Spam Filters

Ever since I got my blog up again last month, I had been receiving hundreds of spam comments each day. I haven’t ever seen so much spam on my blog earlier and was wondering what could be the reason for such a sudden spam rush. I had to manually mark all comments as spam and delete them. I was cursing all spam bots because those comments got mixed up in other regular comments of the blog and I ended up deleting valid comments as well.

That is when I realized that while getting the site up from the server error, I had deleted most of the plugins because one of them had been causing the problem I didn’t know which one. And at that time, I had also deleted the Akismet plugin. It was the one, which was protecting me from thousands of spam comments all these days. It had come preinstalled with all versions of WordPress shipped after 2.0. I didn’t actually realize its importance until it was gone. Akismet has premium plans as well as free plans. If you are running a small business blog or something that doesn’t run on WordPress, Akismet is a definitely a service worth paying for.

On the way to root my Wildfire

It’s been little over a year since I got my Wildfire. Its warranty has now expired. And with quite a few new models up its sleeve, HTC has stopped support for the Wildfire. Guess what, they are now redirecting HTC.com/wildfire to their latest phone catalog.

With much newer versions of Android floating around, and mine still stuck in 2.2.1, I decided a couple of days back to ROOT my phone. And being a newbie to this whole rooting thing, I began to do a bit of research.

Here is what i found:
-You can find the HBOOT version by turning off your phone and then powering it on with the ‘volume down’ button pressed.
-Depending on the version of HBOOT, there are a few apps that would help you change your phone from S-ON to S-OFF.

-Once the phone becomes S-OFF it hardly takes few minutes to deploy a custom ROM.

-CyanogenMod seems to be the preferred community based custom ROM.

-**If something fails during the rooting process, your phone is ‘bricked’. i.e. it can no longer be used.**

-Most guides have a disclaimer for bricked phones saying something like “I am not responsible for your stupidity”.

Despite the last two points being significant deterrents, I am all set to root my phone. More updates in the subsequent posts as I proceed through the process.

Posted from WordPress for Android

New Google Reader #Fail

Google Reader has always been a great RSS subscription tool for me to keep up with the latest posts of my favorite blogs. Apart from that, it has(had) been a great source for me to find new content that my friends were sharing. This was an important reason for me using their service because it helped me find interesting posts shared by like minded people who follow blogs regularly. It helped me find new blogs that I myself can subscribe to.

Google, in their attempt to integrate Reader with their infant social network Google+, have killed that. They have totally removed the entire setup of following others and the Reader specific ‘share’ button. If I find something interesting, I can only share it on Google+, which I rarely use. Moreover, there is a big difference between sharing on Reader and Google+. When I am in a mood to read, I wouldn’t want to wade through zillions of crappy status updates.

And it seems Google just doesn’t care. Reader is going to stay like this and it wants people-who-don’t-like-it to move on.

In all, the new redesigned Google Reader is a big #Fail. It is now just a plain feed reader but a good one at that. Despite all this, I don’t think I’ll move on because I don’t think there is a better feed reader in the market yet.

Six Months With HTC Wildfire

A very short update about my experiences with the HTC Wildfire. This is my first smartphone. And I’m loving it. It is no doubt a handsome phone and its easy to fall in love with it. But no doubt, it is also a low end phone from HTC compared to HTC Legend, HTC Desire or HTC Incredible. As a result there are a few features that are missing and a few apps are not compatible with this phone.

The upsides of using this phone is the Android platform which provides you with a number of fascinating applications. There are a few applications with amazing interfaces that include TweetDeck, Google Reader, WordPress, Maps, Dolphin Browser, Angry Birds etc. The integration with Facebook brings in hundreds of contacts and phone numbers directly to your phone. The sensitivity of the capacitive sensor is also quite good.

The downsides have to be the low resolution screen. As a result many apps are not compatible with this phone. Even the 5MP camera doesn’t work as good as a normal 5MP camera would. Running too many apps at a time may cause this phone to lag.

The phone is an excellent low-budget entry-level android phone for anyone who wishes to be a part of the ‘smartphone generation’.

Headers on My Old Blog

I was going through my Picasa Web Albums when I came across an album which included some of the old headers that I had designed for my old blog which was hosted at blogger.

I did these when I was in college. Most of them in the middle of the night in a sleepy mode. Some of them are outright silly.

Surveys!

Recently a friend at IIM B posted on her Facebook wall a link to a survey on Android phones. My eyes lighted up on seeing the word Android and being an Android user I was tempted to click on it.

