Where am I?!?

What you might be thinking is what I've been upto the past few days. Well, it's time for the truth to be told. I am moving on.

No, not from blogging. Just that I thought it was time that I tried some new blogging software. So, I asked brother GB to lend me a subdomain. A a result you can now catch me at My Temple Of Wisdom.

I am using b2evolution as my blogging tool. There are still many things that need to be done so you can expect quite some changes in the near future :)

Many thanks for being here. I bow before thee to express my gratitude.

Follow me to my Temple of Wisdom.

Showing off S5

Hi. Yes I am back from my trip. I'd be posting more details of the trip as the day progresses.

This is the link to my article on NewsForge on S⁵, the presentation tool that only requires a browser. It is browser/platform independent and it allows you to make simple presentations, that is, you can't have the typewriter or the swirl effects.

Check it out.

Off for a few days

Hi all. I will be doing my vanishing act again. I am going to Agra tomorrow and then we leave for Gorakhpur the same day. I'd be in Gorakhpur till the 18th and back in Agra on the morning of 19th. This means that I will be back by 19th evening.

See ya!

Tips For All -- Fighting Spam

We all want to fight Spam. And we all want to keep our emails away from the automated scripts that hunt for email ids. The first thing that we need to do is to understand what these bots are looking for:
(a) The @. It is a fundamental part of any email id.
(b) Something before and after the @.

What most people do is to include some obvious word in their id so that humans can remove it when mailing them. I am sure you have seen email id's such as mailme@theheroNOSPAM.com or iamDELETE@superb.net It is obvious that the words DELETE and NOSPAM are not part of the actual id. Nevertheless you could include a line saying that these words need to be removed before sending an email.

But a real smart trick can be accomplished using CSS. Let me first describe the CSS class:

.emailID {
direction: rtl;
unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
}

Now you know some scripts like Hebrew are not left-to-right but right-to-left. Suppose your email id was written right-to-left. ni.oc.oohay@alalxunil means nothing to you does it? It is of no significance to these scripts either. .com, .net, etc. should succeed the @, not precede it.

With the CSS class written it is now time to write your email address. Let's say you are a gentlemen. How would you give your id:

Please mail me your suggestions at div class="emailID"ni.oc.oohay@alalxunil/div

Do remember that div class="emailID" needs to be enclosed in horizontal brackets <>. So do /div. Because the template here is also in CSS I can not write the div class within brackets.

Voila! Your email id would appear normal to the viewers 'coz you have asked text to be displayed right-to-left in the CSS class. But to the bots it is as it is, meaningless.

P.S. You can do a google to learn more about uniocode-bidi. Basically it is for languages which are not traditionally left-to-right. Bidi stands for bidirectional.

Tips For All -- Reset the password field

This tip answers to all the troubles you have had when writing passwords. the question that you have often asked yourselves: Do I push backspace or should I use the arrow keys and then hit delete?

The Tip: Whenever in doubt press Ctrl+u. Works in command line and also everwhere in the GUI.

Suppose you were to type your account password in Gaim to chat, and you messed it up and are too lazy to keep the backspace key pressed, just hit Ctrl+u. It would delete the password field completely.

Update

Hi all.

A Very Happy and Prosperous New Year to you too. I know I've been gone long but I am back now. Tell you what, I have something great in store for you. Starting right now (I'll be posting as soon as soon as this post gets published) I am starting a series called Tips For All.

I plan on share the tips I have learned over the years using Linux and some more that I have come across scouring the net. Stay tuned 'coz I have some great tips lined up for you.

The title of all tip sharing posts would be Tips For All. Just like Update is always Update and never Update 2 or Update III.

Cheers!