Month: June 2004

Homebrew? My site isn’t coffee

On May 25th, my good friend Dezza IMed me about making a new website design to go with his new domain, MaskofChina.com. I remarked that there’s nothing wrong with what he has now; after all, he made it himself, it’s homebrew. To which he replied, “Nah, I need a cool one…now that I got my own site…My site isn’t coffee!”

As Dezza likes to say, it’s a Chinese Situation. Behold, before and after:

maskofchina_before.jpg maskofchina_after.jpg

Fortunately, my CSS has improved to the point that I could sketch the design, code it, inlay the Blogger template codes into it and launch it on midnight June 14th. I followed the tried and true avante garde blogging template: two floating columns centred on the page. The only irritating thing is another of IE’s quirks: if an item on the left column exceeds the set width of said column, the right-hand menu will cease to wrap.

I also designed a favicon for his site (to see it in IE, bookmark the site and click that bookmark). The Chinese character for Friend. Hope you enjoy it, buddy.

Gold rush

Formerly codenamed ComboBox and Goldrush, we’ve heard only rumours and murmurs about the impending VDSL rollout in eastern Canada. This has all changed, as I saw this URL in the Metro paper today.

These news come on the heels of Bell Canada requesting a Posted on Categories universe

Whoosh

Rather busy these days – I’ve signed up for a night course at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto entitled “MBA Essentials for Managers”. So far, it’s been an enriching course, although it is only a sampler for the UofT Executive MBA program, available for a sum that could otherwise get you a fully-loaded BMW M5.

During the weekends, I borrow my dad’s car (which sadly is not an M5) to practice driving for my driving exam coming up next week. It’s strange; I’m usually not phased by impending events or deadlines until they are just about to break, but I’m already getting butterflies everytime I think about it.

I’ve also been working on a new website design for Dezza (you know, my friend who’s teaching English to the hapless Chinese of the city of Dalian, China). Top off my nights playing badminton (and fortunately improving), and trying to scream through Neal Stephenson’s 1,000 page novel called Quicksilver before the library loan gives its ghost, and I haven’t had much spare time on my hands.

The real patron saint of the web

It’s nice to hear that, every once in a while, the nice guy finishes first. Sir Tim Berners-Lee was just awarded the Millennium Technology Prize. He was also knighted last December and listed as one of Time’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

So what did he do that was so great?

He invented the Worldwide Web while at CERN in 1989. That in itself is not new: the hypertext concept is prevalent as far back as 1945. No, the real kicker is that he then gave the technology away. Without his contributions, the Internet as we know it today would never have existed:

“There would have been a CERN Web, a Microsoft one, there would have been a Digital one, Apple’s HyperCard would have started reaching out Internet roots,” he said. “And all of these things would have been incompatible.”

His current project, the Semantic Web, aims to make information retrieval more intelligent and intuitive. He is also outspoken about abolishing software patents altogether:

“What’s at stake here is the whole spirit in which software has been developed to date,” he said. “If you can imagine a computer doing it, then you can write a computer program to do it. That spirit has been behind so many wonderful developments. And when you connect that to the spirit of the Internet, the spirit of openness and sharing, it’s terribly stifling to creativity. It’s stifling to the academic side of doing research and thinking up new ideas, it’s stifling to the new industry and the new enterprises that come out of that.”

Smoke and mirrors and portals

Sympatico/MSN held a BBQ at Yonge-Dundas Square to celebrate their launch of the Sympatico.MSN.ca “superportal”. On hand were burgers, hotdogs, ice cream bars, mini-compass keychains that don’t work, and baseball caps. The homeless never ate so well; one fellow was helping himself to fistfuls of ketchup packets. On hand for entertainment were the AntiGravity troupe, with men on “AntiGravity Boots”, trapeze artists, and trampoline acrobats.

sympaticomsn 005.jpg

You think they overdid it? Naaah.

Shoulders of giants for rent

Did you know that US and EU copyright laws now extends creator’s rights to their deaths plus 70 years…effectively perpetuity? Or that Canadians enjoys cheaper meds than the USA, due to Canada’s anti-pricefixing laws? I’ve been reading Boing Boing‘s Cory Doctorow (and former Torontonian) argue for reform in today’s intellectual property laws for a few months now, and he’s always impressed me in how he makes his case.

