Category: General

Addicted to High DPI

While desktop LCD monitors are excellent for playing movies and games, I am not too happy with them for regular uses.

First, they are just too bright.  Most applications I work with consist of mostly white background and, instead of typing on paper-like ambient white background, I feel like I am typing on the surface of florecent lamp.   because LCD monitors radiate white background regularly which usually involves a lot of white background.  To get around the problem, I reduced brightness all the way down but it was not enough.  So I changed the window background color to a light shade of gray and I can now stare at the monitor without seeing ghosts everytime I look away.

Second, pixel density is too low for me.  I got used to my laptop's 15-inch 1600×1480 LCD monitor which supported 130 DPI.  ClearType simply rocks at 130 DPI!  Maximum resolution of my desktop's 17-inch LCD monitor is 1280×1024 and 96 DPI is the highest I can use it at.  At 96 DPI, fonts are ugly even with ClearType on.  Larger LCD monitors don't improve the DPI much either.

Whew.  I feel much better after this rant.  Hopefully, LCD manufacturers will make LCD monitors for business use that is less blinding and more dense.  Until then, I'll just have to suffer.

Digital Typhoon Hits Korea

South Korea is undergoing amazing changes brought on by endless waves of new technologies and trends.  This New Zealand News article provides a good glimpse of what is going on in Korea:

The country has become a hot-bed of free music downloading as fans take advantage of MP3 file-sharing services, including Soribada, South Korea's version of Napster.

In a country of 48 million people, Soribada ("sea of sound") has drawn more than six million users since it launched in 2000.
…Since the launch of these sites, domestic CD sales have nose-dived nearly 50 per cent.
…There were 8000 CD stores in South Korea five years ago, but now we have only 400 left.
…Although the advent of free MP3 files has also devastated music publishers and other retailers, the future of music retailers looks particularly bleak since they also face cut-throat competition from online shopping.
…Sales of music for cellphones alone have outpaced traditional CD sales since 2002.
…"It seems like brick-and-wood music stores like us are nearly doomed, unless the Government comes up with some financial measures to help us stay alive. It may soon be the end of an era for us."

Unfortunately, I don't see a workable solution emerging yet.  If the Lawrence Lessig's so called Free Culture folks have some ideas, I would like to hear them.  Note that people running these businesses in Korea are not idealists nor technologists but people buried neck deep in the new reality trying to stay afloat.

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p dir=”ltr”>Some are adapting fairly well to these changes though.  For example, book publishers hit hard by rampant booksharing online are publishing books written by amateur online serial writers.  As I mentioned before, decent amateur writers receive publishing offers even before their serial reach the halfway point.  This is because the serial itself is the primary marketing vehicle for these types of books.

Jonah

I had an amusing thought today.  I thought, if America was a ship, shipmates would look upon Bush as a Jonah.  While he may explain away every accusations leveled at him, even he would have to agree that he presided over a lot of bad luck.

Unreasonable?  Yes.  Unfair?  Absolutely.  But what would you do if your ship is half wrecked, stuck in the middle of the ocean without a trace of wind nor passing ships, and running out of food?  Superstitious sailors would toss the Jonah overboard and keep their fingers acrossed.

I have met people who had extraordinary strings of bad luck.  Everything that could go wrong would go wrong.  Car accidents, illness, failing business, ruined reputations and relationships.  Koreans believe bad lucks are brought upon by bad karma.  If you or your ancestors did bad things, bad luck will visit you and your offsprings.

One way to ward off bad luck and ensuring good luck is to find good gravesites for your ancestors and good locations for your home or business.  If your family or business has been suffering a string of bad lucks, bad feng-shui (poong-soo in Korean) is usually suspect.  If it's not feng-shui, then it must be the spirits so a moo-dang (voodoo doctor or channeler of sort) is called to to shoo the bad spirits away.

I doubt many people in Korea still believes this stuff, but the prevailing attitudes are 'what else can we do' and 'why take unnecessary chances?'

Maybe Bush should call in a moo-dang into the White House to see what pissed our founding fathers off.  Heh.

Feeds out of service

FYI, my RSS feeds are out of service temporarily.

It's related to compression and HTTP headers.  For some reason, gzipped feed content is showing up as garbage for some people.  On my desktop, IE can read the feed just fine but not on my laptop.  Turning off compression on the server-side (by massanging metabase.xml) doesn't quite work either because the compressor is slipping in somehow after a while.

