Al Hoang

I’m not much of a designer type person but I find Khoi’s answers to some of the questions posed regarding the information design of the NYTimes site interesting since it is a continual battle in trying to add more but use less to say more.

Here’s a quick snippet:

You can think of it as an elaborate logic puzzle, with the onus on my design staff to solve the puzzle using as few elements as possible, in as aesthetically pleasing a manner as possible. We strive to distill every template that we create down to its core parts, and actively debate the placement of nearly every element.

Read more here

Data Center Knowledge links to a story on data center rollouts in Vietnam:

Vietnamese technology company Quang Trung Software City (QTSC) and a U.S. company called DOT Vietnam have announced plans to build a $10 million data center in Ho Chi Minh City.

Some things that I’ve been wondering about with this data center are.

• Cooling and humidity (Vietnam is a tropical country after all)
• What companies will be using that data center once it is built.
• What will the network capacity outbound & inbound from this data center will be
• Price ranges for renting out a rack

I guess I’ll never know since this type of news will probably never get a follow-up article. Perhaps this is a good impetus to have a visit and see for myself what it will be like.

Just for contrast on budgets, M$ is plugging $500M USD to build a data center in Iowa.

For all 20 of the people on the planet probably interested in this…

Two new fonts have been announced by the Institute of Vietnamese Studies in
California for Vietnamese Nom characters. Of particular interest is that these
free fonts between them also cover the CJK-A and CJK-B extensions to Unicode.
(First seen on Unihan mailing list)

I’ll have to check this out soon.

Chinese Computing News Link

Link to the free fonts

Wired interviews Viet Dinh who helped draft the Patriot Act. I found the interview a major waste of words since it’s very obvious that the interviewer herself is strongly in the liberal camp as the way she asks questions it’s basically an accusation of the Patriot Act. These sharp questions bring on a rather gruff and defensive response from Mr Dinh.

Reading this interview just brought disappointment with both the left and the right sides back since both the interviewer and the interviewee seem to be spending more time word jousting than bringing up a meaningful conversation. Which is sad since I don’t follow politics that much. And having to slog through this just lessens my desire.

Here are some tidbits:

WN: Some critics have called you the purveyor of the most sweeping curtailment of freedom since the McCarthy era. Is that an exaggeration?

Dinh: I think it is very easy to employ sweeping rhetoric and personal denunciations. I think it is much harder to back it up with facts and concrete examples. I seek to engage in this conversation by giving as much facts as I can and letting the efforts of the Department of Justice, the administration and my own to be judged by the people, by history and by eternity. Where I err, I obviously am not hesitant in recognizing my mistakes. I wish people who criticize me would just pick up the phone and ask me specific questions, like we are engaging right now, so that we can isolate the issues of difference, so that we can engage in a constructive dialogue rather than a destructive dialogue.

Seems Vietnam is trying to make heavy overtures at the policy level to bring in Open Source to the country.   I welcome that gesture as right now Vietnam is a heavy Windoze shop among the people that actually have the oppurtunity to use a computer and using free or really really cheap software would make it much easier for the Vietnamese to access software without outright pirating it.

I wonder if the government needs any consultants to help them in the transition.  I’ll go

Hmmm not sure what to say. Just read the article and judge for yourself. Seems right now it’s Japan but I’m sure Vietnam would love to work with the U.S. I’m not sure what to think of the software industry and its future.