This astrology site got hurt by piracy again. Someone reverse engineered the chart matching source code from this site and sold to a Sri Lanka based matrimonial site for almost $2,500. The webmaster of this matrimonial site claims to have purchased it from http://www.scriptlance.com/. In the pirated version, the copyright and other information is promptly removed and few display string are changed. The layout and output remains the same.

Although I have taken certain precautions against hackers and code stealers, the fact remains that Java can be reverse engineered if someone is motivated enough.

Are there any readers with legal experience to suggest how I can go after scriptlance?

My newsletter server Zookoda is going down and as a result I will not be able to continue the monthly mailer till I figure out an alternative. Quoting from this page:

As a result we have decided to put the Zookoda platform on ice. Users will not be able to login effective January 1, 2009. We will do all we can to assist users in getting their email lists out of the system for use on another platform. We are not selling Zookoda and all user information and emails will remain protected. Think of it as cold storage.

Over last two years, this site has built a db of about 300 readers. I am thankful to each and every one of you. I will include your addresses automatically in my new service. Rest assured that I will keep them safe. I am an astrologer, not a spammer…

The hosting provider has fixed the problem and I was able to run the kundali and chat matching applet as well as generate images on the site. I will keep monitoring the site and will contact the provider if the site goes down again.

Please let me know if you think there are any other problems.

Thanks!

It was brought to my attention by Saraswati from Chennai that the java application on kundali and kundali match page is not working as expected and is failing with a "no initied" failure. It seems to be a problem with the java/jsp/servlet server on my website. I am on the phone with the customer service and trying to figure out the issue.

I have fixed the problem with the applet and the applet seems to be loading, but the chart image generator is not working. You are likely to see this error "Internal Server Error"

I will keep you updated.

For all those running a WordPress blog, please note - do not mark any spam comment as “spam” while moderation. Just delete it. If you don’t, it will just sit there in the wp_comments table. The performance of your WordPress installation will go down as the size of this table increases.

Why am I ranting about WordPress installation and size of a table instead of writing a post on Astrology? This is because of spam comments, which I realize are almost 80% of all the comments that I receive. I had to undertake a massive cleanup exercise and while I have taken all precautions, I am afraid I might have deleted some genuine comments. If it was one of yours, I apologize.

In the past one week, how many of you have seen the following error message on the blog?

I believe that things should be fine now, but if they are not, please let me know by dropping a line.