Fight Spam, but how?

Been inundated with spammy referrers in the last few months. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I know what it is - backlink spam [1, 2], which means those dirty ad networks generating fake clicks to blogs, to be displayed in the backlink/trackback list, which in turn adds to their PageRank on Google. So wily are these spammers that instead of using their direct URL they are now masking it through t.co and then further wrapping them into StumbleUpon or Facebook or [insert any respectable sounding name] redirects. The blog owners will both be confused and curious - "Gee, who could be linking to me from http://www.filmhill.com/redirect.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FUEmjqui3"

Sadly, even though I have turned my backlinks off through Blogger settings, these guys won't stop. The TLDs are too diverse to block out. But one common pattern observed among these links are that all use t.co to masquerade. Probably could insert a JS snippet to block any incomings of this nature. But I don't see how that solves anything - Google Analytics will still register the referral since the page is going to be accessed and its going to show up anyways.

97 things

I'm reading a book called "97 things a programmer should know". After the first few pages, it seemed like common sense, so I put it down. It didn't solve my crisis of the stalemate I find myself in. Not only that, it was generally uninteresting.

What I do want to read, however, would be "97 things a programmer wouldn't know", which could introduce some new paradigms to the art of software programming that an average programmer won't be familiar to - after years of being in the industry, I have seen people decaying and falling out-of-date; or "97 things a programmer should forget", which could be a treatise against the prevalent bad practices that every new guy falls into.

Next I pit hopes on "Beautiful Architecture", which I understand as an effort towards creating a "programmauteur", my ideal.

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Official Google Blog: When patents attack Android

Official Google Blog: When patents attack Android: "I have worked in the tech sector for over two decades. Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into ..."

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Notifications in Chrome

Some of us would be familiar, and piqued, by the recent suggestion in our Gmail windows: "Click here to enable mail notifications in Chrome". Choose to, and whichever tab you might be browsing on, any new mail or chat message is reported in a tiny corner bottom right of the screen. This nifty addition surprised me enough to find out more about the concept, and its other possible applications.

Notifications to the desktop are nothing new, but notifications on the browser are.
The OSX folks have had something called Growl notifications in place, which requires installation, then could be accessed through the windows.fluid object built into Safari on Mac.

Google, with their support for Web Notifications, and their W3C recommendation in general, have tried standardizing this concept.
Here's a small working example for the same:

PS: Try it, in baby steps, on Jash. FUN!

<script type="text/javascript">
(function() {
var notificationStatus;

setupNotifications = function() {
if(window.webkitNotifications) {
if(window.webkitNotifications.checkPermission() == 0 ) { //permission granted
notificationStatus = 'Permission granted';
} else if(window.webkitNotifications.checkPermission() == 1 ) { //permission unknown
//notificationStatus = 'Permission not granted yet';
notificationStatus = "Unknown, click to <a href='javascript:window.webkitNotifications.requestPermission(setupNotifications);'>enable web notifications</a>.";
window.webkitNotifications.requestPermission(setupNotifications);
} else { //permission denied
notificationStatus = 'Permission denied';
}
} else alert('Not supported');

if(!!document.getElementById("notificationStatus"))
document.getElementById("notificationStatus").innerHTML = notificationStatus;
}

notifyMe = function() {
//permission already granted
if(window.webkitNotifications.checkPermission() == 0 ) {
var popup = window.webkitNotifications.createNotification(
"myicon.ico",
"You nailed it",
"My good sir, by delving into this notification thingy you open yourself to plenty of bobfoolery"
);
//ondisplay is one of the three events for the notification API
// ondisplay, onerror, oncancel
popup.ondisplay = function() {
setTimeout(function () {popup.cancel();}, 6000);
//we keep a timeout for the notification, since they don't have one by default
};
popup.show(); //this displays the notification
}
}
window.onload = setupNotifications;
})();
</script>

A simplified concept, a small API, and user security considerations - the spec has its bases covered. Presently these notifications only work on the Chrome browser across Windows and Linux.
For the old crowd, things were ridiculous, with the programmers having to resort to annoying and invasive hacks like window.alert. This new feature would give online tools like e-mail clients, calendering software, task managers, monitoring systems, etc. an elegant and consistent way to notify users.

However, not everybody is gaga over it. After some toying around, even I am a bit skeptical about the specs and the architecture: The notifications take a while to associate with their tab. They aren't a welcome experience to deal with when your friends start firing messages in your gmail chat window. Moreover, with the proliferation of these (among Tier 1 sites, to merely begin with) we can only anticipate an avalanche of these, since the recommendation suggests no way to restrict or control the notifications.

Lightweight gmail

See my gmail inbox above - that's all there is. Pretty light.
How it got so is an inspired tale, having its origins from Matt Cutts' blog (a popular netizen who leads the Google Webspam team). This helps me twofold
* Lighter page
* More relevant inbox

It's the label-and-archive strategy.

Step I> Fix on a scheme

First thing to work out is whether
- I want my email and chats as different entities, or together. Personally, I'd like to keep them separately.
- I want my emails sifted chronologically, or by mail providers, or by family/friends/office. Let's call them sort-order aka "distinctions". For me, chronological distinction is convenient. I'd also like to keep my stupid chain mail forwards away from more important mails.
- Which emails might be overlapping distinctions. For example, I had several joke-of-the-day kinda forwards, that I wouldn't give a damn about; but alongside were other forwards that were important conversations.

Step II> Get your search filters right

This one is a custom affair. I decided to have my emails and chats for past couple of years filtered in separate boxes, while all else (2008 and earlier) went into a single huge box.
Here's a sample of the way my search filters went
for email: before:2011/01/01 after:2009/12/31 -is:chat
for chats: before:2011/01/01 after:2009/12/31 is:chat
for joke-a-day forwards: fw has:attachment -is:important -label:professional

Step III> Label and Archive

- Once I had the result from mail search, I did "Select All" by clicking on the dropdown arrow next to the select checkbox above mails, and then again clicking on "Select all * conversations" link that now appears.
- Then I applied an appropriate label, say "2010 emails", and finally
- Pressed the "Archive" button.

Back in Inbox
This one is easy. If you want your mail to appear back in your inbox, just click the appropriate label (say, "2010 emails"), and in case you want to see some/all in your Inbox, just select those (or all), and click Move To > Inbox

Unlabel My Email
Even easier.
- See those labels listed on the page (which generally lie on bottom left)? If you click on their dropdown, you'll find a "Remove Label" link.
- Or you could goto Label > Manage Labels, and Show/Hide/Delete them through there
- Or just select all those emails you don't want under that label, click on Labels in the bar above, untick the labels you don't want, then click Apply.