A C Zoom

Is email on the way out? That is probably not yet an easy question, but the amount of spam seems to be holding steady, with periodic bursts of spam email storms.

Here are some graphs of spam at one of my mailboxes. This is for a very public email address. The spam detection is using spamassassin which runs under procmail with a customized whitelist and blacklist. Over the few years I've used this, there have been only 1-2 false positives for spam (of course, detection of false positives is not easy since this requires digging through 100s of spam messages, but I have no reason to believe that false positives are more prevalent). There have been quite a few false negatives - messages that are spam, but missed by spamassassin. These are usually around 1%-10% of the total detected spam messages, which is low enough that the graphs below are still useful to show the trend of spam message counts.

2010 Spam Counts
The Spam Counts images are updated periodically, usually every day, to include data of the previous complete 24-hour period.

Older Spam Counts

Here's yet another URL Link Filter for Drupal, latest version can be downloaded from: linkfilter-4.x-5.x-1.1.zip

Drupal 6.x version is available here: linkfilter-6.x-1.2.zip.

The goal for this filter is to be somewhat like the URL filter included with Drupal, with the additional requirement to be Drupal installation directory independent as well as domain independent so that the URLs in Drupal nodes don't have to be re-edited when a Drupal site is moved to a different sub-directory or a different domain. Additionally, it allows for link text to be specified for the URL, and it preserves the input characters as much as possible, performing no or minimal HTML entity conversions of the input characters. Finally - it distinguishes various links with classes, which can be used to display link icons for specific links. If the link filter tag points to internal Drupal node, then a class containing the type of the node is generated, for example, class="linkfilter-drupal-node-image", which can be used to show distinguishing icons based on Drupal node type. This site uses this filter, and the link icons are displayed based on the class generated by the filter: for external links (linkfilter-urlfull class), images (linkfilter-drupal-node-acidfree or linkfilter-drupal-node-image class), mailto links (linkfilter-mailto class).

Link filter tags [l:URL text] in the input text will be replaced with a link to the given URL, which can be a Drupal link, an external web link, or a local non-Drupal link. Prefixes representing the site url and the Drupal directory are added, as appropriate:
1) Site url is prefixed if URL begins with a / character
2) No prefix is added if the URL has a : in it, as in http: or ftp: etc
3) Site url with Drupal base directory is prefixed in all other cases, this is handled by calling the Drupal l() function.

So, I maintain a few web sites and one site uses Gallery software. This worked fine until recently - when a user tried to create a new album, it failed with an error about being unable to create lock files [ Error: Could not open lock file (/..../public_html/albums/album01/photos.dat.lock) for writing! ]

That was a somewhat misleading error, but - in the end, this turned out to be a hosting provider issue, and not a Gallery issue.

Turns out the hosting provider advertently or inadvertently set the default umask for process under Apache to 0111. This umask removes all execute permissions from new files and directories created by scripts run under Apache.

Gallery keeps the default umask, so it inherited the 0111 umask, and when it tried to create a directory with permissions 0700, it in fact got a directory with a permission of 0600 - read, write, but no execute. Of course, without execute permission, a directory is not of much use - cannot move into that directory, cannot create files in that directory, basically, things will start erroring out from that point out. Software could be written to handle this - maybe always do a chmod after a mkdir? But that is a different discussion.

It did not take too long to find this out, but getting this resolved at the hosting provider took a while - explaining umask, mkdir, and directory behavior. I guess that is the first reaction of technical support - they must get too many false reports, that when a real problem comes up, they have to take some time! [Though I am happy with the provider - they were at least engaged and responded fast with questions, and in the end, they resolved this pretty quickly.] Add to this, all morning today the Gallery site was inaccessible - so I could not search the forums for this issue. In any case, this was a new problem, not previously posted on the Web, nor mentioned at the Gallery site.

nodaddy.com tells a scary story of how Go Daddy went in and disabled a site, for what seems to be totally unjustified reasons, and totally insufficient attempts made to

What is worse, is that Go Daddy continues to insist they did they right thing, compounding the significance of this issue.

My domains are registered with Go Daddy, I was hoping for a better response from them - maybe say it was a mistake and that they now have a new process in place to handle this, but looks like that is not going to happen.

