If you are interested in staying abreast of the latest in the art (?) of cross-site scripting and general javascript-based attacks, GNUCITIZEN is one of the best and deserves a place on your weekly reading list.

I think YouTube purchase was a bad decision for Google as well as the industry, not because YouTube is not worth $1.6B but because there are cheaper alternatives.
If I was running Yahoo, I would quickly form a taskforce consisting of four specialized teams to attack the market from the underside: experience.
Viewer Experience – The first team, consists of mainly engineers and user experience experts, focuses on improving the quality of viewing and sharing experience beyond YouTube. A key attack vector is video quality. Using technologies like MotionDSP, viewer experience can be improve vastly. Another attack vector is video size.
Creator Experience – The second team, with similar make up as the first, focuses on improving the experience of content creators and submitters. Supporting wider selection of video source format and offering ease to use online video editing and management tools will attract content producers. Building a private P2P network will improve the uploading experience.
Advertiser Experience – The third team, consisting of advertising experts with help of engineers, focuses on making it easy for advertisers to target, track, and manage advertising campaigns.
Trendsetter Experience – The fourth team, consisting of marketing and social experts, focuses on creating new trends, to blitzkrieg for mindshare.
For example, I would create a cheap sturdy tapeless videocamera that uploads video clips directly to Yahoo video network then loan them out to selected teens across America for free. Seeding 1,000 yahoocams in each of the top US 20 cities and countrysides of all 50 states means 70,000 yahoocams are needed. At $300 a piece, the equipment cost is $21 million. Let's make that $40 million to account for extraneous costs. Compared to spending $1.6 billion, I think spending $40 million to let loose a horde of Yahoocam wielding teens roaming the whole country shooting video of whatever takes their fancy is worthwhile.
Now introduce rewards for good content. Let's call it video points or vips for short. Capturing a video of ongoing newsworthy event earns the videoshooter vips. Hotter the video is, more vips the shooter gets. Vips can be converted goods and can be used to compete for prizes of weekly or even daily contests, turning the whole thing into a game of sort.
The important thing is to think outside-the-box and to act boldly and timely. Yahoo has to launch the taskforce now to build anticipation while Google is busy integrating YouTube into its fold.

I am afraid you'll have to endure the ugly page breadcrumb. It's supposed to be in the same area as the search box and CSS is not appearing the same as it was on my desktop. Just plain ugly and an eye sore but I don't feel like fixing it till another day.

I might have neglected to mention this but, unlike WordPress (not sure about Movable Type), Daily has built-in support for multi-blogs and multi-users so it can be used to host thousands of blogs each of which any number of users can post to with appropriate permissions. Speaking for myself, I think this feature is rather hot. Of course, it's not yet ready for production use yet…

When I fired up Visual Studio 2005 this morning, code editor appeared to have hung in midst of typing. After trying different keys, apparently the problem was strangely limited to a few special keys and commands (backspace, delete, return, ctrl-X, etc.). Even more strange, I could delete text using Edit > Cut menu command via either the menubar or context menu.
After freaking out for good 10 minutes restarting VS2005 and uninstalling recent additions like Orcas, I came to my senses and searched to find fellow victims of crappy engineering workmanship. Aha. Apparently the problem was wide spread when VS2005 was in beta so I had to dart past that cloud of noise before finding Peter Bromberg's post, Loss of Keyboard functionality in Visual Studio 2005 — and a FIX!, and John Pollard's Delete and return keys not working in Visual Studio 2005, the source of the fix.
As instructed, I blasted the content of "C:\Documents and Settings{username}\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0" folder then reset VS2005 settings via:

Tools > Import and Export Settings > Reset all settings…

menu command and now the all keys are firing again. Whew. Apparently, VS2005 settings get screwed up sometimes which in turn confuses VS2005's keyboard event handler. What a piece of crap.
Thanks to both Peter and John for saving my morning from turning ugly.

