Dear Principal,

We are a domain name registration and dispute organization in Asia,who mainly deal with global companies’ domain name registration and internet Intellectual property right protection in Asia.Currently we have a very important issue that we need to confirm with your company.

On Aug.25, 2010,We received an application formally from one company named Shinory Company that wanted to applly for the Internet Name”billonsite” and some domain names from our organization.

After our initial examination, we found that the Internet Name and domain names applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark.These days we are dealing with this case,we were wondering whether you consigned Shinory Company to register these domain names with us? If it is true,we will complete the registration of these domain names.Do you know this company? Currently,we have postponed this application of this company temporarily.In order to deal with this issue better,please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

In addition,we hereby affirm that our time is limited for dissent application.If your company files no dissent within the time limit,we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by Shinory Company.

(PS:If you are not in charge of this matter,please transfer this email to appropriate dept.)

Best Regards,

Anna
Hong Kong Head Office:
Tel: 00852 9566 0205
Fax: 00852 3069 6940
Email:anna@skasiadnr.com
Website: http://www.asia-gov.com

Riiiiight. You approve that application and have fun with it. But I’ve been around the block, and I know my domain name isn’t in any danger. You just can’t wrangle a dude’s domain name out from under him without being contacted by a real legal authority.

I also love how her website is “www.asia-gov.com”. Very official sounding.

So cute!

$20 for 2 MB of Data Roaming in the USA?

Shit, I eat 2MB for breakfast. Since I got this damn phone, I’ve used… let’s see… 2.6 GB. Gigabytes, Virgin. And on my PAX weekend trip, I’ll be limited to two Megabytes?

This mega-blows.

I want to keep up with Twitter while I’m at PAX (keep track of announced events, the Intel Prize Patrol, spontaneous cool shit going on), checka-checka-checka mah emails, use Google Maps to navigate during the Triwizard Drinking Tour, and maybe browse a website or two for delicious, cool, refreshing information.

So what is a boy to do?

I got some options:

Catch a Canadian Cell Tower

Seattle is vaguely close to Canada. Some have suggested that I might be able to catch a Canadian tower signal there. I’m skeptical, but I’ll definitely check.

Score Some Free Wi-Fi

This is probably my best option, actually, but not one I can rely on. Free wi-fi is surprisingly rare, especially probably if I’m going to be inside the convention center itself (where I plan on spending much of the weekend). I can probably go and swing by a Starbucks and buy a latte and some bits when I want to download mah emails without paying fifty bux, but for most of the weekend, I’ll just have to pray that I pop semi-regularly between unsecured wireless networks.

Blow $20 On What Is Essentially A 1990′s-style Floppy Diskette Worth Of Data

And here is where I am most likely to end up. Virgin, I will be hating you a little bit with every penny of these twenty dollars, and hating you a LOT with the 5c/KB overage you will no doubt be charging me, but what am I going to do, not use my phone all weekend?

Now that said, I just noticed something on Virgin’s long distance information page. Lemme make a phone call.

doot doot doo…

Getting really tired of Black Eyed Peas…

On hold twenty minutes now…

Success! A real person. Gimme a sec.

Okay, apparently that $20/2MB is only for poor schlebs on non-smartphones. For those of us who are the “anointed ones” on smartphones, we pay a flat $6/MB. Better, but still in WTF territory.

Thankfully, I have a nifty little switch on my phone, under Settings->General->Network called “Data Roaming”. It’s set to Off by default and that way it shall stay until I manually decide I need to update my twitters, whereupon it will change to On for about twelve seconds before returning to its natural state.

But Whatever, This Is Depressing

Virgin, your US roaming offerings (data and otherwise) are pitiful and expensive. I’m going to use them as little as humanly possible, and I’m going to complain to anyone nearby who will listen about it. It’s not like it’s a vastly different system down there, hell, I’ll probably even connect to a Virgin Mobile US tower from time to time. The only reason I can see as to why you’d price your services like this is sheer greed.

