Oh yes! Finally, Skype for Mac OSX! (via Joi Ito) Just in time for my trip next week in Korea for the OECD Antispam Workshop. Yea!

Does this means the Bluetooth is dying? (via isen.blog)

Ericsson is pulling the plug on its technology licensing unit, the wholly-owned subsidiary which invented Bluetooth wireless technology and became the driving force behind the company’s Bluetooth initiative.

Or does that means they give up collecting royalty for Bluetooth and therefore, drive more adoption of Bluetooth?

I think we haven’t see end of Bluetooth yet. It might just be that Ericsson realized it does not makes enough money on quarter of a penny royalty. On the other hand, Bluetooth does has its limitation, particularly speed. As an RS232/IR replacement, it is probably suffice but not good enough.

I remember I was on a panel with Vint Cerf last month when he rumbled the difficulty of shuffling our video cable among us. I responsed him with a single word: Ultra-Wide Band. At 400mbps wireless means it is capable of replacing even our DVI cable.

This is so cool! It turns your Gmail account into a Linux mountable filesystem! (via Slashdot). What this means is you can store files onto Gmail account as if it is like your own harddisk and can be accessed from anywhere :-)

Actually I already have this sort of ‘remote harddisk’ on my computer setup for a while, using Apache WebDAV. The nice thing about webdav is that it is accessible by Mac and also Window transparently. And since I ran my own server, I basically have over 100Gb of ‘remote diskspace’.

Still, I am impressed with this hack is made possible using libgmail.

ps: I have 4 Gmail invites. Drop me an email if you want one :-)

Take a look at How Long Can the Country Stay Scared? by Bruce Schneier (via Dan Gillmor).

The DHS’s threat warnings have been vague, indeterminate, and unspecific. The threat index goes from yellow to orange and back again, although no one is entirely sure what either level means….This kind of behavior is all that’s needed to generate widespread fear and uncertainty. It keeps the public worried about terrorism, while at the same time reminding them that they’re helpless without the government to defend them.

This reminded me of Bowling for Columbine, where Michael Moore dedicated a segment taking how the news media constantly keep the country in fear, that “crime rate drop 30% but news about crime goes up by 600%”. Go figure!

Yohoo! Verisign suit against ICANN (wrt to Sitefinder) is dismissed! :-)

But then again, everyone (including Verisign I believe) expected this suit will go nowhere. IMHO, the other reason it is filed is to set a court precedence of what is within ICANN ‘jurisdiccion’ over Verisign and what’s not. As to that goal, Verisign has already won as the suit already forced ICANN to make declaration of their representation.

My team called for a tender to build a prototype for a Digital Content Exchange using Semantic Web technology 2 months back and we awarded the contract to HP last week. More specifically, it is awarded to Semantic Web team in HP Labs leaded by Brian McBride, the creator of Jena.

Oh yea, if you think speaking to geeks is bad, try speaking to Semantic Web people. I find myself saying “using the taxonomy and thesaurus from 386, we can construct the OWL and also reference RDF for content owners and then application developers can build facets browser by syndicating these RDFs” and honestly, I have no idea what I just said :-)

I always wonder why there isn’t such a feature in Powerpoint or Keynote, that is, the ability to project your slides onto the screen but display your notes on your notebook screen instead.

It would save so much paper and time…

Bill Koff, VP of Leading Edge Forum from CSC, is in town doing some project with us. And he gave a 2 hour presentation on some of work and we have several interesting discussions.

One of the discussion reminded me of Metcalfe’s Law and its importances to IM. As companies started to introduce IM into their workplace, very often, in the name of ‘security’, would introduce an “enterprise IM” solution, one which is isolated from the other IM networks. Sadly, they’ve forgotten the value of IM is not in the tool but the community around the it, aka Metcalfe’s Law.

Teams That Succeed by Harvard Business Review

Ben Cohan (the Ben in “Ben & Jerry icecream :-) made an very cute but informative animation on US Federal spending in support of truemajorityaction.org. Check it out :-)