Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Ever heard of the Secondary Inspection Zone at the US customs @ YVR (Vancouver Airport)? Well, I was a guest in that room today. Woke up at 5:00 AM to catch a 7:20 flight (I learned from a past experience that you need to be there at the least 1 hr before departure, that's another story). Anyway, got there at 6:15 and started lining up. Due to the nature I am applying for the Chinese Visa (leaving for China on Saturday), my passport is in the Chinese embassy at Ottawa. I showed my driver's license and social insurance card plus a credit card to the custom officer and they were not satisfied, sent me to a room full of foreign passport holders and wait for a "secondary inspection". The officer in the secondary inspection area did explain to me that a driver's license and social insurance card is no long good for entering USA, after a detailed explanation of why I don't have my passport and the reason of my trip to Sonoma County, she kindly agreed to let me in. However she did have to "blog" the whole thing into the database. By the time I reached the gate, it was 7:18 and I literally watched the plane backed away and took off. I was stucked at the airport for 4 hours, while D'arcy, King and Liang (my UBC coworker) are waiting for me on the other side... Anyway, I don't normally write the daily experiences here, but today's event is bloggable. And for those of you who are planning to travel to States in the next little while, try to bring your passport just to make things easier. And depend how suspicious you look, you may have to leave a finger print behind.

Rumors say leading universities in China are constructing a joint project to produce (or collaborate with the existing technology - Turnitin.com) a Chinese character/documentation recognition/comparison site to help instructors to prevent assignment plagiarism.

When my buddy Joel sent me the message this morning I thought he was joking. Wow, 2 long term competitors are going into a joint adventure? Over the last few years, Adobe faced serious challenges from Macromedia. As a relatively younger company, Macromedia has done an amazing job to take over the web design and online media development market. Adobe tried to produce their version of "Dreamweaver" (Go Alive) and "Flash" (Live Motion), but both attempts failed. Macromedia faced same challenge, however, their "Fireworks" did take over a large number of (Photoshop) users (myself as one of the converted Firework user). I personally believe this acquisition will make the product line much stronger but of cause the consumers will be lack of choice and the market will be dominated by a giant Blue Chip company. I am however, anxious to find out how will Flash change over the next period of time since many of my current projects are related to the technology, Learning Object Authoring Templates, Pachyderm and more...

The current internet is built upon IPv4 technology where an IP (Internet Protocol) address is assigned to every single computer that is connected to the World Wide Web. A finite number (4,000 million) of IP addresses are shared across the world. Since Internet was originated in the United States, therefore, USA has the biggest piece of the pie which is over 1,200 million IP addresses. China, on the other hand, is a late comer and therefore has less than 60 million IP address. According to the population of the two nations, 22 Chinese have to share 1 IP address where a single American can have over 6 IP addresses. This obviously effect the Internet services in China and it’s surrounding areas. The current scarcity over Internet IP address is not only effecting China but also Asia in general. The solution to the problem is to roll out IPv6 for commercial internet usage as soon as possible.

Till the end of this year, China will have invested RMB1.4 billion to build a commercial IPv6 backbone network to connect all its major cities. The IPv6 network will be the largest in the world and will start full operation in 2006. The beta tests of this new network will start next month. IPv6 uses 128 bits address length which will generate an almost infinite number of IP addresses compare to the 32 bits length address (IPv4). However China is still limited to 2.2% of the overall IP address resources in the IPv6 era. USA will have 13.7%.

Jeremy Jaynes was convicted for using false Internet addresses to send mass e-mail ads through a server of Internet service provider AOL. He was considered among the top 10 spammers in the world, used the Internet to peddle pornography and sham products and services such as a "FedEx refund processor. There were 53,000 illegal e-mails presented by the prosecutors in the court but authorities believe Jaynes was responsible for spewing out 10 million e-mails a day and made millions of dollars. He was sentenced for 9 years in jail.

Interestingly enough, one of my co-worker Joel Chauvin mentioned to me about google's new service "Google Map" this afternoon, then I read this from D'Arcy Norman's blog. It took less than 3 min to find my building in both map version and Satellite version! Quite amazing! I have to say the navigation and interactivity of the image data is very smooth. It's amazing to think about nail down a specific building starting from the entire North Amercian map! Go check it out yourself... I remember reading an article talking about Bill Gates recently commented on GPS technology and his interest in having a scoop in the pie. Guess Google is taking it seriously?

Click here to view the bigger picture.

* NEW * 2006 e-readiness rankings available here

The e-readiness rankings is an annual ranking system over the world's 60 largest economies. It is a measure of the country's e-business environment. But of cause the numbers may also indicate how amenable a market is to Internet-based opportunities. The research studies over 100 quantitative and qualitative criteria across 6 distinct categories. I personally think the collected figures may be fluctuate in a quite large range. Plus it is meaningless to compare a smaller regional economie vs a much larger one (HK vs entire Mainland China, should be HK vs Shanghai etc.). But it is a good enough data to represent how well the government has done over all in the past years on supporting technology growth in the regions.

				        e-Readiness Ranking
Country		Score(2004)		2004	2003	2002	
Denmark		8.28			1	2	7
UK		8.27			2	3	3
Sweden		8.25			3	1	4
Norway		8.11			4	7	11
Finland		8.08			5	6	10
USA		8.04			6	3	1
Singapore	8.02			7	12	11
Netherlands	8.00			8	3	2
Hong Kong	7.97			9	10	14
Switzerland	7.96			10	8	4
Canada		7.92			11	10	9
Australia	7.88			12	9	6
Germany		7.83			13	13	8
Korea		7.73			14	16	21
Austria		7.68			15	14	13
...
China           3.96                    52      50

For the full report, please read the original document:
http://graphics.eiu.com/files/ad_pdfs/ERR2004.pdf

Did you know you can get $500 US dollars for every bug you find on Firefox?! The Mozilla Foundation is committed to this promise so seriously that they made a public offer to a German bug hunter $2,500 US dollars for the five vulnerabilities he discovered. This once again reflect the bright future of the open source community. In contrast, the software giant-Microsoft only relies on a team of beta-testers who tests the programs without being rewarded at all other than a price reduction or bonuses for the program they are testing.

I truly believe the current product oriented business model will soon be replaced by service oriented business model in the software industry. This may also help the software providers to fight against the increasing piracy issues.

Google announces today that they will double the Gmail user space to 2GB in the next few weeks. According to New York Times, Gmail also plans to remove limits on message capacity as it competes for users with Yahoo Inc. This makes me think when will Microsoft eventually give up on making money out of their email services. The 3 giant online service providers (Yahoo! Google MSN) are really heating up the battle recently, like expected, 2005 is going to be an exciting year for the IT industry.

Check this animated GIF out, so funny! Hint, focus on one guy at a time...

Click HERE to view the animated version...