If you ever wanted the 5-Minute University on Intellectual Property, look no further than Wired’s colour centerfolds on trends and statistics in piracy, medicine, genetics, and my current topic de force, open source.

Doctorow feels that current IP restrictions stifles innovation, and it’s hard to disagree in this age of idiotic software patents and the RIAA’s intimidating lawsuits. He sums it up quite well in this letter, where he points out that the self-righteous copyright owners of today were the pirates of yesteryear:

“…filmmakers (who enthusiastically violated Edison’s film patents), broadcasters (who played records without permission or payment), cablecasters (who pirated free-to-air signals for their networks) and even hybrid entertainment/electronics companies (like Sony, whose piratical VCR was characterized by the motion-picture people as the certain death of the film industry) are all standing shoulder to shoulder in the fight against programmers and ordinary citizens who have, once again, discovered a better way to distribute and reproduce creative works.

“It’s no surprise that these pirates of the entertainment industry want to pull the ladder up behind them and dog the hatch. After all, the traditional role of inventors has been to create massive new revenue opportunities for the entertainment industry, and the traditional response of the entertainment companies has been to seek legislative relief from those opportunities….

“In a world where 80 percent of the music ever recorded isn’t available for sale
anywhere, the P2P networks have revived what is, quite literally, the largest
library of human creativity ever assembled.”

The butterfly flies tonight

objects_june 010.jpg objects_june 012.jpg

This souvenir came in the mail today. It’s coming. It’s the Sympatico.MSN.ca website. Apparently the portal folks over at Queen’s Quay have been burning the midnight oil on this one. Hopefully they did right this time. Here’s to you folks, this all better be worth it.

Update: Nice site, although My Page doesn’t work in Mozilla and GetEmail seems to be down for most folks. Email passwords are also being transmitted unencrypted?!

Changes are three-fold:

  • new Sympatico MSN portal, with special customized version for Sympatico subscribers
  • MSN Premium software (free or by subscription, it’s not clear)
  • Sympatico Mail Enhanced by MSN (kinda like a Hotmail/GetEmail combo)

I was in the beta. Meh, it’s all about brand strategy.

Innovation and how to love your liver

It looks like one of our partner companies has devised a new innovation initiative. Which is fine, – who doesn’t like initiatives? – but I just can’t get over the name: Prometheus. According to the news release, he’s the “God of Innovation” and his name translates as “he who looks forward” and is known for “intelligence, service and excellence.”

Methinks someone didn’t crack open their Greek mythology texts in high school!

Prometheus was actually a conman. He was also a Titan, not a Greek god. It was his conning of Zeus that caused the Greek gods to take fire away from man in the first place.

I would also be wary of being the initiation lead behind this program. You see, for his transgressions, Prometheus was chained to a rock and had his liver eaten out by an eagle every day. His liver would regrow every night to begin the torture anew. Fortunately, Hercules rescued him only after 30 years of being a living foie gras luncheon platter.

Basically, Prometheus was not the type to win Employee of the Month awards. He didn’t even invent fire – he stole it from the forge of Hephaestus, the god of fire. Now there’s a better candidate for “God of Innovation”. Personally, I think Prometheus is a better spokesperson for P2P networks. 😉

When it comes to strategy and innovation, it is Athena that should be the patron goddess of IT. (The Vatican decided on St. Isidore for the Internet and all things computers.)

Moral of the Story: When naming stuff, make sure you actually know what your chosen name means.

Feet of clay

Two Jeffs stirring the pot this week:

An MBA not the cat’s meow after all?

“There are now so many schools churning out graduates, but demand for MBAs has stayed constant or fallen…”

Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a paper called “The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye” where he postulates that getting an MBA may not be as valuable as first thought. Anyone remember that FedEx commercial where the newly-minted junior executive has to fill out package slips his first day on the job? “But I’m an MBA!” he protests. “Ohhhh,” his manager realizes. “Then I better show you how to do it.”

“No one disputes that an MBA from a highly prestigious school such as Harvard, Wharton, Chicago, or Stanford can lead to high pay, partly because of the great contacts students make there. Still, Pfeffer cites study after study strongly suggesting that this is because those schools are so hard to get into (and so costly once you get there), only the best and brightest fast-trackers have a shot. In other words, they are people who most likely would have succeeded whether they went to B-school or not.”

Microsoft not the bee’s knees after all?

“The Web