I made this comment elsewhere on the Net, posted here because I don't blog often enough these days:

I am concerned more about increasing polarity among news media in middle-tier countries like South Korea, liberals and conservatives subscribing only to news mediums that reflect their biases, news mediums fueling biases of their subscribers for monetary or idealistic profit. It's quite an ugly loop of bias that leaves little room for discussion and facts, leaving only room for debates and rumors.

I've had this view for quite a while now but stating it now because the trend is picking up speed thanks to Internet. What this trend leads to is a vacuum of active moderates, leaving only passive middle in the political spectrum. As polarity grows, each side finds it increasingly difficult to understand the views of the other side, pushing past the point of absurdity and moving toward the point of dehumanization and beyond: violence in the name of patriotic duty.

Watching Joi's video of bamboos in his backyard reminded me that I neglected to blog about our cactus which started it's second firework a month ago. It sort of looks like bamboo but no bamboo shoots. I hope it blooms soon because it's getting too tall.

Above picture was taken from my home office with my iPhone (no Leica like Joi and too lazy to climb out of my coding hole). Cactus on the left is what remained from the first slow mothion firework.

Speaking of bamboos, we had bamboos too but it started to spread out of control so we had to get rid of them (tried everything but finally had to get rid of the wooden deck and pave over them with concrete). I still occasionally get nightmares of bamboo breaking out of concrete.

I haven't got around to read about Dave's SwitchABit until now but it sounds a lot like what I had in mind with Appily except, where Appily's approach is client-side, SwitchABit is server-side. Or is it client-side too, like Radio was? Either way, I think Dave is on the ball: personal service combinator.

As a business, I think server-side is better but that's seemed less exciting than client-side to me when I was sketching out Appily. I wish I had more time for Appily. What am I doing now? Working my butt off to launch something exciting in the security space.

XP SP3 update appears to be running just fine in relatively fresh (5 months) installation of XP running on my laptop's VMware Fusion but not on my PC with 2 year old XP installation. Most annoying symtom is IE7 hanging more than 10 times a day on arbitrary pages. I tried several supposed fixes but to none are working. I've been suspecting that many security vulnerability patches from Microsoft resorted to adding extra synchronization blocks resulting in more frequent pauses and, now, it looks like they've finally gone overboard, leaving IE useless. Uninstalling SP3 until coast is clear.

On the Firefox side, I had to abandon Firefox 3.0B5 in favor of a nightly build (ironically named Minefield despite being more stable than B5) because it was crashing too often. 

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.

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.