Something about Nothing

And when I thought I had seen it all, I spy this comment on one of my posts.

Not even Akismet could mark this comment as spam. Actually no verification/moderation could mark this comment as spam. A news item, with all its fonts converted to caps (no idea why?) has been posted as a comment.

The only logical reason behind this is that this comment is meant to fool Akismet. Akismet has been working wonders for me. It has caught about 1400+ comments as spam and catching more and more daily. And it sure is a great learner. Initially it marked genuine comments as spam, I made those comments as not spam and since then I have not faced that problem. Some days back few comments made through Akismet, I marked them as spam and now no similar comments have gone through.

The commenter is hoping that I’ll mark this comment as spam and hence Akismet will start marking genuine comments as spam and I’ll get irritated enough to turn off Akismet (which I would never ever do in my sane mind). I remember Sreejith got a mail that had an excerpt from a book that the filters would not mark as spam. The explanation for such a mail was found here

So I reiterate the advice given on that post. Do not mark these comments as spam; instead simply delete them. I am not deleting that comment just to keep an example.

Technorati: Comment Spam, Akismet, WordPress

In a bid to become innovator of the century, here comes the next demand.

Cell-phones have made memorizing phone numbers obsolete. Five years back I could have rattled off 30-40 phone numbers without as much blinking an eye. These days I even store my own phone number on my cell-phone under the name ‘Me’, and believe me; I regularly have to use it. If I lose my phone book by accident (memory formatted or cell-phone theft) or design (buying a new cell-phone) the biggest concern is populating the phone book again. It is by far the most boring and most tedious job on earth!

There should be some site where I go & register and can store my entire phone book on that site. According to the volume I want to store I could be charged. If I wish I could even store my messages/profiles there. I buy a new cell-phone and punch in a unique code, and voila! all my data, phone book & messages & profiles are loaded.

This is sounding to me as a bad idea, but an idea that could make money. And please do not go into the technical details, I have no clue how this idea could materialize

Technorati: Business Idea, Cellphone, Phonebook

On Desipundit & in top-50 of BOTD: Top Posts..
Not bad at all…

In continuation with my wants, here is another demand

Proper categorization. I am not talking about the web. In the web everything has proper categorization, I can specifically choose the category I want. I am talking about categorization on television.

Each program telecast on the television should be categorized under Movie, Sports, News, Music, Soaps, Comdey/Humour etc. And yes, there should be a specific category for Commercials too. I should be able to direct my television to keep the Sports category first, then Movies (with the subcategory English over subcategory Hindi), Music next and so on and the last category should be Commercials. As soon as the Commercials start in the cricket match I am seeing, that channel should jump to the last position in the viewing hierarchy and should come back to the first as soon as the match starts. There should be separate buttons on the remote for each category. Like when I click the ‘Movie’ button, I should be able to scan through all the movies that are going on currently. And apart from the channel scrolling, I should be able to directly scroll across categories. These categories should be standardized across all television sets and all telecasting channels.

(The idea to have Commercials as a tag and moving it to the end of hierarchy may not be plausible, since that is the major - or is it only? - source of revenue)

I think this is possible; is any television company doing this?

Software Developers & entrepreneurs of the world, please listen to the travail of a blogger.

Majority of the bloggers, somewhere in a corner of their hearts, hide a dream of becoming a writer. At least I do! Now I need a proper critic who will review all my articles with a cynic’s eye. I am not saying that the comments are useless; they really are the driving force behind any blog.

The comments I would get after I write anything would be something like ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I have no qualms on getting such comments, but what I would really love is an English professor going through the article I wrote and comments should be akin to ‘The structure of this statement was not good’, ‘could have used a bit more description for the brooding man’, ‘what is a gerund doing here!’ or ‘are you nuts? This adjective is not appropriate here’. I am not talking about the spell-check in Microsoft Word, or their favourite error message - ‘Consider revising’. I need more precise help, a software that would understand English, as a normal person or a critic or an English teacher would do and grade the article based on the quality of the English.

In short, I need a virtual English teacher, which would take English text as input and output the grade/score with comments.