Kung Fu and Vampires—need I say more? Go view the trailer for the new Donnie Yen (director of Blade II) Hong Kong action The Twins Effect.
Mark Hyman, of "The Point" recently posted an article about Peter Jennings personally changing scripts before going on air to provide his own political slant to the stories—even making stories completely unrecognizable.
This is my major concern about the FCC allowing one company to control all the media outlets in an area. I think this could be a really big problem in small markets—where you're much more likely to run into the situation of one company controlling all the news. I don't like the fact that it's possible for an area to receive news that's all slanted one way.
We need diversity in reporting to get the full picture. I believe you need to read multiple views on an event in order to properly evaluate your own stance on it. I don't really mind one company owning all of one type of media outlet (i.e. radio, newspapers, or tv,) but I just see a real potential to misled the public if one company decides to abuse their power by presenting only a single point-of-view of events to the public.
Back in December of 2002, Mark Kruger posted a solution to using SSL over CFHTTP in CFMX when the remote server isn't using a trusted certificate. Since a private certificate is just as secure as a trusted certificate (in terms of encryption,) many corporation may end up using private certificates for some web services. So, if you're having recieving errors trying to connect to a remote server over SSL in CFMX, make sure to read Mark's blog entry.
I can't wait to climb like Spidey! Also, when are they going to come out w/X-Ray glasses that actually work? I sure wish I would have bought one of those Sony HandyCams when I had the chance. :)
Macromedia has publically announced latest release of ColdFusion MX, code-named "Red Sky". Make sure to check out the presentation on their take on what's new. This will be a free update for CFMX users. Here's a quick overview:
Performance/Stability:
Fixes:
Microsoft just made an interesting announcement in regards to Internet Explorer. Apparently, Microsoft has decided to drop the standalone version of Internet Explorer.
I found this quote quite ludicrous:
While IE does conform to most of the W3C's specs, there are still a number of areas where it needs improvement and updating—which don't have anything to do w/the underlying OS."Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," Countryman said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
I've got to admit, IE has been my preferred browser over the past 5-6 years or so—basically since IE3 was released. Over the past few years I've felt IE has the best browser on the market, but Gecko's made very good ground over the past year or so. I think the latest Gecko-based browser is a great product and with this announcement, I'm sure I'll find myself using it more and more. I'll probably stick with using Mozilla over NS, just because I find it's a little less bloated. Anyway, if MS sticks to this decision, I think it's probably the death of IE.
My good friend Robi blogged a little story about qForms (my open source JavaScript API) and an experience he had while working on a project a while back. He actually first told me this story a while back—and at the time it really surprised me. I really need to figure out a marketing idea for making some money off the code. I see a little bit of money from donations, but if I could get just a $1 a form (that qForms is implemented on,) that would turn out to be a lot of money—not to mention well worth the $1. Anyway, just thought Robi's story was interesting.
Looking for a good spam filter for Outlook? I've been using Cloudmark's SpamNet service for blocking spam in Outlook for about 8 months or so—since beta 4 or so—and I've found it to work tremendously. Now that the product is out of beta, they've gone to a commercial product and now charge a service fee for each month.
Anyway, the normal fee is $4.99 a month, but for a limited time they're offering it at a locked price of $3.99. I can do you better though. If you subscribe using my referral code of "hzx4hl" you can not only get the service for $1.99 for the first year (from the time of purchase) you'll also give me a free month of service. Ok, so the second thing benefits me, but you can sign up for the service for half the normal cost. I get enough e-mail that the service is easily worth $2 a month. It captures 99.9% of my spam—which adds up to several thousand e-mails a week. That's much better than weeding through them all on my own. Anyway, I find it's a top notched product and well worth paying for.