Photosynth demo is certainly impressive but I am more excited about where it leads to. If one can weave all the photos online into a single world fabric, imagine what will happen when you add video. One minute video taken by a tourist anywhere contains, on the average, 900 frames. Even after accounting for lower resolution, redundancies, and motion artifacts, there are a lot of information there, particularly 3D hints.
Now imagine a virtual world that is built entirely out of all the photos and videos uploaded to the Net, one that is constantly updated and missing parts filled-in over time as camera-wielding tourists roam the globe, a world that offers new business opportunities. A service like Like.com can let loose spiders into that world to tag products with price and shopping information. Enterprising individuals can also offer richer experiences for a fee.
Fun stuff.

With so many new advertising startups, I think we'll soon see negative advertising sites. Call it TechGrill.com, the nemesis of TechCrunch. Instead of mentioning products and services that editors like, TechGrill focuses on the downside, kicking the balls of technology if you will. Why is this interesting? It's interesting because when someone is down (er, kicked down that is), others will profit. In practical terms, companies would want to advertise where their competitors are grilled.
PS: don't bother looking up the domain name. I took it just in case I get bored enough to actually do it. After all, I enjoy telling people what's wrong with them. ;-p

I trust the Democrats as much as I trust the Republicans. In my mind, democrats are incompetent fools and republicans are arrogant bastards. Now that the democrats are drowning in euphoric taste of power, I fear it will move too far and too fast to the other side. Can Bush provide the necessary balance of power to keep overly excited democrats in balance? I doubt it. Nancy Pelosi? How long before she freaks out in earnest?
What I hate about American politic is that it swings left and right madly like a teenager with hormone imbalance. What sickens me is that the division between the two parents, Republican and Democrat whom I consider to be father and mother of this country, continues to widen. Polarization is a nice way to describe a disfunctional family. There is no love in this family. Dad is as arrogant as before but with less finesse, more religious, and overly paranoid. Now the Mom is in charge and ready to kick some butt but I don't think anyone will be smiling happily anytime soon.
Well, that's enough politics to last a year at least. Now back to ignoring.

I got my MBP C2D today although today was shipping date not the delivery date. Actually, it arrived this morning but I was sleeping and my wife was at the gym so I had to pick it up after 6pm which means I couldn't focus all day.
After spending some time with it, two things surprised me:

• it's very quiet (no buzz, no hiss, no fan noise, no hard drive clicking).
• During normal use, temperature is just warm above the function keys and room temperature near the palm rest. Even the bottom was only slightly warmer than the top. On my lap, it was like having an electric blanket on my lap instead of a taster which was what I was expecting. My lap would probably sweat after a while but I don't think it's hot enough to burn or even slow cook. Things got pretty hot though with two yes >> /dev/null going, as hot as MBP used to be during normal use, well at least the ones I played around with at Apple Store a few months ago.

Compared to how hot MBP was before, I think Apple now has better control over the temperature problem. This doesn't mean they have manufacturing consistency problem licked though. I could have been just lucky.
Performance wise, there are noticeable delays but I think that's the usual OS X related delays and not CPU gasping for air. I know that some folks are pissed off because this C2D MBPs are not 39% faster than older models instead of reported ~10% gains. IMHO, the two key reasons to get this model are:

• less problems (second rev!)
• faster GPU (only slightly throttled)

Anyway, I am very happy with my MBP C2D so far. I haven't played with DVD drive much so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

I've been focused on and tinkering with video for the past week and a half so the discussion over ideal length for vlog video grabbed my interest. I  think vlog videos will, in the end, be both long and short, meaning short ones will be strung together into one or more series and long ones will be broken down into small ones, affecting organization and presentation of clips as well as planning, production, and post-production.
Scoble's interviews, for example, should be broken down into shorter clips, each focusing on a subject so that watchers can experience either the whole interview or just the parts that interest them. Turning long interviews into bite-sized segments allows easier navigation and reference as well as offering drive-by advertising opportunities between segments. Seen abstractly, segments adds fine-grained connection points and increases the surface area at the same time, making it easier to link to other contents and resources, both internal and external, and allowing social interaction at attention-grabbing level. For example, each segment could be given a discussion area (comments) so watchers can discuss at a subject level instead of having at the interview level. From traffic analysis perspective, segments give producers better feedback data for improving content and service with.
Unfortunately, today's vlogging tools has not evolved enough to support segmentation. But I expect that to change quickly.

