Jalaj

When SMS turns into Spam Messaging Services

Jalaj — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:02:46 +0000

Doctor, Engineer or Actor! Which profession suits you the best? To find out sms JOB (Your Name) to 51515 E.g.: JOB Raj to 51515. Rs.3/sms

This is a sample SMS that is delivered to its customers by Vodafone’s (Mumbai, India) marketing department. I wonder if there really are people who use these type of sms services that are far from truth. Say I send JOB SHAHRUKH what job suggestion will return back. ACTOR? Then I think Vodafone is suggesting that everyone who bear name Amitabh, Shahrukh or Aamir are best suited to work as actor. If the returned job suggestions is NOT ACTOR then we should say to our very Shahrukh Khan “Hey you are misfit in what you are doing! Why don’t you try something else”

What do you say?

Photo Courtesy: pouwerkerk

Here are some more interesting SMSs

Kya aap romantic hain? Kaisi hai apki romantic life life? Janiye yeh sab! Sms VAL (ur Date of Birth) to 53131. For eg. VAL 25041982 to 53131. Rs3/sms

Ab check karein kitna pyaar hai do logon mein. sms SOUL (your name) (your partners name) to 53131. E.g. SOUL Saif Kareena to 53131. Rs3/sms

Just imagine what will happen if your wife sends your date of birth for the first sms above to recieve “HIGHLY ROMANTIC” and your’s and her name for the second sms to get result “TOO LOW”!!!… guess ! guess guess!!!!

Some more….

Smart, Intelligent, hard working aur kya khubiyan hein aap mein! SMS NAME (apna naam) to 51515 par aur janiye apne baare mein. E.g. Name Salman to 51515. Rs3/sms

Red, Green, Yellow, Black or Blue! Aapka favourite colour batata hai hai aapki personality ke baare mein. SMS COLOR to 53131 Rs3/sms

Aap ke sone ke tareeke se pata chalti hai aapki personality. Sms SLEEP to 51515 par aur janiye apni personality ke baare mein. Rs3/sms

Oh! So there are so many ways to know about your own personality! Which one should I use to know about myself?? Why not all three!!! Here we go!!! … Seems like I have Multiple Personalities (disorder)

Here are some more…

Jaaniye Love Guru se 10 golden rules jinse aap jeet sakte hai kisi bhi ladki ka dil. SMS karein RULES to 51515. Rs3/sms

Har insaan ke andar chupa hua hai ek leader. Aapke andar ka leader kaun hai. SMS karein IDOL (apna naam) to 51515 par. For eg: IDOL Kareena. Rs3/sms

Feels like Partner-2 and Leader-102…

Got bored reading all these above messeges? Hey don’t forget these are samples from what I get each day!!
If you are one of those using these services remember all these SMSs have a single thing in common and that’s “Rs3/sms”… so whatever be the content, intention is the same! Increase your bill or decrease your talktime, Rs.3 at a time.

Jaago Grahak Jaago!

Change is the Only Constant

Jalaj — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:36:00 +0000

Today was a very hectic day for me as I was busy shifting home. In Mumbai if you are living in a rented house then you are bound with an 11-month contract after which you need to vacate. Thankfully I got an opportunity to extend the contract period and today was the day when 22 months completed. Another extension did not happen and after more than a month long search for a flat in the vicinity, succeeded in getting one which was handed over to me just today… How I wish I could have lived at the same location for another term, but rightly said “Change is the Only Constant”.

Today was also the day when this blog crossed half-a-million pageviews mark. At this juncture I was thinking on whether the blog was on right path and answer that I got was a ‘NO’… I read somewhere “I Think, Therefore I Blog”. This blog was meant to be a technical blog and continued to be technical as long as I was thinking Technical and could think of enough subjects to blog on. Now my thoughts are no longer purely technical and thus it’s time I bring a little (or may be big) changes which require that this blog discontinue being branded as technical.

From now on I would be blogging “Random Thoughts” instead. This way I hope to get regular in posting.

