Wow! ArtRage 1.0 is finally out. It's a fantastic painting program available for free from Ambient Design. Having a graphics tablet helps, but you can draw some good paintings even without one. I like it's simple UI also. Very cool. Thanks to Scoble for mentioning it.
Here is a painting of mine:
Searcher
While I was having dinner, Korean Assembly controlled by the corrupted opposition parties impeached President Roh. This CNN article depicts the cause of his impeachment as if he has done something wrong. He hasn't. Corruption scandal mentioned in the article pales in comparison to the corruption scandals of the opposition parties.
By how much? At one point, President Roh said he would resign if the total amount of illegal political funds he used in the last President Election was more than 1/10 of the opposition party's. Controversial figure released last week was a little over 1/7th. Yes, that is still a lot, but less is less and far better direction than more.
Supposed violation of the election law also mentioned in the article is no more than brief informal comment during a TV interview in which he mentioned that he would do everything allowed by law to help the budding pro-government party which has only a handful of seats in the Assembly. He wasn't advocating anything illegal. His plan to join the pro-government party was known by all before so which party he supported was never in doubt. So this impeachment amounts to a coup de'tat by corrupt politicians.
President Roh's executive power is now suspended until the Korean Supreme Court decides whether the Assembly vote was legal or not. Emotion is rising high in Korea at this moment. In the last 48 hours, a former President of Dawoo jumped into Han river because President Roh implicated him in a bribery attempt and a citizen put himself on fire to protest the impeachment vote.
I wouldn't be surprised if million of Koreans showed up in front of the Assembly tommorrow calling for the blood of those voted to impeach the President. Even more maddening is that most of those assemblymen were expected to be voted out of their seats within a few weeks. My own blood is boiling at the moment. I am tempted to fly over there and unleash my own cans of whupass on the crazy politicians.
Update 1:
All of the Korean news sites including OhmyNews and Korean Yahoo News are swamped at the moment. Give it a few hours.
Update 2:
All assemblymen who are members of the pro-government party, Uri-dang, resigned to protest the impeachment vote. President Roh continued his tour of a factory despite hearing of his impeachment. He said he expects the Supreme Court to put things right. When someone asked him how he could be smiling at a time like this, he said he can smile because he has a dream of a better Korea. He also said that pain and suffering is necessary for rebirth.
Update 3:
A man drove through a gate leading to the Assembly building and, when stopped by security, set the car on fire. Another man tried to set himself on fire on the roof of a police station in Choongbook, a state south of Seoul. Koreans are, if anything, very passionate people. I know I wouldn't be able to get any sleep tonight because I am too angry. While I am not a citizen of Korea anymore, I still consider myself a Korean and all this makes me as mad as I was on 9/11.
Update 4:
Thanks to Dave for the link. Here are some pictures of young Koreans protesting the impeachment in a candle march.
Update 5:
Some pictures from OhmyNews:
The guy in the back center is one of the two leaders who
orchestrated the impeachment. His nick name is Choi-tler as in Hitler.
They forcefully removed all the pro-Roh assemblymen
and formed a wall to keep them out while voting was taking place.
Here is the Speaker of the House declaring successful passage of
the impeachment vote. A 'Shoe of Justice' is what he got in return.
Dorks with their arms up are all yelling 'It's My Size!'
A citizen got so mad he attempted to drive into
the Assembly building. Failing that, he torched his car.
Update 6:
Here is an OhmyNews article in English and another picture from OhmyNews.
The People's Candle March
Update 7:
Almost 75 percent of S. Koreans Oppose Roh's Impeachment - Yonhap News
7 Out of 10 Oppose Impeachment - Korea Times
In addition, polls taken by three major TV networks in Korea showed similar results. Looks like Uri Party will win the lionshare of the National Assemly seats in the upcoming election. I had no idea the opposition parties could be this stupid.
Update 8:
People are gathering for massive candle vigils in Seoul (English version) . Below is picture from Jong-ro district at the heart of Old Seoul on the evening of March 13th. Such events became popular recently to give visible mass to the voice of the people. Pretty effective, I think because eventually the choice comes down to surrendering or doing stupid things that could turn the crowd violent.
Candle vigils are planned to be held every night
until at least the election on April 15th.
It's also a family event. Cool.
