Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve had occasional issues with Thunderbird 3, sending out messages via smtp.gmail.com:465. I’m doubting it is my ISP at work, because I’ve been roaming around, and it seems to be the same issue. Long story short, if I click “Send Later” and batch the messages, it seems to be better than just writing a message, and sending it immediately – that seems to just bring up a message saying its connecting, and nothing happens for a long time, before I either cancel it or it times out.

Found some useful Mozilla documentation, on debugging Thunderbird using NSPR logging. Simply, you can do:

export NSPR_LOG_MODULES=SMTP:5
export NSPR_LOG_FILE=~/tmp/tbird.log
/Applications/Thunderbird.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird-bin


NSPR_LOG_MODULE also accepts POP3, and IMAP as arguments. The third line obviously only works on Mac OS X – on Linux, just replace with the path to thunderbird-bin.

While waiting for a meeting to start, I fired up Twitter, and I saw an interesting tweet from Niki Cheong promoting the Heineken Facebook application, which apparently allows you to “plant trees, send greeting cards, and gives you tips on how to party!”. Of course, this isn’t something Niki himself posted – it came via a Twitter advertising network, created in Malaysia, called ChurpChurp.

Malaysia is a country that doesn’t appreciate liquor advertising unless its qualified – i.e. you’re non-Muslim, and you’re of age (I’m uncertain if this is actually 18 or 21, but I believe it is the latter). Heineken basically asks for your date of birth on their website, and I blogged previously about Guinness going so far, to ask for your IC number or passport number!

But look, they’ve found a loophole! Heineken Malaysia has 33,239 fans of this writing. Are they all above 21 years of age?

In fact, Niki’s tweet, just goes to their fan page, and under “Celebrate!”, they ask you: “Are you ready to party?” If you say “Yeah!”, it allows you to go to a Bar finder (note: no checking of age, etc.). What is a bar finder? A place to find lists of bars, in various states, that serve Heineken!!! I mean kudos with the application – the list, allows you to select “Klang Valley”, pick a bar, find all the contact details, show it up on a Google Map, and show you a picture of people having a good time. Kudos to Heineken for embracing social media and creating a Facebook application, and having so many fans on Facebook!

So, it seems that liquor advertising has found loopholes: you do it online, and you get other people to write about them. You do it on Facebook. You might do it on Friendster soon (considering MOL now owns it). You get bloggers to write about it. You get it out on Twitter (are all of Niki’s followers above 21?). Completely brilliant. Twitter’s terms of service doesn’t state anything about this, but it does mention “You may use the Services only in compliance with these Terms and all applicable local, state, national, and international laws, rules and regulations.” Funnily enough, I don’t think rules that apply to other forms of media, apply online at the moment.

BTW, I’m not picking on Niki Cheong (in fact, I just spoke with him before posting this – I have his blessings), or any of the other Churp’ers. I’m just making an observation on how alcohol companies are “going 2.0″, figuring out how to circumvent Malaysian requirements, by going completely online, by targeting social networks, et al.

Interested to hear your thoughts!

I was searching for information about an animal that is common in South-East Asia, and for once, Google not only had the Wikipedia link, but also the Encyclopaedia Britannica link. I thought I’d amuse myself and click it, considering I used to read dead-tree encyclopaedia’s from the 60’s.

I can understand the need to monetise content, and to be fair, paying USD$69.95/year is cheap as chips (since you save $1,325.05 off the print version it seems!), but I think I learned more from the Wikipedia article, than I did the one at Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Do you feel the same way? Wikipedia is going through a fundraising drive, and I think it would be wise to make a donation.

An unknown error connecting to MySQL on 10.0.6.28? Oh dear me… It came back up within 2 minutes though from the time I got the screenshot.

My employer has this odd policy where they force you to change your password, once every six months or so. Its annoying, because sometimes, you forget your password. Its inherently more insecure to write it down somewhere, isn’t it? Plus, you can’t reuse passwords.

However, my mail client always has my password. And therein comes, a useful Thunderbird add-on, called Password Exporter.

Now, I can see what my last known password was, and login when need be.

Twitter has a wonderful Location: field, and a lot of clients, like TwitterFon (for the iPhone), or twibble (for Symbian devices), tend to update the field automatically. They tend to update it with the phone’s built-in AGPS, so at worst, your accuracy in location, is about 100m or so.

I find this to be a tiny problem. You can copy the location string (GPS coordinates), paste it into Google Maps and find out that the person at the Location above, is at MidValley Megamall.

Who cares when you’re in a public location? That can be a good thing for bumping into friends. But what about stalkers who now know where you live? Or an angry wife, that knows you weren’t working late, but chilling out with the guys at a nearby pub?

This is where Google Latitude kind of makes sense. Its opt-in. You only share the location with your friends. Twitter is just open (very rarely, do people’s profiles remain private).

Anyway, I thought it would be cool to write a quick Greasemonkey script to send me to Google Maps automagically. After all, Dive Into Greasemonkey still applies… Quick search on userscripts.org, and I found Twitter Google Maps Link. It does exactly what I want, so I didn’t need to hack up some JavaScript. Win :)