Update:

Feeds now seem to be working although IE on my laptop still thinks the feeds are bad.  I think that IE's configuration is screwed up somehow.  Unfortunately, I don't want to reinstall it because that will cause too many annoyances.  Oh, well.

Another problem is that sometimes gzip encoded response is received although gzip is not in the Accept-Encoding.  I have yet to figure out if this is because a proxy is serving up cached copy without honoring Accept-Encoding header or simply IIS behaving erroneously.

Ponzi and Maryam: My New Drinking Buddies

After spending an entire day in geek mode, I wasn't in the mood for more at one of two dinners Microsoft hosted.  Thankfully, Ponzi and Maryam were there to rescued me.  As Ponzi wrote, we had wacky conversations while enjoying wine and cigar.  They are lovely gals with hearts of living gold.  Chris and Robert are lucky to have them as soulmates.

Ali iPod and the Million Thieves

Now that the excitement over Steve Balmer's iPod comment has died down some, I am curious about what people are filling their iPod and iPod-like devices with since iPod can store 10,000 songs.

Are all the iPod users filling up their iPods with purchased songs or songs from their CD collections?  How many of us have 10,000 song music collection?  How long does it take to rip that many songs?

Does 'fair use' allow a user to fill his or her iPod with songs bought by friends and family since all those songs can be borrowed?  What is the reasonable degree of separation for 'fair use'?

Inconvenience of sharing often drives people to buy their own copy but that inconvenience doesn't exist for virtual goods.  Does the law allow simultaneous use of copyrighted goods?

Update:

I just realized that increasing popularity of podcasting means iPods will have two very different types of content: transient and permanent.  As to what implications this might have aside from UI related issues, I have no clue yet.

The Fourth Leg

So I started using a cellphone again.  I lasted two years without one and had only minor inconveniences.  But when my wife shoved one at me and said Use-It-Or-Else (aka Please), I dropped it into my pocket and went for a walk.  Not Bad.

One of the problems I had with cellphones was that having one in my pocket felt like I had an extra off-center penis with permanent hard-on.  Cellphones have gotten small enough during my sabbatical that it now feels like one after a cold shower.  So I told my wife I'll give it a try.  iPod?  Oy.  It's a long road to there from here.  Let's do it one leg at a time.

Beating and Hanging in Public

This sort of thing occurs regularly on the blogosphere and get worse in numbers and scope as blogosphere expands.  Just as Joi believes that blogosphere is an ideal environment for fostering Emergent Democracy, I believe that blogosphere is an ideal environment for Emergent Chaos.  Echo chamber doesn't begin to describe the terror awaiting us in the future.

In a world where loudness and number matter more than reason, a world where views of distant forests are hidden by nearby dancing trees, growth does not bring wider diversity and deeper understanding but wider polarity and deeper misunderstanding.  The really sad part is that I am one of the savages.

Google Addict

I have grown to dislike Google, the company.  When I am in an unreasonable state of mind, I would even use the word 'hate'.  And I prefer to place the blame on Google, the company, because it's more comfortable there.  While they are great at 'unintended' PR, they have managed to foster hostility against them among geeks over the last couple of years just as Microsoft has done so over the last couple of decades.

Here is a nice takeaway soundbite:

I hate Google, but I am addicted to it.

Can the MSN Search team break my Google addiction?  Not if they keep looking at Google as a service instead of a highly addictive drug.  Google is worse than heroin because it's free and always available.  It's so bad that it's part of my daily language and I often find myself pushing it to family and friends.

You can't beat it unless you offer more powerful kicks.  The mindset that thinks in terms of features and algorithms is incapable of delivering those kicks.  Think designer drugs.  Think habits and addictions.

Read my disclaimer.

Back in the Bay

I got back from Seattle an hour ago.  I'll post about the trip and what I think about MSN Search when my body's gas tank is filled some.

I would like to thank the MSN Event Team though (Britta, Jim, Brenda, etc.).  Britta, in particulary, babysat all of us all the time.  And a big thanks to Sean Carver for throwing the event and making bloggers a significant part of it.  We are a noisy lot and tend to introduce uninvited chaos into any event we attend.  Thanks for putting up with us, Sean.  Although we didn't give what the MSN Search team wanted to hear, I think we gave them what they needed to hear.