Need to think hard if this is a good domain registrar - though looks like it is not that is easy to find any registrar that is good in this respect, at least in the US.

Like clockwork, these pests are able to locate new sites on the web, to infect with their spam postings!

For the past two years, I've not updated these pages much, so had escaped the attention of spammers. But just a month ago, when I got back to updating this site regularly, the spammers have woken up and now I've to keep a closer watch on the new posting activity here.... sigh...

Currently just using the spam module in drupal, which is working fine - though may need to change the configuration so that it marks things as spam as soon as a single URL is found in the post.

I used to use Yahoo a lot, and now go there only for news and email - not for search, and will probably switch over for those old legacy uses as soon as I find something else.

In Firefox, if I go to the Yahoo search page, it would tell me:

Use Yahoo! to search from Firefox


which is something I am never going to do - for a long time now, Yahoo search results have always excluded mention of any aczoom.com link, other than somewhere way below in the search results. Given this, no way am I going to switch my Firefox search box to Yahoo - Google is much better.

This is why I presume there are so many pages on the web related to "SEO" - trying to figure out what search engines do, and how - it is too complex. For example - how come a search engine can list 100s of pages that all link-back or refer to the main page on a topic, but never have that main page show up higher on the search results?

aczoom.com uses Drupal and I suspect this issue is related to that, and URL re-writing is confusing the Yahoo bots. But there are also static pages at this site, and Yahoo does not show them either. And both Google as well as Microsoft MSN search get it right - for all Drupal hosted pages here, as well as the static pages.

So, Yahoo shall remain unused in the Firefox browsers that I use. Hopefully, this should have Yahoo engineers all concerned and rush to fix their search engine :-)!!! Until then, I'll stick with Google Search.

Older blog entry related to same topic: search engine fun

Given rare, unique words on a web page, one would expect search engines could easily determine the top sites to list for the keywords.

My interest led me to these keywords: "aczoom home page".

Google search, MSN search, Ask Jeeves search, all list my home page as the first or second item in the search results. They also list other aczoom pages in their results, and adding more keywords can find links to key pages at my site.

Here's a picture of the Google results in January 2006.

Yahoo search results are strange - they do not list a single page hosted at aczoom.com for the above search! They do list numerous pages that link to aczoom.com, but not a single direct aczoom.com page is listed.

[Well, one page is listed, but that area is supposed to be off-limits to search engines, I guess robots.txt does not work as it is supposed to work.]

Here's a picture of the Yahoo results in January 2006.

I have mostly used Google for my searches, but recently got intrigued with the issue search engines have with handling redirects, and I use Drupal, so started checking out how search engines behaved. My conclusion is that if Yahoo can't get this simple query right, it diminishes my confidence in the credibilily of their search results. This is also technically interesting - how is Yahoo building their list, that would result in this situation?

I did try to help them along, submitted aczoom.com manually to Yahoo, but that was a while ago. Shouldn't have had to do that anyway - they have so many pages that link to aczoom.com, would that not lead them to spider aczoom.com itself?

Regions in India receive an abundance of sunlight - over 300 days on average in a year.

Solar Energy can be harnessed to provide lighting for millions of homes, and in the villages, using solar energy achieves two goals: it provides good quality, longer lasting light for the homeowner, and it helps reduce the burning of fossil fuels such as kerosene resulting in decreased green-house gas generation.

Grameen Surya Bijlee Foundation has initiated the
Dignity through Electricity Program, and has taken the lead in installing 200 systems in a village. GSBF is now looking for partners - NGOs or Individual Donors - to help spread solar energy lighting to many villages that today cannot afford to use anything other than kerosene for lighting.

Grameen Surya Bijlee Foundation (GSBF) is a non-profit Trust set-up to provide lighting and other amenities to the villages in India, using renewable energy sources.

For more information, including names and addresses of the trust management, please visit: suryabijlee.com.

Related articles:
From online edition of Indian Express Nov 27, 2005, Sunlit nights by Rituparna Bhuyan, Digital solar lamps designed by two IIT graduates have brought light to Bhairavnath Vasti in Maharashtra.

After months at looking at various Content Management Systems, Blogging Tools, I've decided to move this site to Drupal.

All the links that most people use are available at the top of the left-sidebar on this page, those pages will continue to stay as they are.