Interesting preliminary survey results from Macintouch:

• Nearly 11% report sudden shutdowns, 19% "the buzz", 12% "the moo", 7% warped lid, 10% AirPort dropouts, and 11% a refusal to wake from sleep. 14% report "other" problems, with excessive heat being the leading write-in candidate.
• …nearly 5% of the MacBook/MacBook Pro models have needed motherboard replacements, 4.4% battery replacement, and nearly 5% "other" repairs. The DC Inverter Board for the display is the leading write-in for repairs, plus a large handful of complete computer replacements.
• Just six people reported a melted MagSafe connector (0.2%), with another 30 (1.0%) reporting fraying, and an additional 38 (1.3%) reporting a loose connector.

Worse than I thought. More revealing is this chart:

My biased reading is that MB/MBP buyers have 60% chance of getting a 'perfect' machine and 3-8% chance of getting a machine with enough serious problems to regret buying MB/MBP. I hope Apple improves the numbers with Merom-equiped MB/MBP.

Dan Webb compares four popular AJAX libraries (Dojo, Prototype, Yahoo UI, and Mochikit). Links are broken and the article is already more than month old 😉 but it's a good read. I ran into it while wrestling with Dojo toolkit which JotSpot uses and sponsors. It doesn't mention Google Web Toolkit (GWT) though which is understandable since GWT is a rather odd beast, odd in the sense it made me chuckle and shake my head.

Among the four, I like Dojo although trying to use it made me feel like I was wrestling a fat sweaty lady. Dojo, indeed. Doc! I am bleeding over here!

I never got into habit of listening to podcast (probably because I don't jog nor drive much) but, while I am experimenting with some OPML apps, I am running into enjoyable podcasts which I wanted to share.

BTW, I tend to listen 'out-of-the-box', meaning podcasts that offer glimpses of other industries or perspectives I don't usually have regular access to.

Anyway, I've enjoyed listening to SalesRoundup today. SalesRoundup is a weekly podcast by Joe & Mike, two experienced tech salesmen. Not everything is new to me and I don't agree with everything they say but it was rewarding to listen to their perspectives and problems they face.

To Joe & Mike: could you guys do a show on selling open source products/services? What are the challenges and strategies? What works and what doesn't?

I am setting up two domains for some experimental services: appily.com and myidpage.com (they are either in DNS transition or empty so don't bother going there yet). Appily will be my workbench of sort for myriads of experimental webapps. First one will likely be OPML related. MyIDPage.com is intended to be the identity portal for Appily services all of which I'll talk about when they jell and firm up.

John Battelle's post on YouTube valuation and comments are interesting. My take is that the fact that people are arguing about risks to YouTube's business model make the risks real enough.

If I was in YouTube's shoes (I wish, hehe), I would adopt bartering to the business model in which content owners receives some adspace and/or some editorial control over pages that uses their copyrighted content.

Here are the two main reasons why I think YouTube can make this work:

1. YouTube is free marketing resource to many copyrighted content owners. Clips from TV shows or movies promote the content just like TV and radio ads and movie trailers do. If done right, YouTube can even charge companies for YouTube service.
2. Giving copyright owners some editorial control will ease their concerns over abuses like people posting full contents in pieces or spoiler clips that reveal key parts of newly released movie.

To implement this, YouTube will have to add automated IP claim processing service that automates most claims by managing risks through sampling and account rating while shifting much of the manual work to the claim submitters and clip posters. No, this won't be easy an easy job but IMHO doable.

I've long thought about podcasting. But I have some 'baggages' I need to stow away before I get can started. Wait. That's not right. I can just do it and there is no one to stop me but I hate to fail in anything I do which I admit is ridiculous but haunts me nonetheless.

