Shandy's Blog

I believe we currently have a 25% reduction in the number of Sri Lanka MVPs in the country! Merill is in Singapore on his way back from the USA and Prasanna is in Australia.

Safe travelling guys!

The Axosoft OnTime 2005 Beta 2 has now been released. It has some great new features and bug fixes, see the Release Notes

I seem to have been in daily contact with Dan on the support desk over the last few weeks and was tickled that I apparently had a new feature named after me - The Shandy Feature - which is the one where there are marks to indictae which tabs have data behind them :-D

My testing has so far been limited to the Windows & VS.NET versions but Hamid Shojaee (The president of Axosoft) has kindly offered to make licences available for the other products in return for my efforts so far in the Beta testing program so I intend to give them a test over the next week or so. I have downloaded all the components, just need a bit of time to install and get my head around them.

Although I had no serious problems with the Beta 1 and have been using it on my production database the Beta 2 has added some nice features and corrected a number of niggling bugs.

The other day I got an email with the subject Update And Verify Your PayPal Account and a body of

Dear valued PayPal member:

It has come to our attention that due some internet frauds some accounts have been stolen. We now must take some actions and verify all PayPal users.

However, failure to update your records will result in account suspension.

Now I hold any email along these lines with suspicion nowadays but I wonder how many other people do? Anyway I thought I publish the type of check I always do with emails like this that seem vaguely authentic.

• Check out Google. Type in the subject of the email as a search, e.g. Google Search For Update And Verify Your PayPal Account. This will often give you some good links associated with the email you have received.
• Check out some of the sites dedicated to this sort of scam, e.g. Fraud Watch International. Information for this particular email can be found at Paypal phishing email - "Update and Verify Your PayPal account***".
• Check out the web site of the company claiming to have sent the email. In this case, Protect Yourself from Fraudulent Emails.
• Check out one of the anti-virus web sites as they often also give information on hoaxes, e.g. Sophos. In this case there was no information on this particular email.
• Do not be fooled by either the email address that the email comes from or the web site you are directed to looking authentic. Email addresses can be relatively easily spoofed and web addresses often have subtle mis-spellings that make them look like an authentic one.

I'm sure there are other checks that can be made and if anyone knows of any please let me know!