My original plan is this: arrived in Osaka-Kansai airport at 1532, clear custom by 1552, take shinkansei at 1616 and arrived in Kyoto at 1729 so as to get to my dinner appointment at 1600 in Hotel Granvia next to Kyoto station.

The (not) surprisingly thing is that this work out perfectly in Japan : landing exactly on time, clear on time, shinkansai leave exactly at 1616 and arrived in 1729 on the dot. In fact, shinkansei has a reputation for have an error of only 12 sec for a year of operation, an incredible achievement considering Japan has to deal with frequent quakes on top of the operational logistic problem.

I could never get this executed so perfectly if this is US or anywhere else.

Over dinner, I learnt that the power supply in Japan are compensated to keep at 100v at 60khz (almost) perfectly too. At least, it is accurate enough for electronic appliances in Japan to use the electric cycle as a clock. :P

That’s Japanese’s precision and perfection.

btw, most people know the Japanese word “suminasen” which is loosely translated as ‘i am sorry’, ‘excuse me’, etc. Not so many are aware that the literal translation is “not complete (perfect)”; Think in the context when it is been used – “i am sorry, i am not complete (perfect)”, “excuse me for not been perfect” … how truely Japanese.

Off to Kyoto now for APRICOT 2005. Sleep really late last night (3am) and have to wake up at 6am to rush for the flight and almost couldn’t make it. Luckily I did because I have a dinner to rush to immediate upon arrival.

Oops, last call now. See you in Kyoto!

via Telecom Asia

The emergence of VoIP apps like Skype isn’t just bothering fixed-line telcos – the prospect of VoIP over wireless LANs is making cellcos nervous too. Some see it as a threat, some as an opportunity, but many see it as inevitable and something that can’t be ignored.

“VoIP is a huge threat, but it’s one that’s coming from outside of the constraints of the mobile environment,” said Mike Mulica, president and CEO of BridgePort Networks during a panel session discussing the ramifications of VoIP on the mobile sector at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes on Thursday. “Skype and these converged voice/data models are providing a low-cost alternative to voice substitution for in-building minutes of use that allows you to go to a low-cost model.”

Read the whole article – Good read. Particularly, note the part where John O’Connell (CEO of Kineto Wireless) said “I think that within three to five years, everyone in this room will have a Wi-Fi enabled handset. During that time, there’ll be a lot of things happening to drive it along the lines of Skype and Vonage. If you sit and do nothing, that’s probably a mistake.”

Remember me about last year at Supernova where I asked the audience how many have WiFi SIP phone and only a few raise their hand. Next week at APRICOT, we going run a trial with SIP/ENUM and giving out WiFi handset!

Now imaging what will happen 3 years later…

Speaking of which, let me help Kevin advertise about Supernova 2005. Supernova 2004 is absolutely one of the best conference I been to – a small crowd but with lots of interesting folks!

Sick of the crappy music organizers that comes with Creative MP3 players? Well, check out NotMad Explorer, a software companion for Creative Nomad, MuVo, Zen etc.

It is not iTunes but it probably make it easier to live with a Creative MP3 players.

By posting this, I dunno if I am helping Creative or slaming their bad software. But Sim, your hardware are great (I love ripped out your 4Gb CF) but maybe invest a bit more usability if you are serious into consumer products?

I mean, just look at some of your customer feedback: “I will never, ever use PlayCenter again” “this app is what Creative’s PlayCenter should be” “PlayCenter … is all rather tiresome”.

I am surprise they haven’t figure out that you don’t win the MP3 market by features but by making it fun, cool and easier to use,. Make your customer love you :- it is not about brand – it is about lovemarks.

So please, go buyout the company and start shipping with your MP3 players. Maybe, just maybe you stand a chance against iPod.

ps: I am not affliated with Notmad in anyway.