Takethosepictures.com - Revelations

Jalaj — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:10:28 +0000

I was just notified about TakeThosePictures.com .. so another of spam sites coming, I thought and putting the url in address bar opened the site. The site looked like something I had seen before… and yes that indeed looked exactly like and seems to be from the makers for crazypicsonline.com. The way the background image was reduced to grayscale and then blurred and the login section placed in the middle, the borders everything was exactly the same.

Then I looked closely, the pictures in background felt familiar, the pics the text below them… that was a screenshot from images.google.com!!! What an hard work for creating a site

BEWARE : THE SITE TAKETHOSEPICTRUES.COM IS A SCAM TO GET MORE EMAIL ADDRESSES

Listed below are some of the most popular posts on this blog on which you are now, if you feel like reading something, instead of wasting time on scam sites.

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TheFunPics.com - Funniest of Invisible Pics

Jalaj — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:22:55 +0000

The fun about TheFunPics.com is that it seems that it is about pics and fun and funny pics, but it has nothing. Putting thefunpics.com in address bar takes you to no where. So what’s funny about it??

Here are a few most visited links from this blog you or on currently.

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Grandy’s Epack Corporation

Jalaj — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:05:50 +0000

A Lot of people are getting emails from Grandy’s Epack Corporation similar to that mentioned below promising a handsome earning each month. Beware as that may be yet another job scam.

From: -----
Subject: To: ------
Date: -----

Grandy's Epack Corp. is now hiring Financial Assistant to help operate international payments.Freelancing today is what we all want to promote, freedom is what we all want to obtain. You don't have to struggle the traffic and spend the whole day in a stuffy office. All you need is PC handy and enthusiasm.
The duties imply accepting payments from our US and AuStralia clients and resending to designed destinations ( usually to our partners).By doing so our company saves up to 10% by reducing tax abuse. What you get is 5% out of every money transfer operation. You're being paid instantly. If work regularly, your monthly gains would be 4000$ and more.

Besides, we offer.
- Flexible schedule (usually 2-3 hours a day)
- Saturdays & Sundays off

Requirements:
- Have to be aged 21 or above
- No criminal record
- Regular Internet access
- Ability to accept payments using your bank account
- Ability to resend the money through Western Union

If feel qualified ,please, attach the following info to start up with:
- Fist Name
- Last Name
- Age
- Sex
- State, City, Zip
- Phone number( home and cell)
- Valid email address

NOTE:!!!! the email address you use to contact us for the first time is: epack4biz@gmail.com
In the subject field put " interested".

Please, use only mentioned email address, otherwise we'll fail to receive your response.

0901:FFFFFFE0 - Metal Gear Online MGO Beta delayed

Jalaj — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:17:40 +0000

Metal Gear Online Beta got delayed due to heavy traffic and everyone trying to connect are getting error 0901:FFFFFFE0 - Unable to connect to sever.

Let’s see when the beta starts.

Here are a few most visited links from this blog you or on.

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icanlearnmagic.com - I Can Learn Magic, Biggest Ones Here

Jalaj — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:41:07 +0000

I stumbled upon the site icanlearnmagic.com a site where I can learn magic, even the biggest ones. I even learnt how to make a site with rushing traffic disappear See it for yourself, the link is here I Can Learn Magic

Here are a few most visited links from this blog you or on.

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www.amberlake.com - Official Website of Amber Lake, Winner of Rock of Love 2

Jalaj — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:12:04 +0000

Update:
The Official Site of Ambre Lake (Not Amber), VH1 fame, is at ambrelake.com and her career has more achievement than just VH1’s Rock of Love 2, some are listed below

Rock of Love 2
Project Slasher
Eden Court
Health & Lifestyles Weekly
Dead End Road
The Empty Building
SWEET HOME ALABAMA
Blotter Series (Atlanta Braves)
The Final Play (24 Hour Films)
Suds
Witch Hunters
Tangled Web
The “Getting” Series
From Venus
Death Impulse
Update Ends

Amber Lake known for her performance in VH1’s Rock of Love 2 has won the 2nd season of Rock of Love. www.amberlake.com has just started claiming to be her Official site (though it’s down at this moment), but may be a fan site instead. Anyways that would get clear once the site starts running.

By the time we update this page here are a few links from this site for you.

