Online Security with SiteHound

I have been running a trial version of SiteHound for more than a month now as part of an effort to keep my PC secure when browsing. SiteHound is from the same people who make Mailwasher, the popular anti-spam software for Windows.

I am thrilled to report that Box Trapper working in tandem with Spam Assasin on my hosting account has kept out 140 spam emails in the last ten days (since 25th November 2006) on two of my email accounts for which I had enabled them.

I use domain-based (rather than free ISP such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) email very heavily and like millions of other users, I have been inundated with spam for a long time as some of my long running email addresses have been posted on web pages.

I was surprised to see the node count somewhere around the 900 mark and then realised that it was the Drupal planet feed. I decided to reduce the nodes as a prelude to a revamp of the site structure and upgrade to the latest versions of category, pathauto and drupal itself. Also, it makes no sense to feature these items just to fill up the site with content when I can use an RSS reader. If I could post the tips I tend to collect about Drupal usage each day, now, that would be really useful.

MasterCard home page without a search box

With a Google PageRank of 7/10 and Alexa ranking at 12,554 at the time of writing this post, MasterCard is one of the busiest sites in the world and with tons of content. Amazingly, the US gateway page (I chose it from the splash page) doesn't have a fundamental requirement- a search box. I couldn't even find a Site Map.

I don't know the logic of this custom, but I learned from my parents this morning that one shouldn't sell stuff on a Friday. The issue cropped up after we had told a vehicle broker to pick up our family's 18-year old two-wheeler in the evening.

Ever since I first heard about FreeNX about a year ago, I was keen to try it out. Well, a bit of serendipitous browsing (I was reading Bruce Perens stern rebuke to Novell on www.tectonic.za) brought me to www.cosmopod.com which offers exactly such a service.

For about 4 years now, I have had this domain and used it for all my email and more recently, this web site. When I first registered it, I got the inspiration for the name from Eric Meyer, the CSS guru whose site is www.meyerweb.com

Sigh! It seems that even when large public sector banks in India try to catch up with the Internet age, they can't quite leave their sarkari mentality behind them.

I was researching online payment gateways in India as part of a project and came across a google ad for UTI Bank's payment gateway. I clicked on the link and was immediateley shown a Firefox warning about not being able to validate the site's verifying authority. Not the best initial experience, but I accepted the site temporarily and continued.

I have had a reseller account with Site5 (www.site5.com) since the last 14 months. One of the things that could be better is their human response time for a trouble ticket.

Site5 guarantees a response (not a resolution of the problem, which is fine) to any trouble ticket within 24 hours. They claim that their average response time is about 25 minutes. In reality, a human response to a trouble ticket (as opposed to their autoresponder acknowledgment) takes more than 12 hours almost every time I have raised one.