It’s like this: A great many of Virgin Mobile’s customers are low-income pre-paid customers. This is where they targeted themselves with their many, many ads. So they have to be very competitive in this space, otherwise they’ll lose people to Koodo and Wind and the like.

But higher-income, post-paid customers like myself aren’t part of Virgin’s target market. We’re gravy to them. And we’re “generally” not price-sensitive. Christ, my favourite part of Virgin Mobile is the rock-solid customer service droids when I call in (though lately they’ve been a little less than awesome – more on that in a future post), not the price. Still, I’m paying early-90′s internet rates here. It’s like 20 years never happened, and it has to stop. If Virgin can do 6 GB for $30 in Canada, they should be able to do better than 1MB for $6 in the States. WAY better.

Oh, and one more thing: Virgin, your waiting music sounds like I am listening to an AM station while passing under a bridge. Seriously, get on that.

Can’t have multiple projects open at once

In Komodo Edit 5.x, your “Projects” pane can have a bunch of projects listed in it, which is very useful – I tend to have a couple of projects open at once, so I can check in one project how I did something (or how an API works), and work in another project. In IDE 6.x however, only one project is open at once, so I’d need to actually open the reference project, open the file, check it out, then switch back to my working project. Tedious.

Worse, projects now keep track of what tabs you have open – so if I open one file file for reference, then switch to another project, I lose all my open tabs.

Definitely decreased functionality. For this reason alone, I’d stay with Edit 5.x.

“Project” pane and “Code” pane are both in the left pane

I can either look at the files in my project or see the Code pane. I need both. I figured “easy, I’ll just switch the Code pane to the right” but no dice. There’s no option for that. No setting anywhere. I looked throughout the install directory to boot, to see if there was something I could hack to get it usable, but nothing. I can’t even have them BOTH open in the left pane (splitting the pane into two vertical sections).

Again, pretty much unusable.

I really want to like IDE 6.x, but these are pretty much showstoppers. Thankfully 6.x is going to be in beta for “months more”, so with any luck things like this will get fixed, but I’m surprised they’re here in the first place. Am I the only developer in the world who works from multiple projects at once and wants to see both files and code layout at the same time?

Anyway, I’m digging around in the source, figuring there’s maybe an .ini or .xul file or something I can play with, and check out what I find in “helpOverlay.xml”:

< !DOCTYPE overlay PUBLIC "-//MOZILLA//DTD XUL V1.0//EN" "http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul">

I don’t do this often, but I LOLd.

Now, back to trying to figure out how to change this damn pane location…

“Great,” I thought. “Time to figure out what’s broken.”

See, one of the strengths of Kohana is that the maintainers are totally willing to break backwards compatibility in order to refactor something a better way. However, one of the weaknesses of Kohana is that the maintainers sneak in and break shit when they update.

It’s entirely the same thing, depending on how you look at it. Thankfully, the devs rarely change anything sufficiently large enough to warrant more than a couple hours of bringing things up-to-code, and when I’m done that task, I generally end up with happier, nicer-looking code as a result. So I can’t be too upset.

To boot, there’s usually some sweet ups along the way. New functionality, enhanced functionality, broken stuff fixed, that kind of thing. And while only a point-release, there’s some stuff in here this time that you very well may want to have.

Two Whole New Modules!

• The OAuth module lets you do neat things like integrate with Twitter without writing a lot of cruft code.
• The UnitTest module integrates PHPUnit directly into Kohana! This is so cool! I played around a few times before with trying to do this myself before giving up on it in favour of writing actual domain code. Now that someone more dedicated than myself has actually integrated it, who knows? I might even start writing test cases.

Better XSS Protection!

In all kinds of little places, characters are being escaped where they weren’t before, meaning that the XSS vulnerabilities that are in your project don’t creep in at the framework level.

A Whole Bunch Of little Fixes!

There seems to be generally better code documentation all over the place (example: the database config file), and a lot more flexibility opened up (example: final constructors removed all over the joint, the UTF8 file is now extensible). As well, there’s a bunch of little bugs fixed everywhere, meaning that all those little edge cases I haven’t run up against? I never will.

So What Broke?

Nothing!

