Go Speed Racer Go!

There are so many ways a live action adaptation of the cartoon can go wrong, in fact there are already many reasons to hate it from what we can see from the trailers.

But if you're a 80s baby like me who woke up early on weekends to catch the cartoons, there is some sort of guilty pleasure to be had. Especially when I found that many elements from the cartoon was faithfully recreated eg. the car, the campy uniforms and if you watch the music video below, you would recognize the pose from the picture above.

Of course, all that in addition to the over the top automobile action and fancy CGI.




I think one can only love or hate the bright colors and stylized action. But hey, what do you expect from a movie where the protagonist's name is, of all things, Speed Racer.

TM does port blocking

Old news, but still news to those who are not yet affected.

Effective since December 2007, TM has blocked all outbound SMTP traffic or port 25 traffic from dynamic IP addresses in their effort to curb spamming activities. They are implementing it in phases, starting from the brickfields area and gradually to the whole of Klang Valley and the rest of the country. The only way to send out emails would be through streamyx or TM's email service.

You can read about it here.

I came to know about it when a couple of days ago I realize my outbound emails were not going anywhere, so I fired a complain to my web host and they pointed me to this bit of information. Fortunately, they have open another port for outgoing emails from their users.

To be honest I have no idea about the technicalities of such an action, as long as I can send my emails I'm giddy. My beef is that neither TM nor my webhost has taken the initiative to release a notice to inform their users.

On the other hand, apparently, TM's action has drawn some flak from their users. You can read about some of their responses here.

So if you are using streamyx or TMnet and suddenly discover that you can't send any emails, contact your mail service provider (eg. your webhost) who should already have a solution for this.