I was quite irritated to find out recently that if you have a Google hosted domain and use that to login to Gtalk, you cannot communicate with Twitter without jumping through a few hoops, and even then, only under certain conditions. My first thought was that “these sort of things” should just work (tm). Turns out I was really wrong …
Unlike what is probably thought by some (like me earlier)Twitter is not logged into Gtalk to talk to you. It uses XMPP/Jabber to talk to you. If you have logged into gtalk with your own domain name, how do you think twitter knows that it needs to send the message to gtalk’s servers? As Joe Beda explains, it is almost like SMTP. So instead of MX records, Twitter looks up your SRV records from DNS. So to talk to Twitter (and other such apps that will be using this mechanism in the future), you need to setup SRV records for your domain. And that means you need to have complete control over your domain’s DNS records.
I was looking around tonight to check out some celebrity blogs out there. It seems to be a fad nowadays - celebrities blogging is now almost a statement!
Here are some that I found, and I will be adding more to this list when I find more:
Aamir Khan: Aamir’s controversial blog which keeps making headlines. No blogging software used. The code looks like generated from some offline data. No comments on the blog page. No feeds. Some nice guy has tried to create feed for the blog by scraping it, but it seems a bit outdated. Interesting thing about the hosting of the blog. www.aamirkhan.com is hosted on a freebsd machine. However, the blog content is picked up from a CentOS linux machine elsewhere. Another weird thing - I can’t see any comments on the blog (I use firefox). But the page source shows comments by users.
Just now got an invite to Pagii, from some stranger, sent directly to my office email. Bad, bad.
This turns me off such ventures completely. Getting invites from known folks who are trying out
different YASNs, is irritating but not completely obnoxious. However this is.
Looked around a bit to see what this is about. Turned out this is a social venture from
Freewebs, and descriptions from various places on the net
makes it out to be a place where you can make fancy home pages in ajiffy, and comment on other’s.
Not too exciting. But check out if this interests you.
Granted, it is about 37 minutes long. But it is one of the finest that I have ever heard. It is also one of the rarest, in the sense that a political candidate, running for the president of USA, no less, could ever dare to make. It is also rare to find even non-politicians confront the issue of race so effectively on the face. It is also one of the best references for those learning about public speech.
And curiously, if you replace black/white with upper-caste/lower-caste, it addresses as an analogy the same problems that India faces, and offers the same path of positiveness that our country needs, and what has been missing all these years because of our universally hated politicians.
I must have been living under a rock all these days. I just discovered Librarything yesterday.
Librarything.com is your online bookshelf. It lets you enter just the ISBN of books , and will pull in all the rest of the meta info - even thumbnail cover images. If you have a bar code scanner, you can scan your hundred+ book collection in no time at all. For Indian prints, I use the US ISBN number of the original written in the inside pages next to the print information, and tagging the book “indian-edition”.
So he decided that this was perhaps not such a wise move. There is a video presentation explaining why. The summary is that the representative he is fighting against is pretty strong, and for a first hand politician, the margin of defeat is going to be enormous. And “losing big” is not the best way to start such a campaign.
In other news, I have been trying out Twitter for the past few days. It is turning out to be quite addictive. Aren’t we often stuck at times, with nothing to do for hours, with just your mobile to give you company? Instead of fiddling with it, or taking lame pictures, vent yourself out on Twitter. Just keep it under 140 chars please. ;) Updating through gtalk sounds interesting till you find out that there is no way that pidgin would keep a count of characters for you and your last update has just been br0ken into two parts. About time there is a pidgin plugin which keeps track of your word count.
Flickr’s camera stats is an enormously humbling resource for me. It would be the most powerful message for newbie photography enthusiasts - creativity rules technology any day, so stop thinking too much about your camera. The kind of amazing photos taken using basic point-and-shoot cameras by talented photographers from around the world, keeps me firmly rooted to the ground while I lug my bulky Rebel Xti wherever I go.
