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Showing posts from October, 2006

From del.icio.us, 28 Oct 2006

Getting Real From the makers of Basecamp and Backpack, 37 Signals, comes this wonderful little book about building web apps. / programming design web books

From del.icio.us, 27 Oct 2006

About:config entries - MozillaZine Knowledge Base Great reference for tweaking Firefox settings. / web reference Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories Wired Magazine asked writers to come up with stories in six words or less. My favorite, by Margaret Atwood: Longed for him. Got him. Shit. / fun fiction cool books

Email-to-mobile hack

Not! I was scheming a quick-and-dirty email-to-SMS hack: Send email notifications to my vanity mail address. Tag it "sms". Create a filter that forwards mails tagged "sms" to [email protected] As we all know, @chikkatalk.com is Chikka 's federated XMPP server. So... mails should then be received in my mobile phone. Easy does it, right? Well, not. Chikkatalk.com is indeed an XMPP server, but not a mail server: [iandexter@hiraya ~]$ dig mx chikkatalk.com ; > DiG 9.2.5 > mx chikkatalk.com ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;chikkatalk.com. MX ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: chikkatalk.com. 10503 IN SOA ns1.chikka.com. hostmaster.chikka.com.com. 2006060100 3600 600 604810 86400 ;; Query time: 2 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.101#53(192.168.1.101) ;; WHEN: Fri Oct 27 00:53:32 2006 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 101 [iandexter@hiraya ~]$ Eep. ...

Movie night: 'The Banquet'

Our team went out for a movie. We watched The Banquet ( Ye Yan , directed by Feng Xiaogang), starring, among others Zhang Ziyi. Synopsis: Set in ancient China, the story revolves around intrigues in the imperial court. The Emperor dies mysteriously. The Emperor's brother takes the throne and marries the Empress. His son, the Crown Prince, suspects foul play ("Tofu stinks in the Forbidden City."). He seeks revenge. He's got the hots for his stepmom. His girlfriend, the courtier, dies. His uncle, the usurper, dies. But there's a twist. :) Sounds like, hmmm..., yep, " Hamlet ". Take Mel Gibson's Hamlet, minus the insane bloodshot eyes; add true-blue (royal red?) acrobatics and kung fu chops of Jet Li's caliber, but better; add astounding landscape panoramas; and you've got Hamlet, Chinese style (or is it Little Ma-ling? ngwek. :P). Plus, this isn't about the Prince at all, but about the women. I mean, hey, with Zhang Ziyi and the Qing lady ...

I won't be using IE7 anytime soon

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Well, I *did* try it once, but I got this: Live Search is better than Google's? Call me dogmatic, but I'll place my bet on Google any day. Less than a week after it's release, a nasty vulnerability crops up: So, no thanks, IE7: slick-UI-page-zooming-integrated-feed-reader-pluggable and all that jazz considered.

From del.icio.us, 20 Oct 2006

What if Clippy came to PHP? LOL. Come to think of it, though, I'd still prefer a PHP-based CMS (Drupal, of course) anytime, XSS vulnerabilities, warts, and all. / cms geek php humor

Building connections with LinkedIn

I've just started building up connections on LinkedIn . I opened up an account about a few months back, and then forgot all about it. It's supposed to be a great way to network with other tech-inclined people, so let's see. My profile is here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/iandexter .

QOTD

“Big companies take extraordinary people and make them do ordinary things. Startups take ordinary people and make them do extraordinary things.” I think the magic of Google comes from taking extraordinary people and letting them do extraordinary things. -- Niniane Wang, Googler

Metawire.org is dead

Old news, probably. I was fixing old and presumably dead links when I tried to access my pages in metawire.org , only to find out that all data has been lost. Abandon all hope, all ye who once had FreeBSD shell accounts in Metawire.org. Sad.

From del.icio.us, 14 Oct 2006

HowtoWriteLTSP5Plugins - Ubuntu Wiki Jumpstart kit for Edubuntu LTSP dev-wannabes / howto linux ltsp ubuntu 10 seeeeeriously cool workplaces Feeling workplace burnout? Not if you work in any of these offices. / design cool

Snapshots

I've just installed a web-based IRC client on Dreamhost . Now I don't have to worry about firewalls blocking IRC connections . Brushing up on my C skills again, helping out a former co-worker on some coding stuff. I hear Google is going the offline route with Google Docs. Cool. Finally! (But that's just speculation, of course.) And, oh: didn't make it to the IOSN Linux TOT (got shortlisted but didn't make the cut). Well, it's okay. There'll be more opportunities for that. I probably won't be able to take the LPI certification exams as well -- my company made me choose between those exams and training from another vendor. *shrugs* Later...

Spamland

My fascination with spam continues (call this the second part of a continuing series, the first of which was this ). Snagged via Boing Boing a cool in-the-works animation series, Spamland: Can't wait for the next one.

From del.icio.us, 12 Oct 2006

Google Docs + Spreadsheets On the way to Google Office? / web google Coghead: Design applications visually A simple, powerful new way to create web-based business applications that can be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere! / web tools tech programming design Making Comics: How to communicate visually Howto on creating cool comics drawings. / howto graphics cool comics books art

What's in a name?

I recently received a feedback, which came through this blog's contact form : Congratulations on having the same name as me. You may just be the reason why I can never get [email protected] etc. But I will let u off for having such a name. Right. And that's my problem because...? (No contact details were given, but the IP address is from AOL.)

From del.icio.us, 11 Oct 2006

BBspot - Yahoo Erotica Editor Fired for Excessive Programming Wished I had his job. :P jk / yahoo work programming perl humor geek fun

From del.icio.us, 5 Oct 2006

Social Networking: Time For A Silver Bullet The value of social networking, in general, is diminished with each new service entering the field. There's a need for some standards in the social networking space, as it is difficult to maintain profiles at each social network. / web tech internet Bob Sutor: Essays - Open Standards vs. Open Source How to think about software, standards, and Service Oriented Architecture at the beginning of the 21st century / tech standards programming opensource ope

From del.icio.us, 3 Oct 2006

Penguin Books - a photoset on Flickr Photos of classic Penguin book covers. via Boing Boing. / typography flickr design books art Boing Boing: Graffito warning from 1597: "play here and die" Pax Vobis Memento Mori Qui Ludentis Pilla / humor Google Reader Easter Egg Looking at the brand-spanking-new look of Google Reader, as well as some reviews about it. Here's an Easter Egg for you. / xml atom rss humor google fun

Spam lit

Ever wondered where spammers get the seemingly random text they add as fillers to fool spam filters? I did a book search on Google using a single spam sample. Here are my findings: 01 Scaly-conscience, and a knot of gentlemen from the town of 02 not in want of, into the road: which not only made it rank and the tumbler, ordered a glass of this ale - WOULD order it - I told 03 young wife paler than formerly, all this time; more rarely seen by room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and 04 Then, Agnes, you wrong him very much. He my bad Angel, or and thither, after I had recovered that which I had left behind, we 05 gleams - in your friend Traddles, is an unspeakable comfort. With promising, at the corner of a dirty lane, ending in an enclosure 06 myself with glory. But as nothing of the sort happened to be intended for Good night. got up and went away. They followed, 07 particularly confidential to her companion and protector, when a been wretched, too. I waltz wit...