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For one of my domains (say bar.com) hosted on Bluehost, its emails (e.g. foo@bar.com) are manged by Google Apps, and its content are managed by Drupal. I tried to use Drupal’s Trigger and Action to notify me on new posts. These notification emails could not be sent to foo@bar.com with an error log entry, but they could be sent to my Gmail address without a problem. Here is why:  screenshot of "Change MX Entry", on cPanel When changing the bar.com MX entries in order to let Google Apps take over, I mistakenly checked the “Always accept mail locally even if the primary mx does not point to this server”. The emails are sent from and to the same domain. Aha! That’s what the “locally” means. And since foo@bar.com accounts did not exist on the local server, the notification emails failed to be sent. Obviously, the solution is to uncheck the option. Starting from yesterday night (June 2nd, Beijing time), Twitter became unavailable. Didn’t think much about it, because, you know, Twitter has been infamous about that. This morning, looking at the calendar, I suddenly realized what the reason might be – the Tiananmen Square anniversary on June 4th. Checking popular sites for people to get / share information, I found Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live had all been unaccessible, at least for me, from Beijing. Surprisingly, Wikipedia, even the Chinese version, is still on, but if you tried to reach some sensitive page, you would be blocked from the whole site for about 1 min. It’s funny that even early morning yesterday, people were still cheering on Twitter that Bing can return sensitive search results, including even images and videos. The new baby of Microsoft is obviously not prepared for the nasty Internet environment in China. Google has most important data of mine. Emails, calendar, to-do list, documents, RSS subscriptions, photos…… You name it. I want those data at my fingertips, anywhere, anytime, even when without Internet connections. On my laptop, Google Gears makes it possible except for the to-do list (Remember The Milk is a good alternative supporting Google Gears). The good news is that I have a iPod Touch, so I don’t need to carry my laptop as often. I use the iPod Touch built-in Mail, Calendar app to sync with Gmail, Google Calendar respectively, and use some 3rd-party app like RSS Runner to sync with Google Reader, but their interfaces are not as familiar nor as integrated as the Google Mobile App. Unfortunately, the Wifi coverage is still low and obviously the buzzing 3G won’t do any good to an iPod. To make matters worse, Google Gears does not support iPhone / iPod Touch! It is said “Gears is available for Windows, Windows Mobile (IE Mobile, Opera Mobile), Mac (Firefox, Safari), Linux and Android.” Yearh right, everywhere except iPhone / iPod Touch. I’m just about to search for an iPhone application that can sync with Google Tasks, and hopping that Google Gears will be available for iPhone / iPod Touch soon. This is a separator. Posts and comments prior to this were imported (with the tag ‘imported’) from my old Live Space using this tool. Now, it’s time to find time writing some new posts Since Firefox 3.0, I’ve been a big fan of Firefox, especially with the wonderful Delicious add-on. However, I have to keep IE on my computer because using Firefox in Intranet is annoying. I have to enter my corporate / domain credentials every time I visit a sharepoint site because by default Firefox does not automatically respond to NTLM challenge. I finally found how to partially resolve this problem. Why it’s partially? After reading the article above, you will realize that the list does not support wildcards / regular expressions to cover all intranet websites (sufficient but not necessary, a site whose name does not contain a ‘.’ is an intranet site), so you still need to key in your frequently visiting sites one by one. It’s said that all the configurations under ‘about:config" can be specified in ‘prefs.js’ or ‘user.js’ as well. Now that it’s ‘.js’ file, maybe the list can be enabled to support wildcards / regular expressions by adding a couple lines of code into the file? Didn’t try it. Let me know if you did, and I’ll host you a coffee. Selecting and distributing photos of friends has been painful for me, especially when friends do not want them degraded or publicly accessible on web albums. Manually grouping photos by person, respectively attaching to each email, and then sending one by one is just broken. To right the wrong, I once got the idea to combine manual tagging and face detection&recognition. I talked to several folks, searched around, and accidentally got to know ilovephotos.com via their elevator pitch that they are implementing this idea. And… that’s it. Today I randomly mentioned this idea to 老丁 and 何志坚 during the dinner. Right after the dinner, 老丁 sent me the news that Picasa 3.0 was introduced with a brand-new feature called “name tags”. I read it with with mixed feelings – glad to see that Picasa, which is one of my favorites, makes this idea real and addresses my pain; ashamed to see this not-bad idea (at least sounds not bad to both Google and me) is still just an idea to me. I simply didn’t even start. Admittedly, Google had this idea way earlier than I did, probably back to 2006 when it acquired Neven Vision (a key player in face and image recognition), but it should be just in the blood to feel impelled to execute on exciting ideas. BTW, in terms of how much an idea is worth, there are two sayings I like most:
6/27 was BillG’s last day as a Microsoft FTE (full-time employee). Working in RedW-D, I went to the Town Hall hosted in RedW Cafe via WebCast. This time, Bill was more emotional than last time. In the last few minutes, tears were swelling in this eyes. Looking back, here is a great story from Joel Spolsky about his Spec review with BillG, in those glory days. Yeah, those early days of Microsoft, those early days of BillG… Moving ahead, BillG will devote himself to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Many people might think it’s just giving money away, which is probably the easiest thing in the world. This is not true, for "the barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity." As stated in the Guiding Principles – "delivering results with the resources we have been given is of the utmost importance". To deliver results with finite resources means to find a high-priority problem, raise a quest, break complexity down to actionable items, so that people know how to help. "Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world" – I believe Bill will change the world, again. Just read in Richard Stallman’s personal page: "I also visited Tibet unawares, because nobody told me that JiuZhaiGou was part of Tibetan territory annexed by China since the conquest". WTF… I’m fairly active on Douban, but not on Facebook. On Douban, I always feel like I’ve got something concrete to talk about and share; on Facebook, although there are various applications, people are still more into something inane (IMHO), such as biting one another. However, Douban still needs to figure out how to better encourage users to discuss/share/socialize based on the concrete content, and furthermore, loop in their friends from real life. "Love does not consist of gazing at each other but looking outward in the same direction". The same for Friendship, I believe. I got my iPod Touch on Jan 2nd. I’m not very into entertainment, but for what I spent $300? Just a portable browser. There are complains that compared to iPhone, iPod Touch does not have Email, Stock applications installed. So what? It supports JavaScript! I don’t understand with Gmail, Google Finance, why we still need those applications (doing emails when you are offline is the only scenario on top of my head). Also I cannot understand why things like Mobile Windows Live Messenger and Mobile QQ are still under development. On PC, compared to RIA web pages, applications locally installed may be more responsive. However, when it comes to handheld devices, this is not necessarily true. AJAX makes Rich Internet Applications (RIA) widely adopted. Flex will probably take it to the next step. I guess in future, we need local applications only when we need daemon processes, like to capture service messages or to prompt a coming event. GPRS->EDGE->3G->4G, these will enable us to access Internet anywhere, anytime. I would say if we could only choose to build 1 excellent application on Windows Mobile, we have to choose IE for sure. The others will eventually not matter much. With all these being said, looking at the mobile experiences with which Google are surprising end-users, the web API’s with which Google are inspiring Dev community, I can’t help worrying about the future of Microsoft. |
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