Found an interesting article called Internet Apocalypso aka the ClueTrain Manifesto. I know I know, I am about four years late reading this (it is published online in 1999 and was the best seller in Business Week in 2000 and have been translated to a dozen of languages).

But have things change over the last four years? Zilch! Intranet is still intranet around with corporate good-doers telling staff how to keep in-line.

It is easy to say “embrace change” and “speak the truth” but in reality, not many organizations (or people) can really swallow transparcy and truth. Changes need time…

Saw this article from Dave Farber’s Interesting People list:

Evidence of a new type of international extortion racket emerged on Tuesday with revelations that blackmailers have been exploiting computer hacking techniques to threaten the ability of companies to conduct business online. Sites have been asked to pay up to $50,000 to ensure they are free from attacks for a year. Police are urging any victims not to give in to blackmail and report the crime.

Anyone encounter this? This is unbelievable!

Michael Everson wrote:

I am pleased to announce that Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) is now shipping keyboard layouts which support the Afghan Pashto, Afghan Dari, and Afghan Uzbek keyboard layouts specified in the Computer Locale Requirements of Afghanistan report http://www.evertype.com/standards/af and that at least one of Apple’s shipping Arabic fonts, Geeza Pro, has full glyph support for Afghanistan’s languages.

Yohoo!

Patrik Fältström send me an email from his new and proud domain fältström.se. Notice there is the swedish character ä and ö? Yep, Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) finally! Yippee!

IDN is the effort of the WG I co-chair (together with Marc Blanchet) from 1999 to 2002 to bring internationalization to domain names, initiated from a project I did back in 1998. You know, if I know what I have to go through to do this, I probably won’t do it in the first place but now it is done, I am really glad I did.

ps: For more info on IDN, see RFC 3454, 3490, 3491 and 3492.

At the Asia Open Source Symposium today, a friend asked me: “What do you think will happen to Microsoft if Bill Gate leaves?”

After giving it some thought, I said “Probably nothing”.

I mean, why would it be any difference? While Bill Gates is the icon for Microsoft, the real power of Microsoft, IMHO, are the huge number of talented people in Microsoft who can make things happens, its culture of taking big risk and never give up and its seasoned processes for software development to business operation. Microsoft, in short, is an conscience entity of its own, beyond any single individual, even Bill Gate.
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I drop by at the Asia Open Source Symposium at the Pan Pacific Hotel (which is a 10mins walk from my office) this morning. I mean, I have quite a few old friends are here at this closed door (hmm..) seminar like Shuichi Tashiro from Japan and Ho Jian Ming and Wu Guo Wei from Taiwan.

Spend a lot of time catching up and paying too little attention to the speakers. But still, it is fun to catch up with friends, especially those who are once bitter enemies. As the Chinese saying goes, “You never know someone until you fight them”.

It is also a pleasure to finally met Dr. Kenichi Handa the author for Multilingual Emacs (MULE). We have some discussion on MULE (or just Emacs now) regarding input methods and rendering for various languages. For example, Khmer in Unicode is “broken” in 3.2 which is “fixed” only in 4.0, or the difficulty of supporting various Indic scripts (locale rules not available).

Particularly, I hope I can convience him to support the Afghanistan languages like Phasto and Dari. I helped to started an UNDP project to support Phasto and Dari last year and we badly need Phasto and Dari support for Unixes.

There are many countries who have been experimenting with ENUM/SIP. At least I know the folks in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Sweden, Austria (etc etc) who are experimenting with ENUM/SIP.

I met up with Yoneya a couple of days ago in Japan. So after seeing some of the JPRS work on ENUM, I suggested we should hold a BoF (Birds of the Feathers) at APRICOT2004 on ENUM/SIP. I believe there is value for an information sharing among the AP regions on our ENUM/SIP activities and also discuss how we can collobrate on our trials.

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The New Manager’s Handbook by Morey Stettner

HR gave this book to every manager so I got a copy too. It helps the book is small (I finish the book over lunch). I suppose it is useful for a new manager but not particularly interesting to me. Not a book I would recommend.