It was a research survey about smartphones in general and asked us to compare different operating systems to each other and give appropriate ratings. The wildfire is my first smartphone and I haven’t actually used the iphone or any blackberry device. So I gave ratings based on what I had read at sites like appstorm and mashable.

My feelings about the survey was that it had a quite misleading title. Something on the lines of ‘Smartphones Survey’ would have been more apt. Secondly, they hadn’t included a brief summary about what the survey was about. Till the end of the survey I was expecting sometimg more specific to android but it didn’t have any. In the end, I submitted the survey a bit disappointed.

Surveys conducted by my office are even more amusing. Once they tried a new caterer for lunch and wanted to get the opinion of all employees about this caterer. The questions that they had was “Do you like the food provided by the new caterer?” and “Do you wish to continue with them?”. And most of us intentionally answered that the food was bad but we still wanted to continue with them. At times they come up with much more arbit questions and equally arbit answers.

They use an open source tool called “LimeSurvey“. That eventually led me to find more such tools. A few such interesting tools that I found are SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy, SurveyGizmo etc. Some of these are paid plans. And some like Survey Gizmo offer student plans which was used by my friend for that ‘Android’ survey. And more recently I found a couple of sites like GoPollGo and iQpoll.

And now Facebook has come up with their own Question-Answer system which can also be used for creating polls. And of course we can see Facebook use its gigantic user base to its advantage and try to drive traffic with arbit questions. The most recent poll that I saw was created by my bro asking his friends whether he should take bath or not?

While very few of these polls will be useful a large part of them will be random and will continue to be so.

New Year Resolutions

Its that time of the year again. Everybody is talking about resolutions. Am not of the kind who stick to their resolutions. I do remember my resolutions, but rarely do I take effort to keep them.

Like every year, last year too I made a decision to write frequent posts on this blog. And as it always happens, I wrote just over 20 posts in the entire year. The pattern was something like 5 in Jan, 4 in Feb, 3 in Mar and the frequency kept decreasing. Not that am busy. Just that am lazy. Can’t do much about it now though. (But there is indeed the option of making new posts appear as if they were publish in the past).

I even ambitiously set off to create a new blog in a couple of specific niches. Both have been temporarily shelved due to lack of initiative on my part. Both are in fact great opportunities that I need to utilize. My resolution for 2011 would in fact be to make the best out of everything in the year ahead and to snatch opportunities as they come.

Why I ditched Firefox and chose Chrome!

I used to love Firefox. I loved the browser’s innovative features. I was even a member of the Spread Firefox community and promoted usage of Firefox among my friends and family. But over the last one year the browser has changed from good to bad. It has changed from one of the most loved browsers to being one of the most hated ones, next only to the universally hated IE.

Whenever I used Firefox, it didn’t take more than 15-20 minutes for the CPU usage to peak, eventually hanging the browser, making me reload the page again. Believe me, with painfully slow internet connections its an awful experience. Gradually the browser began to consume more and more memory and became slower and slower. About a year ago I didn’t have much of a choice other than venting out my feelings, because Chrome was at its infant stages and I surely didn’t want to return to IE.

After a few months, Chrome came along as a light, super-fast and powerful browser with all its extensions and features. The choice was simple. Here are some reasons why I chose Chrome-

Startup time – Chrome is much much faster wrt to the startup time. While it takes about 7-8 seconds on Firefox, its just a fraction of the time on Chrome. Its blazing fast.

Each Tab is a different Process – Some sites contain a lot of JavaScript, CSS and AJAX. In Firefox, when such sites open, it freezes all the other tabs. For a user like me who has lots of tabs open simulatneously it could be really troublesome. Chrome resolves this making making each tab run as a separate process.  This ensures that one tab doesn’t hang the others. Chrome even has its own Task Manager which you can access by Shift+Esc. Also see some stats by typing about:memory on the Omnibox.

Clean and Simple with the Omnibox – The Address bar at the top often called as the Omnibox doubles up as a search box. This conserves much real estate and makes the browser look cooler and convenient.

No Status Bar – Until Chrome, I had been used to the status bar. But just by it not being present in Chrome I realized that it was just an useless addition which I never really needed. This too conserves much real estate.

Application shortcuts – Google Chrome enables me to create shortcuts for most of my frequently used web applications. This too helped me in conserving precious loading time.

I have been using Firefox for so long that I won’t hate it. My loyalties might have changed but I still have feelings and the desire to use Firefox. I would love to see some overhauls and expect the browser to bounce back. I’d be willing to shift to Firefox if they are able to attract me with powerful features.