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3rd World Sudoku Championship 2008 starts today

Jalaj — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:19:52 +0000

Results (Update 17/Apr/2008 3.30AM IST): While the official site is yet to announce the results more than 10 hours after the scheduled closure of the tournament, we managed to get a glimpse of final result thanks to TimeOnline UK that published just 15 minutes ago. Thomas Snyder, of the United States won the championship for the second year running and the team competition was won by the Czech Republic. Original News here

The 3rd World Sudoku Championship 2008 held at Holiday Inn, Goa, India starts today with arrival of the competitors the whole day. Competitors from 30 countries will participate in this competition.

The first round of competition will begin tomorrow 15th April and the final results are expected to be declared on 16th April Evening.

From India Ritesh Gupta, Himani Shah, Rajesh Kumar and Sumit Bothra will fight for the title and Jaipal Reddy Mogiligundl, Gaurav Korde and Omkar Hendre would participate as Guest Competitors.

Randy Pausch and The Last Lecture

Jalaj — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 04:23:13 +0000

While The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch is making breeze all over the world, I could not save myself from getting impressed by the Book and the Author who reminded me of the classic Indian movie (a fiction) “Anand’ and it’s central character Anand Sehgal played by Rajesh Khanna

“The Last Lecture” are a series of lectures given by various professors given the scenario that if they were to die in the very near future and they were to give a last lecture what topics would they touch. Randy Pausch was assigned a similar lecture though the authorities were quick to change the name of the series and call that lecture as first in the series “Journeys” for the reason that Randy Pausch was indeed moving towards death being diagnosed with Terminal Pancreatic Cancer.

On September 18, 2007 Randy gave this lecture that focused on Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. This speech was taped so his children, ages 5, 2 and 1, can watch it when they’re older. This video was later posted on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo. The video is sized 177MB so while high speed broadband users can view that without any problem, slow speed internet users (includes me ) may find problems. In any case the transcript of the entire lecture is also available here and reading the lecture is as inspiring as the video itself.

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.

Randy described his childhood dreams of “Being in zero gravity, playing in the National Football League, authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia, being Captain Kirk [Star-Trek]“. The entire lecture was bubbling and full of humor, as at one place Randy spoke :

And we’re not going to talk about spirituality and religion, although I will tell you that I have achieved a deathbed conversion. [dramatic pause] … I just bought a Macintosh. [laughter and clapping]

Randy ended his talks with following words :

So today’s talk was about my childhood dreams, enabling the dreams of others, and some lessons learned. But did you figure out the head fake? [dramatic pause] It’s not about how to achieve your dreams. It’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.

Have you figured out the second head fake? The talk’s not for you, it’s for my kids. Thank you all, good night.

This lecture that was attended by some 500 people got a worldwide coverage with Zeff Zaslow’s article A Beloved Professor Delivers The Lecture of a Lifetime that appeared on Wall Street Journal the very next day. Zeff also proposed Randy to elaborate the lecture in a full book for which he was willing to provide all his help in putting his spoken words into writing. Since Randy did not want to compromise with even a small fraction of time and that he wanted to spend mximum time with his family, he declined, but later accepted given the possibility that he needed to give only an hour each day talking to Zeff over phone while he was exercising on his bike.

This way while exercising he was asked a number of questions by Zeff bringing out many of his rare thoughts and experiances. And the final outcome was the book The Last Lecture, a must read book for all those who dream.

It was 15th August 2007, when Randy was diagnosed with Terminal Cancer and given a period of 3-6 months left. Since then he is being treated to buy more time for his life. Randy’s website is here and he posts regular updates on his health here

Introducing Photowebparty.com

Jalaj — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:20:19 +0000

Introducing Photowebparty.com - In fact there is currently no such site in existance. It is just one of spam site that is generating traffic out of false mails etc. This trend started with crazypicsonline.com, moved ahead with more of supporting sites and then followed by localpics.info.

So now since you are here following some mail followed by a web search, it is advised that you keep away from such sites.

Listed below are some of the most popular posts on this blog on which you are now, if you feel like reading something.