Pictures from other Korean cities:
Photos of foreigners and canines protesting as well.
Quality of video codecs is not something I dwell much time on but I throughly enjoyed ExtremeTech's excellent comparison of video codecs. They compared the quality and performance of four codecs: DivX5, WMV9, Quicktime, and MPEG-4. DivX5 and WMV9 came out on top although I thought WMV9 was clearly superior to DivX5 except in encoding speed. Two surprises for me. I thought Quicktime was better than the comparison showed and didn't know MPEG-4 sucked that badly. Phew!
IIS 6.0's auto-compression feature is driving me nuts. For some reason, my RSS files are being served compressed even when client didn't ask for it via HTTP Content-Encoding header. I even got Port80's ZipEnable to disable compression just for RSS files but that didn't work consistently so I just disabled compression for all static contents. Maybe Port80 should have named their product ZipDisable.
Update:
Eeek. Even disabling compression for everything via ZipEnable doesn't work. Looks like it's time to explore the IIS 6.0 registry settings.
One often overlooked area of security industry is user participation, the role users play in a security system. Geeks are so obsessed with technology that there is a valuable resource already assigned to each account: the user. Users are not only free but also highly motivated. After all, it's their account that they are watching over.
The problem is that today's security systems do not provide enough tools and information to the users.
When users log into a system, they usually receive almost no feedback beyond seeing the protected resource. With web pages, all they get is a lock at the bottom of the browser and a sign-out button. All that let's the users know is where they are and where the exit is. It doesn't tell them whether someone broke into their account last night. They wouldn't even know if an intruder is standing right next to them. WTF.
Technologies that help users play a bigger role in security is an area that is still wide open IMHO. There are already some patent activities in area, including one I recently filed for a client, but that is just a drop in a bucket. For example, blogging technology like trackback can be applied to this area by helping users become more aware of activities happening around them.
Effectiveness of most security technologies depend heavily on the effectiveness of the user interface. Unfortunately, there just aren't many engineer with deep experiences in both areas. If you are a security expert, you should be thinking as much about the users as the hackers. Helping them become more aware of what is going on and making it easy for them to take actions will lead to more secure systems.
Update:
A reader asked me to explain what my patent is about because he didn't want to wade through all the exasperating mixture of geektalk and legalese. Quite understandable. I don't like reading or writing patents myself so some other poor guy had to write it based on a few hours of my handwaving.
Imagine yourself living in a log cabin somewhere high up in the mountains where it snows all the time. You wake up in the morning and take a walk around the cabin. If nothing came by while you were sleeping, you will just see your footprints in the snow. If something did, you will notice right away.
The patent is about visual methods (sorry) to do the same for users signing into secure system either during or after signing in or at the point of transaction. You can even print it out on credit card invoice so I can be assured that no one but I used that particular credit card in the past week. It is similar to the 'last time you logged in' message you get when you log into a Unix system except the visuals are designed to present higher density of information effectively like the way Edward Tafte's Sparklines does.
Everyone has their own understanding of what social software is. Here is mine:
so·cial soft·ware:
Software that leverage, facilitate, or amplify social phenomena.
Sense of humor is alive and well in Ireland.
Lacking an event or notice panel in my blog, here is a manual reminder of the Corporate Blogger's Dinner which will be held on March 24th at Venture Frogs in San Francisco.
Impact of powerful brands on our minds is stronger than most people realize because it hits us below the belt, at the subconscious level. It swoops under your flailing arms of reason and strikes hard, leaving long lasting bruises of wanting and trusting. Those bruises are weak spots hackers will attack to knock you down.
Enough with words. Click on some of the links below to experience the impact of powerful brand images. They are links to phishing parody pages. To experience the impact fully, try to observe the effect of the brand image on each page. Note that you already know that these pages are fake cockeyed pages.
I think protecting brand images from being abused at the browser level make sense even if strapping DRM technologies into IE or Safari might seem distasteful to some of us.
I like much of ongoing Microsft's .NET-based push, but I think they are going too far with respect to Microsoft SQL Server. For example, BizTalk Server 2004 requires it. Across the board, arrows points to Microsoft SQL Server as if it was Rome and I see it just getting worse with Yukon and it's special brand of XML features. Let up, I say.
Don Park's Weekly Habit 