As we started using it, we realized the Manage Links feature was fully broken and we could no longer add or edit or delete any links. We gave the benefit of doubt to the WordPress team, as such minor issues do happen.

Then as we started adding new blogs, and then when we tried adding new images, it gave a serious error that file types were not recognized or something like that.

Now I know for a fact that this version has not been thoroughly tested and has bugs which is not worth using right away. So if a patch is released within a day or so, we will apply it or roll back to the previous version on our blog networks.

If you are planning to upgrade to v3.2, I strongly recommend waiting for a few days before doing so.

We at Auro Infotech congratulate Team India for their achievement and are proud of every one that made it happen.

Team India Rocks!

As a part of this, we are disabling 777 access to any website. To accomplish this, we are migrating our servers to SuPHP to secure our PHP and apache configurations. This move will make sure files cannot be written by everyone and will prevent the issue caused by the 777 permissions that were previously allowed on all files.

We are implementing this change in our shared servers on 30-Oct-2010.
suPHP is a tool for executing PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners. With this we have following advantages in shared hosting environment

No folders or files can have 777 permission and it cannot be owned by user “nobody”. This is one of the greatest advantage where we can secure the files and folders in the site as none can do anything other than the site owners.

This change will go in at midnight on 29-Oct-2010 and as of 30-Oct-2010 we will not allow any 777 access on any of our servers.

Site Owner should make following in their site
1. Make sure no 777 permission files or folders/directories present in the site. The recommendation is to change it to 755 for folders and 644 for files.
2. .htaccess file should not contain any php_value. Please move those values under php.ini file instead.

Please feel free to contact us if you need any help with this.

Resellers please pass this is to the respective site owners.

Since we use Blackberry heavily at Auro Infotech, we are quite comfortable with the setup of Blackberry to be used with email accounts on Auro Infotech hosted domains. This post gives details of the steps involved in setting up the same.

Lets assume your domain name is called yourdomain.com and your user name is username. Please make a note of the following details regarding this:

Domain Name: yourdomain.com

SMTP Server Name: mail.yourdomain.com

POP3 Server Name: mail.yourdomain.com

user name: username@yourdomain.com

email id: username@yourdomain.com

To configure your email account with a blackberry device, choose the option to ‘Integrate with Personal Email Account’. (This has to be done for any setup which is not going to use a Exchange server and since our hosting accounts do not use a Exchange server, we have to use this option).

Once you choose it, go to Settings – Email Setup and enter the details given above in the next set of steps.

btw, if you use Outlook or any other email client on your desktop, please note that setting up Blackberry device to link to your mail account does not cause any sync action with your email client on your desktop.

Any mail deletion on Outlook will delete the mail from the mail server but not the Blackberry device. Similarly any mail deletion on Blackberry client will delete the mail from the mail server, but not on the Blackberry device.  That will definitely be a limitation as both the Blackberry and Outlook use POP3 and SMTP to interact with the mail server.

We use this limitation to our advantage. When this happens, we always have a copy of mails on my Outlook, which remains locally forever. All blackberry mails are set to be deleted from the device after 30 days (If you want to save any mail longer than this, you have to open the message and ‘Save it’ and it will then get saved permanently in ‘Saved Messages’ on the blackberry).

Hope this helps.

All these days, when there is a search for an organisation, eg Yahoo, the results used to show one result from their website and then results from other sites with the information on Yahoo.

With the change made by Google, the results now show multiple results from Yahoo website. In some instances, there are as many as eight results shown from the same site. This change is tactical and is going to result in the following:

1. Users are going to see more irrelevant results on page one and hence will be tempted to click on the ‘Sponsored results’ on the right side, as it gives them more options to choose from. This will result in increase in the profits for the Adwords program through which Google shows the sponsored results.

2. Users are going to see less of Search Engine Optimized sites and hence the value of Search Engine Optimization will go down.

3. Users are going to be tempted to getting used to clicking the Adwords regularly thus enabling this habit and hence raising the value of Google stocks

Ultimately, it appears Google is bent on showing us how to search and it is because of their sheer dominance in the online world.

I had tried calling Paypal support team and talking to them about the major issue that I found with using Paypal withdrawal into our bank account in India, where it did not get deposited as a foreign income and only got deposited in Indian Rupees as local income – which is really bad for us as we will lose the tax benefits we have when we get foreign income. More this withdrawal issue from Paypal are available in this link.

After 30 minutes of wait, I was directed to a customer service manager called – Rocio who said she is based out of the US and she clarified to me two things:

1. Paypal Regulations Team which sets these policies do not accept any information from customers in any form (email or phone)

2. The withdrawals into bank accounts in India will only come in the form of Indian Rupee.

This only means using Paypal will prevent us from any of the tax benefits we are allowed to receive for bringing foreign income into India. That also means, it is time to stop using Paypal until this changes.

She even provided her employee number to me, which was quite impressive, considering the fact that I clarified to her that we have been able to withdraw from Paypal into our bank accounts in the past as US Dollars – which she says cannot have ever happened . I told her that I did not have the time to go back and prove how it was in the past, but want to focus on how we prefer it in the future, if we have to continue using Paypal.

