I'll be in Seattle from October 3rd to October 5th.  I don't have any plans for the evenings yet but I am sure something will come up.  Maybe I'll attend a bloggers dinner.  I'll be staying at the Monaco Hotel downtown so I might just stroll down to the waterfront to stuff myself with seafood.

Last time I was there, I had a bucket of mixed sea food.  When they brought the food out, they just slapped down some newspapers on the table and emptied the bucket on top of it.  There weren't any utensils either.  Just a pile of sea food and some ale to wash down with.  Yum.  I hope I can find the place again 'cuz, while others might enjoy talking like a pirate for a day, I prefer eating like one.

Being an entrepreneur means I have a fetish for domain names.  I just got the openbookshelf.com and the gang.  What is the chance of me actually using it?  Near zero.  Sometimes I feel like a dumb squirrel.  Thankfully, there are dumber squirrels.

I wrote back in February:

I predict that Firefox browser marketshare will be near 20% by end of year 2004.  It's that good and getting better.

And browser marketshare numbers so far:

2004	IE 6	IE 5	O 7	Moz	NN 3	NN 4	NN 7
September	68.3%	6.5%	2.5%	17.7%	0.2%	0.2%	1.3%
August	70.3%	7.0%	2.3%	15.5%	0.3%	0.3%	1.4%
July	71.0%	7.7%	2.3%	13.8%	0.3%	0.3%	1.4%
June	72.4%	8.3%	2.3%	11.8%	0.3%	0.3%	1.4%
May	72.6%	9.2%	2.2%	11.0%	0.3%	0.3%	1.4%
April	72.4%	10.1%	2.1%	10.3%	0.3%	0.3%	1.4%
March	72.1%	10.7%	2.1%	9.6%	0.4%	0.4%	1.4%
February	71.5%	11.5%	2.2%	9.0%	0.4%	0.4%	1.5%
January	71.3%	12.8%	2.1%	8.2%	0.4%	0.5%	1.5%

Actual marketshare of Firefox is less than the 17.7% because this statistic does not distinguish between Mozilla and Firefox.  My guestimate for actual Firefox marketshare is 12~14%.

So it looks like my prediction is still on track.

Update:

Apparently News.com is seeing similar numbers:

Among CNET News.com readers, site visitors with the Firefox and Mozilla browsers jumped to 18 percent for the first two weeks of September, up from 8 percent in January.

After reading Wired's Instant Messaging Goes Graphical article this morning, I came up ChatToon.

ChatToon is a graphical game for IM, SMS, IRC, and MUD users on platforms with graphics capability.  The idea is to either cooperatively or competitively fill in cartoon dialogue bubbles of a typical morning cartoon provided by the chat hosting service or uploaded/pulled by one of the users.

Cartoonists can make their one to four cell cartoons available and are compensated with per-usage fee and publishing fee.  Publishing fee is charged when people want to share the end product of their ChatToon game with friends and family or post it to their blog.  If it's good enough to be distributed widely, then the cartoonist and the ChatTooners share the generated royalty.

I am not going to pursue ChatToon because I am busy with other ideas and because ChatToon has many sticky issues which I don't have time nor interest to resolve.  Still, I thought the idea was interesting enough to post about.

We can't see the backside of the Moon, only photos.  Likewise, we never see the backside of GUI objects.  Not only do we not see it, we don't expect it to be there like we do with the Moon.

As a kid, I had a moment of enlightenment of sort when I saw my father open up a gadget (I forget what) with a screwdriver.  From that point on, I had the urge to open things up to see what's inside.  Usually screws that hold gadgets together were in the back or on the side.  So the bit of knowledge I added to my model of the world then was that the front of a gadget was for controls and the back was for opening it up.

That bit of knowledge didn't apply to GUI objects.  To open up a gadget onscreen, you have to browse the menus to find the settings or preference command because there is no backside to GUI objects.

Backside is a lost word in the language of GUI design.

Now we can google, but we still can't flip or turn.

These are just MUD/IRC/IM related scraps of thought trails accumulated over the past couple of weeks.  Actually, most of them are resurfaced scraps from long past but I turned them over like one would a flipjack so I thought I should park them on my blog so I can look it up next time they resurface.