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Google App Engine - New from Google

Jalaj — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:14:14 +0000

Google today launched the preview release of Google App Engine. Just a few minutes after I read about it in the official declaration, and learning that only 10,000 developers only would get to signup for time-being, I rushed to signup page only to know that signups were no longer available. Determined not to lose this time (I got my first gmail account after 1 year of its release in absence of invitations) I tried signing in using google ids of each of my family members and my Google Apps account and at last was surprised to see before me the title “Welcome to Google App Engine” with a button saying “Create an Application”

So now I am a proud owner of a limited-users preview account on Google App Engine. Since I am not much conversant with Python, which I tried learning a ouple of years back while working on Zope and Plone, my first application on Google App Engine is going to happen much sooner but at least I could start and so I went ahead with adding an application.

Localpics.info - A Possible Trap to collect your MSN Credentials

Jalaj — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:29:30 +0000

Localpics.info , is perhaps, a new crap site looking for you to get your MSN credentials. For what? Don’t know! but if you really want to know contact the person mentioned in WHOIS data

Let’s peek into their terms and conditions!

By filling out this form, you authorize TST Management, Inc to spread the word
about this 100% real and upcomming Messenger Community Site.

So by filling in your MSN credentials you authorize the site owner to “spread the word”, in other words peek into your contact list and send all your contacts mails to get their credentials in turn.

You will receive your share of the credit in helping us spread the word. This is a harmless
Community site which is offering users a platform to meet each other for free.

By “You will receive your share of credit” they mean the mails that your contacts would be sent will be on your behalf, as if you yourselves are sending the mail And notice they are offering a platform to meet each other for free… Was Microsoft charging everyone? ??

This is not a “phishing” site that attempts to “trick” you into revealing personal
information.

They only ask for your login credentials and not the personal information! Personal information can anyways be collected by logging into your account.

ANY LIABILITY, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY LIABILITY FOR DAMAGES CAUSED OR
ALLEGEDLY CAUSED BY ANY FAILURE OF PERFORMANCE, ERROR, OMISSION, INTERRUPTION, DEFECT,
DELAY IN OPERATION OR TRANSMISSION, COMMUNICATIONS LINE FAILURE, SHALL BE STRICTLY LIMITED
TO THE AMOUNT PAID BY OR ON BEHALF OF THE SUBSCRIBER TO THIS SERVICE.

They take no liability and are responsible for nothing as they didn’t any money from you.

We may temporarily access your MSN account to do a combination
of the following:
1. Send Instant Messages to your friends promoting this site.
2. Introduce new entertaining sites to your friends via Instant Messages.

So next time they start a new website they can continue to spam you with mails related to that site too!!

This is a free service. You will not be asked to pay at any time.
You will not be subscribed to anything asking for payment.

Statement is clear… they will spam you for free!!

You can now go through the rest of the terms yourselves to find which trouble you are getting into!!!

Photo Quiz - Spot the Fakes

Jalaj — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:27:22 +0000

I have earlier come up with two posts Email forwarding - All Fun and No Responsibility and Email Forward related to Osama Bin Laden Virus about hoaxes that spread round the net in form of email forwards and insisted that we check the authencity of information before forwarding it. A reliable site to get info on hoaxes is About.com: Urban Legends.

One of the most popular article (or rather a Quiz) recently added there is Urban Legend Photo Quiz: Spot the Fakes!. It is a quiz that compilles a lot of hoax images mixed with some true ones, and requires you to guess if an image is real or fake.

From the 55 photos shown there I succeeded in picking out all true and fake ones correctly and scored 55 out of 55!

Take this quiz and see how much do you score!

This Blog is For Sale

Jalaj — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:37:40 +0000

I started this blog on 12-Dec-2006 with simple aim to journal my learning. I am no SEO but when I learnt that next PageRank update (2 updates happened in January) brought me a PR4, I started thinking that way. Later I upgraded to own domain on 24th May 2007. At that time the highest pageviews on a single day was 587 and total pageviews at about 25000.

Moving to new domain brought a heavy drop in traffic as it was that time that Google took highest time for next update. The dropdown also had it’s root in my failure to note that my most of the highest viewed posts were not in Google’s index for new site. At last with Google PR update and my efforts in bringing all posts to Index paid and traffic started moving ahead.

