orkut is mmorpg

orkut is the only MMORPG I play. Thankfully I don't have to be a sociopath mass murderer to enjoy the game.

the dotcom lives on

and you know its name even though you have forgotten so many others's. I doubt any dotcom brought all its employees to a two-day ski trip?

improper coincidence

In one episode of Yes, Minister, the Minister (of Department of Administrative Affairs of Her Majesty's government) is discussing with his Private Secretary Bernard about fixing an unfavorable independent report by meeting its author coincidentally.

Minister: There is nothing improper about coincidence, is there, Bernard?

Bernard: How can a coincidence be improper, Minister? Impropriety postulates intention, which coincidence precludes.

At least back then officials worried about appearance of impropriety, if not impropriety itself....

with apologies to you know who

For the second time, they're empty-nesters | csmonitor.com

del.icio.us

http://del.icio.us/j. also in the side bar.

Why didn't I inline it in the side bar? Because cross-site scripting is not allowed. I could use a third party rss display tool to render rss but it's somewhat cumbersome. Iframe would've worked except for resetting target and inheriting CSS.

Albania saves me from consumerism

Inspired by the clever name of del.icio.us I played a bit of domain name Scrabble. Of course all the good names (like mani.ac) are taken already and Albanian NIC wouldn't let me have ascetic.al. Denied.

Salam Pax on Nightline

Where is Salam? On Nightline. It's good to see him showing Ted Koppel around Baghdad. I guess it's only a matter of time before his name will flash around the world.

turtles all the way down

How many virtual machines can you nest?

* Microsoft Virtual PC running Windows XP on top of Mac OS X
* Nokia device emulator on top of WinXP
* Nokia J2ME/MIDP virtual machine on top of Nokia device emulator
* J2ME applications running inside the MIDP VM

[via Erik]

client vs server side XPath

Jon Udell's XPath based blog search tool. He's trying out server side xpath now to save bandwith. I've been thinking about pre-computing index on the server and shipping that index to the client instead. More on this later.

soundbox

Soundbox - mp3 widget from Laszlo Systems (based on Flash).

what's the difference between a geek, a nerd and a dork?

So asks Tajel, but obviously she has been slacking on her reading as the answer was published by the girl some time ago. No degree for you, Tajel.

hubris and nemesis

This article on hubris and subtle yet damning intellectual dishonesty that tries to sugarcoat it reminds me to study the subject carefully. [via aldaily]

INEX 2003

to read later: INEX 2003 - Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval.

this year will be better!

or maybe not...

Pichinson, a self-described "doctor of reality" who helps liquidate companies, says he wouldn't have moved from Los Angeles to Palo Alto a few months ago had he not smelled more high-tech trouble looming.

"Sadly, it looks like 2004 is going to be another busy year for me," Pichinson said. "There's still another 6,500 to 7,500 companies out there who are among the walking dead."

database as coordination mechanism

Patrick Logan writes (quoting James Robertson)

The plain truth is, not that many projects really need complex distribution mechanisms. Most apps look a lot like this:

• Read data from a store (db, files, etc)
• Modify data
• Dump data back to the store

I think we have gotten too far away from this wisdom. The typical database has distribution and coordination built in. That means for the most part you get to write your application in isolation. The database also to serves to coordinate the application's own actions.

We need to get back to the future and look at how to simplify coordination and not just message passing. Databases are a coordination mechanism for one or more applications, and one mechanism is better than two.

We know that databases provide concurrency control and transaction management. These features let applications share data -- you can call this coordination at low level. But what about coordination at high level? How can they exchange semantics of data? e.g. "9999-12-31 in date field means now? never? forever in the future?" or "20 point means 20 basis point." (Schemas and constraints can check syntax of data but not the "validity" of data.) Because I don't see how databases provide meaningful (hence ad-hoc) coordination, I don't quite understand Patrick's last sentence above especially the second half.