Hacking the Good days…

At times, we need

The wisdom to see things that we can’t change

The graciousness to smile and nod

The courage to let go

The realisation that nothing is permanent

The inner peace that we still have us.

-to people we love

From Times Online, Simon Barnes wrote,

A lot of our fear and mistrust of China comes from the fact that it is a one-party state and that political unorthodoxy is discouraged. But it is a reckless misunderstanding to assume that the population are sublimely happy with this, and want nothing more than to serve the state. If that were so, the Chinese would indeed be a sinister lot: but the idea is absurd. I can exclusively reveal that most Chinese people wish to live happy, peaceful and fulfilling lives, to look after their families, to get enough to eat and to get a kick out of life.

Not entirely unlike us, then. So perhaps we should instigate a Cultural Revolution in the head: and look upon China not as a nation, but as place where 1.3 billion individuals happen to live.

Not sure about his emphasis on how ‘beautiful’ Hong Kong Chinese women are, but the rest of the article resonates with what I have been trying to articulate these days. Last thing I would add is, please, people, the notion of ‘Chinese people’ is a contestable one, just like you cannot assume all Americans are the same, as with any nations, not all ‘Chinese people’ are the same. One basic tenet of human rights is to respect people as individuals, instead of just a herd of things that move and feel the same way.

*sigh*

Can’t wait when August is over.

Sometimes this little thing in my head never seizes to amaze me. There are times you understand certain things in life that you have no control of, and you shouldn’t delve on it emotionally, but even though your mind might know, you heart leads you the other direction. It even amazes me more of how little control I have over it.

Okay, back to why my brain amazes me – it’s because i can’t believe i still remember the definition of cognitive dissonance is. Cognitive Dissonance, don’t take this as the definitive definition, is the state where our action contradicts our beliefs of ourselves. This makes us emotionally uncomfortable and we either distort the ‘reality’ or our beliefs of ourselves to make us feel better. Remember another one of those days that you may think you’re reasonably clever, and you can’t solve a problem, you might just think that you’re tired or the problem is not in the area of your expertise? Boo hoo, it’s not easy to admit that we’re not as smart as what we think… (have you ever helped a 15 years old with his/her maths??)

What is interesting is in a social situation, where there are people who might have big egos (but not necessarily strong), and have to be the centre, first and foremost. When not all attention falls into them, they get frustrated – instead of thinking what goes wrong with them, they think of what goes wrong with the person who take the attention away.

I am not sure why I was thinking this much about how our mind works, but I’d suggest a large part comes from the recent media/global attention on China and the Olympics. It’s been subliminally frustrating, as a Chinese who lives overseas hearing news about the Olympics, the increasingly polarised stances between ‘the Chinese’ and ‘the West’, split media attention, accusations on various levels from both ’sides’, the pressure for people to take sides, where focus is no longer on what are we in common, but us-and-them. It is overtly frustrating that increasingly you need to take a stance, you are either with us, or with them. You are either Chinese, or you are not.

Has anyone ever thought that underneath our skin, we might all be a bunch of potatos? Or tomatos? Or apples?

What really matters when we all ultimately seize to exist?

I meant to share a quote a few days ago, after watching a document on Frank Lloyd Wright that beautifully ended with a quote between Wright and Mike Wallace,

‘WRIGHT: Yes. You get so far, as I am immortal. I will be immortal. To me, young has no meaning, it’s something you can do nothing about. Nothing at all. But youth is a quality, and if you have it, you never lose it. And when they put you into the box that’s your immortality

If only each of us thinks of what kind of emotional, spiritual, intellectual trajectories we can leave to make this world a better place to be.

If only we demand less of others but ourselves.

If only we judge less and feel more.

If only.

Wright’s classic falling water, Flickr image from fred_jang

For those who are info junkies and geek in one – you might as well be curious about how the issues of surveillance, freedom (both positive & negative) unfold on the almighty World Wide Web. From Lawrence Lessig’s mapping of the history of copyrights development, to general international interests in how internet surveillance works in China (The Atlantic has a great article on this and they interviewed Andrew Lih, former new media professor and an avid Wikipedia contributor), Havard’s Berkman centre for Internet and Society will of course not miss this space as one of the thought-leader in this area:

This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk.

The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”

Just bought the book – can’t wait to check it out… For those what are in Boston, man, don’t miss the book talk on the 25th of April!

A while ago I wrote about the buzz around Fire Eagle, and I’m happy to announce that Steve Marshall is giving a presentation on Fire Eagle, at the Over the Air hack day here at Imperial College.

In nutshell, Fire Eagle is,

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy, [...] We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.

An interesting example Steve started with is a Wikipedia-Geo app wikinear.com – which finds Wikipedia pages near you geographically. That’s pretty awesome – the brilliant thing is the results – such as ‘Tokyo Diner’, ‘West End of London’, ‘The Ivy’ etc when you’re in London. Pretty cool, imagine when you’re strolling in new city – you literally become a walking Wikipedia :) :) :) One person asked how Fire Eagle knew where you were, and Steve mentioned that some Nokie updaters worked with Fire Eagle, and since it’s completely open, users can actually play around and check out how your phone can sync with Fire Eagle.

*Privacy note: You can purge your data from Fire Eagle anytime, and you can ‘hide’ yourself as well, more information check out readwriteweb’s review.

*For developers: A Yahoo! Group for Fire Eagle Developers (at the time of writing there are 450 members).

*Update: Steve’s blog on Fire Eagle links here.

This cracks me up – ironically I found this out on my ‘funwall’:

Even more ironically I’m feeling very very dreadful whenever I see all these pending ‘requests’ from my facebook. Weekdays we troll through thousands of work emails, and when we get home during weekends there’s another hundreds of stupid facebook apps out there – apps are probably just a phase, ultimately from a user’s point of view, I only care about how facebook helps us connect with one another:

Talking about application development, I was at the Over the Air hackday today and am really intrigued by how mobile can take on to become the next springboard of technologies connecting people together in an asynchronous manner (i.e. people are connected not in real time, instead our phones become an aggregating tool where users can choose when and who to respond to, just like our email, which is what the net is for). People often make parallel between facebook applications and mobile widgets, as in if there are many people using facebook applications, there can be a room of widgets for mobile.

One the contrary, partly stemming from my cynicism towards the facebook apps development trend, I see that a more timely and relevant comparison should be on how users discarding desktop computers and shifted towards a laptop paradigm for three reasons: the evolution between generations of technologies has much more to do with (1) hardware improvement, (2) providers’ cost reduction and (3) how users perceive new technologies. With the continuous price drop + expanding storage of mobile phones and flat rate for mobile internet service, next for the whole mobile/internet industry is why users should be using the internet on their mobile.

The key problem, as I learn from today’s keynote and our mobile engineer’s, Ricardo’s presentation*, is definitely compounded further by the challenge of interoperability – how can you create a functional tool that is workable on any mobile device? If I were to submit a hack tonight, it will probably be a knowledge-sharing platform that speeds up the mobile development process, probably a portal aggregating all resources as a directory in one place where developers share insights in the most efficient way they can, so that we can progress to a standardised, incremental approach more quickly than we are today. But how can we add value to the developers and what kind of functionalities this portal should possess, so that developers will look more than just their interested areas?

I quite like Yahoo! Go 3.0 bundle concept in this regard because once you created a widget and ensure it is supported by Yahoo! Go 3.0, we have a team of 200+ engineers making sure that your widget works with as many phones in the market as possible. When Ricardo was presenting this to the hackers they look pretty intrigued – hopefully by tomorrow there will be some interesting hacks coming out! :)

Updated: Ricardo’s presentation slides are available on his blog here