09 January 2003

Product vs. Service: VoIP Interesting story about some big corporation trying to charge a premium for a cheap service. Analogues of telephone companies and WiFi-service providers were drawn. I am wondering whether charges of the various local companies are too high, and why they claim to lose money over local voice lines. 11:42:43 AM

Macworld Expo Comments Continue Safari breaks single day download record for Apple. The browser war is not concluded! 9:29:39 AM

Macworld Expo: Exciting Times The media have been saturated with information on new hardware and software from Apple just announced in Macworld Expo. Apple's new presentation software Keynote is very interesting. I look forward to playing with it and using it. I like the form factor of the 12" Powerbook G4, althou I am not comfortable that it lacks a PCMCIA card slot. I admit that the PCMCIA card slot on my 15" TiBook is unoccupied most of the time, so it is quite possible that Apple's decision not to put the slot in the new machine is sound. The Airport Extreme is also very interesting. This piece of equipment could serve as an access point and a bridge at the same time, meaning that one can form a mesh WiFi network easily. There are access points, and there are bridge, but I believe this is the first one which does both. Pity to use the Airport Extreme card (for the high speed) I would have to upgrade to a new machine, which I won't be able to do until next year. The new Safari browser will replace Microsoft Internet Explorer as the default browser on new machines. It is based on the KHTML core, and is lightning fast. It beats Chimera on speed by a comfortable margin. However, it has problems handling tons of CSS stuff. Web developers will have to support an additional browser from now on, which is of course bad news. 9:06:01 AM

Basic Law Section 23 Legislation Demonstration I attended the big rally and demonstration a few weeks ago, and bummed into Po, a good friend who is a student at the Lingnan University down the road from where we live. He was helping the Student Association folks (who did some fine work at the rally demo) to take pictures of participants. I received the following email this morning. 各位朋友： 你好, 我地係學聯社會運動資源中心(簡稱8樓)呀！… 上次係反對23條大遊行中，我地攪左個影流，大家寫左留言， 我地幫大家影左相！ D相已經晒好喇！ 我地打算送返比你呀！ 日期：11/1/2003/1/9 [Ed: 11/1/2003] 時間：大概下午5:30 地點：九龍旺角西洋菜街(行人專用區)我地有街站 做咩：羅相、同大家再傾下計、同其他行人傾下23條？？？無所謂 有咩打比彩鳳96240117 / 27873551 彩鳳 費用全免 歡迎捐獻 查詢電話: 27873551 , 73022646 蘿蔔糕 電郵 : smrc (AT) sinatown.com 主辦 : 學聯社運資源中心 地點 : 旺角彌敦道739號金輪大廈 8/F A (太子始創中心斜對面, 隧道比鄰,煎釀三寶隔離) Not that I didn't shoot myself on the day... I'll try to attend their "debrief" session. The least we could do to support these fine young people. 7:00:56 AM