• IRC channels as rooms in a MUD – an IRC channel is, in essence, a bunch of people talking in a room.  Everyone can hear and see each other (unless they are whispering or lurking invisibly).  It's just like being at a same location in a MUD.
• IM session inside a MUD – IM is like talking inside a private room in a MUD.  Overlaying the room metaphor gives persistence to sessions and storage for shared objects.
• Wiki page as a room, an object, or a thread of conversation inside a MUD.
• Topic or thread of conversation as an object – threads of conversations are constantly created and updated and 'leads' to the threads can be found by where, when, who, and what.  So if you enter a room where a conversation took place there some time ago, you can find it and, if you want, pocket it to keep track.  In a sense, you are subscribing to a feed.
• Googling conversations in IRC and MUD – this is self evident so I won't explain.  A hack implementation can just generate a web page per thread of conversation and let Google index them.
• NPC as IRC bots – enough said other than that they should be easily programmable, customizable, and deployable.
  • Fido, open the report.
  • Fido> Which report?  I have…
• MUD objects with MIME types and custom renderers – images are displayed, audio and movies are played, spreadsheet is displayed using Excel, etc.  Thumbnails of these objects are displayed when 'see' command is invoked.

A while back, I noticed that a fresh 'best web development language' war broke out, this time between Java and PHP.  I tuned out when it got ugly but noted that the war got started when a Friendster engineer posted about the Friendster's switch from JSP to PHP along with some throwaway comments that many Java geeks interpreted as insults.

I didn't know that the engineer was Joyce Park (hey, a fellow Korean-American blogger) and that she got fired recently for blogging until I read the Red Herring article (aren't they supposed to be dead?).

The problem here is that most bloggers just don't realize that they have a powerful tool in their hands that could cause serious damages whether intentional or not.  If Joyce said what she posted to engineers she met in person, all there would be a heated discussion.  But posting the same on her blog created a big wave of controversy among geeks with Friendster as the center piece.

Although everything she wrote was indeed public information and the change in file name extension (.jsp to .php) made it clear to any geek that Friendster switched from JSP to PHP, Friendster could have paved over inquiries about the switchover with silence just as Google did with Orkut's use of ASP.NET.  But Joyce pushed Friendster into the middle of PHP vs. Java battlefield when she wrote in a post titled Friendster goes PHP:

… we can now stop being a byword for unacceptably poky site performance…

What I don't understand is how she failed to see the consequences of her post.  The flamebait title and comment along with her being an employee of Friendster made it a perfect slashdot fodder.  Not only has she not seen it then, she doesn't see it  even now.

I am not saying Friendster was right to fire Joyce.  I think they overreacted and opened a supersize can of whupass on their own face.  But I think it's more important for corporate bloggers like Joyce to learn how to protect their employers from their blogging activities.  Pointing angry fingers at Friendster points in the wrong direction IMHO.  We need more learning and less lashing out.

Longhorn will bring 3D to the desktop.  This means that windows will be hierarchical 3D objects that can be, for example, swivelled aside to make room on the desktop without hiding the window's content.  Window contents are 3D so buttons and controls are swivelled when the container window is swivelled.

I am not yet convinced that Longhorn's 3D window manager has much non-geeky values.  In the end, we are still simulating a deskbound world and therefore the GUI is constrained and contorted by the desktop metaphor.  Because our world cannot be translated into a language that consists purely of desktop lingos like documents, folders, pens, and magnifying glass, we invented windows.

While I could go on and on about the limitations of the window metaphor, I am running short on time so I'll just get to my point, which is:

Longhorn desktop itself should swivel down to reveal a 3D world within which we can work 'directly' with persistent objects instead of limiting ourselves to windows.

Instead of squeezing real world size objects into spacially meaningless hierarchy of folders, lets place them in rooms, buildings, and places to which we can navigate in.

As an engineer, I realize fully that this sort of change is equivalent to a mindless auto executive telling the engineers to lower the dashboard by 5 inches.  But this subtle change will finally let computer users leverage their real world knowledge and experiences when working with computers.

A nice quotes on Zen via Marc,

"before studying Zen – man is man and mountains are mountains – yet things are confused."

"while studying Zen – man is no longer man and mountains are no longer mountains."

"after studying Zen – man is man and mountains are moutains – yet things are no longer confused."

My take on Zen is even more down to earth.  To me, Zen is just a tool to remove mental wedgies.  Just as brushing your teeth regularly keeps your teeth healthy and smelling fresh, practicing zazen regularly removes mental debris stuck in your mind before they could infest and grow into something more menacing.

Zen doesn't deliver truth or meaning of life, just a more comfortable perspective, a product created out of necessity by those who suffered enough to shave their heads over thousands of years ago.  It won't help you if you are crazy though just as you can't brush your teeth if you can't hold a toothbrush.  That's what shrinks are for.  It will help you if your mind is tangled into a ball of mess by your own doing.

Thank goodness Zen masters don't charge like doctors do.