I also stated to her how this issue will impact many other businesses like ours, as we all depend on the foreign income and the proof of it from our banks in India for tax savings, but I guess it did not matter.

She just clarified to my doubts about using Paypal again and as mentioned earlier, we will be stopping using Paypal until this is clarified by Paypal team to us.

I am quite sure Paypal will not be impacted by us deciding to hold off on using Paypal again. At the same time, I can say with confidence that many more businesses like ours will come to realise this issue sooner or latter, and stop using Paypal. Once this issue starts to make a dent in the revenue, Paypal is going to realize that their way of handling the foreign income is definitely putting their Indian business clients at a loss and affecting their revenues.

Good luck Paypal

It was nice doing business with you, will update you if we decide to use your services again

In order to get these deductions, Auro Infotech will have to receive payments into its banks in foreign currency only.

Paypal is one of the payment gateways we use to receive payment from our clients. With Paypal’s feature to transfer money into banks in India, we used to withdraw from Paypal to our bank accounts as US Dollar and it was considered as foreign income.

After the recent changes announced by Paypal, the option to choose in USD or INR is removed and we have withdrawn two payments so far. We realized this week that the payment is coming in only as Indian Rupees, which will directly make us ineligible to get any tax deductions, as the payment is not considered by banks as foreign income, as it is received in Indian Rupees. This is a huge issue!

We are trying to work with Paypal support team and its executives to find a solution to this problem as it does make a big difference in the financials.

I spoke to an account representative at Paypal who did not have any clue that after the 29-Jul-2010 change made by Paypal stopping withdrawals to banks in India, they actually reinstated it again on 30-Jul-2010, but with the restriction I have mentioned above. He conveniently told me ‘No sir, we do not have any more updates on this change you are talking about. All that we know is that we stopped withdrawals to banks in India and we can only give cheques to you’. What a shame! A leading company does not even make sure its customer support representatives are up to date with the policies of the company!!!

Right after that I told him that I would like to speak to a person who knows about ‘Process related changes’ and I want to talk about the potential impact it is going to have on Paypal.

Since I realized that it might be better to give the Paypal folks a written documentation about this issue, I have sent them an email (contents pasted below). I really hope they realize this issue and find a solution.

If Paypal is unable to work with us and find a solution to this issue, our only other option will be to stop using paypal and use other gateways that will help the banks in India to recognise the payment as foreign income.

If any one else has come across this problem and has found a work around for this issue, we would love to hear from you about how you handled it. Please feel free to post your thoughts here on this.

—————

Hello Paypal Support team,

I would like to bring a potentially major issue with respect to the recent change made by Paypal to the withdrawal procedure from our online paypal account into our bank account in India.

Before the changes were made (ie before 29-Jul-2010), any withdrawal we many from our Paypal account to our bank account in India, it used to give us two options: to withdraw in USD or in INR.

We preferred using USD, as it will bring the foreign income into India in USD and hence our bank recognized it as a foreign income, and hence at the end of the financial year, our bank in India gave us the Foreign Income Remittance Certificate (FIRC), which is mandatory for us to file along with our taxes at the end of the financial year.

With this change (made after 29-Jul-2010), we noticed that Paypal does not give us the option of withdrawing the payments in USD anymore and automatically sends the payments only in INR. We also verified with our bank that the money in our bank account in India is received in Indian Rupee only. This automatically makes these payments ineligible for any consideration to FIRC.

In this situation, if Paypal is considered as a bank in India and will be able to give us the Foreign Income Remittance Certificate, then this problem is solved. I am not sure if Paypal is, in any case, please let me know your thoughts on this.

If the above case in not applicable (ie. Paypal cannot issue FIRCs), then I request Paypal to look into solving this situation. Until this is solved, we will not be able to use Paypal for any of our transactions and will wait to hear from you on your proposed solution on the same.

This same problem is going to come for any India based business trying to receive foreign income using Paypal as the gateway and if this issue is not resolved, it is just a matter of time before which they will stop using Paypal. Hence I believe it is in best interest for both Paypal and the Indian businesses for Paypal to find a quick solution to this problem.

I am available via email or on the phone to discuss this with you at any time.

Regards,
Administrator
Auro Infotech

We are using a search engine called Search Plugin .  This search engine uses PHP code that was working well on its old server which had PHP 5.1 on it.

Recently, we migrated Search Plugin to one of our semi-dedicated server for enhancing its usability. After we migrated to this server, we faced the following error.

Deprecated: Function eregi_replace() is deprecated in /home/searchpl/public_html/include/searchfuncs.php on line 582

We came to knew recently that the in-built function mentioned in the error eregi_replace() is deprecated (or removed) in PHP 5.3.2. The recommendation from PHP is to use the alternate function preg_match.

Please see the sample code below

Old version: $a = strtolower(eregi_replace(“[ ]+”, ” “, $a));
New version: $a = strtolower(preg_replace(“/[ ]+/”, ” “, $a));

Please note that in preg_replace, the first argument should be placed between  “/” tags.

