This morning, hard disk of my computer crashed at sector zero. Hopefully I had backup of my recent works but other stuffs including my address book are all gone.

Please, if you think I should have your e-mail address again, send it to me.

Thank you.

Do you like solving problems and challenges? I do a lot. A few days ago a friend sent me a link to one of these challenging web sites, Rankk.org.

The site was very attracting, even at the first look. So, I signed in and started the journey. To be honest, I didn’t expect to encounter such a mean and puzzling challenges. The challenges are primarily based on mathematics, logic, and programming skills. Form the challenges that I solved so far, I can tell you that they are designed perfectly, and by solving each one, you may learn something new.

Hope to see you there, and good luck for your sacred journey.

Nowadays getting spam messages is a daily routine. And, because sending e-mail cost nothing, most of these messages are e-mail messages. The bad thing is that these e-mail messages are not only advertisements, they can be trojans.

To get rid of these messages, and not to be a spammer, we have to:

• Either use an Anti-Spam enabled mail server or install a client-side Anti-Spam on our machine.
• Install an Anti-Virus with E-mail scanning feature.
• And, times that we get spam messages from a trusted guy/gal, inform the sender about possible infection of his/her computer by a trojan or virus.

However, these are not enough to prevent us from being a spammer. A hacker can use the vulnerability of an out dated mail server to send spam with our e-mail address. In this case, what may people think about us? What can we do?

It is more than a week that a guy is using my e-mail address (not e-mail account) to spread a trojan. People complain why I am spamming them, and I don’t know what should I answer. It’s really a bad situation.

A few years ago I had a weblog (in Persian) and used to write about social issues there. The weblog was hosted by one of these free blog hosting services.

One day, when I wanted to write a new post, I noticed the service is not available. According to the announcement of the site, the reason was improving the service. But after more than a month, the service was still down. This is why I stopped blogging.

I have more stories on using freeware web hostings. Before establishing DELPHI AREA, I had two other Delphi related sites:

The first one was hosted by Yahoo!. After a few months my account terminated, because Yahoo! was not happy about outside links to my downloadable files.

Therefore I moved the site to Crosswinds, which supposed to be very serious on freeware web hosting. This later site could survive more. However, eventually they stopped their free web hosting service. They were so unrespectful that didn’t notify me to remove my files, and never answered my emails. I guess at that time they had received a very good business proposal, so good that everything was nothing compare to that.

I know paying money for something doesn’t mean that thing is good. But now I’m very convineced that when something (except source code) is freeware, it’s better to don’t spend time on it. In other hand, when we have paid for something, at least we have more freedom to complain or nag about it.

Anyway, let’s see what is going to happen with my paid blogging. Besides Delphi and programming, here I’m going to write about my personal thoughts and ideas, and my wife Leila may have some posts here too.