Despite the reported troubles with production, with each trailer I see of the upcoming movie A Scanner Darkly I am more and more interested in it. I am not familiar with the books at all, but here is IMDB's plot summary of the movie:

"A Scanner Darkly" is set in suburban Orange County, California in the future. It imagines a paranoid world in which it seems two of every 10 Americans has been hired by the government to spy on the other 8 -- in the name of national security and drug enforcement. When one reluctant government recruit (Reeves) is ordered to start spying on his friends, he is launched on a journey into the absurd, where outsourced government contractors largely define the social construct, where identities and loyalties are impossible to decode, and where not even his girlfriend can be trusted. The film highlights the inconsistencies and ironic consequences of the war on drugs.

Honestly, for me the main attraction of the movie has nothing to do with the story, but with the "Rotoscoping" animation technique used in making the movie (they film the actors, then go over the footage with a computer program, add in sets, and draw all the actors - read more on the tech behind the movie in this WIRED article).

The end result is pretty awesome:

From the looks of it, the movie could be awful, but at the same time send my eyes into a state of euphoria.

SpellBound is an awesome spell check extension for the Firefox web browser. Unfortunately with the release of Firefox 1.5 SpellBound broke. And with the developer now on the Mozilla team and working on integrating the spell checking directly into Firefox 2.0 - the extension appeared to not be getting any kind of update.

Well, I was sick of opening MS Word, or Gmail to run spell checks for blog entries, forum posts, etc, so I thought I would Google the problem, and low and behold I found a forum discussion regarding a development version of SpellBound for Firefox 1.5. And not only does it make the extension compatible, it adds some nice enhancements like immediately underlining misspellings in the browser (yea I know, Mac users already have this in all your apps if you enable it).

Here are the links to the resources you need to install:
Install the Development SpellBound XPI
Install your languages dictionary file (here is the US English file)
Now restart Firefox and enjoy.

UPDATE 2006-09-15: You might also be interested on my review of the Spell Checking features built-in to Firefox 2.0 (Beta).

This month I will be speaking at The Boise Code Camp, a collection of various coders getting together to share their knowledge in various fields (C#, ColdFusion, MS SQL Server, etc.). I will be speaking on at least one topic, AJAX, and possibly two others: ColdFusion, and MySQL. I am looking forward to it. I will update this post as it develops.

Its a free event for all to attend. So if you are interested in web, database, or software development you should come on out.