Viraj's Weblog

So I'm reading an Oreilly newsletter which gets sent to my gmail account. I came across this blog explaining some neat bash tricks. One of the comments pointed to a Unix Tip of the Day site which I thought would be cool to subscribe to.

Then I came across this blog about email newsletters. I thought to myself, I do get a shitload of newsletters to my email account, which I just read and trash. Do I want to add more crap? I think email is becoming more and more useless for such things. I end up wasting alot of time reading email. Then I remembered that Bloglines lets you create random email addresses to use for subscribing to newsletters and such. It displays them just like the blog subscriptions.

This seems a more natural way of dealing with email newsletters, and I think I'll convert all of mine to this.

b2evolution has some simple blog antispam features, but it relies on a list of strings that in my opinion is not very scalable. I have been wanting to add SURBL support for awhile, and finally did. It was much easier than I expected. I had found some complicated solutions to do this in PHP, but really all I needed was URL parsing and DNS functions, both of which PHP has. All I did was modify the antispam_url() function in _functions_antispam.php with this PHP code. It also makes sure any URL domain has a proper MX record before it is accepted.

The b2evolution developers suggest making plugins for modifications, but I felt the above too simple to warrant class inheritance and all that crap. We'll see how it works. Unfortunately, SURBL is mostly for links in spam email, and I doubt their submission form would accept blog comment spam. Anyhow, I think it should help somewhat.

Ugh, my gmail outgoing mail seems to taking very long deliver, up to 24 hours! wtf..

I looked at my Tmobile bill today and noticed it was $10 higher than normal. I have their 'get more' plan that gives 600 'whenever' minutes. I never come even close to using my cell that much.

So I'm looking at the charges, and noticed that the $10 was from 411 calls! WTF? Tmobile is charging $1.25 for each 411 call. That is such a fucking ripoff. Why can't they use the 'whenever' minutes that I never used to pay for this crap?

On the bill envelope they are encouraging people to dial 411. Their desire to squeeze as much money as possible from customers is vividly apparent.

I've setup a new blog for a buddy of mine Scott Illsley whom I used to work with. Check it out.

A friend of mine told me about an RSS agregator that emails you called rss2email. Pretty cool, and written in Python as well. The problem I have is I don't have a machine to run such as script on.

In the latest Linux Journal there was an article about Bloglines. This is a free web service that lets you subscribe to RSS feeds. It even has a public API to use in scripts. It's very cool, and I've started using it to keep track of blogs.