Walking on Asphalt River

Yesterday afternoon, I stood in my driveway and looked at the black asphalt road passing by my house.  I asked myself what if the asphalt was liquid and the road was a river.  What a river it is, flowing everywhere people live.  Six degrees of separation pale in comparison.

I imagined wading into the river up to my neck which awarded me with a smile.  Not a bad return for playing with imagination a little.  After spending a few more minutes picturing myself swimming in the road, I moved on to what I set out to do.  I walked onto the asphalt road.  Ahhh, there!  A flicker of amazement visits me.  I am walking on water!  With that, I walked safely back to my driveway with an even bigger smile.

There are things that amaze us, but amazement itself is entirely our own making.  What saddens me is how fast amazement fades into mundane.  Things, places, people, understanding — nothing escapes, all fading like photos left out in sunlight — flowers, mountains, Ferrari, Walkman, campfire, my son's little toes, all becomes mundane eventually.

So I am left with cheap thrills like the one I pulled yesterday.  I am still amazed with how stupid human mind is, but I am sure that will fade too.

I won't be able to blog for the next two days.  Find your own supply of amazements meanwhile.

Next-App Button for Cellphones and PDAs

I had a couple of hours free last night, so started browsing through J2ME and Nokia docs to find what I needed to know to implement the Cellphone Rescue Button (in hindsight, I should have called it Fake Ring Button).  Guess what?  I can't implement it with J2ME.

Fake Ring Button is a very simple program.  It just waits for a specific button press and plays the ring tone after some preset delay.  Only tricky requirement is that it needs to be active all the time.  Unfortunately there is nothing in the J2ME docs that allows me to do this.

After thinking about the problem, I concluded that there is no need to change J2ME at all.  All I really need is a Next-App button on J2ME phones so that users don't have to bring up the list of midlets, scroll down to the one they want to use, and activate it to use the midlet.  With it, user's hand can memorize how many clicks is needed to run the Fake Ring midlet.

Next-App button would be useful on PDAs as well.  Two clicks to open my address book, scroll down to Mrs. Wong, and three clicks to make an appointment with her.  Bingo.

Next-App button is, IMHO, more effective than 'function' buttons with useless icons that take up more space and cost more money.  Instead of bring up your cellphone or PDAs and fiddle to get to the application you want to use, your thumb will click to your application as your hand is moving up.

Hmm.  Maybe the Next-App button can be the Power button…

Are there cellphones or PDAs that do this already?

Update #1: See the Appy post.

#33 on Blogdex?

According to Blogdex, my blog is ranked #33 on the list of "most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community".  Huh?  I know I have many readers and my posts get linked widely even crossing language boundaries, but #33 seems rather high up.

Update #1: I am now #79 after being #33 for over a month.  If the ranking is purely based on how widely memes spread, I think this is about right.  While amount of traffic I get is not among top 100, I do tend to post original and often viral memes.

Odd Nods

When I wake up each day is a special moment for me.  As consciousness seeps back into my brain like someone returning home from a daily vacation, I often find odd pieces of thoughts.

I am neither gay nor religious, but their issues are interesting to me because they are so complex.  I must have peeled away much of the issues in my sleep this morning because I was woke up with this seemingly clear and amusing understanding of what religious people are basically saying:

Gays are misusing the product designed by God.

Does the customer have the right to misuse, abuse, or even destroy products?  Answer is yes for me.  I don't care if Steve Jobs hand-assembled an iMac just for me.  If I own it, I can do whatever with it and damn the warranty.  This raises the following question:

Am I bought or leased?

If I am just leasing, I can't misuse the product.  Religious people seems to be saying that we are all leased from God.  As for me, I don't care because the supposed owner hasn't pounded on my door asking for rent yet.

Anyway, I enjoyed thinking about these things this morning, enough to wake up with a smile.

Secure XSLT

If you thought you could just throw in an off-the-shelf XSLT engine into your software to enhance your output capabilites, you need a security wake up call.  XML has its own set of potential security issues that must not be overlooked and XSLT is no exception.

Prajakta Joshi shows how to perform XSL transformations securely in Secure XSL Transformations in Microsoft .NET.  If you are not a .NET programmer, ignore the .NET bits and concentrate of the issues.

