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MySpace Photo Statistics

November 30th, 2007

In MySpace on average (based on sample size of 2071208 images) 15 photos are uploaded per user. Considering only users who have at least one or more photos uploaded, they have on average uploaded a staggering 32 photos.

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Comment Guard Pro (WordPress Comment Spam Protection Plugin) Released for Internal Testing

November 30th, 2007

I like to say that Comment Guard Pro will be the final plugin you will ever need for WordPress comment spam protection. It contains 18 pluglets for protecting you from comment spam, an open API for you to write your own pluglets, detailed live statistics (AJAX updated) and more. We have combined years of experience of ours and the community in comment spam protection, used extensive data from Comment Guard plugin which we deployed on our sites and few beta sites for a year to develop this plugin.

I am happy to say that the much awaited Comment Guard Pro is now released for internal testing so we can fine tune the settings before release. We should be able to release it in mid-December.

Comment Guard Pro was born out of our frustration in dealing with Comment spam. We gave excessive stress on quality and functionality in this product. No real comment should ever be lost. You shouldn't have to pore over Akismet or any other comment spam moderation queue to find out false positives. Comment Guard Pro is designed to give you peace of mind and save you time to allow you to focus on blogging (and your life).

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Subscribe To Blog Comments

November 29th, 2007

I have added a plugin to allow you to subscribe to comments on my blog and track it in real-time with email.

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Beware GMail Goofs Up On Spam Protection

November 28th, 2007

GMail has apparently gone bonkers with its vaunted spam protection feature or maybe spammers have finally managed to successfully corrupt its (naive bayesian?) filters. GMail is generating tons of false positives (valid emails being marked as spam) with no hope in the horizon so far. You need to be very careful with using GMail.

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MySQL SQL Delete Notes

November 27th, 2007

To delete duplicates from a MySQL database table I normally copy the duplicate data first to a temporary table and then use the copied id's to delete from the original table.

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MySQL: Creating Users & Granting Access Simplified

November 23rd, 2007

In MySQL you can use the GRANT statement to create users and assign privileges to them at the same time. It is extremely convenient and beats create user or directly hacking the mysql.user table. I learned few things about GRANT the hard way.

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Never Restart Network on Multi-ADSL Connection Machine…

November 23rd, 2007

I learned it the hard way. Our gateway machine with firewall (shorewall) has multiple ADSL connections configured with load balancing for more bandwidth and transparent fail-over. Today I faced an unenviable problem where one or other of the ADSL connections were going down sometime after a network restart. It was unique because the ADSL modems (configured as router) were accessible via telnet or ping and displayed perfect connectivity. However I was unable to use them as gateway to connect to a server on the internet. They were working fine before. With our non-trivial setup there were many suspects including the shorewall firewall and iptables (dropping certain packets?), network adapter, routing issue etc.

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Text-Link-Ads New Tips For Beating Google (PageRank Penalty) Asks Bloggers To Sell Their Integrity

November 22nd, 2007

Text-Link-Ads upped the ante in their fight against Google (in their effort to help people buy page rank) with the following "tips" for bloggers:
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Don’t Give Up On Vista

November 21st, 2007

Engadget and few other sites are sporting a creative Mac ad utilizing both the leaderboard and vertical sidebar space to make fun of Vista (again). Check the video.

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6 Simple & Safe Postfix Changes for Over 95% Spam Reduction

November 18th, 2007

I used to receive around 5,000-7,000 spams daily on angsuman [at] taragana [dot] com email which is publicly available on the internet. It was consuming too many productive hours daily to fight spam. I decided to fight back. To reduce the spams I first made changes to my postfix configuration with the aim to stop most spams upfront. With 6 simple changes to my postfix configuration my spams dropped from 5,000 - 7,000 to a manageable 5-20 spams daily, often less. Let's look at these 6 simple postfix changes in details to drastically reduce your spam count too. I am consistently getting over 99% spam reduction after implementing these changes.

The changes proved to be safe and without false positives. In several weeks of manual browsing through the log file, I couldn't spot a single false positive (a case where legitimate mail is rejected).

Note: This changes do not involve (nor do they conflict with) spamassasin or clamav, which I might add later.
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