Mercury News ran a story on Michael Powell field trip to the Sillicon Valley (via Jeff Pulver).

“Now to be a phone company, you don’t have to weave tightly the voice service into the infrastructure. You can ride it on top of the infrastructure. So if you’re a Vonage, you own no infrastructure. You own no trucks. You roll to no one’s house. They turn voice into a application and shoot it across one of these platforms. And, suddenly, you’re in your business. And that’s why if you’re the music industry, you’re scared. And if you’re the television studio, movie industry, you’re scared. And if you’re an incumbent infrastructure carrier, you’d better be scared. Because this application separation is the most important paradigm shift in the history of communications, and will change things forever. . . . I have no problem if a big and venerable company no longer exists tomorrow, as long as that value is transferred somewhere else in the economy.”

“People don’t work for their organization. They work for their boss.”

I can’t remember where I read about this but it is something that remains true so far I have seen.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying the junior or middle management is more important then the senior management. Instead, I am suggesting that the relationship between yourself and your direct reports (regardless which level you are) is one of the important factors in determine how a group performs.

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I have a lot of files. I kept all my files since 90s, documents, emails, everything. These files are scattered across different desktops and notebooks as I move them from one to another over the years. It become confusing and difficult to keep track of all my files.

So while sorting out my desktops and notebooks last week, I accidently trashed my financial account. Scanning the other machines found a backup (*phew*) but that was 6 months outdated (*sigh*). So I decided I need a better system. The system must be able to synchronize my files across multiple platforms (I have Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OSX) seamlessly and can be automated easily.
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Merry Christmas!

I have a lovely present this christmas: A blog spammer. :-)

As I have a captcha plugin, the poor guy have been entering comment manually using innocent looking comment (e.g. “Yes, this is a good page”).

Unfortunate for him, I trained my blog engine (using mt-bayesian) to identify his spam in the morning and when he tried it again in the evening, my blog has successful tag them as spam. (I still display spams for testing but I probably should stop displaying them totally soon)

Lovely to see how adaptive my mt-bayesian is :-)
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Okay, I just realized I can go onto IRC via IPv6 :P

*** jseng6 is ~jseng@2001:208:5:1000:220:edff:fe1e:41d1 (James Seng)
*** on channels: #joiito
*** on irc via server calkins.freenode.net (Milan, IT)

The best part is I can still talk to other IRC folks who is still on IPv4.

See IPv6 IRC Servers list. I am on irc.ipv6.freenode.org incidently.

I just fried my Linksys WRT54G which I bought yesterday *sob sob*!

I been looking forward to playing with this baby since I learn it runs Linux with all sort of cool hacks. Imaging, a linux box less then US$100, that has 802.11G and 4 port switch on board.

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Living on the Fault Line by Geoffrey A. Moore.

Bought this after lunch with Teyu. Geoffrey Moore is a well-known name in the valley and to anyone involved in high-tech venture. Particularly, I am most impressed with his previous two book, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado. I look forward to some quiet time to read this book.

Jay Leno, in his talk show making fun of Saddam said, “They say he (Saddam) was confused; he was disoriented. It’s the same conditon Al Gore was in before he endorsed Howad Dean.”

The last statement really makes my blood boil, so much so that I decided that I will boycott Jay Leno talkshow from now on! No way I ever ever going to watch his show again!

But as I calm down and think rationally, I wonder why I feel the way I do. I mean, Dean Howard is running for American President (2004) and I am just a non-American in the Singapore! What has he got to do with me?
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David Beckemeyer has a follow up on his entry on IP Telephony. We are definately in sync altho I have a two comments.

First, I agree with David that ENUM is not a magic bullet to the universal addressibility problem with current IP Telephony deployment. If the basic infrastructure is a close network, ENUM, which is essentially a mapping of number to (SIP) address would not help at all. ENUM is an only a value-add, making life easier for folks who is familiar with +65 1234-5678 but not sip:jseng@sip.provider.com. The former is also easier to type when you only have a 12-keypad.
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Loic Le Meur, an entreprenaur and VC is thinking whether to take his ublog open source or not. He got most of the basic advantages of open source movement correctly but still not sure.