Coredump

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

• 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

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 63xxxxxxxxxx@chikkatalk.com
• 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< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 32086
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;chikkatalk.com.           IN   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. Stupid me.

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 what’s-her-name, who cares about the Prince?

But it was great. It was fun and refreshing watching something like this after a long day’s work. (I came to the movie late, joining my teammates near the middle of the film, because I still had a remote troubleshooting conference with a Turkish customer (something about Akamai’s servers not being friendly).)

Rating: four chopsticks.

Spoiler: they all die.

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.