Taking a short break from Daily, I've started writing a Live Writer plugin. It's not as simple as plugins currently available and needs fairly extensive server-side support so I probably won't be able to show it over the weekend. Anyway, the primary goal for this project is…fun, in this case .NET fun.
Re all the hoopla over Google buying YouTube, I officially don't give a hoot cuz I am having too much fun.

Just fixed an i18n comment bug. Thanks to extra sweat I put in to make Daily highly configurable, no code update was necessary, just addition of a couple of jars plus config patch then restart. One of these days, I'll add hot-config for convenience. In practice, however, configuration changes without bringing systems down is rare. Even large banks use the good old shutdown-patch/reconfig-restart. Of course, they do load-balancing and rollout waves to minimize the inconvenience surface but I've never seen hot-config on their must-have list.
Anyway, do me a favor and post comments in your favorite foreign language to test the fix. Thanks.

Daily webapp is written in Java. I could have used .NET/C# combo but a) I am more comfortable with java, b) Eclipse beats Visual Studio hands down (except for writing web services), and c) java currently offers more choices when it comes to third-party libraries.

Libraries:

Spring Framework 2.0 – for ease of ad-hoc configuration. It lacks support for distributed dynamic configuration so I'll have to cross that bridge later. Optional Spring MVC (equivalent of Struts) is also used but I might switch later. Spring Web Flow was not used but I might do so when need for screen complex flow arises.

iBATIS 2.2 – I prefer close-to-the-metal DAO works so I chose iBATIS over Hibernate. I used only Data Mapper layer so far although I'll probably use Data Access layer as well when I add fine-grained caching.

Lucene 2.0 – freaking great for search flexibility and tagging support.

TagSoup – I chose John Cowan's TagSoup over JTidy for parsing HTML because it's faster and code looks easier to tweak later to handle brain-damaged RSS feeds. TagSoup is currently being used to sanitize HTML content, extract embedded data like microformats and tags, and to strip tags prior to submitting content to Lucene.

JBoss Rules (formerly called Drools) – Although current version of Daily doesn't require much dynamic intelligence to support basic blogging engine needs, I've got a lot of features that calls for fast rule-based blackboards which is what this library is really good for. I've used Drools with good result before but I think mixing it with something like ServiceMix opens up some interesting possibilities. For now, it's handling some minor HTTP request analysis and link analysis, results of which is unfortunately not being used yet. Hah.

TestNG – for next generation unit testing, TestNG beats JUnit 4 easy.

Apache XML-RPC – for Blogger, MetaWeblog, and Movable Type APIs. I am using version 2.0 instead of 3.0 because the later version closed off some key integration points which makes it more difficult to use.

Akismet Java API – for comment spam checking with Akismet.

According to AP, North Korea went ahead with its nuke test. And according to Korean newspapers, North Korea confirmed it with an official announcement saying the test, performed on 9th, was successful and no radiation leaks were found. A South Korean geological research agency reported that an earthquake measuring 3.6 on the Richter scale originating from the test site in North Korea was detected on 9th at 10:30AM.
The show finally begins. Oy.
Update: Reuters reports that China was notified just 20 minutes before North Korea pressed the button.

It took me awhile but now the blog is running on my blog engine. I had some difficulty with URL rewriting to keep old links working but was able to fix it in the morning.
With new blog engine, I'll be using mainly Live Writer to post because it has some cool features like image effects (color pop and picture frame used on the sexy picture of a Korean starlet on the right) and tags I added below.
I've turned on Akismet to filter comment spams but haven't tried it yet. There are many old pre-switch comments still but I'll have to add a comment search feature before I can remove them efficiently (i.e. search
comments with 'poker' in content or other fields then delete them altogether after checking off rare honest posts.)
PS: The banner image was taken last week looking west from my boat dock which can be seen in this satellite map inserted via Live Writer
(deleted due to javascript error it was generating). Hmm. I just noticed that there is no way to center things in Live Writer. Weird.