I don’t understand what the deal is with not having a simple, non-javascript, non-flash, plain HTML login form on the front page of websites where most (all) content require authentication. Twitter, linkedin, flickr, (to name a few) are all guilty of this. I do not like staying signed-in to any of these services and have my browser clear their cookies after every session.

Its not lack of real estate, most of them find space for elaborate sign-up forms. All I ask for is a simple one line login form which shouldn’t take more than 24×240 pixels. While we’re at it can we all agree to set tabindex=1 on the username field so that I don’t have to tab over a gazillion times?

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Give a boy a fancy toy and the first thing he does is break it open to see whats underneath. So when I started using Google Voice, I had to break it.

Now, the most important feature of Google voice is call forwarding where it can ring multiple registered phones when your Google voice number is called. Here’s a bit of fun with this feature –

• From a registered phone, dial your Google voice number
• Key in your PIN, press 2 and dial your registered phone number (the same one you’re calling from)
• Say “hello” and enjoy the infinite loop, its more fun if you love hearing your own voice

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While certain companies are always viewed with a suspicious eye, certain others are considered a joke. Google, on the other hand is considered the son of God despite its evils.

With the explosion of Web 2.0 services, I find it a pain to sign on to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and the million other sites that have mushroomed. (I’m paranoid about staying signed on to sites with everyone and their brothers abusing beacons). So, on this day, the 13th of November 2008, I nominate our friendly neighbourhood do-no-evil company to implement a single sign on that I can indiscriminately blindly trust.

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I was glancing through the BGP Instability Report which is a measure of the number of updates from various ASes over the past month. For a stable network, the number of updates must be relatively low.

I don’t understand why five of the top twenty most active ASes must be Indian ISPs. For a country with 3.6% of the World’s internet users and 0.5174% of the World’s IP addresses, it does seem more than a bit unusual.

It does point to very incompetent ISPs.

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More genius:

[14:45:27 jaidev@~]$ host -t mx yahoogroups.com
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 10 mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 20 mta1.grp.vip.re1.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta12.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta13.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta14.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
[14:45:31 jaidev@~]$ telnet mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com 25
Trying 66.218.67.194...
Connected to mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 yahoogroups.com ESMTP
helo <censored>
250 yahoogroups.com
mail from: <censored>
250 ok
rcpt to: <censored>@yahoogroups.com
250 ok
data
354 go ahead
Subject: Photos
.
554 we cannot accept this message because it appears to contain virus (#5.7.1)
quit
221 yahoogroups.com
Connection closed by foreign host.


Yahoogroups just refuses to accept emails with a subject line containing just Photos. Wow, my spamassassin setup is better than that.

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