Funny

April 6th, 2005

We do Chinese right

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kfctranslate.jpg“At KFC, we do chicken right!” get translated to “在肯德基,我們做鸡是对的!” which unfortunately means “At KFC, we’re right to be prostitutes.”. Haha. (via mrbrown)

April 2nd, 2005

April Fool RFCs

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While normal human beings celebrate April Fools by making publishing their transparent desktop picture on national newspaper, geeks publish standards like UTF-9/UTF-18 and Morality requirements for Routing. Look, geeks can be funny too! (ie, if you can understand the joke :-)

Anyway, IETF has a traditional to publish April Fool RFCs and I always watch out for them. But some of the April Fool RFCs are more then jokes. For example, RFC1149, an April RFC publish in 1990 talks about how to use carrier pigeons to carry IP packets. We have a great laugh during one of the IETF in 2001 when someone revealed they actually implemented it. Yes, they put packets into paper, put them on carrier pigeons and send them over! So thanks to that, RFC 1149 is now made a Full Standard :-)

Incidently, the UTF-9/18 joke reminded me of my UTF-5 Internet-Draft publish 5 years ago. No, UTF-5 was not a joke – it is was the proposal that got IDN Working Group started in IETF and also become the foundation of the ACE (ASCII Compatible Encoding) used in current IDN.

March 18th, 2005

The Long Tail

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xjqxz-cover.jpgI notice a trend lately : I seldom watch movies or TV. I get my dose of mass media movies from my longhaul flight (SingaporeAir has great collection on their movies-on-demand). I dont watch TV because I lost interest in Mediacorp programming and more importantly, I found something that suit my need – Internet.

I can find lots of exotics shows which I can’t find in Singapore at all. The latest show I got from the Internet is a series called 仙剑奇侠传, a China-made show which as far as I know, not sold in any stores in Singapore. Neither do I have very high hopes Mediacorp will show this over the air. But you can buy it here.

It was adapted from a Taiwanese game which I love in the early 90s. And of course, the main actress 刘亦菲 is incredibly beautiful. Last I heard, she is filming 神雕侠侣, oh boy!

xjqxz2.jpgxjqxz3.jpg

The problem is most thinks china-made show are lousy. Ha!1 But there is a demand for such show outside China too but they are tiny, really tiny until you aggregate them together.

long-tail-curve.jpgThis is preciesly the Long Tail phenomenal Chris Anderson talks about today. Before Internet, there is almost no way I can get these shows at all. It would be interesting to see how people going to make money out of all these long tails.

And almost every industry have a long tail – What’s your long tail?

1 Okay, I agree there are rooms for improvement but heck, who watch 流星花园 because of F4 acting skills?

Footnote: I remember arguing with a friend in 2000 that Korean shows is going to be big (after seeing what they have in Korea from my frequent trip there). No one believe me then because the rage back then is Japanese shows. Today, I say, watch out for China made shows.

March 17th, 2005

IDN Parody on verisign.com

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Guilllaume Rischard setup a parody on verisign.com using the IDN spoofing trick. He managed to get one registrar to register verisign.com with a cyrillic S (U+0405) (ie xn--veriign-mog.com :-)

parody-verisign-small.jpg

Also check out Neustar website, the competitor to Verisign.

This actually started in #joiito a couple of weeks ago after the Eric published the spoofing attack paper. A joke was made that it would be funny if someone did it to verisign.com and so he did.

I suppose I could rant why Verisign should adopt the JET Guideline (or ICANN Guidelines) but this parody would send a louder message.

Nevertheless, I am sure the folks in Verisign will react to this quickly.

The first would obviously fixing their own registration rules – if a student in UK can do this, this isn’t a good sign for them. Hopefully the fix will be consistent with the ICANN Guidelines :-) [btw, despite my rants against Verisign, I actually like the people work for Verisign – I still have friends (i hope) working there who is doing their best to do good things]

The second is how to deal with the parody site – Verisign isn’t know to have a great sense of humor so I fear for my friend – I taken the liberty to speak to Wendy from EFF just in case. IANAL but the only thing I could see Verisign has a case on is the domain name itself (verisign.com) which is their trademark. The rest of the site have been made clear it is a parody – adapted from Neustar, who apparently have a great time laughing at the parody – or modified from Verisign in such a way no one would be ‘reasonably’ confused.

I suppose they could initiate a takedown notice under DMCA. But that would be interesting – how do you initiate a takedown notice on yourself :-)

They could get their army of lawyers to send threatening letters to Rischard to take it down – but that would only be PR disaster for them and would further attract more attention to the site.

Or alternatively, they could just send a polite email to Rischard to ask him to take it down – Rischard is doing this for a laugh, not looking for a fight so he might afterall.

March 3rd, 2005

Very Big Transfer

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big-transfer.jpg

I am not sure I can wait 1 year for the download to be completed :-)

February 23rd, 2005

APEET Bert

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apeet-bert1.jpg

February 1st, 2005

Why China will rise to become a superpower in the world

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or as according to Cheeky, a very funny Singapore blog. Unfortunately, most non-Singaporean won’t catch the local favour jokes but you probably get this one :-)

From Germany
germanwoman.jpg

From Russia
russianwoman.jpg

From United Kingdom
britishwoman.jpg

From United States of America
americanwoman.jpg

And finally, from China
chinesewoman.jpg

January 19th, 2005

Not Milk

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Was glancing at my and found a site called notmilk which her reader recommended, a site about eating healthy. Well, here is a gem from the site on egg:

When you eat these animal proteins, they create an acid condition in your blood. Imagine the essence of stinky rotten eggs infusing into your bloodstream. We cannot afford to lose bone density, but this is how your body compensates,by leeching calcium from your bones to neutralize the acid. Dr. William Castelli, lead researcher of the Framingham heart study (America’s largest heart study) calls homocysteine the key to all heart disease.

Wow, that sound serious. Eating eggs apparently will eats into your bones! So the article went on to talk about some other stuff which is bad for you and make the following recommendation:

FIRST: Eliminate all milk and dairy
SECOND: Eliminate all poultry and eggs
THIRD: Eliminate all seafood
FOURTH: Eliminate all pork
FIFTH: Eliminate all beef

As a rule, the higher up one goes on the food chain, the more concentrated are the toxins, heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, and PCBs in their flesh and body fluids.

Duh. So what can you eat?

December 18th, 2004

Why cyclists wear black

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menintights1.jpg   menintights2.jpg

lol (via MrBrown)

December 5th, 2004

VISA meets Dog

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internet-dog-small.jpgJeff ordered a VISA debit card for his beloved Dog. Give a real meaning to On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog! Haha :-)