While it took me 432 days to reach first 100,000 pageviews, the next two 100,000 pageviews took just 22 days and 19 days respectively. March 2008 witnessed highest pageviews ever 167,544 in a single month with highest pageviews 8221 in a single day.

And Alexa too started showing up the graph for my blog as I crossed Top 100,000 on two particular days (shows up when graph smoothening reduced to minimum on graph).

Though this blog still shows as PR4 in Google Toolbar, Probability is that at least the home page is indeed a PR5 as evident from the Crawl Status Page, which shows page(s) existing in “Medium” slab.

Here is the breakup of how all posts found viewership (stats as on date, as of now).

Above 100,000 views (1 post)
10,000 to 99,999 views (2 posts)
1,000 to 9,999 views (26 posts)
100 to 999 views (102 posts)
below 100 (102 posts)

I intend to sale this blog for three reasons, one because due to my other commitments I have gone slow in learning, and even if I do I rarely get chance to journal it on blog. There is too low and uneven activity nowadays. Second, I may not be able to sustain the traffic flowing-in in future. Third I have this blog hosted on wordpress.com which doesnot allow adding Google Adsense or anyother javascript code which could have monitised the blog. Most traffic to this blog flows from Google and other search engines and there are too few RSS readers. I cannot risk moving the blog to self-hosted account as I am no entrepreneur.

By selling this blog I would be giving away the entire content, administrator access to this wordpress.com blog, the domain that expires in May 2009. After the transaction is over you can remove my Administrator access to the blog and export / move or do anything with it.

Feel free to comeup with amount that you think you can pay for this blog in “as is” condition. I will continue expecting bids till 15th May (the domain upgrade on wordpress.com expires on 23rd May 200 or until someone comes up with an irresistable offer.

You can use the contact form below for privately placing your bids and Comment section for any inquiry which being public may benefit other bidders too.

Use this contact form for bidding (Private)

[contact-form]

Use Comment form at the bottom for any inquiries (Public)

Update: April Fool’s Day is over… So let’s get back to routine

Using Yahoo Pipes - Google Trends Scraper

Jalaj — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:34:00 +0000

In the last post Using Yahoo Pipes - Google Trends Tokenizer, we saw how Yahoo Pipes can be used to prepare a Google Trends RSS feed containing search strings as individual items instead of all existing in a single post as provided by Google. It works fine except that someone asked me what if I want to get similar feed for Google Trends for some previous particular date? Tricky! since Google provides RSS feed for just the current trends and not the old dates.

So in this post we will achive this requirement. But from where will we get raw data? Hope you haven’t forgot that though Google doesn’t provide Google Trends RSS feed for old dates but it does provide the data on HTML page!! If we could parse this page to extract the data out, we can do it… Fortunately Yahoo Pipes provides a “Fetch Page” module that can fetch a raw HTML page and even do operations as getting data from within given strings or break page content using a delimeter. Let’s start doing it…

If you reached the page looking for the RSS feed it’s link is here. Change the date appropriately to get data for date of your choice. If you are here for learning how to use Yaho Pipes to get the work done, then read ahead.

http://google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X&date=2008-3-19

Above is the url for Google Trends Page containing data for say the date we take here March 19, 2008. Add a “Text Input” module from “Unser Inputs” section so that we can enable user to provide the date input. Fill “Date”, “Date (yyyy-mm-dd):” in fields Name and Prompt. We will leave Default as blank so that on event of not passing any inputs the Current Trends Data is fetched.

Now add a “URL Builder” module from “URL” section. Fill “http://google.com/trends/hottrends” in field “Base” and leave the path element field blank. Add anotehr Query Parameter by clicking on “+” sign by the side. In the Parameter name sections fill “date” and “sa” to the two parameters respectively. Fill “X” as value for parameter “sa” and for date field we need to fill the value as per user input so drag output from the “Text Input” module into value space for paraemter “date”.

Add a “Fetch Page” module from “Sources” section. For the URL Field get the value from “URL Builder” module. Fill

in “Cut content from” and