I had two crazy days meetings with various visionaries and champions. Many of them are in town for the IX2003 organized by SITF.

Yesterday, I had lunch with Patrick Gannon, CEO of OASIS. Patrick is in town to kickstart the “Framework for Web Service Implementation TC“, an initiative of my group. His ideas on “Standard Registry” and “Multilingual Web Services” are something I have to follow up with him.

This morning, I had a meeting with Paul Tearnen and Suresh Damodaran, VP and Senior Software Architecture of Rosattanet respectively. They have a new concept of “Reference Object” which would fit very nicely to a project we are working on. I am very excited about the possibilities of “Reference Object”.
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Went to the 9 hole Executive Golf Course in Mandai today with Maynard, Melvin and Hon Chung. The course is a easy course for beginners and all four of us are beginners. In fact, this is the second time I am on the green.

The results are okay for a beginner I suppose, but I believe I could have done better. Next week perhaps…

John Patrick has a very interesting blog today called “Youth at the Gate” (CIO Insight).

When I am growing up as a kid (and I am not that old btw), we play five stones and “goli” (marbles). We play police & thief catching in the field or varity of sports. Kids today grow up with Nintendo, Playstation and Internet. How their generation going to redefine the world in 10 or 20 years is beyond our imagation.

This is why it is important we listen to them. Sure, Asia Pacific Next Generation charter is to groom the future AP Internet leaders but more importantly, APNG provides us a chance to learn and listen from them.

IBM isn’t the only one listens to them. Microsoft did and come up with ThreeDegrees.

Spend last night trying to put together a site for IETF Education Team using movabletype. Yes, I know MT isnt designed for CMS but hey, it works :-)

Take a look at how I twist MT at http://james.seng.sg/ietf-edu/

Here is a rant from Esther Dyson, the editor of Release1.0 on Goggle of Blogging, Technorati.

Although the premise of the blog world is decentralized, bottom-up, user-centered content, the value of Technorati-like services is in clustering: helping users to find like-minded people, or unlike-minded people with similar interests.

(Incidently, a little bird told me in IRC that Evan Williams, the founder of blogger.com actually helps Esther to set up her own blog at ETCon few months back).

I feel very sad today when I read on slashdot that two anti-spammer services are shutting down due to massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on their services. Monkeys.com and Compu.net joins Osirusoft in the antispam blacklists’ graveyard…ahem.

Strictly speaking, blacklists aren’t useful in stopping spams due to its high false-positive. Blacklists, is at best, a political tool to force ISPs to do the right thing to terminate spammers within their network.

While I don’t agree that blacklist is the best way to fight spammers, it is nevertheless a sad day to see spammers winning this war…

I haven’t been blogging for a while…this is because I found a new love…Drupal.

Drupal is an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites offering a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, metadata functionalities using controlled vocabularies and XML publishing for content sharing purposes.

It is much more powerful then any commerical CMS I have seen and I have fun hacking it for the last few days. Perhaps I should contribute back some of my codes back to the community…

Eric S. Raymond, working on his latest book The Art of Unix Programming, wrote:

Open source turns software into a service industry. Service-provider firms (think of medical and legal practices) can’t be scaled up by injecting more capital into them; those that try only scale up their fixed costs, overshoot their revenue base, and starve to death. The choices come down to singing for your supper (getting paid through tips and donations), running a corner shop (a small, low-overhead service business), or finding a wealthy patron (some large firm that needs to use and modify open-source software for its business purposes).

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A couple of days ago, New York Times reported that Verisign is going to modify its DNS infrastructure to redirect non-existence .com & .net to its search engine.

Acutally, Verisign introduced limited DNS wildcard to do Internationalized Domain Names earlier this year and unfortunately, ICANN has not make any strong stand against it.

So it is not surprisingly that they got bolder and take the next step to add DNS wildcard to both .com and .net with no advance notice *sigh*. (To their credit, they did prepare a whitepaper about their implementation.)

So whats the problem about DNS wildcard for .com & .net?
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There are generally two kind of people in management or leadership: (1) the cool and quiet guy (2) the energetic and charismatic guy. I shall refer the first as Type A and latter as Type B.

Asian (particularly Japanese) believes there is a colloration between their blood type and their character. This is not to say all Type A managers have blood type A etc, but an interesting belief nonetheless.

Over the years, I observed that Type A managers likes to have Type B as their reports. Likewise, Type B managers like to have Type A reports. If both of them are Type A, then the team is too passive. If both of them are Type B, then there would too much conflict.

It is common to find alternating Type A and Type B as you tranverse the management hierarchy: Type A CEO will have Type B CXI who will have Type A VPs who will have Type B Directors etc.