If you use “eregi” then the equivalent replacement will be “preg_match”
Sample code is

old version: while (eregi(“([-]?)\”([^\"]+)\”", $a, $regs)) {
New version: while (preg_match(“/([-]?)\”([^\"]+)/”, $a, $regs)) {

This replacements solved our function deprecated issue. I thought of sharing this with everyone. Since I am not a experienced developer, I am learning about the arguments in the function preg_replace and preg_match and also, the use of “/” in the first argument.

I will post my next updates after my learning, If any knows please comment here.

Thanks for reading this..

Within two days of sending the notice, they sent a follow up mail that they were able to continue with the service. In this follow up mail they also clarified that they will continue to give the 5USD refund for the cheque withdrawals.

We have used Paypal in the past to receive payment amounts made by overseas clients. So we waited to try this out to experience what is new in the changes they have made to the withdrawal process.

Not any major changes. The only two changes we noticed were:

- During withdrawal, there is now a mandatory question on ‘What is this payment received for’. I am guessing this step has been introduced to provide more accountability in the system for any foreign revenue that comes into the country.

- There used to be an option to send the money in US Dollars or in Indian Rupees. Now there is no such option and it just gets converted while we send. I remember making a mistake in the past when we withdrew the money as Indian Rupees and later realized that our auditor complained that those payments did not qualify as foreign remittances. I am guessing this step is introduced to prevent banks from manipulating with the rates.

In any case, looking at this change as well as the Ultimatum to Blackberry by the Indian Government, it is quite obvious that the Indian Government authorities are tightening the processes around the online aspects of doing business in India, which is a very good sign of progress in the right direction.

——————————————

Message sent by Paypal team on 29-Jul-2010:

We’ve received good news.

You can continue to enjoy electronic withdrawals just as you did before.

While we have received your appreciation for the advanced notice and the refund of the cheque processing fee, we also have heard loud and clear that you highly value the ease-of-use of our electronic withdrawal service. Our customers are our number one priority and we are working tirelessly to improve our service.

Thank you for your patience and in appreciation for your continued support, we will still provide the $5 USD processing fee refund for any cheque withdrawals made from July 29, 2010 until further notice.

For any enquiries, please contact PayPal customer support by logging into your PayPal account and clicking on ‘contact us’ at the bottom of the page.

Thank you,
The PayPal Asia Team

—————————————————–

Original Message sent by Paypal Team before 29-Jul-2010:

In accordance with regulatory instructions, we would like to notify you about a change in our withdrawal functionality in India starting on August 1, 2010.

At present you can request for either an electronic or cheque withdrawal of funds from your PayPal account if you are an India user.

From July 29, 2010 onwards, you will only be able to request for a cheque withdrawal of funds from your PayPal account.

While we are working hard to restore the electronic withdrawal service, in the meantime, we are bringing this matter to your attention so that you can plan your future withdrawal activities accordingly.

To request for a cheque withdrawal:
1. Log into your PayPal account, click on ‘Withdraw’.
2. Click on the ‘Request a cheque from PayPal’ link.
3. Enter the withdrawal amount and select your mailing address, then click ‘Continue’.
4. Click ‘Submit’ to confirm your request. In order to help you with this change and until further notice, we will refund the $5 USD cheque withdrawal fee to you for cheque withdrawals made on July 29, 2010 onwards.

For any questions, please log into your PayPal account and click ‘Contact Us’ at the bottom of the page.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused from this change in our withdrawal functionality. We will provide ongoing updates to you here. We thank you for your attention and patience as we work tirelessly to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.

Thank you,
The PayPal Asia Team

Currently, the text from a Blackberry is encrypted before it is transmitted. This has been done to protect the device and its owners. Very recently, UAE govenment had raised an objection on the same topic with the Blacberry folks. Their concern is that this device is capable of allowing terrorists to have easy flow of text communication, which cannot be intercepted with the current architecture. In fact, all the instant messengers such as gtalk, yahoo, msn, icq, facebook, aol and skype can be accessed from the blackberry and that might add to the complexity as these IMs are not necessarily through the blackberry messenger, but through third party applications installed on the blackberry.

It is going to be very interesting to see Blackberry’s reaction to this situation as it will impact many organisations in India including ours, as we are heavily dependent on the blackberry services for our day to day operations at our Indian offices. We use Blackberry devices for our team leaders and support staff, to respond to client emails instantly, communicate among ourselves using the blackberry messenger, and also to do some important tasks such as rebooting the servers in case of emergencies, access our ticketing system, etc.

As an advocate against single point of failure, if blackberry is blocked we had come up with a plan to go back to old fashioned style of accessing mails from pcs, but it will surely reduce the speed with which we communicate. Hence it might be a good idea to research and shop around for other smart phones, which do not depend on the blackberry server and will help us interact directly. I have heard quite a lot about Nokia, but have not ventured into trying it for business purposes.

If you know of any good recommendations, please do let us know.