Alexey Solofnenko blog

My primary GMail account gets very little SPAM and 99% of it is caught. I guess the spammers know that it does not make sense to spam it. So I decided to make an experiment and forwarded all my home emails to an another GMail account. At first GMail decided that most of newsletters I get is a spam (I guess many people are marking them as such instead of unsubscribing), but after writing few filters with disabled SPAM checks the things worked well. Google keeps spam messages for 30 days and now, after a month, I have the number - total 40K spam messages.

We were already running SpamAssassin on our server, so effectively I use GMail to weed extra 100 messages per day that SpamAssassin does not catch. In addition Thunderbird rules were automatically moving expected emails into subfolders, so I just had to delete [almost] all messages from inbox. I was not in a bad shape before, but now it is much better. However I wonder, how "normal" people live with it...

I have been playing with my new VOIP phone for some time now. I bought Linksys PAP2-NA and opened an account with a Canadian firm. Surprisingly I found out that Canadian dollar is now more expensive than American. Not much to warrant looking for another company. Of cause it did not work out of the box - I had to always use long distance numbers even for my zone and incoming calls were always busy. After contacting my provider I unchecked "Send DID Prefix" option in my DID and it worked! I still need to iron out problems with NAT before disconnecting my normal phone - incoming calls do not always connect. After that I will tell my TelCo bye-bye.

Today I visited my photos on Panoramio. Some photos became popular, some others (usually the photos that were not selected for Google Earth) stopped being popular. Surprisingly the photo I am not proud of is the most popular - a road in Long Beach. The only explanation I can think is that nobody else made a photo of this uninteresting street next to the Aquarium. As usual, location is the more important than the quality of the photo itself.

Today I updated my resume with GrandCentral phone number. The number now calls my cell, my home, and my business number. I even installed GizmoProject client, but GC wants me use a real phone number with it. I do not understand the reason for it. There are free numbers, but I still needed a credit card and I did not want to give any. Maybe I will generate a temporary number just for GizmoProject.

Yesterday I tested new number and it worked great. First time my wife was surprised by the prompt she heard after peeking the phone - GC told that the caller is unknown and whether she wanted to answer the call, send to voice mail or to ignore. While she was thinking, VoiceMail activated. Next time she will be prepared.

Yesterday my friend showed me a site he has been working for a while. It is DivorceFormsPro. The idea is sound - the service allows saving a lot of money on preparing divorce documents for courts. There is a small flat fee and no time limit. At home over internet at any pace one can create documents acceptable by divorce courts. The site helps all the way from preparing to filing and everything in between. DivorceFormsPro even provides free paralegal review. Looking at the rates lawyers ask just for talking with them, this site is a clear choice in most situations. I hope nobody I know will need it, but for those that will, I recommend this site.

Long time ago I setup my blog trackback URLs with a prefix containing a backslash. On UNIX file systems backslash is a normal character and not all spammer scripts can handle it. (I remember confusion when I did the same in a virtual file system in one of our products - /home/DOMAIN\user - was just two directories down under root folder, but people expected three and wondered how it worked). Some of the spammer scripts double escape back slash, others just omit it, thinking that the following forward slash is escaped. Of cause these are just bugs in their scripts and they will fix them when it becomes important. I recently fixed a similar bug in my project, but I will tell about it later.

Today I got an invitation to join GrandCentral. It is a "virtual phone number" service. Most of the features are not needed with the current state of cell phones, but one feature seems really useful - call switch - if somebody calls you on a cellular phone and the reception is not very good, you can press '*' and all other phones will ring, so you can start using another phone. Temporary redirect feature can be also useful. Of cause I cannot resist playing with it more. Lets see, how it works...

While I was out of work, I did not notice that my home server is not accessible from outside. It happened after my ISP changed my IP address. It is dynamically assigned, but it was pretty stable for the last few years. Such change ought to happen sooner and later, but why did not my monitoring service say anything? I guess I need to use something more reliable.

I just got a spam messages with URL like http://www.google.com/url?q=%68%74%74%70%3A... (which is encoded http://....). Google wanted to know what links you are clicking on and bad guys now use the same URLs to redirect to their sites...