visit out of curiosity (attraction to virtual dusty attics?). While I was there, I was reminded of the two link to strangers invitations from whom I foolishly accepted when I first started using LinkedIn.

The problem is that I found no links or buttons at LinkedIn that allowed me to disconnect a connection. Can someone point out where or how I can do this? Where is the scissor in social networking?

To stem the tide of terrorism, key terrorist origin and destination countries need to pass legislations that severely penalize families of terrorists. This will force parents of potential terrorists to take more interest in knowing what their children are up to and curb them away from their destructive path. Also this will raise the ante for suicide bombers so they'll have to put more than just their worthless lives on line.

Also, we need to put up fake Al-Qaeda recruiting websites. While the same can be done by closely monitoring the real ones, this approach offers more options. Trapped and turned, they can help us infiltrate the real ones.

These are, no doubt, extreme measures but I fear terrorism will spread like cancer if steps like these are not taken. Even now, pro Al-Queda communities are spreading. Even in Korea, an Al-Queda fan club was recently formed. It was promptly shutdown upon discovery but, by that time, its membership was 100+. While most of them were probably joking when they were carelessly posting about blowing things up, I am pretty sure a handful of them were not. Left alone, there are no limits to what misguided youths can do.

More popular you are as a blogger, more wary you should be of your power to destroy because your readership is, in essence, a potential lynchmob, ready to be loosed on the target of your choice with a single mouse click. If you are an A-List blogger, be very wary.

If you can't trust yourself not to abuse your powers, then try to cultivate a balanced readership. This is hard to do if you spend a lot of time shouting your readers down, call them names, and telling them to leave if they disagree with you. Keeping doing that and you will end up only with readers whose opinions align with yours.

I tend to focus often on the downsides of the socio-technological advances to do my part in adding to the balance. Evolution tends to leave a lot of dead bodies behind, you see.

This is an old popular topic but I thought I should state my opinion. I don't think bloggers are journalists. Journalists who maintain blogs are journalists. Bloggers who act like journalists are not journalists. Bloggers who gets journalists jobs are journalists. Clear enough?

Now that is done, let me state that I don't think any extra 'rights' journalists enjoy above and beyond what us non-journalists have should not exist in the eyes of the law. However, I think they should be allowed to keep what they, as an organized group, can and have forced others to give. We, the bloggers, just need to pull together and do the same.

In other words, we don't deserve anything we can't defend. Journalists have managed, overtime, to define and defend their territory. We can and will do the same over time. Meanwhile, claiming that bloggers are journalists will just cause confusions. We are something else despite the overlap in effects.

London was hit. I can hear the cries but, sitting in my trench staring straight ahead, the sound turns into fog and dissipates without reaching me. I feel nothing, not even ange, except a sense of relief that it was not me who got hit. Idle days before 9/11 are fading memories, replaced with stains on my uniform.

As I have written before, we are all soldiers on the frontline of battle against terrorism, a line made up of billions of people. There is no similar line on the other side, just an expanse of impenetratable darkness. The darkness is born out of pride and despair, a mix that turns lives into explosives. It is almost comical that they have to throw their lives away to make them meaningful, but that's the lure of darkness.

Hundreds on the line got hit today. Much more will die before the dawn comes. I am sorry but today is just another day at the frontline for me. I'll cry for the dead when the dawn comes, but not before.

My Social Fabric (via Wired) is a very interesting social software thesis that could unfortunately, if applied naively, turn friendship into work. The UI is very cool though.

I wonder if this is the PeopleAggregator Marc was attempting to describe? If not, I still don't get it.

This post is a capture of my preliminary thoughts on combining artificial intelligence and automated user feedback to generate new fonts. I've designed some fonts during my Apple II display legible text by taking advantage of monitor defectors and also during my Mac days because I couldn't find a good font to program with. Both times, each font took unbelievable amount of time and result was never completely satisfying.

The system starts with a seed font and a font transformation model (FTM) for the font. FTM is created using a GUI tool to mark features of a family of fonts, much like the way latest 3D modeling tools allow animators to draw skeletons and design meshes to ease model transformation. What FTM really does is defining what aspects of a font family can be changed and how they should be changed. A lot of room for innovations in constraint expression here.

The font creation process is divided into two phases. The first phase is the design phase during which the goals is to create a unique design that meets the design goals. Design goals are qualitative and are specified through policy configuration. The second phase is the finetuning phase during which the font is optimized and customized using font hints.

In each phase, the system applies genetic algorithm to design a generation of font by transforming each part of the font randomly. The result is shown to users to gather feedback. Feedback questionaries are dependent on the type of transformation made so if the width of a font was reduced, then the question during the might be:

• Too thin?
• Too thick?
• Just right?

During the design phase, questions will be more abstract like:

• Too warm
• Too cold
• Too sparse
• Too dense

Another approach is to simply use thumbs up or down.

A variation of this approach can be used for font selection and personalization to help the user select the font they need and then fine tuning it to their need or taste at the point of sales.

Here is a nice enumeration and previews of fonts for programmers (via Roy Osherove and Bradbury Software Forum). My favorite was Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (download) which looks a bit thin and sparse but crisp enough. Anonymous preview looked nice too but ended up looking too thin in ClearType. So I am going to give Bitstream Vera Sans Mono a spin in both VS.NET 2005 and Eclipse.

The font I really want is Consolas which will ship with Longhorn. Rest of Longhorn fonts look great as well. Yummy. Too bad I don't have time to play with Longhorn prelease bits.

It's interesting that farkers and slashdotters behave differently although I suspect there is a large intersection. For example, many farkers commented offsite but slashdotters commented mostly onsite and very little offsite. I think the difference is the superior comment/rating support Slashdot has and uneven comment support on the web which curbs visitors inward.