Here is my laundry list:

1. I sound 'funny'. – I heard this one from my wife so I am pretty sure there is some validity to this and the best angle I can turn this is that I sound rather 'unique'. No kidding. No one who ever heard me speak ever mistake me for someone else when they hear me on the phone. Annoying yet partly satisfying, I have doubts as to whether my voice is 'consumable' without 'presence'.
2. I have nothing to talk about. – It's true. When I am by myself, I sink 'into' myself, leaving nothing to output. People tell me I am very funny and that my jokes 'bites' but my humor 'happens' only when I am interacting with others and never in any planned fashion which erases any chance of monologues.
3. I am too wise. – Huh? By 'too wise', I mean I expect all kinds of things and am rarely surprised which means my responses to world events is rather muted. To say something, I must want to say something which means whatever I want to talk about must be affecting me rather rigorously. But that happen so rarely. It's easier to expect El Capitain to jump up and down.
4. I don't like replays. – Who likes saying same thing over and over? I sure don't. So who is going to come up with the material? I am sure subscribing to 1000 RSS feeds will do the trick but that feels rather inefficient.
5. I am a terrible at being objective. – So true. Best I can manage at being objective is not giving a shit about whatever it is.

Anyway, this should be good protection against myself for a while. ;-P

Yup. That's a sea cucumber alright. As gross as it looks, it's considered a delicacy in asia. I only eat beef and chicken when it comes to meat but my taste in seafood ranges pretty wide, including sea cucumber (but not sea urchin which looks like cat's tongue and tastes like milk).

You can go to pretty much any good chinese restaurant and order a plate of cooked sea cucumbers in a variety of sauce. Those dishes are made out of dried sea cucumbers and the art of putting moisture back into the dried sea cucumber is precious trade secret. Frankly, I don't like them cooked because, once cooked, only thing that remains is the texture which is…meh. Let's just say I've had more fun with linguini.

The best way to enjoy sea cucumber is raw: cleaned, chopped into little morsels squirming to grasp purpose out of thin air, dipped in spicy red-pepper sauce, and eaten with a bottle of cold soju or sake. YEAHHHH! Not only is it crunchy, sea cucumbers are much better mannered than rebellious raw octopussy and squid which often require a bit of wrestling while you eat.  And sea cucumber is considered 'stamina' food like oyster and abalone are. ;-)

Now, where was I? Ah, apparently there are talks going on right now to decide whether to put sea cucumbers on the endangered species list. Sorry, no articles to link to cuz I can't find any except this one in Korean. Koreans are not worried about missiles but they are worried about sea cucumbers. Go figure.

Come on now. Give me a great big EWWW. LOL.

Looks like Google is doing very well still but I wonder if advertisers are really getting the bang for the bucks they are spending on online ads? I ask because I have not once clicked on any of the Google ads and my eyeballs now glides around and away from banners and AdSense boxes on their own. The only effective online advertising I've seen lately are short ads that show before an online video clip starts playing.

Nuts. I think my brain needs a tuning cuz my intuition is no longer inline with rest of the world.

I've been tinkering with .NET 3.0 today. At first, I've installed the July CTP but, because it lacked Visual Studio integration, I've settled on the June CTP.

Here is a question for XAML experts out there: how do I display HTML inside a XAML panel? The HTML fragment I want to display is from an XmlDataProvider and there is no URI for the fragment so I can't just drop in a Frame and set the Source with a URI. I can drop a WebBrowser into the panel using code but I am asking if there is an XAML-only solution.

Update 1: Looks like there isn't a simple way to display HTML content in WPF-based UI. There seems to be no way to convince Frame to display arbitrary HTML fragment without a URI. Also, when URI to passed to a Frame to display an HTML page, the page's document model is hidden. A workaround is to use WindowsFormHost to embed WebBrowser (a Windows Forms control) but there seems to be some subtle problems with this approach. This is ridiculous given that HTML is the most popular content format today.

I just got voxed by Joi so I spent some time with it. I haven't licked the full length of it yet but Vox seems to be a very nice package of services. It has magical potentials but, as every cook knows, finding the right mixture of features and keeping them balanced while growing ridiculously fast could be very tough. Anyway, I'll try to rib them along the right path.

Friendship is cheap because you can't bill your friends. – /R