“IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet”

Sounds like something Microsoft would name the next version of Internet Explorer?  Well it was part of the list of possible names that Microsoft could have named IE8, but fortunately the team at Microsoft sided with sanity and chose simply “IE8.”

I guess it does pay off to read the default RSS feeds that come with Outlook 2007.  It gave me a bit of amusement while studying for my exams which commence in…two days *dies*.

I’ve had a Gmail account since September 7th, 2004 and currently have 13096 conversations (and counting) in my “All Mail” box using up roughly 1GB of space.  One of my first suggestions to the Gmail team was IMAP, and I am glad to see that it has finally made its way in.

The advantage of IMAP over POP is that you can see a list of your folders (or in Gmail’s case, tags) and emails that you can move around, mark read/unread, reply, forward, etc. right in your favourite email client, and any action will be synced with the server.  Thus, you can mark mail as read, and label it some tags from Outlook, and Gmail will automatically do the same thing on their side as well.  Also, since all the actions and mail are synced with the Gmail server, whenever you login from any client configured for your email, or from the Gmail web interface, you will see the same list of emails in the same tags.  POP only allows you to get the mail (in one single inbox folder, relying on your client to filter any incoming mail), but any further actions won’t be synced up.

I’ve known that Gmail was going to add in IMAP a week or two ago while reading “Look out Outlook IMAP for Gmail is Coming” on GottaBeMobile, but I didn’t realize that I would get the functionality so quickly.  So I found the IMAP feature in my Gmail today (I don’t use the web interface much) and I thought I’d try it out.  It took a while to sync up all the folders and headers.  Anyway, I’m still debating whether or not to keep it.  I’m still trying to figure out how to archive mail from the inbox, and trying to get Outlook to download the entire messages from the server.

After reading “5 Tips on securing your Wordpress blog from spam comments and pings,” at leftblank, I decided to try out Bad Behavior (although I think the correct way of spelling it is Bad Behaviour ), a plugin for Wordpress which blocks detected spam bots from reaching the blog. So far the combination of Bad Behavior and Akismet is working amazingly well. Bad Behavior first turns away any spam bots, and Akismet catches any other spam that happens to trickle through.

Bad Behavior has blocked 627 access attempts in the last 7 days.

I haven’t even installed Bad Behavior for a week yet, and already it has made a noticible impact on the number of spam that I am receiving on the blog.

However, there is again a chance that a legitimate user is blocked by this plugin, but I surely hope that it won’t happen.

Akismet has caught 5,742 spam for you since you first installed it.

Akismet has done a great job catching spam on my website. I usually check Akismet once a week or so, and in the past there has been around a hundred, but now every time I check I’m getting upwards to 500 or 600, and obviously I don’t have the time to sit here and look at all the comments linking to pharmaceutical products, real-estate ads, and others…well…you probably know anyway since spam affects most people who use an email address.

Point is, I don’t really have the patience to fish out your 1 post that went into the spam out of 500 spam messages, so if you don’t see your post up here after a week or so, please repost it, and send me an email.

I’m thinking perhaps installing a CAPTCHA image or maybe a simple “mathematical skill testing question” (perhaps both?) to reduce the amount of spam that actually gets into the Akismet spam-box. Don’t worry, the skill-testing question won’t require university-level calculus so you kids out there don’t panic

I was just looking at Shaw’s website earlier and found out that Shaw unveiled a new high speed internet option Shaw High-Speed Nitro Internet (now they have 4) some time late last year. It costs about $100 per month, and you get 25 Mbps down, 1Mbps up, 150GB of monthly bandwidth.

Are we gaining on the Swedish?