Check out Aptana.TV, a site just for screencasts demonstrating Aptana, an insanely fun to use IDE for AJAX developers based on Eclipse that offers almost Andrew-like (anybody still remember Andrew?) edit-and-play experience, almost too much context-sensitive help, and crazily useful javascript IDE macros (editing command keys seem rather odd though and caret likes to play hide-and-seek). You can run it as is or run it inside an existing Eclipse installation. Ruby nuts can create a powerful combo by using Aptana and RadRails together. They are both Eclipse plugins after all. Aptana was founded by Paul Colton, the JRun guy.
As to which AJAX library to use, I am now favoring Yahoo UI library for base functionality because YUI is well documented and thoroughly tested and because Douglas Crockford's presentations showed that they know what they are doing and are carefully cultivating the YUI library for practical use of AJAX without going overboard with excitement like most AJAX developers I've run across. I haven't tried it yet but I think complementing YUI with judicious use of AFLAX could be very effective.
Update:
After spending an evening with Aptana, I found some problems with Aptana editor views. It sometimes get confused with JSP pages. Auto-complete support is too eager and sometimes mangles nearby tags. Like I mentioned, caret disappears. I couldn't find manual pretty formatting. Smart indentation seems to conflict with Eclipse settings. I like it overall though. HTML pages are hosted through an embedded web server of sort so there is no need to deploy to a web server to see what your AJAX code does. Although turnaround time saving is probably only a few seconds, smooth edit-save-click cycle really makes tinkering fun.

Checkout Douglas Crockford's recent video sessions Theory of the DOM (part 1, 2, 3) and Advanced JavaScript (part 1, 2, 3). Although I've participated in DOM standardization (insert groan here) and done my share of JavaScript hacking (another groan here), I thoroughly enjoyed both of his presentations.

I've just spent some time looking over Apollo. In essence, Apollo is what you get after Flash plugin swallows the web browser inside out then spit out what it couldn't digest, basically all plugins not directly supported by Adobe. What they did is take Flex2/Flash9 code base and mixed it with WebKit HTML browser code (used by Apple's Safari browser), replacing rendering pipeline with Flash9 display list pipeline and erasing the seams between JavaScript and ActionScript, making never-seen-before (unfortunately 2D still) HTML rendering flexibility and performance boost as well as making incestuous containment hierarchy possible.
From purely technical point of view, I am thoroughly impressed with Apollo. From paranoid security point of view, I think Apollo will be seen as a browser by users despite what Adobe does and the thin wall of installation dialog that separates adobe-app: and http: will fail to solidify in users' mind. From business perspective, I think it's lack of support for popular non-Adobe content types (QuickTime, WMV, etc.) through plugins will impede Apollo's popularity. I am also concerned about native code integration support because it would be rather tedious to write full applications in JavaScript, particularly since JavaScript lacks expansive collection of third-party libraries like Java, Python, and Perl does. .NET is weak in this area as well but not as badly.
It's kind a funny that Apollo and WPF are in a similar situation with third-party content type support. Apollo will handle HTML, PDF, and Flash well in 2D while lacking 3D and WMP support. WPF will handle 3D and WMP supported movies nimbly but fails to support HTML, PDF, and Flash seamlessly. Both treats makes QuickTime like some poor cousin despite the fact that Apple will keep it a rather noticeable sore thumb for years to come. Gosh. I think even Shakespeare would have had a hard time contriving a more tragic narcissistic love triangle (?!?). Oy. What a tragedy.

Just a few useful .NET tips:

• To render preview image of Flash movies, cast result of AxHost.GetOcx() to IViewObject then invoke its Draw method. This works even if Flash control AxHost is not visible or clipped. You can use the same trick to make webpage thumbnails but it'll work reliably only if you do so from within a timer event callback.
• For QuickTime movies, above trick doesn't work so you'll have to scrap the bits off screen via GetWindowDC, BitBlt. Works only if QuickTime control AxHost is fully visible.
• For WMP-supported movie formats, you can use DirectShow's Media Detector object (samples) or, if you are using WPF, build a MediaPlayer with a MediaTimeline pointing to target movie then pass into DrawingContext.DrawVideo to grab preview images.
• If you only need thumbnails of WMP-supported movies and don't care what size, you can use Shell's thumbnail extraction extensions (IExtractImage2). Don't ask me for the code because this option was not attractive enough for me to dig.

There are two hardcore alternative solutions if you don't mind keeping your hands in the sewer pipe for the whole duration of your product's lifecycle.
First solution is to patch key API calls to intercept bits in transit. Yes, this can get ugly, particularly through .NET InterOp layer, but then be thankful that you only have to patch in-process and in memory only (i.e. inject jumpers into loaded DLL image import table). But then, thanks to DRM arms race, you'll find yourself deeper and deeper into the pit over time. Isn't that nice?
Second solution is to decode and render movies yourself since physical bits are not protected. There are plenty of open source video codecs out there to get the job done so the real problems are legal and maintenance issues.

Poor Mikey had enough and gives back some in TechCrunch Bashing Heats Up.
Oh my. I don't know what all the fuss is about. What is wrong with being biased? Isn't that just another word for being opinionated? And what's wrong with making money and investing? Credibility? People read TechCrunch to find out what's new in Web 2.0 space, not Mike's opinions. But then I also think nothing is wrong with people whining and wailing when they don't like something. That's just human nature.
Anyway, I think competitors of mentioned companies can be satisfied partially with a link at the end of each post, one titled "Competitors" or "Also See" that leads to a separate moderated page to which competitors can mention themselves or post opposing comments. This is a great way to get competitors bickering with each other which could be as enjoyable to watch as cat fights. This could be a lot of fun!

Come on Mikey. Just try it!