//beconfused

Yay! //beconfused celebrates 700 posts of crap. My posting rates are getting lower these days. And that’s because of some restrictions. I don’t want to visit my web site using the army computers as they are:

# Generally slow computers that screams “trash me” when each application hangs.
# Curious eyes often pry on what I surf – that means no blog, email and reading nerdy stuff. [Nerdy stuff bad; nerdy ain't fitting well with the army guys.]
# The army has a list of web sites all the computers visit. It’s a rumour but I think I am confident to confirm it since it’s so easy to get a log file with those information anyway.

So that’s no blogging. No comment moderation. Sorry if your comments got stuck. I got an off on coming Monday and am quite happy about it now. I tried so hard to apply for an off day, they just keep refusing to let me have it! Now I got my off day with strings attached – I promised to return immediately if something crops up.

I notice that the almighty WordPress 2.51 has been release and can’t wait to upgrade it. I’ll do so once I resolve some FTP (File Transfer Protocol) problems with my internet service provider.

By the way, Akismet – the spam filter I deploy – is totally amazing. My spam level is down 99% I tell you! It’s caught lots of spam comments since installation.

My most popular post is just a photo of Jay Chou (with 75 comments at present). Most loyal commentor is probably Nafcom – who blogs about ICQ and Opera from Germany! Thanks to all readers.

By the way, thanks to all the visitors who clicked on my Google advertisements. I can’t identify anyone but I get about 1 or 2 clicks a day (I don’t click it). It helps me pay for my blog’s web hosting. So do click if you see advertisements that interests you.

Well, here comes part 3 of the Windows Live Mail preview. You can check out part 1 and part 2 first before you read this.

Address filtering

(Filters email address as you type.)

This is one of the features I really like in Gmail, now it’s in Windows Live Mail too. That’s the way emailing should be like anyway. No one likes to open the address book to add addresses. Windows Live Mail does not implement them differently from Gmail. [Click here for a larger image.]

Sending mails in rich-text

The toolbar has been improved slightly. It looks quite similar to the existing one in Hotmail. I think it has a strange addition – to allow uses to add a search link to a particular text. Of course, Windows Live Mail tries to search in a particular search engine. It doesn’t change much, the existing one in Hotmail is already quite good already anyway.

By the way, I still don’t understand why their emoticon icon at the toolbar looks like a yellow french artist with a moustache.

Spel-chacking

(I tend to spell wrongly sometimes.)

One of the cooler features of Windows Live Mail is it’s spell checking feature. It checks as you spell, just like the way Microsoft Word does it’s checking. It is not as fast as the way Microsoft Word checks the spelling of course. I found the speed to be acceptable and I finally am confident of typing a formal email with Windows Live Mail. I always use a decent word processor to spell check my email before I send them to someone important.

Handling junk

(Emails in Junk are not displayed at all.)

Actually, I prefer to just call them spam. Microsoft calls it junk emails. Gmail just disallows images to be displayed and filters spam to put them in the spam folder. Windows Live Mail filters spam and put into the junk mail folder and went further to disallow message content in the junk folder to be displayed. I guess it is some kind of security feature to make sure no one even reads the contents of suspicious email. I think that move may be a little unnecessary though. [Click here for a larger image.]

Conclusion

Windows Live Mail is a significant improvement from the current Hotmail. There are some bugs which have yet to be fixed. One of which is that I can’t access my email from my company, which also means everyone in the army can’t access it I believe. While opening the page, Internet Explorer asks me to download a file named “attachmentpopup.aspx”. That doesn’t happen at my place.

At my workplace, I can only use Firefox to check my hotmail account. It has been “converted” to a Windows Live Mail beta account. Unfortunately, with Firefox, there are none of these cool features that you can play around with. It just hasn’t been implemented. In Firefox, Windows Live Mail is nothing more than the usual Hotmail with the Windows Live Mail look, it doesn’t have AJAX at the moment.

Note that what I wrote is just a glimpse of how Windows Live Mail is like as of Febuary 03, 2006. Microsoft may add and remove features. Sorry that I took so long to complete what was to be one post only. I wasn’t very free but I just want to show something (Windows Live Mail) I really like to you guys.

