General

It is always interesting to see the unique ways in which people use the Internet. While there are many general online clothing stores one particular store is designed for a unique market. Scrubs Gallery sells medical uniforms, or Scrubs as they are called, directly to nurses and other medical staff.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to this site is the simple yet attractive design. Buyers can browse the selection using the left side menu or narrow down their choices using the quick search options. Scrubs Gallery features a wide selection of solid and printed tops and pants as well as lab coats. They have clothing for both male and female medical staff. An online size chart helps you decide which size is right for you. They even have a 30 day money back guarantee which is good to have if you make a mistake and buy the wrong size, or just change your mind. They also claim to save you money by offering lower prices. Scrubs Gallery is definitely an option worth looking at for medical scrubs.

Amazing how much things can change in just a few weeks. When I checked my site's page rank a few weeks ago it showed 0 PR but after the recent google page rank update its jumped to 5! I remember reading an article some time back that suggested that google denies page rank to new websites. It gave the example of a site that went from 0 PR to 7 after 4 months! Now I know that this effect is known as the sandbox effect. And so it is with my site. Roughly three and a half months from the time I registered this domain it has finally got a page rank! And straight to 5 at that. I just have the biggest grin I could possibly have *g*.

Recently I have been buying a lot of domain names for resale and I have had to provide contact information that is publicly accessible in the whois database. This database is widely used by spammers to harvest email addresses. But I figured out a way to make my email address public whilst limiting the number of spammers that harvest it. The key is to create an email address with the words "nospam" in it.

The idea behind this is simple. Lots of users disguise their real email addresses by adding nospam to it. Then they instruct their friends to remove nospam before using their email address. In fact this technique is so common that spam software has adapted to it and it automatically removes "nospam" from any email address that contains it. So by creating an email address that does contain "nospam" in it you are fooling spammers into using the wrong address. For example my domains carry the email address domain-nospam@abdussamad.com . Spam bots harvest it as domain-@abdussamad.com which is non-existent. Of course I do remind humans that the email address is to be used without modification by making that clear in a note in the address field. How well has this technique worked? In more than a month since making this email address public I have recieved only two spam messages. In my book thats not too bad.

America's lap dog Israel is at it again. Massacring Lebanese citizens by the hundreds. It has already ventured into one Lebanese town and I think a full scale invasion is not too far away. I think Israel is simply following America's orders. America wants to destroy Muslim countries and this is just one more step in that direction. They are targetting shia countries first fully aware that sunni countries will not risk a war for shias. Iran is almost certainly going to be next. And then they'll target the sunni dominated countries like Syria.

By attacking Lebanon they are trying to provoke Syria and Iran into joining the conflict thereby giving the Americans an excuse to attack them. Bush's greed for oil wealth seems neverending. What's amazing is that the leadership of the Muslim countries is fully aware of this and seems to be unwilling to defend their countries. Are they just to going to lie down and roll over? Or are they going to unite and fight?

After some unfortunate delays I have finally moved my blog/website to my own domain - abdussamad.com . It feels great to have my very own domain and be able to post anything I bloody well feel like!

One thing I learned during this move is that, in practice, sqlite databases are less portable than mySQL ones! This is because few webhosts support sqlite databases. Most webhosts still run php 4 and they do not bother to install the sqlite extension. I think the reason they do not upgrade to php 5 is that it may require them to upgrade their legacy linux installations as well. On the other hand, almost all *nix hosts support mySQL. So I had to migrate s9y from a sqlite database to mysql. Despite my best efforts I couldn't do this migration via SQL dumps. Instead I had to import my entries using RSS. However, I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest stable version of s9y - 1.0