Radicals and Extremists are always a bad news, even if they are on your side.

It is okay to have strong views and argue sensible. And it is also important to recongize different people will have different views. And even people on the same side may comes in different shades of greys. But when you cross the line making threats (or worst, carrying out the threats), you not only alienate the majority moderates, you also put the rest of the moderates advocates in bad light.

I have seen Linux zealots who done more damage to Linux then their competitors could ever do. And today, I feel so sad that one cause I fight for at work might just die because of a radical advocates. Thanks, but really, you are not helping! *sigh*

Paul Hoffman send me an email a couple of weeks ago asking me how Chinese choose their name, esp. their English names which prompted me to write this entry.

Background¹

Chinese has a Family name followed by a Given name and no Middle name. Family names are typically one chinese ideograph although there are some rare family names with two ideographs (e.g. 司徒). Given names are typically compose of two chinese ideographs but there is a trend (particularly in China) to give single ideograph name. For example, the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming 姚明 Family name is Yao with a single Given name Ming.

Chinese names are read and also written in this order: Family name followed by Given name (e.g. my name 庄振宏/Seng Ching Hong). While some Westerner may find that order uncomfortable, it is equally uncomfortable for a Chinese to be address by their Given name first (Ching Hong Seng somehow just don’t sound right).
Read the rest of this entry »

The Maverick and His Machine by Kevin Maney

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

Bought these two books before dinner just after golf (Gosh, I havent play Golf for 7 months now..I am surprise I can still hit the ball! :-)

The Maverick is a book about Thomas Waston (Sr) and how he remake IBM. Thomas is well-known for not just encouraging mavericks (aka “birds who refuse to fly in line”) but also promote and use them well during his time. Those days (not-so-co-incidently) also happened to be the brightest days of IBM.

The Elegant Universe is a layman book on T.O.E (The Theory of Everything) aka Superstring Theory. I would have become a Physicist if computer hasn’t been invented.

How to think like Leonardo Da Vinci (via Dewayne-Net):

In business, it’s important to employ ambidextrous employees — people who have business and technology skills. For they can imagine the future. If you don’t employ multi-talented professionals, you lose out on business oportunities that cannot be imagined by the linear worker.

Yep, how true! It is no longer suffice for an engineer to be just an engineer and MBA to be just an MBA. Over years, I notice innovation is a often a 1+1. Take two old unrelated but established concepts, put them together and bingo, you got innovation! (e.g. Auction House + Internet = EBay!)

ps: Oh yes, it was a pleasant surprise to come across Tom Peters’ blog!! Yes!

I just left NIDA stealing some of the IP packets :-) While there, I bounced in Dongman Lee and Chanki Park. Park is an old friend who is currently the manager in charged of the .KR domain names registry and we have a brief chat about Korean domain names.

Apparently, they have over 80,000 thousand korean domain name registrations (wow! that’s more then the whole of .SG) but Park expect that the numbers will be going down in the next few months. The main reason cited was the lack of support of IDN in Internet Explorer, the pre-dominate browser in Korea.

Of course, there are plugins to IE to support IDN but nothing beats native support in the browser. In fact, IDN is already support in all the alternative browsers (Mozilla/Firebox/Conquerer/Opera/Safari) except IE. (Apple actually have a marketing campaign in Japan regarding the fact that Pathner nows supports IDN)

I am aware of friends in the Middle East to Asia (Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan..) who have organized numerous discussion with the Internet Explorer team (like Michel Suignard¹) but none seem to be able to get Microsoft moving. *sigh*

Park suggested that I should pull together a meeting again with Microsoft. I hope the folks at the IEBlog are listening.

¹ Don’t get me wrong..Michel is a good friend and I dont meant to embrass him here. But the reasonings for not supporting IDN is plausible 2 years ago but sound very silly now.

I arrived in Seoul last night and catch dinner with dda. Ah, Korean BBQ, how I missed it! Then we went over to Bar 66 for beer with Anthony (the Strategic Director of Lucent whom I met on plane on the way here). Great fun and dda, thanks for putting up with me at your place :-)

I just finish lunch with Shin¹ from National Internet Developmet Agency (NIDA), formerly known as KRNIC. Apparently, NIDA is now a government organization under Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) and I’m writing this from NIDA office :-)

Shin also gave me this interesting booklet published by MIC on their IT 8-3-9 Strategy (The Road to $20,000 GDP/capita), a brainchild of their IT Minister Daeje Chin (formerly VP of Samsung).

Basically, IT 8-3-9 Strategy involves:
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the speakers have more or less covered almost all the current antispam techniques, I wonder if I should repeat them again for my talk today which will probably makes it pretty boring. Or should I do something else and make it interesting…so I did the latter :-)

Since my session is ‘Emerging Technologies’, I decided to turn my talk to ‘Emerging Spam’.

Business communications technologies has constantly evolvoing, from Postal Mail to Telegraph to Telephone to Fax to today Email. By historical trends, we should not expect Email to be the end of this evolution¹.

And if we look at generic problem of “spam” (ie. bulk unsolicated commerical communication) it has also followed the communication evolution too. From Junk Mails to Junk Fax to Junk Voice Mail to Email Spam, we can also expect spams to exists in new form of communication technologies.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was sitting with a Microsoft PR lady over dinner yesterday and I commented how sad Microsoft has alienated the Open Source community. I mean, it is one thing for Microsoft would see Linux as a competitor and react strongly towards it as they would against any other competitors, it is another to go against the ‘Open Source Movement’.

The result of this alienation is that Microsoft has not done much to encourage OSS developers to build OSS Windows applications which of course, resulted in less OSS apps developed for Windows. Yes, I am aware of the numerous OSS applications that runs on Windows but comparatively, given Windows has >90% of the desktop market share, I would expect the numbers to be much higher.

They are making the same mistake Apple did when they alienate Mac developers. Like it or not, OSS is here to stay and when there are more applications that runs on Linux then Windows, guess what the customer would run?

OCED Antispam Workshop is a suit and tie conference, something I am not very used to. Luckily, knowing Korea, I packed my suit with me so I dont look so out of place this time round.

The main discussion on Day 1 revolves around an “OCED Antispam Toolkit”. But don’t think of it as a technology thingie but more like a ‘toolbox’. Basically, it is a document that integrates the multi-layer elements into a coordinated whole. In layman terms, it provides information and practical guidance for a ‘government/regulator’ who wish to tackle spams, ranging from legistration, consumer education/awareness, industry self-regulation, industry participations and international cooperations. (Does this sound like Singapore Multiprong Antispam effort? :-)

Sadly, it is still a work in process so no draft of the document was circulated…

My talk at the OCED is tomorrow but I think I can share my last slide now…Oh boy, I am going to have fun! :-)

[There is no long term (antispam) solution. (In the long run, there is no Email)]