Internet and WWW

Did anybody try live.com lately? It looks nice but they have a long way to go. Microsoft is creating this to compete with yahoo and google better than what it did with MSN, but there are some fundamental issues with it and they better fix them if they really want to be in the race.

My thoughts on Web 2.0. Let me know what you think...

Ahh, the glory of a good Flash Gordon reference; it never fails to brighten one's day. But today I am not following the orders of General Kala, or doing the bidding of Ming the Merciless. Today, I am playing The Curmudgeon on the subject of Web 2.0 and the mysteries of Asynchronous JavaScript And XML--better known to the digerati these days as AJAX.

Caught wind of this via Slashdot. It's a review of a billion webpages, undertaken by the WHAT Working Group, with an eye towards seeing what HTML names, elements, attributes, and related metadata people are actually using.

The following has also been submitted to comp.risks.

In today's (Feb 17 2005) New York Times, James Dao ("Philadelphia hopes to lead the charge to wireless future") describes lawsuits brought by profit-seeking (not necessarily profit making) companies against the setup of public access wireless.

These lawsuits are frivolous in the sense that after five or so years, wireless coverage in the USA is at best patchy and unavailable to many people. In some cases, such as that of TMobile "access" at Starbuck's, I believe (without being a lawyer) that its sale violates the law, because a credit card is required and the service is unavailable for "legal tender" cash payment.

...is located on the first floor of the enormous Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Shue, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

The Chungking Mansion is a warren of guest-houses, mosques, fortune-tellers, and shops. It's mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide for China, which expresses pious hope that its reader does not elect to doss there on the night it chooses to burn down.

All different sorts of chaps of all religions queue patiently at the Chungking, even for an elevator to their room.

I was really so excited when I first saw popup blockers a couple of years ago. I thought my dream came true to go to a website without worrying about unlimited popups that gets on to my nerves. I was thinking like, there is surely something called happy surfing and I had all these fantasies about surfing the net without any interruptions.

Last week I received two intriguing emails from the Washington Mutual Bank, prompting me that some unauthorized activities have been noticed on my account. First I was stunned. A: I don't have a personal account with them. B: I co-signed a joint account at a Washington Mutual Bank for a friend of mine five years ago. My friend was here in the US on a business visa, and he badly needed a bank account to cash his checks. So I helped him out by co-signing.