Seriously, it just worked. I copied 3.0.7′s system directly over 3.0.6′s. Ditto for the auth and database modules. This is perhaps one of the worst ways you can do an upgrade because so many things can go wrong, but nothing did. I’m seriously impressed.

So there’s a couple of neat new things to play around with, a whole host of sweet little fixes – looks like a very solid update.

Kudos to the Kohana team!

Kohana 3 has a very neat structure that allows you to safely extend its base classes, adding functionality to classes as core as Kohana itself without ruining the interfaces other classes use to communicate with it.

The basic pattern is as follows:

abstract class Kohana extends Kohana_Core { }

class Kohana_Core {
    // Real functionality here
}

You may not recognize the brilliance inherent in this pattern if you don’t know a little something about Kohana – it autoloads classes in the following order:

# Application folder, then
# Module folders in the order defined in bootstrap.php, finally
# System folder

Which means, if you define your own Kohana class in your application/classes folder, then anytime anyone calls Kohana::debug(), they’ll be calling YOUR version of Kohana. Want to redefine debug() to output via FirePHP? Go nuts. Just make sure that your version of Kohana extends Kohana_Core.

But what if you’re developing a module, and you want people to be able extend ”your” version of Kohana? Well, you can follow the same pattern as the developers do:

abstract class Kohana extends Kohana_Modulename { }

abstract class Kohana_Modulename extends Kohana_Modulename_Core {}

class Kohana_Modulename_Core extends Kohana_Core {
    // Real functionality here
}

It looks a little convoluted, but bear with me. If people choose to define Kohana directly, they can, thus cutting off your module entirely. But if people choose to extend from your module, they can define Kohana_Modulename and place their functionality in there, remembering to extend Kohana_Modulename_Core from that class, and the whole chain remains. In fact, they can extend the chain further with this same pattern for their own Modulename.

Now, this doesn’t really help when two modules BOTH want to redefine Kohana and aren’t aware of each other, but that is probably always going to be a problem.

Straight-up complimentary, no charges, no sign-ups or anything silly.

I’m in the station just now and the speed is grand – we’ll just have to see how it goes on the train itself.

Elderly driver dies after car hits house

A woman in her seventies died Wednesday after her car struck a house in the Blossom park neighbourhood.

There is too much of this past-tense, verbs-being-applied-to-impersonal-nouns bullshit in news writing. Nobody ever assigns blame any more. The car struck the house, oil was spilled, a woman died of knife wounds – like its the fault of the inanimate objects in all these cases.

Are news organizations so desperate to cover their asses and not offend anyone that they’ll remove the heart and soul from the interesting news they’re trying to report, and replace it with boring, flat, featureless pap that will neverless get the facts across in the least-suable style possible?

This lady didn’t die because a car hit a house. She died because she had a heart attack while at the wheel, lost control of her automobile, and crashed her car into someone’s home.

This decision came back to bite him in the ass pretty much immediately, as this is what Adam picked out for steaks:

Adam’s steak is the one in the rear, weighing in at precisely 1 kilogram. Charbel’s is the one in front, weighing in at 1.2kg. That’s about the weight of both of your lungs, for reference.

Nevertheless, Charbel is filled with determination!

Look at that thing though, it’s the size of his freaking head!

Forsaking knife and fork, Charbel tears into his steak:

Literally.

However, it soon becomes clear that Adam is pulling ahead of Charbel. It’s sort of close though, considering that Charbel has a fifth of a kilogram more steak to go through.

Charbel can’t figure out how he does it.

It’s not even a contest any more.

Charbel is amazed, and perhaps a little overawed.

Adam has dominated Charbel.

The final bite:

Now, more than ever, Charbel is determined to finish this monstrosity in front of him.

Or is he?

Adam adds a little humilation to the mix.

Lest ye think you could best Charbel in this contest, look at how thick that goddamn steak is.

Defeated, Charbel asks Lisa for help.

Lisa polishes off Charbel’s meal. Or, at least that forkful.

Overall, an excellent BBQ that we will have to repeat before we vacate the premises. And perhaps you could bring your appetite next time, Charbel?