Guan Yang's Radio Weblog

What is the point of e-district.net?. None, so far as we can see [The Register] The guy who's responsible for Flash should be rounded up, dipped in tar and feathers, roasted on hot coals, tortured, mutilated and chopped to pieces, and then really hurt.

First, it'll be priced competitively with Groove. But unlike Groove which is a closed box, Radio 7.1 will be totally open. Easy to replace. Its purpose is to manage static sites from your desktop. The cursor moves out of the cloud and onto your desktop. [Scripting News] Well, free Radio was nice as long as it lasted. Guess I'll just switch to Vanilla.

I'm doing a maths hand-in right now. With Emacs, L_AT^EX and Mathematica.

Alex reminded me that the Torneau store where I bought my Fossil wristwatch was looted recently. Kind of makes you think...

On a scale from 1 to 10, how weird is this? Actually, this is where I bought my watch (Fossil, $75). They said the battery would last around 10 years, but I could come back for a free change. Now I see I've been cheated.

Despite the address, the store is actually immediately beneath 2 World Trade Center.

Infrared HotSyc® is so cool. Look - no cables!

Berkshire Hathaway issued a statement Friday estimating the total liability of its reinsurance arms, GeneralCologne Re, the oldest reinsurer in the world founded in 1852, at $2.2 billion. Berkshire is a very large U.S. taxpayer having paid about $2.7 billion in U.S. Federal income taxes for the two years ending December 31, 2000. Since a very high percentage of the losses will be borne by U.S. subsidiaries, Berkshire will receive an immediate tax benefit in the form of a reduction of estimated taxes payable during the remainder of 2001 and a prompt refund of estimated payments made earlier in the year. Incidentally, Berkshire Hathaway is one of the few reinsurers that has a negative cost of float.

Has anyone else noticed that The Economist smells funny? The pages have this weird smell - chlorine?

The math teacher got really mad today when he found out that everyone in the class had copied a proof from me (that I had gotten from someone else). Should avoid single points of failure in the future.

US markets open in 24 minutes.

I've just become editor of my first category at dmoz. My personal goal as an editor: Help World:Dansk grow larger than 100,000 sites.

My ICQ number has 8 digits. Embarassing.

Interesting math problem: If x + y = a and x² + y² = b², express x⁶ + y⁶ in terms of a and b.

Why does the Danish media refer to NASDAQ® as a "technology exchange"? Here's one example from CNN.dk: "The headquarters of the American technology exchange Nasdaq collapsed ... A spokesperson for Nasdaq said that the collapse would not affect the trading in technology stocks." Weird.

Interesting fact in this week's Economist: September 11, 1922 was the day when a British protectorate was established in Palestine against stiff Arab opposition.

The major Danish portals, like SOL and Jubii, are in a major cash crunch right now. They've tried to fight off bankruptcy with layoffs, porn and charging businesses for links in their directory. Now the major Danish portals have started an initiative to make the ISPs [sic] pay them out of their profits from Internet traffic. Logic: The portals generate revenue for ISPs, so they should get a share. Meanwhile the media (i.e. the portals and their content suppliers) are painting gloom pictures of a world where there is no original Danish content on the net; they claim that 70% of the traffic on broadband ADSL connections goes to the foreign media mafia (duh).

I am have no sympathy. The general quality of Jubii and SOL is such that I am surprised they have any costs at all. Jubii basically consists of a directory that's perhaps more comprehensive that the dmoz Danish section, but certainly not as good. Its editorial policies are archaic and Yahooesque. The Danish portals lack imagination in developing web services, and ultimately their demise would be a good thing. A new crop of portals would emerge that either present a low-cost Reuters-on-the-net model with directory data from dmoz and develop other services in-house with cheap Russian labor, or buy them on the ASP market. The other kind of portal would be cost-heavy, with services that are worth paying for - like comprehensive financial information or a high-quality community.

How we know Echelon exists

Danish Re has photos of every single employee, along with bio information. That's what I call openness.

School
I've been back in school for more than a month now. As you might know, the IB Diploma Program has 3 subjects at higher level (5 90-minute lessons per 2 weeks) and 3 at standard level (3 lessons per 2 weeks). Unfortunately, my school doesn't have sufficient funds to teach HL and SL separately in all subjects, so we're taught together. This means that I have significantly more than the anticipated 450 minutes per week - probably closer to 650 minutes. This also means that when the common core in each subject has been covered, I'll only have around 300 minutes a week.

My six subjects are Danish A1 SL, English A1 SL, Psychology SL, Mathematics HL, Physics HL and Economics HL.

Danish and English are so-so. Not the most interesting subjects in the world (right now we're reading Medea and Death of a Salesman, respectively) but certainly not the worst I have. English is a lot better than last year, where I got a 7 for the thinnest essay I have ever seen.

Psychology sucks, big-time. The material we're covering is extremely boring and tedious.

Physics is probably the easiest subject we have. IB Physics does't require any significant intelligence, and the necessary mathematical and analytical skills are negligible.

Economics is probably the most interesting subject I have.

I purchased 100 shares of THRAN.CO last Thursday.

Reuters screenshots.

Just changed to a new TrackPoint. It feels really great to use a completely fresh 'Point - they get really worn fast.

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Real-time access to Reuters is a surreal experience.

I remember eating a hot dog at the WTC last year, in front of the Borders at 3 World Trade Center. That's also where I bought my Zippo.

CNN has been down for most of the day, but it seems that they're up again with a static page, still running iPlanet. I like this format a lot better.

We had a really cool bug today. I was using the wrong call to check a timestamp that was in seconds since the epoch, but I didn't discover this because the ns_gmtime result (a Tcl list) was still less than the expiry date (an integer). But last night when time_t rolled into 10^9 people couldn't log in.

Currently compiling GCC 3.0.1 because PyWX does nasty things with egcs-2.91.66.

Apparently it's not that wise to invest in a KFX (the main index on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange) index fund. If you had invested Kr. 10,000 in the following funds in 1993, you would have this amount today:

Sparinvest KFX Aktier	23,379.00
Danske Invest Danmark	41,091.87
Uniinvest Danmark	33,738.68
Alfred Berg Danmark	28,000.00

So KFX actually performed worse than all the broad Danish stock funds listed. (This is of course because there aren't that many mutual funds in Denmark - precisely 157.)

The server that hosts Unicast has effectively been down for several days. What happened was that our ISP, DHT, changed upstream provider, and we had to change IP addresses. They forgot to tell me about this, so I thought it was just one of their regular bouts of downtime (the very reason they changed upstream providers). Then I found out that the IPs had changed, and had to phone them with instructions for changing the IP on Red Hat 6.2. And then the nice guys at Network Sol^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HVeriSign Global Registry Services decided not to update the gTLD zone files for almost 24 hours.

A new perspective on Dave Winer.

Jakob Nielsen on Google's text ads: It's also cheap to run a few hundred exposures to test an ad's click-through rate. The 355 exposures of the field study ad cost $5, which is cheaper than having a staff member even think about whether to run the ad or not.