My annual Radio subscription will expire in one month which means I better put together a replacement, hopefully with Blog Brix.  While I am at it, I am thinking of upgrading my website as well.  It's currently JSP-based but I am looking at replacing it with Velocity templates or extending it with JavaServer Faces.  This is also a good time to experiment with mixing blogging technologies with traditional website code.

Korean government announced on 27th that it plans to launch an online newspaper for government-related news.  There is already serveral websites (i.e. http://www.news.go.kr) with similar content, but the plan is interesting because it seems to be modelled after OhmyNews.com with government employees acting as reporters.  Seoul city government has already been operating a similar online newspaper (http://inews.seoul.go.kr) with one full-time editor/reporter and 100 citizen reporters writing articles.

Many traditional newspaper publishers are accusing the government of oppressing the press by creating a competing online newspaper.  I think this is a cool thing although it should allow all branches of the government equal access to the newspaper.

I wonder if they are going to have ads and cartoons...

Reading Tim's On Not Being a Gamer reminded me my own gaming experiences.  Unlike him, I am a gamer which means I have to stay away from games.  I avoid MORPG games like Everquest and DAoC because I know I will lose too many hours to the game.  They are highly addictive and sucks real world life out of you, replacing it with online life, laughing and roaring all by myself in my office.  It affects work and family life.  Thankfully, it's less addictive than smoking.

Still I miss the online RPG world.  The pinnacle of MORPG's magic is when your party runs smack into deepsh*t as Tim illustrated with two screenshots.  The rush of emotions unleashed while watching your and your companion's health stats drop like stone and flashing by in various shades of red is difficult to match in real life.  Perhaps waking up to find 200% overnight gain on my Yahoo call options might come close in magnitude.

In games like that, true character of a person comes out.  There are some who would teleport out on the first hint of trouble.  Can't blame them if they are mages, but I have seen some tanks do that in my gaming days.  Occasionally, I would come across characters who would jump in just to give time for the companions to get away.  Those times are more powerful than watching a good war buddies movie.

Besides RPG, I like playing wargames, particularly WWII wargames.  I usually play the American or British side but the rush of blitzing with those excellent German tanks, Panthers especially, is enough to lure me into German side occasionally.

Damn it, Tim.  Now you got me itching for some blood and gore online action.

Some information on TypePad's Template Builder UI has been released.  While it retains much of the first preview's clean design, it looks pretty complicated.  First problem is that there are two many levels, leading to nested tabs.

I would add some visual location hints.  Maybe a simplified upside down tree with colored branches and nodes showing where and how deep the page user is looking at.  Only the recently visited tree nodes should be labeled, leaving rest to show label on hover.  Each branch should be unique looking to allow users to identify it by shape.  Since number of tree images are finite and smart labelling can be done using client-side script, it should be cheap to implement.

The 'tree' provides not only a unique image for each page, but also an alternate means to navigation if the nodes are hyperlinked.  If similar simplified tree is used right side up for user web pages, then it all sort of fits together: tree for user pages, root for system pages.  Having a unique and easily identifiable image on each page means a lot to user experience.

Unless I am mistaken, Atom will require embedded XHTML to use numeric character entities ( ) instead of named character entities (i.e.  ).  While I understand the reasons, I think this may cause some round-tripping and usability problems.  Yet, there hasn't been much discussion over these issues except for a brief mention in one of the Wiki pages which I can't seem to locate at the moment.

While most blogs are readable and many are informative, very few are enjoyable.  I ran into one this morning as I was looking around to see if there are any good open source Java blog tools out there.  The short answer is No.

BileBlog is a Java blog, meaning it is all about Java, by an apparently anonymous Java programmer named fate.  If he isn't anonymous, he must have a mile thick skin because most, if not all, of his posts are ultra-strength rants, strong enough to peel golden paints off saints.  If you take a some good observations and valid complaints, mix with some amusing bullsh*t generalization, and wrap them in colorful analogies, you have a BileBlog post.

I enjoyed reading BileBlog because, despite all the unnecessary extras, fate's posts scratched many itchy spots I have about Java technologies.   If you are into Java, go check it out and see if it scratches some of your itchy spots.  If you are an open source Java programmer, be sure to wear some protection before wading into it.