Reuter is providing video clips of news via RSS (via Loic). Yoo, finally. I discussed the idea (RSS + BT) sometime last year and really happy to see this happening :-)

It is almost impossible to find a consumer broadband provider that gives you decent upload bandwidth wrt to the download bandwidth. Look around…all these offers of 512kbpx or 1.5mbps broadband access usually comes with 128kbps or even 64kbps upload!

“Why would consumers needs more then 128kbps upload bandwidth?” question comes from the perspective that consumers only consume information and have its origin from the “Consumers are Stupid” mentality of the typical ILEC. Such mentality is not only outdated but could potentially be fatal.
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CircleID asked me to write an article on our recently published RFC 3743. Check it out and let me know what you think (apart from the grammer mistakes which I keep finding everytime i read it again :-)

It is difficult to explain RFC 3743 or commonly known as the Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines without some lesson on Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), particularly how it relates to Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). Luckily, an Internet-Draft [PDF] we wrote back in 2001 discusses the issues quite neatly in this context.

In brief, Chinese characters (Hanzi) or Han ideographs are evolved from pictographs (writing made up of pictures) across thousands of years. Unlike other writing systems, Han Ideographs are constantly evolving. In the 1950s, China underwent a major exercise to simplify the Chinese writing using an almost systematic process. The resulting simplified form or Simplified Chinese is now being used in China and Singapore while the original form or Traditional Chinese is still being used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and most oversea Chinese communities.

Because of the almost systematic simplification process, there is a somewhat 1-to-1 matching between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. It is easy to associate it to the like of uppercase/lowercase in English but at best, it is a bad analogy that grossly underestimates the depth of the problem.

If that is not complicated enough, Han Ideographs are also used to write Japanese (Kanji), Korean (Hanja) and old Vietnamese (Chu Han and Chu Nom), and each language has its own simplification history and rule. In addition, there are many Han Ideographs that look exactly the same (CJK Compatibility) or have similar looks (zVariants) but assigned different code points in Unicode.

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The April statistics (via Adam Peake) shows FTTH in Japan is growing nearly at 100,000 new subscribers per month! While the FTTH is bearly 1M subscribers (out of 14M broadband subscribers), the grow rate is very significant.

I wonder why the sudden surge of interest in FTTH in Japan…something to check out when I am there next!

Nemesis by Issac Asimov

Yep, not a book on technology, business or management!

And not bought recently either…Lets see, the receipt shows I bought this on 26th July 1999 from Kepler’s Book @ 1010 El Camino Real in Menlo Park. Wow, thats a book I bought in two previous life ago.

Anyway, Issac Asimov is my fav author ever since I was a kid. I read almost all his Foundation and Robot stories and could describe his Three Laws of Robotics and its philisophy to anyone anytime.

With thousands of short stories credited to his name, I remember driving around El Camino Real, looking for those really old second bookstores and stay there for hours, hunting for his short stories and sometimes buying the whole book for the sake of one of his story. It become some sort of pasttime when I was there.

Sometimes I marvel at all the mistakes I made in my life. You know, the silly mistakes like making a bad deal and lost the a few million dollars or opening my big mouth and offended some big shot, yada yada.

But would I be where I am if I didn’t try? I mean, “non-action” is always easier since it requires no energy at all and impose almost risk (except the risk of not doing something when you should). But as saying goes, no risks, no gain. I am who I am because I am willing to take risks. Sometimes I fail but sometimes I made it. In either way, I am a better person then if I haven’t try.

Speaking of risks, I really hate it when someone uses “calculate risks” as an excuse for not trying. Yea, right! As if there is any other kind of risks. All risks is calculated. Some may considered a sequence number reveal in a dream sufficient to take a “calculated risk” to buy Toto while others (like myself) find it silly. Others finds investing in a bear market is crazy but I considered it a calculated risk.

The question isn’t whether the risk is calculated or not but whether if it is well-informed and intelligent risk taking.