Regarding Maya, the spam harvester trap that I've set up; I forgot to add that I didn't write the script I'm using. While I did have a related idea about thwarting spammers (who happen to be sending about 60-70 junk emails every day to my TimepassTown.com inbox), I discovered a host of spam harvester traps that people have written in various languages. If you would like to contribute your bandwidth and set up a trap on your website, pick up a script from here. Be careful though. Make sure you properly configure your robots.txt file to stop the well behaved indexers like Google, etc.

I hate exams - they really cramp your blogging frequency. Anyway, 6th semester is over, and I've got to start preparing for the Mumbai trip.

Just noticed another thing - 48 hours of not checking emails got me about 90-100 emails in the inbox. And about 70 of them were spam. That's 70% noise. Ouch.

Mike Wendland wrote an article a few weeks ago about millionaire Alan Ralsky who lives in a brand new 8000-sq-foot luxury home, complete with T1 Internet and everything else this sweet world has to offer. So how does millionaire Alan Ralsky pay for all this? Simple. He's behind 40% of the junk email you get in your inbox everyday.

Slashdot picked up this article, and soon we had Slashdotters churning out all sorts of information about him, including his postal address, which people eagerly used to sign up for every ad catalog and junk snail mail there they could lay there hands on! So now, Alan's been "slashdotted" with junk mail! Read more in Mike's follow up article.

Ben and Mena Trott, the couple that brought us MovableType are celebrating their third anniversary. Mena's even posted some love letters from when they were 18. Happy Anniversary! (The footer on Mena's blog is really cool: My life is Powered by Movable Type

One day even I shall open up my inbox archive and copy paste love letters from when I was 18.

...It's been a year since I was 18.

JoelOnSoftware:

When I'm training someone to be a C++ programmer, it would be nice if I never had to teach them about char*'s and pointer arithmetic

I know exactly what he means. I am a C++ guy at heart, but this is why I use PHP for more or less everything nowadays. (link found via Rob Fahrni)

I wrote to Rob when I saw a Visio ad in my inbox today, and before I could even reply to his first email, he had googled me out! (yes, it's a word).

This is what I got in my inbox a few minutes ago:

Hi,
We found the following 9 broken links on arnab.org:

On page http://arnab.org/blog: 
http://arnab.org/properties.php : Not Found
http://arnab.org/blog.php : Not Found
On page http://arnab.org/blog/: 
http://arnab.org/blog/properties.php : Not Found
http://arnab.org/blog/blog.php : Not Found
...

For just $5 (US) per month we will check your website regularly, and warn you of any future broken links. Your website's visitors will thank you for it. [direct paypal link]

The broken links he sent were correct - so the email was pretty helpful, and I would consider it if it was a little cheaper. That's what I call good marketing.