I use Dreamhost as my web host for all things web related because they give me waddle of storage space and bandwidth. But their email system kinda sucks when it comes to spam. So I’ve been supplementing it with ESVA.

First of all, a Virtual Appliance is basically a VMWare virtual machine image designed to run out of the box to perform a specific application function(s). These appliances can be run using the free to download VMWare Player or VMWare Server.

ESVA acts as a mail relay for all my domains. It uses variety of tools (virus scanning, spamassassin, greylisting, black/white listing, etc) to filter out unwanted mail. It has reduced the number of email actually delivered to my mail systems by 90% and successfully identified spam about 95% while only having 2 emails falsely identified as spam in the past 2 months (approximately 20000 emails).

New version of ESVA was released today. Version 1.6 includes MailWatch, a much requested addition, to help with monitoring and managing quarantined messages.

Official site: http://www.global-domination.org/ESVA/16/

Download Mirror: http://esva.extraneus.com/ESVA1.6.4.zip

VMWare Applicance Listing: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/542

VMWare Forum Discussion: http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=60005

Speaking of upgrading my browsers, on top of going to IE7, I’ve upgraded to Firefox 2.0 and Opera 9.0. All these are nice but I still like IE because most websites are designed for the masses who are still using IE. But I’ve been to a few of those not so well designed sites with endless popups and there’s that whole security thing. So I use Maxthon as my primary browser. It’s a browser written with IE rendering engine. It supports tabbed browsing, plugins, extensions, ad block, etc. And of course mouse gestures which I think works better than Opera’s implementation even if Opera invented gestures. There are gesture extensions for IE and Firefox but they don’t work as well as the browser natively supporting it.

Anyway, if you like IE and all those sites that still use ActiveX stuff, give Maxthon a whirl and find out IE isn’t all that bad.

I decided to upgrade to IE7 the other day because I figured it couldn’t be any worse than IE6. The upgrade went smoothly and immediately I noticed a few things.

1. I like the minimal UI. It’s clean and uncluttered.
2. It’s got tabs but it doesn’t do mouse gestures.

3. For some strange reason, Google was the default search engine.

After doing a few searches I began to notice that something just wasn’t right… There are no “cached” and “similar pages” links in the search results. My first thought was “Why would google remove that?”. Why indeed? So I fired up my firefox and did the same search and the links are there. This makes me wonder who’s playing the devil here? Is it Google purposely not giving the links or is it IE7 removing them so we’ll use Microsoft Live Search (which happen to have “cached” links). Or maybe it’s something I’ve completely missed. If anyone knows the answer shoot me a note.

I turned on WP-Cache plugin for my wordpress blog and lo and behold I end up with a blank page until I hit Refresh. Seems like it’s a bug in WP-Cache code which was written in PHP4 and I’m running PHP5.

Here’s the fix:

Edit wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php.
Replace ob_end_clean() with ob_end_flush().

Hmm.. I thought that I needed a blog as a way to keep all my thoughts in order. I usually do google searches on something and then I forget where I saw it and then I have to go search for it again. Some are easy to find but some are a little pain. I just put it here for my personal reckoning but if someone stumbles upon it and find the info useful then what the heck.