Saturday, February 23, 2008

Gmail crash on Firefox

In case you've been bugged with frequent gmail crashes on fx (9 out of 10 times for me), you can safely assume it to be some extension not gelling well with the big G; or at least that was the case for me. Finding out the real culprit was a bit tricky though: I disabled AdBlock+ on gmail, uninstalled YSlow and Firebug without any luck, in the end, the less pesky HTML Validator turned out to be the problem, disabling HTML Validator for gmail has fixed it for now.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Spammy Yummy!

Another one of those spam hatred posts; didn't check my gmail a/c for three days and now I see 165 spam messages: I have no inclination to sift through them even though there might be few false positives. At least, with my gmail I was very careful with posting it on public forums; heck I would try to use mailinator.com to register to public forums in case I really had to register but the darn Google Newsgroups didn't let me use any other a/c except Google to post to their forums (there are some disadvantages of using SSO after all); so now my gmail email is open to spammers to harvest, and I guess the monsoon was really good this year cause the harvesting seems to be going on in full swing!).
Digressing a little; I believe there are two ways your email is spammed: 1) It's somewhere on a public facing site so is harvested by bots/spammers (2) You provide your email address to a site and they sell it off to harvesters. For (1) if you indeed have to make your email address public there's not much you can do; except use throw-away email addresses like mailinator.
2) If you have your own email provider with a default catch-all email a/c then it's easy; create unique email addresses for every site that you are registering with; for instance my registration email address could be sachiniscool.ameritrade@example.com for the Ameritrade site and sachiniscool.match@example.com for Match.com site; this way at least once I start getting spammed I know who sold my email address (and perhaps create Junk filters). Unfortunately; this doesn't work for majority of people; who don't have their own email provider. I think it would be great if public email providers like Yahoo, Google & MS etc. supported some kind of "catch-all" functionality with the email addresses that they provide, something like if I prefix or suffix my actual email address with some text and a delimiter; the mail would still be forwarded to my real email address for e.g. sachin#ameritrade@live.com (here # is the delimiter and ameritrade is the suffix) should fwd mails to sachinATlive.com and then I would have to way to know in case ameritrade ever sells my email to some spammers.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Driftwood

I've been noticing that I have become quite infrequent with my posting off-late; but once you haven't been doing anything really worthwhile for some time it's a little tough to be posting regularly without sounding redundant! Anyway, after a long hiatus (7 months to be precise); I again have a day job: it's the same run-off-the-mill stuff that I've been doing all through these years: it's not that I didn't know that this job isn't going to be any different from the older ones before I took it; it's just that I felt I gotta be doing something(!) and since even 7 months of break didn't really help me in figuring out what I wanted out of my life, the best was to get a job which would at least keep my motor running! The ironic bit about this job is first thing that they do is send me back to the states for few weeks; a place I didn't really want to return back to and the biggest irony being I have my return on 8th of March (if you've been a regular to my blog; you will know the significance of this day in my life). This is my first trip to the west coast so maybe I will spend time trying to see places nearby: I see the towering (literally & metaphorically) Space Needle from my hotel: got to go to the top; have plans to visit the Woodland Zoo & hopefully if they still have Orca Watching this time of year; try to sight few Orcas. Visited the Aquarium today which I think is passable (the boston one is any day better); but then perhaps; all these places wouldn't really appeal to me without having someone to share the experiences with!