Death of E-Mail?

The world is giving up on popups because of spams.  Will we someday be forced to give up e-mails because of spam?  What about forums, chatrooms, and instant messaging?  Comments and trackback are also starting to come under assault from spammers.  Where is the line in the sand?

I used to feel comfortable with reliability of e-mails.  When I send something to somebody, I felt reasonably sure that it will be delivered and read.  That is no longer true today even with wide use of spam filters.  When I send an e-mail now, I no longer feel sure of it being read by the receipient.

Of about 300 e-mails I get each day, about 200 are deleted.  Out of 200, about 175 gets classified as spams or likely spams by my spam filter.  Since there are so many, I tired of scanning the headlines to catch false signals long time ago.  Wham.  They are wacked even though I know that no spam filters are perfect and aggressive filters signal falsely as much as 17%.

25 spams that pass through the filter undetected are found by glancing at the sender's address and the subject of each e-mail.  Are they really spams?  I have grown to care not.  If I don't recognize the sender or the subject line looks overly chummy like "Did you get my mail yesterday?", they are wacked without hesitance.  Foreign e-mails?  I wack them without mercy.

Constant avalanche of spams have de-sensitized me to the point where I no longer care if I delete legitimate e-mails.  Next step is accepting only digitally signed e-mails from known sources.  I don't think we are too far from that.  Spam filters actually seem to promote de-sensitization.  More reliable the filter is, more complacent the user gets.  When was the last time you looked inside the spam and suspected spam folders?

Taking my own attitude about e-mails and spams into account, I expect everyone to be doing pretty much what I do.  When I observed how my wife and son handle e-mails, I found that they are even more brutal than I am.  They don't even look at the subject line, relying only on the sender's address.  If they don't recognize the address, it is deleted without even a glance.

Now, step back and think about how much businesses around the world have come to depend on e-mail to do business, communicating with each other, their partners, and customers.  Then think about what the loss of e-mail reliability means.  Already, my friends in spam-suspect countries like Korea and China are having difficulty reaching me by e-mail because their messages are thrown into the spam pile.  This has direct impact on the ability of companies in these countries to do business.

We are in serious boo-boo, Toto.

Update #1: The message I was trying to convey in this post is not that we need better spam filters.  The message is that spam is not only annoying like dinner-time telemarketing phone calls, it is hitting businesses below the belt by degrading a major communication channel.

Cellphone Rescue Button

I visited #joiito IRC channel last night to chat.  During the chat, I started brainstorming about useful software for cellphones using mosquito vanquishing software from Korea as an example.  I started with a voice-recognition software that rings the cellphone when it recognizes a keyword.  Others like Roji-san joined in with on-command-recording of voice and video.

After I left, I realized that you don't even need fancy voice-recognition.  All you need is a cellphone with buttons and sound under software control.  To use your cellphone to make a Great Escape, just download a piece of yet-to-be-written software and set the delay time (let say 1 minute).  To use it, just put your hand into your pocket and press a button.  After 1 minute, the phone rings and you say "Excuse me, I have to take this.  [after ten seconds] I am sorry, I have to leave, it's an emergency."

Maybe not as innovative as mosquito vanquishing program, but useful to far wider audience.  I refreshed and upgraded my J2ME development tools today to prototype this.  Lots of fun on the way although I got a deadline looming that won't leave too many spare hours.

Flame Warrior Trading Cards

Thanks to Clay Shirky, I found Mike Reed's Flame Warriors, ongoing attempt to classify participants of online discussions.  It's absolutely hillarious and illustrations are usually perfect.

Here is an example:

Big Dog and Me-Too

"Big Dog is a bully who doesn't hesitate to use his superior strength to intimidate other combatants. Big Dog may be smart, articulate or just plain mean, but in any case he is a remorseless fighter, brutally ripping into even the weakest of combatants. Once Big Dog securely fastens his powerful jaws on a hapless victim, Me-Too will join the attack. Me-Too is far too weak and insecure to engage in single combat, and must ally himself with Big Dog or a pack of other Warriors to bring down his quarry."

It's like a Online Behavior Pattern repository.  I wonder why there is no Idiot in the list though.