PS : I’ve just started using Firefox 4 beta 3. I’m yet to reach my conclusion of the latest version. Hoping that it turns out to be good.

My Three Years on Twitter

On the 13th of August this year, my twitter account celebrated its third anniversary. I joined Twitter when it was in its nascent stages in 2007. I had heard about the site where you can share stuff regarding What you were doing at a particular time. I thought of checking it out and registered myself with the handle alagappan_nitt. At first I didn’t fully understand the need for sharing my current status with strangers. And I didn’t have any followers or any interesting people to follow. I tweeted once and disappeared. I never used it for another 8 months or so.

Any social network starts becoming interesting and useful only after it has gained a significant user base.  And twitter started gaining traction in 2008. A few of college buddies like @a4arvind and @sathyaphoenix joined twitter. Even in 2008 I just used the site for chatting with my friends about random stuff. It was like a substitute for IM clients. But I felt the features like tagging someone using @ very useful in linking to others’  profiles. I felt it could also be pretty useful for sending info to a group of friends. But the harder part was convincing friends to join twitter. I tried a bit but failed badly. Still I occasionally used twitter for updating my status during vacation and other holidays.

Around mid-2009, Twitter started becoming more interesting due to its explosive growth. It got a lot of media coverage and a lot of celebrities started using the service. And hence general public too started adopting it. A lot of my college buddies too started using it. Eventually I migrated from the old handle to the present one that is @alagappanr. Then I got the opportunity to interact with interesting people and follow them. I started using the service more often. Though I sticked to the web interface most of the time I also experimented with a few twitter clients.

Gradually twitter was being used for different purposes than what it was originally intended for. It began to be used a major real-time news source. As a influential PR/Marketing tool. As a tool to track events. As a major knowledge source. As a way to stay connected with friends 24×7. As a tool for fun. It was so overwhelming that Twitter changed its standard question from ‘What are you doing?’ to ‘What’s Happening?’.

In the month of June in 2009 I attended Twitter Unconference in Chennai – Buzz140. It has some interesting presentations on what twitter could be used for etc etc. It was wonderfully hosted by Kiruba and Co. I got hooked to the service ever since. I have been tweeting regularly and have connected with quite a few people.

As far as the interface used is concerned I have been using the web interface predominantly. I find it simple and easy to use. Apart from that I use/used a number of services like Echofon, TweetDeck, HootSuite, SMSTweets, TwitterSMS etc. Twitter through SMS is one feature that I guess is the most useful.

As I was writing this post I found a site called MyTweet16 where you can get your first 16 tweets. It was nostalgic. My first tweet was about Orkut. Orkut is now dead for me.

Though I am still a small user with a small following, I guess I am more connected with the internet than ever before. I guess just existing on a service is not a big achievement. There is a long way to go for me to extract the maximum out of twitter.

[Find out When you joined twitter at www.whendidyoujointwitter.com] [Follow me at www.twitter.com/alagappanr]

Interesting and Useful Google Chrome Extensions

Recently I made a switch to the new Google Chrome Beta browser since I was having some trouble with Firefox and also because I was looking for some change. Two major attractions with the chrome browser are its speed and its simplicity.

Though presently Chrome cannot match the number of Add-on’s which Firefox has, I guess it eventually will, since a large number of useful extensions are becoming available for Google Chrome everyday. He is my list of interesting and useful extensions.

Gmail Checker -Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Mail inbox. You can also click the button to open your inbox.

Google Reader Notifier -Displays the number of unread items in your Google Reader account. Clicking can show a preview popup or open your Reader account.

Adblock – The same features which were present in the Firefox Add-on. Blocks all advertisements on webpages.

Add This – This extension allows you to easily share, email, translate and bookmark webpages. You can configure the setting yourself or you can set it to autoconfig based on usage.

Send from Gmail – Do you get irritated when MS Outlook opens up each time when you click a ‘mail to’ id on a webpage.? Make Gmail your default mail application. It opens a compose window each time you click on a mail address on a webpage.

Chrowety, Chromed Bird – Excellent Twitter Extensions for Google Chrome. They come with a set of really useful features and both are easy to use. I prefer Chrowety for my regular usage.

One Number – A extension which lets you gather all google services in one button. Using this would eliminate the need for a number of other extensions in this list. Would be handy for those with a large number of extensions making the toolbar a bit crowded.

There are also extensions like the google wave notifier whcih might be useful for those who are actively using Google’s wave.