I think granting H-1B visa by public review might be more effective than the way it's done now. The idea is to let any U.S. citizen participate in to the selection process. One way to do that is, with H-1B application and applicant submitted resume available online, give N opinion points for each volunteer to express positive or negative opinion on N applicants. Authentication can be done with the same way electronic tax filing is done.

There is lots of room for abuse but, conceptually, I like this idea.

What follows Tax Day in my brain? My birthday. Yup, I took another step toward 50 today, leaving just four more steps left. Oy.

I don't like birthdays but I had to give in when my son let me know I was robbing him the pleasure of buying his dad a birthday present. So I let him get me Grand Theft Auto IV. Nice, particularly because I tend to spend most of my time looking at places when I play games. I haven't had the time to play the game yet but I am hoping Liberty City is as well implemented as the cities and valleys in Assassin's Greed where I've been spending an hour every other day just running around or climbing to catch virtual sunsets.

It would be cool to play full online world version of GTA. Maybe with stock market as well as fences to sell stolen goods. And it would be cool to have top 1000 bloggers in the game as roadkills, er, residents.

Hysteria over mad cow disease is reaching boiling point in South Korea (photos of candle vigil), triggered by recent pre-FTA concession by South Korean President Lee to remove ban against US beef and boosted by a timely sensational episode on PD Notebook, a Korean version of 60-minutes.

Regardless of all the arguments for or against US beef export to Korea, I find it interesting that people are desensitized to countless deaths-by-car yet hysterical over the possibility of death-by-food. And it's ironic that Korean automakers stand to gain significantly from the US-Korea FTA if it goes through.

Java 6 is now available for Leopard but it's 64-bit only and I've confirmed that Eclipse 3.3 won't run using it. So it's appropriate only for running 64-bit ready Java software (like Tomcat) for now.

If you still want to set it as default VM, first try the Java Preference app in:

/Applications/Utilities/Java

The app is apparently sensitive to command-level profile changes so it didn't work for me. What worked for me is the following:

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions

sudo ln -fhsv 1.6 CurrentJDK

sudo ln -fhsv 1.6 Current

To undo above changes, simply repeat the command back to where CurrentJDK and Current symlinks were pointing to. For me, following worked:

sudo ln -fhsv 1.5 CurrentJDK

sudo ln -fhsv A Current

My company is in need of a consultant in Menlo Park area who is highly knowledgable about mozilla source code platform, enough to build a custom version of Firefox. You must know mozilla's platform layer, network, and security manager layer, XPCOM, and XUL like back of your hand.

Please send your resume to me (click on my photo).

Latest trend seems to be telling Microsoft what it should do with Vista being more well known as a curse rather than the replacement for Windows XP so here is my two cents worth:

Microsoft should build a browser only operating system. No desktop. No file-system. No applications. No endless parade of features. Nothing but a tabbed-browser. Take only the essential bits out of Vista kernel, enough to hoist browser on top and select few essential apps to run inside browser window, then throw in necessary update features with 360-like network support, then give it away as Microsoft Web 2.0 to box makers and anyone who wants it.

Revenue stream comes from ads and selling additional apps and necessary OS extensions via the application network. Lock it down so users can't just download any software and run on the system, in the name of security. Vulnerabilities? Reload the entire OS (well, deltas) when any unregistered bits are detected. Who needs anti-virus if the whole kitchen sink is thrown out and replaced at the first whiff of trouble? Trouble getting users to install .NET? Don't offer the choice if you don't like what people chooses. Flash? Locked down like iPhone and make Adobe beg to meet the necessary needs and no more like playing YouTube but screwing AIR. Let Adobe build AIRphone if they want to.

What Microsoft gets:

• Software distribution network
• De facto search engine
• Payment network
• Massive identity network
• Secure platform
• Largest IM network

The list can go on and on. The beauty is that Vista and beyond can go on in parallel. If done right, less than 250 people needs to be thrown in to repackage what Microsoft already has and repackage it within a year. This would cost far less than what it takes to buy Yahoo with even better result, return to monopoly over hundreds of millions of users.

Are there any programmable game chairs out there? I mean one with force feedback motors instead of chair on woofer kind. Chairs from Ultimate Game Chair looks good but I've read that they are driven by sound output instead of specific force feedback signals because game console makers started to encrypt the signals.

My need is not urgent because the idea (no, it's not a game) I want to explore has been gathering dust in my head for more than a decade but I want to start collecting necessary parts, one of which is zero-g chair with fine-grained force feedback control. Biggest concern I have with my idea is motion sickness and fatigue (imagine playing Grand Turismo for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week). Only workaround I have is selective process like the way fighter pilots are chosen.

Before Web exploded, I used to haunt Stanford libraries, looking for referenced papers and proceedings. Even now, Web offers breadth but rarely the depth of information I want to research without hitting some fee-barriers. Most often, I would hit the wall at ACM when I am find an interesting paper then try to follow the trail of referenced papers. I used to find interesting USENIX proceedings to buy when I used to visit bookstores weekly but I haven't had the need nor urge to visit a bookstore in years.

The good news is that USENIX papers are now free. The bad news is that ACM and IEEE papers are still not.

Solution for a general social network problem I've been thinking about for the past year suddenly started to jell tonight. Not too sure what to do about it since I am engaged fully except to give hint in the form of blog post title. Yeah, I know a thing or two about teasing. ;-p

Being able to write code for any platform in any languages is a good thing but having to do it in parallel is not. While overseeing java-based server-side development, I am tasked with developing clients in Firefox (javascript, XUL), Internet Explorer (C++/Win32), AIR (actionscript/javascript, Flex/HTML), and now iPhone (Objective-C/OS X). That's five language and six platforms I have to juggle. It's times like this that recent abundance of syntax-aware editors with auto-completion shine. And, of course, Google code search provides instance access to all the example codes (good, bad, and ugly) in the world.