Category: General

Writing Down Passwords

While I agree with Jesper Johansson's view that discouraging people from writng down passwords just encourages them to reuse passwords across systems, I don't think passwords should be written down. Instead, they should be printed. Print not just one password but tens of them scattered across a page. All but one will trigger an alarm and lock all the doors nearby automatically.

3D stereograms (aka Magic Eye) could be a fun part of the solution too so people will have cross their eyes to signin. LOL.

Persona Category Conversation Post


Persona Category
Fumes from my Role-Bloggers post made me think of personas as blog post categories. With categories, each post belonging to zero or more categories. With personas, each post is more of a topic on which one or more personas comments on.

Conversation Post

Fumes from the paragraph above made me think of conversations as blog posts. Starting with the persona as category idea, replace personas with people and allow iterations to get conversation captured as a post. Too many ways leads to this idea. Each Gillmor Gang podcast is, in essence, a conversation post. Each courtroom hearing is a conversation post.

In short, I took the boat to Timbuktu to get to New York. Hey, it's more fun this way! Besides, there are still too many No Left Turn signs in my head.

Floating

Matt's experiments with floating is making me want to float. I wonder if there a floatroom near my house. There is probably a few in San Francisco but driving to the City to relax makes no sense and driving back after a float could be hazardous. Maybe I'll just put on some earplugs and float in our neighborhood pool. It will take a lot of salt to saturate the pool that size though.

Wrong Atom

To me, the intricate pile of MUSTs and SHOULDs piling up in Atom format spec is a display of short-sighted technocrat bullshit.

For example, what is the point of requiring all entries to have a unique identifier when feed clients have no incentives to reject feeds that violate that requirement? Filtering of duplicate entries from multiple sources is a quality of service problem that is best dealt with in a separate opt-in specification. Clients and servers that support the opt-in spec will be more popular if resulting differences in user experience and distribution are significant enough. If not, there was no need for it anyway.

Ignored mandates are much worse than ignored opt-ins because mandates leave no room for failures, competitions, nor changing needs. Opt-in approach can also embrace RSS so that clients can check for the extension elements regardless of what the container feed format is.

Will the Atom WG see the light? I doubt it because they are thinking more about their product than the market.

Chopstick Science

Apparently, chopstick skills contributed to the recent stunning advances in stem cell research.

I grew up using steel chopsticks (actually, I used silver chopsticks at home and still do) in Korea so I guess my hand is more dexterous than your average wood chopstick users. For example, I can easily pick up individual strand of hair or a spec of dust with my micro2005 chopstick.

My wife and son, however, can't so the chopstick gene might be in a decline. I know that thick beards are rarely seen in Korea and it's also disappearing in my family (notice the hairless cheeks and the missing spots in my jawline?). Thankfully, at least the thick eyebrow is declining more slowly although I can't hold a pen on top of my eyebrowse like my father can. I am still hoping my son might be able to when he grows up.

China also has a chopstick story related to stem cell research although it stems (sorry) from lack of dexterity. I am impressed, however, by the display of kung-fu power necessary to penetrate human skull with wooden chopstick.

Role-Bloggers

A rather alarming new trend in the blogosphere is role-blogging: blogging in characters other than yourself.

If you find vampires fascinating, you can start a blog as a vampire, posting stories a real vampire might post. Others who are into vampires subscribe to your feed and post comment as fellow vampires. Eventually a community of pretend-vampires emerges.

Hard to believe? Recently, a Korean teenage girl was arrested for stabbing a man because she was afraid the man might report her and her friends to the police after he saw them doing something suspicious with a syringe. She and her friends, whom she met through her vampire blog, were tasting each other's blood drawn with the syringe.

I have no idea why she thought stabbing the man might encourage him not to report her, but I think using a blog as a way to experience another life is something to take notice. It's like using the Net as your closet.

iChatBot

Here is an interesting hardware project I don't have time to do: iChatBot.

The idea is to take one of several vacuum robots in the market and strap on top of it a Mac Mini, a LCD monitor, a camera, and a microphone. Reprogram the vacuum to take command from the Mac Mini. Likewise, Mac Mini is configured to run iChat exclusively. Once built, let it loose in an office. An office can dedicate an iChatBot to each remote worker (remote senior staff) or maintain a pool for a group.

When a remote worker launches a special version of iChat, he will see what the iChatBot's camera sees. Likewise, his face is displayed on the LCD. With mouse and keyboard, iChatBot can roam around the office and participate in meetings or converse with anyone that happens to cross the bot's path. iChatBots equiped with Nurf ball launcher can, of course, do far more…

Hmm. The idea needs a catchy name. Tele-presence? Where have I heard that before? iRisma? iThere?

Classroom Clickers

Classroom Clicker is a great idea that will change classroom education forever, particularly in countries like Korea and Japan where classrooms are as interactive as TV is, meaning not at all. Like TV remotes, these clickers will let students change the channel.

The orange clicker is made by Hyper Interactive Teaching Technology from Arkansas. Dialpad-like clicker in the middle is made by GTCO CalComp of Maryland. Simplest looking blue clicker is made by eInstruction Corp. of Texas.

Conference-jacking

A cool suggestion was made in comments to Dave's rant against IDG's Syndicate conference organizers' unreasonable demands: conference-jacking!

The way I interpret it, the idea is to use conferences as a tag of sort to hang podcasts off of, effectively creating alternative conference tracks anyone can contribute or listen to for free from anywhere anytime.

I've felt that most of the available podcasts were too radio show like, meaning they are pumped out everyday on whatever topic each podcaster is interested in. So topics are scattered and so are the podcasts.

Conference-jacking brings the podcasters together to a single location (a wiki + an OPML feed would work) to talk about a small focused set of topics that coincides with a meatspace event that someone else organized and spent money to publicize.

Radical!

Update:

I've registered alterence.* domain. Looks like Tyler Karaszewski couldn't resist either. He registered openconferences.org.