With increasing number of broadband ISPs choking BitTorrent traffics down to irrelevant level, I fear BitTorrent is no longer an acceptable platform for new applications. What do you think?

Having watched the Jazz.net demo video, I have mixed feelings. I don't want to trivialize the tremendous amount of sweat and heart that went into the project but, to put it bluntly, it feels too…stereotypical German. By that I mean too focused on functionalities and not enough attention paid to what gives the namesake, jazz, life.
As I watched Eclipse evolve, I noticed the same happening. Proliferating views and perspectives, each making perfect sense yet, as a whole, cluttered and bewildering. Jazz.net is an extension of Eclipse. Watching the video, I had to wonder what it would feel like being a cog in the machinery of Jazz.net. Jazz.net enables global projects but at what price? Where is the life in engineering? What will engineering be like if it's measured only in metrics and graphs? Precision can be fun but visibility and control are both blessings as well as curses.
I wish the best for the Jazz.net team but I wish there was more, more space, more room for us than details. I know that I am asking for something elusive because, even in midst of 40 close guild members at Molten Core, supposedly having fun, we can feel like less than a person and more like a switch waiting to fire in time. But then maybe there is no room for us in the machinery of global economy. 

My copy of RESTful Web Services, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby, arrived this morning so I spent some time reading and skipping through chapters. It's a well written easy to read book that attempts to shed more light on an increasingly popular yet still foggy and unfortunately politically charged area called REST (Representational State Transfer).
Overall, I think anyone interested in REST will find 400+ pages of examples and clear explanations very helpful. As for me, most of the content wasn't new to me but I ordered the book to read Chapter 8: REST and ROA Best Practices. As expected, the chapter insightfully enumerates a broad range of design issues REST developers are likely to encounter.
Good stuff but, like a tasty appetizer, the chapter left me wishing for more, a book that focused soley on the subject covered by the chapter, maybe a series of compendium is needed to cover the growing body of knowledge as the area evolves through wider use.

As I mentioned before, I am in midst of launching a webapp under Appily label. Underlying theme of Appily is a growing collection of simple yet practical webapps. While the first app is being preped for trial launch, I wanted to start thinking about the follow up which is intended to address common teleconferencing needs. One problem I have is that I am a frequent teleconferencing user but never hosted one involving more than a handful of people.
So I would like to have in-depth discussion with folks who frequently hosts medium to large teleconferences (i.e. financial teleconferences). If you are such a person and you are interested in helping me identify common problems, please contact me.

UPDATE: If you would rather just coredump teleconferencing problems and wants, please use the comments. Note that I am not looking to replace any existing teleconferencing systems (it'll be awhile before telephones go out of style), just augment them to improve their effectiveness.

GNUCitizen points out some potential XSS vulnerabilities in Google Gears. My only take away is that developers have to be more careful and scrub everywhere, not just at the server-side. More work is good, me think. ;-p

Once in a while, a good paper appears in the endless river of PhD thesises, one that stands out because it's likely to impact the near future. This time it is Solid Texture Synthesis from 2D Examplars . Check out the video and, if you are into computer graphics, read the 22mb paper.
In case you are wondering, I no longer actively keep track of research papers. I ran into this one while researching the current state of art in realtime in-game editing. Answer: recent progress is rather disappointing.
Update: Pete Shirley's blog seems to be a good source for pointer to graphics-related papers. A single cascading topic focused search will reap more results than one has time to read but it would be nice to have a federation of insightful blogs specializing in computer graphics.

Yup. Technorati is down. I had to comment out Technorati scriptfile loading code from the front page so the page can finish loading. I don't know if the scriptfile is really needed after a blog has been successfuly claimed but less dependency on other site the better so I won't be restoring it when Technorati comes back.

This incident is unfortunate because they appeared to be on their way back recently.

I doubt blogs like Engadget will run out of new products to post about any time soon but the rate at which we are depleting rare earth is a concern. Rare earth is used in a wide variety of high tech products like LCD and cellphone yet 90% of it comes from China.
Will China tighten its grip  on rare earth export like OPEC does with oil? I think it is in their best interest to do so. Even worse, I think China may stop exporting rare earth all together to initially monopolize manufacturing then eventually to dominate development.
Will nano-technology advance fast enough to erase our dependency on rare earth before we run out of it? Whatever the answer is, it's going to an exciting race.

Meanwhile, my MBP is no longer the top of the line. Dang. 4G of RAM is nice.

I don't know when nor why it happened but Akismet now thinks my blog comments are spams, even comments to my own posts. How do I redeem myself to Akismet? O Kiss Me Akismet!

During my daily visit to Cute Overload, I noticed what looked like a plea for help. Clicking through, I ended up at SaveMyHusband.com site where there were two videos, one by the wife of the abducted man and another of the abduction taking place. The site and videos smelled fake but I didn't notice anything that clearly indicated that site is a marketing gimick by CourtTV.
I don't know who is responsible for this highly offensive marketing stunt but it disgusted me enough to never look at another CourtTV program. I am also unsubscribing from Cute Overload because they allowed this highly deceptive ad to run on their blog.
I guess marketing breeds intolerance too.
UPDATE: The 'plea' video is now clearly marked to indicate it's just a dramatization. Good. Their ad at CO still has nothing more than an easily overlooked gray Premium Ad link at the bottom. Even noticed, all that say is that someone paid for the ad, not that it's a game.