A few days ago I watched the movie 9 — mediocre plot, but grand visuals — and the images of those future robots are still vivid in my mind. Yesterday, the big Flash game Machinarium entered my gaming journey.

疯狂约会美丽都 Les triplettes de Belleville, also known as The Triplets of Belleville. Watched it today. The first 5 minutes made me decide this was a unique and great piece of animation. So I paused it, hurriedly ate my meal, very reverently closed all my other programs, and gave Les triplettes de Belleville my undivided attention.

Requires Flash Player 10

Ten years to sharpen a single sword — guarantee the quality, not the quantity. After watching Jiaokeli’s See Through, I fell unusually in love with it. (download page portal) One person spent three and a half years pouring himself into creating a personal short film, giving up a stable job and material comfort, all for a little over 16 minutes of animation. What conviction sustained him through it? How could it not be a masterpiece?

My Norton is about to expire, and MS just released MSE the day before yesterday, so I quickly gave it a try. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) can protect computers running Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 against viruses, spyware, rootkits, and Trojans. The Microsoft Security Essentials software itself cannot fend off all web threats, but when used with the IE8 browser and a fully updated Windows operating system, it will provide users with a complete security solution.

Season 2 of Lie To Me (别对我撒谎), which premiered on September 28, is now available for download too. Download page: http://www.verycd.com/topics/2771391/

The first note on security sandboxes. Security sandboxes have tripped up plenty of people, so this is well-trodden ground. This afternoon I ran into error 2123. The scene of the crimeA certain list flash page needed to support gravatar avatars (gravatar’s cross-domain policy file lives at http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/crossdomain.xml). While loading the avatars they serve up, I hit a security sandbox violation, with this error: SecurityError: Error #2123: Security sandbox violation:

Last time I ran into the problem of Flash’s NavigateToURL being blocked in IE, and the fix was to set wmode. Last night I hit another wmode problem: a text input field in Flash (a genuine TextField in CS4, type=’input’), once embedded in a web page, couldn’t take Chinese input properly in Firefox — the IME worked, but everything typed came out garbled.

Fringe season 2 has started, so I’m following it. Heroes season 4 is underway too, so I’ll keep following that as well. Sure, Heroes has way too many plot bugs, but since I’m this bored, I’ll stick with it anyway…

This article gives us a bit of insider gossip about Flash CS5. There are a few typos in it, and for someone whose English isn’t up to much, like me, it was enough to bring tears to your eyes. A few things I paid attention to: Adoption rateLooking at the current state of the Flash platform, FlashPlayer10 installs are still climbing, and the new figures are expected to reach over 90% coverage in the near term. Flash CS5 featuresThe biggest news for developers is that Flash authoring is finally integrated with FlashBuilder. If you’re using Flash CS5, you can export a new FlashBuilder project through a new export dialog.

I stumbled on this movie this afternoon. It’s no blockbuster, but it’s a genuinely rare gem. The cast gives me the same feeling as watching a DND live-play video. The imagination runs wild, it’s got a real spoof vibe, and it’s a lot of fun. Halfway through I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

Yesterday I went through the hassle of reinstalling the OS on my desktop. I’d been torn between Windows 7 and Ubuntu, but in the end it was Windows 7. Whenever I mention Windows 7, my friends’ first concern is always compatibility. The last stretch of time I used Windows 7, as I recall, was back at Qoolu, and every night WoW, CnC3 and RA3 all ran without a single compatibility issue. Older games are a different story, though (why do I always start with games…). EA games from before Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, Warcraft, Diablo and the like are all unsupported. Oddly enough, it is compatible with StarCraft — the “garbled graphics” version, that is. Taobao and online banking, naturally, are not compatible.

Half a year already — Season 2 has finally started airing overseas, which means we can download it. YYeTs is updating Season 2:

Domain email is a personalized mail service from Tencent. If you own a domain, a few simple settings are all it takes to create mailboxes that use your domain as the email suffix. It comes with the following features: a custom account name and email logo of your choosing, up to 10 mailboxes under the same domain, and group functionality.

Problem description:This afternoon I ran into a hassle: IE7 and IE8 intercept navigateToURL('xxx','_blank') inside Flash; getURL under AS2 gets intercepted the same way. I feel like I’ve run into this before, but it doesn’t happen that often, so I never bothered to dig into what conditions trigger the interception. It came up again today, so it’s a good chance to figure out why. After some searching, I found plenty of discussions from last year. Someone pointed out: IE7 and Firefox (the version I’m using is 2.0.0.11) block opening new windows with the navigateToURL method, while the getURL method in AS2 doesn’t — which is pretty annoying. Since the project chose AS3, we just have to find a way around it. The first thing that comes to mind is ExternalInterface, of course, but testing showed it still gets blocked. Then I wondered whether adding wmode would help, so I added the wmode attribute set to opaque to the page — and sure enough, it worked.