Read back

• Windows Live Mail Preview page 1 of 3
• Windows Live Mail Preview page 2 of 3
• Windows Live Mail Preview page 1 of 3 (you’re here)

I made a couple of changes to my blog.

The new anti-spam tool – Akismet

(Akismet caught my spam!)

Firstly, I am most happy with Akismet. It is amazing. You won’t understand the joy of clicking the ‘Delete all’ button on that image above. I smiled after I clicked and waited like a little kid longing to play the new toy when queueing for purchase at the cashier. The feeling is just amazing.

The set up isn’t hard. All you need to do is to upload the plugin and enter the WordPress.com API key. And you’re on. Actually, the WordPress.com API is the hardest part. Read more about Akismet.

Finally upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2

I was lazy so it took long. The updating process is simple but as I have made some customizations here and there, I was kinda lazy to check through the PHP files to see what changes I made. Anyway, it is up. I don’t see significant changes. But I do note that there is improved administering interface for adding pages. I can finally click on ‘Save and Continue Editing’ in pages.

(An ajax web poll. It looks pretty good already so I didn’t make any changes to the looks.)

Added a web poll

Currently, it reads something like – Do you like polls. I know it sounds dumb. It is dumb. Do sound out if you have any suggestions for the web polls.

A good thing to point out is that the web poll support Ajax. The specifications of an Ajax application is that it updates the servers through JavaScript silently. You can read about the technical specifications at Wikipedia.

I chose Jalenack’s Democracy poll and it’s been working quite well except for the fact that no one responded to my polls.

That’s all

I think that’s all for updates. See you! I’m going to camp again.

I just logged into my blog to post some stuff and I am most shock to discover…

_(Oh no, it says I have 148 moderated comments!)_

Almost all of them are spam! I hate spam.

I just receive this strange message in my inbox, now will anyone please tell me what is going on?

From: Neateye
Reply-To: Neateye
To: Dew <dew@beconfused.com>
Date: Apr 28, 2005 4:21 AM
Subject: Gouranga

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ….
That which brings the highest happiness!!

This can be considered spam, but my spam filters in Gmail did not catch this message. This email doesn’t seem to be advertising any bloody thing too. Gouranga? What the hell is this?

‘Gouranga’ can be a slang, a divine name or some Grand Theft Auto thingy. So what the hell is this ‘Gouranga’, I am quite tempted to reply the emailer but I won’t. That person probably wouldn’t reply and I am kind of lazy you see.

Gouranga is makes me more annoyed than happy. Well at least it’s not a penis enlargement advertisement.

I just got my first bunch of spam since I moved my blog from blog.beconfused.com to this current location. I am so mad at these spammers. Spammers, if you do read this, let me inform you of this.

Well, you see, the software I use is called WordPress and all comment links are attributed with the beautiful “nofollow”.

Let me explain what the hell is “nofollow”. It means not to follow. Well, asides that. As described by our dear search engine Google:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

If you are thinking of posting something like this – Online casino in your comment, it is of no benefit for you. Because your comment just becomes this instead – Online casino!

See, the bloody “nofollow” is there. It’s useless, Mr. Spammer. The whole spam-to-increase-Google-PageRank thing is so yesterday. Please, I believe you are smarter than that.

Now, get the hell out of my site (sight)!

Downloaded something recently. It’s a rather interesting concept actually. I mean, every time I get spammed by spammers, it really makes me wonder what if the spammers themselves are actually spammed.

And now they will, thanks to Lycos.

Screensaver tackles spam websites

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.

The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.

He said the screensaver had been carefully written to ensure that the amount of traffic it generated from each user did not overload the web.

“Every single user will contribute three to four megabytes per day,” he said, “about one MP3 file.”

But, he said, if enough people sign up spamming websites could be force to pay for gigabytes of traffic every single day.

Source: BBC News

I don’t know if this is first of it’s kind but it’s definitely the first time I spot just a program and it uses Macromedia Flash by the way. Download it now! (Point your region to United Kingdom, use the drop down list if you have no bloody idea where UK is because, personally, I don’t.)