Workaround for Lifehacker or gizmodo automatically redirect the browser from .com to .jp

I sometimes experienced that lifehacker.com or gizmodo.com do redirection automatically to lifehacker.jp or gizmodo.jp. Possibly that the website is either checking the ip address of the user or the browser's local language setting. This auto redirection is quite annoying when accessing the page from google search result, because instead of showing the correct page, it shows the front page of the Japanese version. To solve this annoying redirection, add subdomain "us." in front of the url of lifehacker.com or gizmodo.com page.

For example, if the original URL is:
http://lifehacker.com/5799574/top-10-fixes-for-the-webs-most-annoying-problems

it will become:
http://us.lifehacker.com/5799574/top-10-fixes-for-the-webs-most-annoying-problems

Once the us.lifehacker.com is loaded, it will stay in the English version although we omit the subdomain "us." until we delete the cookies.

That's all :)

Update 2013/4/30:
There are few changes at lifehacker and gizmodo, so that this tips is no longer working. You can check the new changes here:
http://lifehacker.com/welcome-to-the-new-lifehacker-472650381
http://gizmodo.com/welcome-to-the-new-gizmodo-481330297

That's all :)

how to change gimp language setting

After changing some regional and language settings in my vista to Japanese, if I run gimp, it displays unreadable character instead of English. I found this url is very helpful to change the language of gimp (in XP, Linux, and MacOSX):
http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-fire-up.html#gimp-concepts-running-language

For vista, it is very similar with XP, example is to use English (en):

1. go to control panel, system, advanced system settings
2. click Environment variables..
3. add new environment variable (click New...):
   variable name: LANG
   variable value: en
4. Ok. Finish.

That's all :)

Zend framework mail: broken kanji

I'm using Zend framework for most of my web projects at work. One of the must-have features is must be able to send email either scheduled routinely using cron or executed manually from the web. Somehow, I found that on certain web based email clients the contents of the email with Japanese kanji is unreadable.

I'm quite surprised that after doing many trial and errors converting the encoding type, the solution is very straightforward. Simply add a line to the header of the email contains MIME-Version information as follows:

$class->addHeader('MIME-Version','1.0');

But I still don't know why it should be added manually.. :S

That's all :)