Via Joi Ito:

I’m listening to Andrew Odlyzko giving a talk right now about why Quality of Service (QoS) and real-time streaming is stupid. He showed a slide showing that P2P and other traffic are generally transmitting files at faster speeds than their bit rates. Basically, if you cache and buffer, you can have outages in the downloads and you’ll usually be fine. I agree. I can see why carriers would want to spread the rumor that QoS is some feature that we have to have, but it’s strange that so many researchers seem to think we will need QoS supported video streaming. Maybe they need to stop watching cable TV.

Bingo! I agree. I am on the file side of the debate – I see the future in download not streams. Streams dont offer more control then files – except giving you the constant worries how to deliver high amount of data to your users at the same time. Streams don’t give you any better DRM then files – Streams can be easily captured and converted into files without DRM.

Look around you – all the cool stuff we have today are file based – Tivo, iPod, Bittorrent, etc. No streaming service I know was successful. So I wasn’t too surprised when Steve Jobs say no to Sirius.

¹ Incidently, Andrew already made similar points in his paper: Pricing and architecture of the Internet: Historical perspectives from telecommunications and transportation; I blog about it about a year ago.

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

From Bruce Schneier:

SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing.

The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper announcing their result

SHA is a US standard hash function which is used in a lot of security application. (SHA-1 is also published as RFC 3174). How bad this news depend how easily to find the collision but we dont know until the papers are made public; But according to Bruce, looks like it still requires some brute-force but just (a lot ) less of it.

I been scretching my head for a while what to get for my wife for Valentine – handphones, PDA, Tiffany – been there done that. Used to send her flowers but that was before the wedding. But when my wife hinted to me she wanted a mini-oven, I thought she was joking. It’s so boring and she could just buy it herself.

But I really run out of idea so heck, why not? So I thought maybe the new kind of microwave oven which can be pre-programmed for all sort of food and perhaps hack to run Linux or something; Nope, she just want a plain oven. Nope, not even one with an electronic clock; just a plain one which uses mechanical clock which you can hear it goes ‘click click click’.

Imaging my surprise when she really love the new oven. Nope, she was never so excited about other gifts her; She really love it.

Looking at some of the comments left there, obviously most man don’t get it. I still don’t.

The expected has happened: LECs (Local Exchange Carriers) started to block Vonage (or SIP in general) to protect their telephony services. (via Slashdot).

What was surprisingly is how stupidly they did this – they could just do a bit of trottling, limited the bandwidth, drop a few packets now and then, and it would take a long time before someone figure it out while in the meantime, people will think how bad the Vonage and SIP services sux and will just stay-put. But no, they go ahead and block the port totally.

And thank God for that. Now that Vonage has filed a complaint with FCC and hopefully this will set a precedence to all those who wish to try this block or trottling trick.

This is also one of the reasons why I am anti-port-25-blocking as a solution for antispam. Blocking port 25 is a quickfix but would destory the end-to-end connectivity – it is similar to blacklisting except you are blacklisting ports. Most importantly of all, the same equipments that does port 25 port blocking (and the fact they have confidence now that it will work properly) will allow them to do port 5060.

I couldn’t put it better so I won’t. From Paul Hoffman:

Reading the ensuing Slashdot and other coverage gave me the feeling that nearly everyone talking was from the US, UK, or Australia, the three countries that have the least native need for IDNs.

It also became clear that few of the folks in the discussion knew much about Unicode (and, in some cases, the DNS…). Suggestions like “find all the homographs and map them together” and “ban all domain names that have more than one language in them” reminded me of discussions four years ago with people who were also unfamiliar with the basic topics but felt empowered to speak anyway.

For completeness, I should explain why both of those proposals are silly. The number of homographs in Unicode is in the thousands under the best of situations, and much higher in the worst…

Banning all domain names with more than one “language” would ban names that include both non-ASCII and ASCII characters. This ignores how deeply English and French have mixed with other languages; it is common to find businesses with the word “shop” or “café” in their names throughout the world…

Given that the problem is that domain names with more than one script can cause homograph confusion, the solution should highlight names that have more than one script and say what script the characters come from. This can be done with a hover-over pop-up like this:

It is clear that what would be best is that the proposed solutions come from people who have both a reasonable understanding of internationalization and a reasonable amount of care about languages other than English.