April 21st, 2007

Customer Service @ Immigration

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china-immigration-feedback.JPG

This trip to Beijing, I notice the immigration counter has a new device (above). Yep, you can give instant feedback of the officer who is serving you. Customer Service @ Immigration. Wow! Guess Beijing is taking Olympic 2008 very seriously, making sure they have the best in front of the visitors.

Anyway, it is a refreshing compared to what I get when I go US, finger print and 100% (what you mean it is random?) full check, every time.

April 18th, 2007

Transit in Hong Kong

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Just arrived in Hong Kong and taking a super red-eye (3am) flight to Beijing. Don’t have a choice…only way to make it to my meeting in time. :-(

April 17th, 2007

A virtue never tested is no virtue at all

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viaTom Peters

Billy Bragg was coming through my car speakers singing, “A virtue never tested is no virtue at all.” That pretty much summed up the two coaching sessions I had just completed. Both of the leaders I have been coaching have been identified as high potential candidates for the executive team.

April 14th, 2007

Researchers Explore Scrapping Internet

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A research for a next generation Internet (I blog about GENI earlier last year) made it in the mainstream media (TIME) with a sensationalized title as above.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

No, there are some problems with Internet and we need to work on those. And we are working on those from a clean slate. But no one in the right mind is actually proposing to scrapped the current Internet.

But hey, what do I know? The TIME title is probably more exciting then “Global Environment for Network Investigators Project”.

April 10th, 2007

Pearls Before Breakfast

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Someone send me this article; it is too good not to share this. Pearl Before breakfast, an investigative story about putting the one of the world best violinist (Joshua Bell) in the Metro and watch what happened.

It is so sad. Only a few stop to give money. Even less stay on to appreciate the music and only one recognizes Joshua.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Perhaps sometimes we should slow down, listen to the music and smell the flowers.

April 10th, 2007

Interview @ SG Entrepreneurs

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An email reminded me about the interview I had with SG Entrepreneurs. Check it out if you are interested.

April 5th, 2007

Strange Encounter

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silver-ang.JPGAs the plane was about to land, I notice the pretty air stewardess sitting opposite me have a very interesting name. So I compliment her name, made some small talks and bid her farewell.

After my meetings, I suddenly wonder what would turn up when I google her.. Turn out she is one of the project superstar finalist in 2005, Silver Ang. That was totally unexpected.

ps: Yes, I watch very little TV.

April 3rd, 2007

Twitter hack – Shoutbox on WordPress

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mrbrown and me was discussing what we can do with twitter last week. We thought it would be cool to have a shoutbox on seewhatshow linked to twitter so anyone can instantly feedback how good or bad the show they are watching via their mobile phone.

I went to do some research and find a pretty nice AJAX shoutbox for WordPress. I was also pretty excited to learn Twitter is expanding their API but was very disappointed it is not available yet. Stuck, I am not one to give up so easily, I spend the whole today doing a hack.

The hack is actually quite obvious: Since Twitter send all private message to you via SMS or IM, the solution is to link your twitter to an Jabber account (e.g. GoogleTalk) and then write a Jabber client that will monitor the private message and process it.

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Add yourself to http://twitter.com/sws then send a private message (“d sws your message”) and see it appears on the shoutbox. You can also do a semi-private message in the format of “@sws your message”.

(The problem is we need to add you to SWS’s friend before you can send private message. I suppose we an do another hack but how I wish there is an auto-add function in Twitter…)

Steve Poland talks about doing weather info service “d weather 14202”. I think there are many other interesting stuff you can do with this hack, more interesting then a shoutbox or weather service.

So I decided to release the source code to the blackbox. Go do some interesting stuff with it :-)

Update: doh, less than 24hour of doing this, twitter released a new set of APIs. It is probably more efficient to do this via the new API :P

April 2nd, 2007

IP over SFSS

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RFC 4824 The Transmission of IP Datagrams over the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS):

This document specifies IP-SFS, a method for the encapsulation and transmission of IPv4/IPv6 packets over the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS). The SFSS is an internationally recognized alphabetic communication system based upon the waving of a pair of hand-held flags [JCroft, Wikipedia]. Under the SFSS, each alphabetic character or control signal is indicated by a particular flag pattern, called a Semaphore Flag Signal (SFS).

sfss.JPG

April 2nd, 2007

Thoughts on the Music Business

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via Mark Cuban

The first thing that dawned on me as I thought about this was simple, yet scary. I cant remember the last time I bought a CD Player of any kind, nor can i think of a reason why I would. Sure, my PCs have one, but its rare I use it for music. If the music industry is going to rebound, rather than trying to find ways to sell more CDs, they have to either find a reason for people to start buying CD players again, and I cant think of a single reason why anyone would, or the industry has to quickly as possible find a way to get rid of music CDs. Their ongoing dependency is creating an imbalance that drags them further away from turning their business around.

Hear hear!

If people are not buying CD players, then there wont be a CD industry anymore. Music download (DRM or not) is the future, embrace it or die!