Flawless in Seattle

I landed in Seattle and comfortably settled in at plush Monaco Hotel.  Flight here was uneventful except for the usual strip show at SFO.  In my room, I found a backpack full of goodies and a glossy folder of the schedule.  And a booklet of event attendees' bio and photo arrived just a minute ago, fresh from the printer.  So far, I am impressed by the well produced red carpet treatment.

I'll have to miss the dinner tonight to get together with an old pal but I see that Dave, Chris, and Liz are attending as well.

Disclaimer: Because I am a pushover with people who are nice to me, my views on Microsoft will be biased until the red carpet treatment effect wears off in a couple of weeks.

Harry Podder’s Spellcasting 101

Watching Dave spread the podcasting meme is like watching Moses split the Red Sea.  Simply amazing and much more effective than infomercials and brainwashing.  The cool thing is that he is just doing and talking about what interests him but his activities are slowly eating up our mindshare.  It's a new form of evangelism.  Devangelism?  Nay, it's Davangelism.

Farting about Nothing

Wow.  Suddenly a new cool expression appears out of the blue to enrich our culture: herring fart.  While the recent discovery that herrings communicate by farting is probably not good news for Red Herring, I doubt those stinky fishes are saying much, not even enough to qualify as micro-content.  On the other hand, I am tired of the expression bullshit, so the discovery of herring fart is good news to me.

I am also glad that Mother Earth doesn't communicate the same way because we'll have many more Mount St. Helens if she did.  After all, she has a lot to say to us.

Java and XP SP2 Firewall

One of the nice features in XP SP2 Firewall is that when an application tries to access the network, it opens a dialog asking if the application should be granted network access and remembers the choice user makes.  This is great for normal applications.  Unfortunately, Java applications all fall under the hosting application name (java.exe and javaw.exe) so network access can not be given to some Java applications and not others.

Unless Java applications start running with Security Manager enabled and the Security Manager is better integrated with the host platform firewall such as XP SP2 Firewall, I fear IT Administrators will start cracking down on Java applications.  Until that happens, I think popular Java applications will have to be cocooned inside a thin native application wrapper to give each application a unique process signature.

Note that .NET applications don't have this problem.

Mouse Pad Key

I have been thinking about new authentication methods and some of the ideas I came up with are quite interesting.  One of them is the Mouse Pad Key.

Mouse Pad Key uses the optical mouse to read keys on a sheet of paper by moving the mouse around on top of the paper.  The idea is still theoretical because I haven't looked into whether optical mouses can reliably read patterns on a piece of paper.  If the key pattern can be printed on regular papers, then keys can be sent electronically.  If not, then a special printing process may enhance security.

A special mouse driver will be necessary, of course, and unubiquitous availability of optical mouse makes deployment impractical but I thought the idea was interesting enough to share.

Penalty for Unnecessary Roughness

Recently, I stomped on the Firefox team and Tim Bray.  Yesterday, I stomped on Jonathan Schwartz and Technorati.  I would like to give myself a yellow flag for unnecessary roughness as they do in football and take it easy for a while.  While I write posts as I see it and feel like it, I think I have been doing too much stomping lately and my feet needs some rest.

What’s is wrong with Technorati?

Before, I thought Technorati was going places and liked the service enough to attend a Technorati developer open house, but I am not sure any more.

They now have over a hundred servers instead of a handful and tracks four million blogs instead of less than a million, but the quality of service seems to have gotten worse over time.  Am I just imagining that Technorati seems slower and results seem less complete and more noisesome than before?  I have no problem with outages, but I am disturbed by the apparent lack of improvement in the performance and quality of their service after all time time and resources they invested.

If they are having problems and need some help from the outside, maybe they should open up and ask for help.  If the last Technorati developer open house meeting was any indication, I am sure they will have no problem finding volunteers who would be glad to donate some time to save an important part of the blogosphere infrastructure.

Update:

Just a day after this post, Technorati announced Technorati Hackathon event to gather the Technorati fan/clan.  Way to go, Dave.  Also, the service seems faster and more reliable all of a sudden.  If I was a conspiracy addict, I might have wondered if they were waiting for a fool to post a complaint before turning on some optimizations.  Results are still noisy though with many duplicate items and blogroll links.  They need to work on that.

Anyway, I am happy enough for now although I am perfectly willing to be the whiny cheerleader.

Per-Floormat Patent

Jonathan Schwartz filed patent applications for per-employee software pricing.  Awesome.  Maybe I should file a similar patents for per-chair, per-desk, and per-floormat software pricing methods and offer them at a much lower license fee.  It doesn't have to be items an employee has usually only one item of.  While I am at it, I can file patent on software pricing schemes based on thousands of other business sizing metrics and millions of derivatives.

Tiger on the loose

I was expecting it to be released a few months later, but JDK 5.0 (aka JDK 1.5 and Tiger) was released today.  Go get it, jBoys and jGirls.  While you are at it, you might want to lean over the edge a bit with Eclipse 3.1M2 since Eclipse 3.0.x has some Tiger-related issues as-is.

Speaking of Tiger, I am a tiger too chinese zodiac wise.  Many times over in fact since chinese zodiac applies to months and hours as well.  When all the signs, including those of my parents, are combined, I have several tigers, one dragon, and a bull.  Of the three animals, tiger is my favorite.  My wife thinks I am the Tigger though: roaring occasionally, but bouncing around happily most of the time.

Boing!  Boing!  oh ho ho HO!

Ongoing Hypocrisy?

I just had a IM chat with Didier again.  Didier is now just a few days from moving back to Bordeaux, France but he was angry about Tim Bray's recent post:

Tim wrote recently in Helping Them Lie:

Google is getting some well-deserved flak for emasculating the Chinese version of Google News by suppressing headlines that point at things the government of China doesn’t want its citizens to read.

…

By suppressing the headlines that point at forbidden material, Google is actively aiding and abetting the Chinese government’s marketing program.

Back in June, Joi Ito wrote, in response to Dan Gillmor's post about Iran's net censorship, about a conversation he had with a Sun employee he met:

I once sat next to a guy from Sun Federal, a Sun Microsystems subsidiary, who was on his way back from selling a filtering system to a government.

Going further back on News.com:

Amnesty named several U.S.-based companies as alleged suppliers of technology used in the Chinese government's crackdown on Internet speech. These included Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and filtering software supplier Websense.

Oops.  I know Tim is an upstanding guy and I don't think he was aware of the role his own company played with China's Great CyberWall, but I can understand how his post might appear to some people like a display of hypocrisy.

For companies like Sun, profits are profits but business practice that undermines the moral ground of its employees, particularly an outspoken one like Tim, can hurt them badly.

Disclaimer:

As for me, I have not participated in anyway with the building of their firewalls or news filtering infrastructure.  However, I am perfectly willing to sell them anything they want as long as it's legal and there are profits to be made.

While I fully sympathize with those suffering from the Chinese government's newage campaign of tyranny, it's ultimately a battle for the Chinese citizens.  If they are putting up with it, I am not going to waste time shaking my fingers indignantly.  I think it will happen eventually but not any time soon.

On the other hand, fingershaking is a great exercise for those with full stomach.