This morning I read an interesting Korean news article (Korean) about millionaires in china. According to the article, 91% of those with $10 millions or more in asset are close relatives of high government officials. Shocking, I thought. I couldn't find the chinese government report mentioned in the article though.

Looks like the blogosphere is rediscovering the security risk of subscribing to blog feeds which I last blogged about in Comment on Microsoft Embracing RSS. The risk is inherent and not limited to blog feeds but to all forms of syndication, including OPML. Simplicity of the carrier formats and wildfire-like nature of social technologies are the two primary risk amplifiers.

Starry eyed, we are drawn to bonfires like mash-up and AJAX, enchanted by the moment and forgetful of the dreary dawn. Too poetic? Then here is a controversial soundbite for entertainment:

AJAX and mash-up are like bath house orgies and RSS and OPML are like intravenous drug addictions.

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p dir=”ltr”>It's not completely right nor completely wrong. Use as directed: as food for thought and not for furthering your arguments.

While reading a korean novel, I've learned of seoup-chup (seoup = get?, chup = resident mistress), a practice that existed during the Chosun era for divorced women. Back then, men could throw his wife out (a practice called sobak) when she is guilty of any of the seven sins that could be committed by a wife (i.e. not producing a son). As far as I know, wives can't throw their husbands out so it was a one-side practice.

After getting thrown out, a women could a) return to her parents in shame, b) commit suicide, or c) stand near a sunghwang-dang (a kind of local shinto-like shrine I think) at early dawn and follow the first man she sees (fate?). Seoup-chup is certainly an odd practice from modern perspective but very interesting I thought.

I don't know if the man had the right to refuse but I imagine it would be difficult to refuse if the woman threatened to commit suicide. Upper class women back then carried a little silver knife called eonjang-do for that purpose. My grandmother had one too but the blade had rusted away when I saw it.

Hmm. GOOG chart is not looking too healthy and support at 350 don't look that solid either. When it goes, YHOO will be caught in the downdraft and it's support at 25 might not hold this time. I hope I am wrong for the sake of recent YHOO buyers.

I must…resist…my old chart reading habits.

Joel Spolsky's Can Your Programming Language Do This? starts from cooking and ends up with MapReduce. Fun read if you know a thing or two about programming.

I think BlogHer is wonderful but I don't think it's a good idea to make room for more men at BlogHer. IMHO, the idea makes as much sense as making room for men in the ladies room: uncomfortable for both genders. Only when greatly out numbered, men will be pacified enough to contribute constructively to BlogHer. I think 1/3 is the most the conference can handle without turning on alpha male bits among attending men and disturbing the women into their clamshell.

Woot. 24-inch LCD display (Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP) I ordered last week arrived. I don't typically upgrade monitor and computer at the same time to keep the shopping madness under control, so good reviews and reasonable price (~$700) clicked. Installation was dead simple and the screen is very sharp and responsive without a single dead pixel. What I like the most about this size LCD is that DPI is just right for my eyes when it's pushed back to the far edge of my desk.

• Babe Not Included

Paul Colton and team at Aptana are a wild bunch. They wrote AFLAX, an open source javascript library that opens new doors for AJAX webapps by leveraging Flash. Just take a look at this AFLAX.Canvas preview demo. Who in their right mind would implement DIV-based Canvas for smooth user experience degrading? It sounds easy in theory but not in practice because you have to implement the Canvas drawing API in pure JavaScript. Crazy! I love that kind of crazyness. 😉

They are smart too because, instead of trying to compete with other popular AJAX libraries, they integrated with them (Dojo, MochiKit, and Prototype with Rico so far).

Under the hood, AFLAX requires Flash 8 or later because it uses the ExternalInterface feature which allows a Flash movie to expose an API accessible from JavaScript. The downside is that I don't think Flash 8/9 penetration is anywhere near ubiquity yet. But recent popularity of podcasting and ready-to-serve media services like YouTube and MySpace need the new features provided by Flash 8 and 9 for best UX so I am optimistic about AFLAX.

Last but not least, Aptana is building an Eclipse-based IDE for AJAX webapps in general and AFLAX in particular. Checkout some Aptana IDE screencasts. Cool.

My thumbs are UP for AFLAX and Aptana IDE. I sure hope they have enough energy left to get to the finishing line cuz I can see how far they dragged the mountain already.

A Question for the AFLAX team: what's with stack overflows in demos? They seem to occur during page transition.

Wow. Getting quite close to the big one, eh? Happy happy birthday to Doc. I think your smile and positive attitude is more infectious than Cluetrain Manifesto. 🙂

If Friendster heads in the wrong direction with their social networking patent, I think a link boycott should be called for. How does link boycott work? A link boycott is intended to starve a domain out of the Web by a) refusing to serve requests from a link from the target site and b) directing all links to target site to elsewhere. That leaves only bookmarks as the sole onramp to the target suckster. Ouch, that should hurt.

a) is easy to do. b) take some massaging. All this can be implemented transparently with a proxy or filter.

I hope Friendster tries to push the issue. I want to see how effective link boycott can be in practice. Note that such a boycott won't be as effective against China because links across language barriers is not very strong. Still, I think link bocotting China could be annoying enough to force them to abandon broad censorship, particularly when the next Olympic nears.